121–130 of 373 posts
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Make an efficient fusion reactor the size of a truck, and the solar system becomes your backyard.
Make an efficient fusion reactor of any size, and you can power Fischer-Tropsch plants to synthesize carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel for the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure.
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Speaking even more pedantically, a new decade is starting right now ... and here comes another one. The 2020s start 2020-01-01 (just as the century called "the 1900s" started 1900-01-01). The 21st century started 2001-01-01. The 203rd decade starts 2021-01-01 -- but nobody talks about the "203rd decade". That's the difference in terminology between decades and centuries; we don't refer to decades by their ordinal num…
Continuing the pedantalization escalation the 21st century started 2001-01-01 if you follow the Gregorian calendar "named after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in October 1582" However if you are not fussed about pope Greg and then and go with ISO 8601 or common usage it started 2000-01-01.
In the same spirit of pedantry:
Well, no, Gregory is beside the point; if you are referring to Anno Domini dates, the 21st Century (and Second Millennium) began on the first day of the year A.D. 2001, whether or not you prefer the Gregorian Calendar.
Preference for the Gregorian Calendar or not will affect when you believe A.D. 2001 started, though.
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>The plasma heats up, but how do you turn that into useful electrical energy? I appreciate that many people are commenting 'you couple the plasma to a working fluid', but I think the original comment was more along the line of how you couple a confined plasma to a working fluid. By definition the plasma is in a hard vacuum, magnetically bottled. What, then, is the coupling method? Thermal photons escaping confinement…
80% of the energy from DT fusion comes out as neutrons, which enter a blanket and deposit energy there by collisions and nuclear interactions.
Do you know how far along are we in understanding how to build an effective blanket that can withstand the neutron flux while maintaining its physical integrity?
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> this is still exciting given how anemic advancement in the fusion space has been for 50+ years At the top of my list for when I'll be king for a day is - massive, national-scale investments (think: reaching towards one percent of GDP) in fusion research. This is a major roadblock, but things look awesome on the other side. We just need to get our stuff together to hop over this fence somehow.
I think it’s generally very hard to force technological progress along by just throwing money at it. Let’s suppose this proposal works out, ITER will become a very expensive boondoggle. A technological dead end. But if you’d taken the ‘Manhattan Project’ approach and thrown 10x as much money at fusion research 20 years ago we’d most likely have spent most of it on a super-ITER. It might be operational by now and migh…
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It could be argued that ITER is actually quite important in learning how to deal with high technical complexity in general. Probably a good reason by itself to keep working on ITER, ISS is way simpler in comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Criticism "The project however was significantly delayed at the design stage as result of purposeful decision to decentralize its design and manufacturing among 35 parti…
In other words, ITER is a jobs project.
IMO jobs facilitating knowledge, experience & wisdom transfer between so many countries is worthwhile on its own, nevermind that the goal is to help solve our energy problems. If we get experience developing a massive international moonshot program from a jobs program, so be it.
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> this is still exciting given how anemic advancement in the fusion space has been for 50+ years At the top of my list for when I'll be king for a day is - massive, national-scale investments (think: reaching towards one percent of GDP) in fusion research. This is a major roadblock, but things look awesome on the other side. We just need to get our stuff together to hop over this fence somehow.
I think it’s generally very hard to force technological progress along by just throwing money at it. Let’s suppose this proposal works out, ITER will become a very expensive boondoggle. A technological dead end. But if you’d taken the ‘Manhattan Project’ approach and thrown 10x as much money at fusion research 20 years ago we’d most likely have spent most of it on a super-ITER. It might be operational by now and migh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s generally very hard to force technological progress along by just throwing money at it. Let’s suppose this proposal works out, ITER will become a very expensive boondoggle. A technological dead end. But if you’d taken the ‘Manhattan Project’ approach and thrown 10x as much money at fusion research 20 years ago we’d most likely have spent most of it on a super-ITER. It might be operational by now and migh…
Sure, but on the other hand, such a lucky break of this new approach might have had never happened. At the same time, if super-ITER approach was shown to work, by producing it en masse, it would likely be cheaper per installed MW than nuclear power, which would remove the need for solar panels and wind altogether. We'd have cheap power with no danger of nuclear pollution, no real nuclear waste problem, and no destroy…
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How so? Unlimited, non-radioactive fuel and inherent safety of the system alone could tip this scale pretty severely in favor of fusion once it becomes energy-positive. And remember, once that happens, investment is going to be through the roof, which will accelerate progress. Either the "scientific community" (whatever that means) is either too pessimistic about this, or you've just made this up.
It was my understanding that fission and fusion both use the same Nuclear Power Plant sized facility. Fusion just replaces the radioactive bit, you still need steam/electricity conversion/transmission/cooling... it's not like a suitcase you can plug wires into, you still need a massive 'factory' to make electricity, just the one bit is a safer.
Having read about tokamaks for thirty years, I'd be curious what specific breakthroughs and innovations have occurred since the 1980s, which lead to the optimism described in the article (which is otherwise frustratingly devoid of detail). It's great there are seven-peer reviewed articles about SPARC, but plasma was not my specialty in physics -- would any specialists care to comment on whether there is anything part…
My layman's understanding is that recently available (~last 5 years) industrial scale processes to produce rebco tape[1] is the specific advance in superconductor tech that's specifically enabling higher tesla magnetic field strengths from significantly smaller and lighter and easier to manage magnets, so you can get a system that's "powerful enough" to run net posititve at a size that's small enough to be built by a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is still exciting given how anemic advancement in the fusion space has been for 50+ years At the top of my list for when I'll be king for a day is - massive, national-scale investments (think: reaching towards one percent of GDP) in fusion research. This is a major roadblock, but things look awesome on the other side. We just need to get our stuff together to hop over this fence somehow.
I think it’s generally very hard to force technological progress along by just throwing money at it. Let’s suppose this proposal works out, ITER will become a very expensive boondoggle. A technological dead end. But if you’d taken the ‘Manhattan Project’ approach and thrown 10x as much money at fusion research 20 years ago we’d most likely have spent most of it on a super-ITER. It might be operational by now and migh…