71–80 of 494 posts
Sweet, nucluear fusion now must only be 20 years away!
20 years ago we were joking about it being 40 year away. So yes, it is timely progress. I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this research which has the potential to solve the climate crisis "unexpectedly".
Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to cook ourselves. Though there are some people working on beaming heat into space, I suspect they haven’t fully accounted for heat absorption by atmospheric dust.
It'd be interesting to ponder whether such a "heat ray" would work, in terms of thermodynamics. Some kind of heat pump, the hot side of which is hot enough to radiate into space? I can't imagine that having a net cooling effect when considering the Carnot efficiency of a refrigeration cycle. Maybe a giant ice machine in space? (Then again, any ice would probably create more heating than cooling as it enters our gravi…
Absorption and emission bands matter. They are in fact made of exotic materials (rare earths IIRC) so it’s at least plausible.
> Fusion ignition is the point at which a nuclear fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining. This occurs when the energy being given off by the fusion reactions heats the fuel mass more rapidly than various loss mechanisms cool it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition
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Would more cheap (in all ways) energy be a bad thing? I don't think so, people pay money for that sort of thing.
Heat pollution. Green house gasses are not the only way to cook ourselves. Though there are some people working on beaming heat into space, I suspect they haven’t fully accounted for heat absorption by atmospheric dust.
Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…
Was your input temperature too low? That would explain it. At low temperature differential, you have lower efficiency and need much bigger machinery for the same output.
That said, fusion has a chance to be competitive, because the temperature will be higher. (Obviously, the thermodynamic limit is in the billions of Kelvin, but a practical power conversion system will operate in the range of 500-1000 Celsius.) But for the foreseeable future, it won't be competitive.
The important thing to know is that the NIF is about nuclear weapons design (verification of modeling software used for nuclear weapons design), not about developing fusion power plants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
20 years ago we were joking about it being 40 year away. So yes, it is timely progress. I am still bitter that we don't invest more on this research which has the potential to solve the climate crisis "unexpectedly".
I'm somehow afraid of a world in which huge amounts of energy can be wasted without having a bad conscience. Probably it would lead to some new problems.
Meta-question about fusion energy -something I don't understand about the movement. I spent a few years as CTO of a company providing heat-to-electricity plants. We financed and built them off high-heat plants like natural gas turbines. The "fuel" was heat going up the stack - so it was essentially free. We still couldn't compete with conventional electricity plants, even with a $30/tonne price on carbon in Canada. G…
It's political. Taxes on carbon pollution are inevitable, but for the time being there is still political blockage because of the power of the cartels.