ITER is nothing more than a money sink to underfund innovative research in fusion power.
Big Oil ️ ITER.
ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
401–410 of 466 posts
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool your boots... The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... The comment you to which you are responding even asserted that basic research does have value - and does not assert that the trade offs go one way or another. The implication of the comment as I read it was that we should at least critically think about those trade offs rather than just writing a blank check to wh…
> The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... It also happens to be wrong. If more projects that require nuclear physicists get funded, more people can become nuclear physicists. We're nowhere near the point that we're going to run out of potential nuclear physicists who could be trained if there was more demand for them. At some kind of abstract level there are a finite numb…
>> The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion...
>> It also happens to be wrong.
Wow. The startup guy gave an actual example of the tradeoff. Am I correct that you see that not as a tradeoff but as a loss?
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#403Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#404I am going to need some help on this one as my knowledge on physics is limited: What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale? I desperately want nuclear fusion to work because 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. It's also 500% more important…
There's a good talk here about why ITER is so large: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk The idea is essentially that to get the parameters needed to make net energy with tokamaks, you need either very strong magnets or a large device. At the time of ITER's design, they used the strongest magnets they could find and then made the thing big enough to get the energy gain they wanted. The speaker of this talk ar…
Awesome talk. Thank you for the link!
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? Thinking it was "mission accomplished" in 2003? Having no exit strategy? Creating a power vaccum, which was eventually filled by Islamic State? Aquiring oil, in a world which is trying to divest from it, and which is being damaged by its use?
>Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? The planning of it, which, you know, happened before "mission accomplished" and all the things that went wrong. It has been widely reported and asserted that the planning started considerably before 9/11, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
> Formation 1997
That's 6 years before the invasion, so slightly longer than a single election cycle, and significantly shorter than the duration of the war itself. I wouldn't exactly call that 'future oriented', especially since 3 of those years were spent under the Clinton administration; Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld pulled the trigger pretty quickly once in power.
It's also incredibly short-term compared to its contemporaries, like Russia's "Foundations of Geopolitics" or China's "Peaceful Rise".
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 arg…
This argument is the same bullshit as your first one: https://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy...
> This graph is from Tim's website and illustrates the relationship λ (lambda) between the world't total accumulated wealth (C, the integral) and our ever-accelerating energy consumption rate (a, measured in 10^21 joules per year)
It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP). What are the error bars on the calculation for how much the entire planet is worth in dollars?
For reference, GWP growth rate has been between 3% - 6% in the period considered by that paper. If the net world wealth growth rate was 1.82% during that period, it would suggest that depreciation effects are significant in determining that figure.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 arg…
Or perhaps it isn’t, when you actually account for everything: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...
That Vice article is talking about the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from material resource usage growth.
It's possible that our inability to recycle (in an economically efficient way) will end up putting some limit on economic growth, but this is very different from the global thermodynamic argument being made by the article that I was responding to above.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? Thinking it was "mission accomplished" in 2003? Having no exit strategy? Creating a power vaccum, which was eventually filled by Islamic State? Aquiring oil, in a world which is trying to divest from it, and which is being damaged by its use?
>Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? The planning of it, which, you know, happened before "mission accomplished" and all the things that went wrong. It has been widely reported and asserted that the planning started considerably before 9/11, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
We have plans to invade everywhere, buildings full of plans.
“Future” oriented thinking would be Phase IV Occupation plans. That filing cabinet was empty (by design) and “It’s the UNs problem now” is not very future-oriented strategery.
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Says the man living in a world plagued by short termism, where companies forsake their future to improve their quarterly report, where we have condemned generations to suffer climate change just so that we could have 15% cheaper electricity and enjoy oversized cars. This going further down this path only lead to misery
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…
We shall build add tech towering stacks so high they darken the sky
Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly
#410Earlier 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…
Well they won't cause money rewrites the mind to worry about money.