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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

#381

Post by rimliu »

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?

Soon enough we will have the opposite problem to worry about.

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

#382

Post by cwhiz »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #277
cwhiz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see some models on how solar power could work in northern cities, or honestly any city. The NYC metro area has over 23 million residents and there is essentially zero space for a solar farm. In the winter it's cloudy almost all day and there are only 9 hours of sunlight. Rooftop solar is an option but the models I have seen show a theoretical max around 1,200 MW which is about 1/30th of the NYC metro…

No I guess NYC needs to keep that nuclear power plant in Lower Manhattan then.

I know you’re saying this as if it should be something scary that I should oppose.

But I am not even remotely concerned about nuclear safety. If noise and traffic were no concern I would live right next to a nuclear power plant.

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

#383

Post by undreren »

karxxm wrote: post #317
undreren wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source? OP said nothing of the sort. They said that they didn't understand the prioritization of funding given an alternative that they found personally much much more valuable.

I am pretty sure that this project is not prioritized in any way. It's a research project with funding from all over the world. It should be compared to the CERN project where scientists from all over the world try to understand science behind it better. One could argue that CERN is a waist of money since there are other fields of study in physics which seem to have more potential. We should be happy that states from…

No one claimed the opposite.

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

#384

Post by perl4ever »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #348
perl4ever wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that interest rates in developed countries are generally lower than in all of history, and mind-boggling amounts of surplus capital are being deployed by companies like Amazon, Softbank, Tesla, etc., it seems to me that the world is less "plagued by short termism" than any time in the last 13 billion years. I'm not debating your assessment in an absolute sense, or the direction that resources are deployed, I'm…

I am struggling to make any sence of your post. COVID demonstrates lack of being prepared and future orientated, we did not have PPE stockpiles and did not takw actions that would contain the virus to save the economy now. The more future oriented you are, the safer you are.

You're talking about predicting the future correctly and making the right tradeoffs. Being future oriented means trading off short term goals for long term ones; preparing for the future says nothing about whether we are prepared in hindsight.

You can use "future oriented" to mean being prescient or omniscient, but I think that's a useless way to define the word, because it's not a thing that exists.

The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy, and I assume we would agree it was a huge mistake, right?

WeWork was a tremendously future oriented company, that wanted to be everything to everyone, but it wasn't, and won't be, the next Amazon.

It would be bad for society for similar projects to suck up all the resources in preference to short term needs.

"it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future" - Mark Twain

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

#385

Post by tiborsaas »

imtringued wrote: post #375
nucpal wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a dumb question. The answer is kinda dumb though, most working fusion reactors don't have a way to extract heat yet. But the plan is to use the same turbine (heat water into steam) technology from fission reactors. So you have cutting edge plasma physics in one part of the reactor and old school victorian-era steam turbines in the other.

So it all boils down to boiling water?

Yes, it's just a mindbogglingly complex and advanced steam engine :)

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

#386

Post by Tepix »

Angostura wrote: post #338
irthomasthomas wrote: post #304

I'm surprised that we're still chasing moon shots in strong force fusion, while weak fusion, which has actually been demonstrated already, gets little attention. Chemically assisted/low energy nuclear reactions have been proven to produce clean energy and useful transmutation. This process can be used to turn radioactive waste into inert material. For example, technetium-99 is a particularly pernicious by-product of…

> which has actually been demonstrated For certain values of "actually be demonstrated". I don't think it's been reliably shown to be a real phenomenon, has it?

That is my impression as well. It needs a lot more peer-review and reproducable results in different labs around the world by different scientists.

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

#387

Post by Tepix »

ragebol wrote: post #355

What downsides are there to fusion power, assuming it's commercially viable in a couple of decades? What negative externalities are there that could make it prohibitive? Fossil fuel has pollution etc, solar takes up lots of space and is apparently also ugly, wind energy is ugly and makes noise (according to NIMBYs). What argument could a NIMBY person have against fusion power, besides the big building in their back y…

Can't be miniaturized, thus expensive. Not mobile.

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

#388

Post by yohannparis »

nucpal wrote: post #342
saberience wrote: post #340

Dumb question here, but how is the actual power transmitted to the grid? I get we are trying to have some sustained reaction with plasma inside a magnetic field... but that just makes heat, not electricity. Other reactor types have water to heat up and make steam but where does this happen in a Fusion reactor? It seems as though there is no obvious "place" for there to be water to turn into steam. Again, sorry for du…

It's not a dumb question. The answer is kinda dumb though, most working fusion reactors don't have a way to extract heat yet. But the plan is to use the same turbine (heat water into steam) technology from fission reactors. So you have cutting edge plasma physics in one part of the reactor and old school victorian-era steam turbines in the other.

To be fair, todays steam engine are marvel of efficiency and reliability and water-cooling is a perfected science.

Almost nothing is has easy to manage and powerful as steam.

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

#389

Post by Retric »

arkh wrote: post #129
jpdus wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Picture a few large cities with contractors running around every roof tending to solar panels and compare to a few experts at a single nuclear power plant. For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series. This is a very flawed and short-sighted argument. Averages don't matter when you are talking about fat-tailed/power law risk distributions. Nobody would be op…

> But (almost) everyone would be opposed to a fission plant or nuclear waste facility next door - and rightfully so. Reading this kind of debate from France is a good laugh. If you're interested you can check where our electricity comes from here: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit... (between 60 and 70 percent of nuclear energy today).

France exported and imported a vast amounts of electricity during it’s nuclear hay day and still needed huge subsidies. In effect they where little different than people living near a local nuclear reactor getting most of their power from it while extremely dependent on the wider electric grid to meet demand and lower overall prices. Which as odd as it sounds demonstrated civilian nuclear inability to scale as they still needed to reduce power plant utilization by ~10%.

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

#390

Post by wiz21c »

valuearb wrote: post #273
throwaway2048 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its pretty presumptuous to assume your startup has economic value, and the SSC didn't. Plenty of completely economically worthless tech startups.

Well, ours was profitable and sold for $95M, kind of a definition of economic value.

Now you have economic value it's time to have other kind of values. And with that amount of money you definitely can.

(of course, this is the comment of someone who painfully gathers 3000 bucks a month, that is who has 0 firepower except a few donations here and there, a few signature, etc. Not everybody is blessed with "the good idea").

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