81–90 of 240 posts
2040s? 20+ years from now!?! Too fuckin slow!! For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
And fortunately soon Musk will need fusion for Mars travel and colonies. He just personally got extra 100B to burn - i think SpaceX will start to hire nuclear scientists and engineers soon :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. I'm a layman too but I get the impression that the theory is basically there and we just need to figure out the engineering. That's a solvable problem with lots of money and lots of teams. Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?
>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fission is a solved engineering and science problem though and we’re still blocking it to let the sea levels rise. Point being, nobody actually cares about climate change enough to make hard decisions so a Manhattan style project is highly unlikely.
Politics, NIMBY, risks of accidents, and radioactive materials pollution are unsolved problems. You could argue it’s sociology than engineering but a problem nonetheless. I think nukes is the future but nukes belong in space; just build some fission on high orbit to perfect fusion, and bring the meat down over microwave or as bulk hydrocarbons or whatever that works. Solar system has unlimited free meal supplies of r…
Are at an inflection point for fusion power? With interest and funding for it finally gaining steam? I’ve noticed several announcements about independent efforts this past year [1–6] but not sure if (a) it’s always been this way or (b) my view is skewed by HN. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21806334 "General Fusion" [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979608 "ITER" [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com…
Additionally, with the new administration it's expected that nuclear may not be viewed favorably as wind and solar continue dropping in price. So there's a lot of threats going on and all these press pieces may be attempts at buttering up the people in power and also the general population to get them excited about fusion and hopefully etch bits off of the general fear regarding nuclear power.
Personally, NIF is stuck, it's not gonna work under its current design, and convincing Congress to fork out some 60 billion dollars for a modest increase in laser energy when we probably need 10x laser energy does not seem like a good idea. Especially when the food lines are getting longer and we're approaching an insolvency event. It's hard to justify.
I think that solar/wind + battery (e.g. Tesla Megapack) will make fusion irrelevant.
Miniaturized fusion (I know, a long way from this -- but so were computers) would revolutionize everything. Including transit, shipping, airlines, and other industries where batteries won't quite cut it (not to mention deep-space exploration).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most of my life fusion has been perpetually 30 years away. Now it is only perpetually 20 years away. That's progress!
This graph often gets mentioned in the context of "always 30 years away": https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm It's not on "schedule" because we aren't putting the resources towards it.
It probably is the last one, considering that the enacted 2012 budget of the US DOE for Fusion Energy Sciences was $401 MM ([1], p 16).
But then, why is only the US DOE supposed to invest in fusion?
In any case, as of 2020, this budget was increased to $671 MM [2].
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/FY13Highlights.pdf
[2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-doe-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>God I wish we could Manhattan Project this shit. Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot…
Aren't you implying, intentionally or not, that a "Manhattan Project" level of expenditure, $25 billion, is enough to make meaningful progress towards commercial fusion energy production? I don't think that is a given.
Serious question: how does an article like this get written without mentioning SPARC[1] once? They're hardly secretive, they're MIT's people, they're moving on a plan to get results in ~5 years, and they're talking about the same kind of things: tokamaks, better computer modeling, and easier to make higher temperature superconductors for stronger magnets. I'm just a layperson, I only know pop science level stuff here…
I am pro-nuclear, and I think it would be a mistake to assume this article is also pro-nuclear. Heck, the very first six words ("U.S. fusion scientists, notorious for squabbling") prime a reader to see those hardworking people as bickering nerds working on fleeting, individual, theoretical interests. I sincerely doubt we will see any uranium-based energy technology ascend to dominance/ubiquity while over half of Eart…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is giving you numbers for why this is wrong, so let me ballpark. Typical solar irradiance is 1000W/m^2. Mean sunshine hours where I live is 3000hrs/y. Assuming 100% efficiency, 100% solar irradiance, perfect angle etc for those 3000hours, we get ~10^10J of energy. Those are bad assumptions, but very generous. In a gram of deuterium, per e=mc^2, we get ~10^12J. There is 100x more energy in a single gram of dete…
> In a gram of deuterium, per e=mc^2, we get ~10^12J Deuterium is not antimatter, where they entire mass of the substance is converted to energy. In nuclear reactions only a very small percentage of matter (~1%) is converted to energy.