211–220 of 240 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of a tangent, but I still firmly believe that for Earth weather conditions, Fahrenheit is a more intuitive scale. 0 is a really, really, really cold day and 100 is a really, really, really hot day. 50 degrees is neither especially warm nor especially chilly, 70 degrees is warm, 30 degrees is chilly, 20 and below are truly cold, 80 and above are truly hot, and if you go into negative numbers or above 100 degrees…
Cold and warm are relative. 0 for freezing / snowing and 100 for boiling gives you a much more understandable range. Honestly, US metrics don’t make any kind of sense anymore...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in high school we visited a small 5MW nuclear reactor. It was a few years after Chernobyl and we got a very long lecture about how this was all the fault of the terrible Soviet design and that it could never happen in a western-designed nuclear reactor. As far as I remember from the news at the time, the tsunami was terrible, but not unprecedented. If this obvious risk was ignored, what other risks are bei…
It's also important to note that literally one person has died as a direct result of the reactor failing in Fukoshima. Around 1600 died in the evacuation process, mainly elderly people. The earthquake itself killed over 15000 people. Imo it's a massively overblown disaster. Yes, it's bad, especially the environmental effects, but it's absolutely nothing compared to the earthquake and tsunami itself.
It is also irrelevant to compare the earthquake and tsunami to the nuclear disaster. Earthquake and tsunamis are unavoidable natural disasters, but the Fukushima Daichi disaster could have been easily avoided.
You're also ignoring the massive costs of the disaster and the monumental scale of the cleanup. The official costs put it at $188B and counting.
A tokamak is a kind of fusion reactor, and basically the most prevalent. "100M degrees" (Kelvin) corresponds to 10 KeV (kilo electron volts), which is an important figure to exceed for D-T fusion. D-T fusion which is the kind of fusion the ITER Tokamak (a forthcoming fusion reactor and international megaproject) intends to demonstrate. An older fusion experiment, JET (Joint European Torus) reached these levels, so th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to know what you're talking about - do you know what the end goal of the work in this field is? Is it working towards nuclear fusion as an energy source?
The specific EAST reactor [1] mentioned in the article is a testbed that will enable new technologies to be used on the ITER project. The ITER project [2] is currently the largest fusion power research project underway (and the largest reactor under construction). ITER's goal is to provide research that enables new technologies to be used on the DEMO project. The DEMO project's goal [3] is to provide commercially ava…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand, this represents sufficient energy to overcome the Coulomb Barrier [1] which naturally repels atoms apart. To cause fusion, you need to push particles together either hard enough or fast enough that they push through this repulsion and fuse. The repulsion is a product of the electrostatic repulsion of the positive charges of the nuclei (pushing the positive ends of two magnets together, essentially).…
> you need to push particles together either hard enough or fast enough that they push through this repulsion What's the difference between "hard" and "fast"? What does pushing "hard" mean?
Conceptually, there's two main methods of fusion - inertial confinement, and magnetic confinement.
In inertial confinement, lasers are shot at the plasma to squeeze it together so the pressure (and thus temperature) increases until fusion occurs. This is also what happens in stars, except they use gravity not lasers. Conceptually, this is what I alluded to when pushing it 'harder'
In magnetic confinement, the pressure/temperature is increased by shooting electrical currents through the plasma among other techniques that i'm not as familiar with. The volume hasn't really decreased, but the kinetic energy and pressure of the plasma has increased so it's the same principle, but this is conceptually what I alluded to when i said pushing it 'faster'.
In either sense, the idea is to somehow increase the plasma temperature which increases the kinetic energy of the particles enough that they overcome the electrostatic barrier. It was just really badly worded by me and I apologise for that!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took at least two burned dishes before I realized the recipes I was following called for Fahrenheit, not Celsius
What kind of fusion reactor of an oven do you own that goes up to 425 degrees Celsius?
Can someone comment on what kind of economic effect that working fusion reactor technology would have? I hear sometimes contradictory hear-say on the lines of "unlimited energy", "reactor would have to be fed constantly".
I'm not sure that it would have a profound effect at all. Fission is very power dense as well and fission fuel cost is not the primary driver of overall costs in existing nuclear designs. Fusion might end up looking a lot like fission, but hopefully with a lower perceived safety risk and thus more public acceptance. Granted, modern fission designs aren't actually unsafe, but that doesn't matter for PR purposes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cold and warm are relative. 0 for freezing / snowing and 100 for boiling gives you a much more understandable range. Honestly, US metrics don’t make any kind of sense anymore...
Except for weather, it’s never 100 C outside, or else we’d all die.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what i've read[0] it will remove about a third of the cost (probably less). About a third of energy cost goes on fuel (now almost 0), a third on the grid, and a third on the station (now probably more). Whilst a 20-30% reduction in energy cost would be great. The really important change is that it is much more scalable and easy to get. You don't need to dig up coal, or drill for oil. All of which can be limited.…
Even though the cost of energy is divided by thirds, fusion still generates so much more power that the sheer scale can overpower lots and lots of bottlenecks. For instance, it is chemically possible to combine water (either atmospheric or from a normal water source) with atmospheric CO2 to chemically synthesize hydrocarbons. It just takes energy. So you could have a single, absolutely massive fusion plant next to an…
I do disagree with you on Hydrogen fuel cells replacing electric cars though. I think battery powered cars will be better than hydrogen powered ones. The power storage is more reliable, and the power transfer is more simple (lines as opposed to truck delivery or pipeline. And if we assumed that it would be done on site at stations, then they would already have power lines, so just use that!)