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ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

bbc.co.uk

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Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#181

Post by godelski »

valuearb wrote: post #164
godelski wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm particularly upset about SSC's[0] failure to be built. There are many advantages to housing the smartest scientists in the world within the borders of your country, and those benefits aren't limited to scientific output. After all, a big part of these multi-national projects is the culture war. And let's be real, which is worth more? A super collider that runs for decades or the F35 (which cost more,…

My software startup was a huge beneficiary of the SSC cancellation, it freed up a nuclear physicist to write graphics software for us, which became one of our biggest products. I’m in favor of pursuing basic research, but there is always a cost. When you take a group of your smartest people and focus them on non-economic activities, the economy loses something.

I think you're over simplifying things with the example. There's 2 major factors that I see.

1) It is unknown what economic impact that the SSC would have had. It could produced more value or less than that which you and similar industries contributed to from the benefit of these scientists. A search shows that without accounting for the impact of the fundamental science, CERN's revenues exceed the costs by ~3bn euros[0] (report seems to also ignore ambiguous contributions like spin-offs). So the companies that benefited from the closure would have to at have near this revenue.

2) Scientific projects are fundamentally long term economic investments. These scientific projects have returns on investment of larger than 20 years and sometimes upwards of 100. These are impossible ROIs for companies, but great for civilizations.

These factors are huge and we're not even talking about the local economy boom because and influx of smart people which typically leads to higher quality schools in the area and tech startups that grow because subcontracting, consulting, and spin-offs. We're also ignoring the cultural impact as labs serve as a form of cultural exportation, which is important in the global game played between countries (the economic value of which is difficult to quantify), and this is what you are directly responding to.

It is fairly difficult to answer these questions, so I think your answer is too simplified.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004016251...

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#182

Post by CarbyAu »

Avicebron wrote: post #133
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is also not true if we dealt with the massive overpopulation of the earth instead of acting as its some sort of moral crisis not to stuff as many people as possible onto a planet with finite renewable resources.

How do we go about dealing with the massive overpopulation?

As per sibling comment to yours, society wide development seems to lead to lower birth rates. Lift the masses out of poverty.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#184

Post by nicoburns »

cameldrv wrote: post #149
Scarblac wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gains the space underneath. Flat roofs (of large commercial buildings, for instance) sound like a good place for them. I don't understand why they are put on the ground instead so often.

Because it's difficult to install them at scale like that. For example, if you want to do a big solar project, you have to negotiate with the owner of every building you want to put panels on, you have to find a place in every building for inverters, you have to install metering, you may have to upgrade the grid to handle the extra power going out, then you have to have an account and customer service and payments fo…

> Ultimately this is the problem I have with solar: It puts an effective cap on our energy use. Solar will never be more than 100% efficient, and there is only so much land that it is reasonable to use, so if we say, wanted to expand our worldwide energy usage 10x, it's not really feasible.

Isn't this exactly why we should be installing solar on rooftops. It might be more exensive, but it's a bettet use of space. Plus most of the extra cost is labour, and aren't we constantly worrying about how their aren't enough jobs. Seems like a win-win to me.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#185

Post by nicoburns »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #61
andrepd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a fusion power fanboy but >nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is a…

Hydro is extremely restricted because of geographical and environmental constraints. Solar is also quite constrained by lack of large-scale storage and environmental concerns, and just by the weather. Same goes for wind. Keeping in mind that electricity production has to increase significantly to absorb the shift from ICE to EV vehicles I would tend to agree that there is no way to meet demand without nuclear even if…

My bet is that large scale storage is a much, much easier problem to solve than power-generating nuclear fusion.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#186

Post by dane-pgp »

hlfy_hn wrote: post #151
andrepd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a fusion power fanboy but >nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. So renewables can absolutely be part of an energetic transition in the near future, while fusion is a…

"This is just not true, there's no way you can say this. Solar costs are going down massively. Hydro is dirt cheap already. " ROTFL. You made my day mate. For starters: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

> For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9% to 2.3% per year ... When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization.

His argument is that sometime in the next 275 years we have to make some change to our economic system, unless economic growth decouples from energy use growth during that time.

What he doesn't say is that it has been decoupling for decades even before he wrote that post, and, by an equally valid extrapolation argument, economic growth will become completely decoupled from energy use globally in another 50 years:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-econo...

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#187

Post by godelski »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #177
godelski wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm particularly upset about SSC's[0] failure to be built. There are many advantages to housing the smartest scientists in the world within the borders of your country, and those benefits aren't limited to scientific output. After all, a big part of these multi-national projects is the culture war. And let's be real, which is worth more? A super collider that runs for decades or the F35 (which cost more,…

What you mention about billionaires paying for it piques me especially. For someone like Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg or any number of other ultra rich individuals, the PR value of simply stating that they will themselves pay for such a collider up to the cost of its proposed budget (maybe so long as some organization or government promises to cover any cost overruns, or overruns beyond a certain percentage) would be eno…

The discussion of billionaires building "CERNs" came out of a discussion I was having with a friend as a way to quantify how rich these people are in terms more understandable. Graphics like pixel wealth[0] just show scale, but doesn't put things in perspective. But a Forbes analysis estimates the cost of finding the Higgs at around $14bn (rounding up)[1]. I also tried using Super Computers, but at around $300m a piece the number was too small (e.g. Elon is 100 Auroras and Bezos is 1000, ball parks). Number of CERNs became a much more approachable metric but also has the fault that these take over a decade to build (meaning the # of CERNs is likely an underestimate).

I do agree that this would be a great PR move. Especially as we've seen Bezos grow his wealth by $65bn in the last 4 months[2] or Elon by $44bn (more than doubling) in the same time frame[3]. But the practicability is also a little naive considering that these numbers do not equate to liquid cash that they have available. Though someone like Gates has much higher liquidity than Bezos or Elon.

But it is interesting. Maybe if my metric catches on someone will build one (or another mega science project) :D

[0] https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?list=billionaires...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?list=billionaires#...

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#188

Post by kbenson »

andrepd wrote: post #168
kbenson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solar/wind have trouble beating nuclear on metrics like death/watt because you need lots of infrastructure per watt. Really, this makes me think one thing, jobs. We can take steps to make jobs safer, but if solar/wind get even close to nuclear but employ a lot more people, then that's a huge gain overall. Reducing personnel costs is a gain for a company's bottom line. Increasing personnel costs is good for society,…

>Increasing personnel costs is good for society This is your brain on capitalism. :p More seriously: more jobs, more human effort, more accidents and injuries and death, less free time... this is objectively a bad thing. It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.

Well, part of the problem is that I said "we can take steps to make jobs cheaper" when I meant "we can take steps to make jobs safer".

We keep automating away jobs. People want/need work, mostly for money, but also because want to feel they are doing something and part of something. So I don't take it as a given that less free time and more human effort is objectively a bad thing. It really depends on the person and whether they feel a sense of accomplishment in their work.

As for death and accidents, that's somewhat addressed by my typo fix.

> It's only from the lens of the current economic system that it becomes a positive thing, which speaks volumes in itself.

The thing about the current economic system is that it's the current economic system. It can change, in small ways and big ways, but I'm not not sure it will (even if we're probably in the absolute best time to try out UBI we'll see in our lifetimes, and it will be a shame if/when it passes us by in that respect, even if it means life is much better overall).

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#189

Post by worik »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #178
valuearb wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My software startup was a huge beneficiary of the SSC cancellation, it freed up a nuclear physicist to write graphics software for us, which became one of our biggest products. I’m in favor of pursuing basic research, but there is always a cost. When you take a group of your smartest people and focus them on non-economic activities, the economy loses something.

That's incredibly short-sited. I'm glad for you that your startup was able to make money, but do you really think that the long-term economic value created is higher by making yet another piece of graphics software than from fundamental research? I would argue this entirely the other way; whenever the smartest people are sucked away from foundational work to make money "up the stack", it makes us all the poorer.

Pie in the sky when you die....

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#190

Post by ArtWomb »

godelski wrote: post #134
petschge wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer is that the surface only goes up a factor of 4 if you increase the radius by a factor of 2, but the volume goes up by a factor of 8. So the ratio of (energy containing) volume to surface (where energy get's lost) if getting better with increasing size. There is of course much more complicated answers, all the way up to full-device simulations using gyrokinetic codes like Gene or Gkeyll that take mil…

This is the main issue and I don't want to make it any more complicated. But I do want to explain something because people hear arguments between fusion scientists. Within the field no one really doubts that ITER is going to work (there's a few, of course, but the majority don't doubt). The thing they are arguing over is if it is needed. The big reason for ITER is not to generate power but to demonstrate that sustain…

>>> small scale reactors

I believe this is the DoE position. Leverage AI/ML to design smaller magnetic confinement. With the goal toward commercialized products and partnerships.

JET was on track to breakeven. And I think most of the researchers involved believe they would have gotten there if the funding hadn't been cut. I think what they want is simply long term commitments. The sort of thing that is risky in fiscal budgets that can change year to year ;)

Final Report of the Committee on a Strategic Plan for U.S.Burning Plasma Research (2018)

http://brookhaventech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Burning...

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