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Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

imperial.ac.uk

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Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#481

Post by throwaway894345 »

ransom1538 wrote: post #475
ashtonkem wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only way to end climate change is to have a serious debate about population control. It’s always disturbing how quickly this stuff goes from here to “we have to prevent other people from having kids rather than having Americans stop consuming”. Get your neighbor out of their F150 before trying to sterilize the global south. > Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. Fusion. Fission has…

"F150 before trying to sterilize the global south" Right. So people not buying a f150 will help combat the climate destruction of a doubling population in the next 40 years. Is this a joke? I don't understand how a smart group can say such stupid things.

The parent was clearly exaggerating. The point was pretty obviously that Americans should curb their appetite for carbon before proposing extreme population control policies for others. Which is an eminently reasonable point, and sad that it has to be articulated explicitly.

More seriously, "getting your neighbor out of their F150" or any other "personal responsibility" approach is doomed to fail because citizens don't have appropriate information to make informed environmental choices (we can't accurately estimate how much carbon goes into the manufacture of the products and services they consume) which is why carbon pricing is necessary.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#482

Post by throwaway894345 »

diordiderot wrote: post #349
ransom1538 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Of course, the consequences of climate change are billions cast into abject poverty" The only way to end climate change is to have a serious debate about population control. But no one wants difficult debates (at least people that matter). Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. I foresee a population explosion into areas once uninhabitable.

Pretty sure you could just price in carbon. Poverty is more like not driving an f150 2 hours to your job at office, not max eating 6 steaks a week, taking shorter showers, and turning your AC in south Texas in August from 62 to 78

Your point is excellent, but ironically (of all vehicles to pick on) Ford is coming out with an all-electric F150 next year. Which kind of makes an even more profound point: we don't need to give up our luxuries, but we do need our luxuries to become more efficient. If you switch to an electric water heater, you can enjoy your long, hot showers without worrying about carbon pricing driving up your bill.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#483

Post by xondono »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #470
xondono wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the cost of switching to renewables too early is negligible compared to the cost of switching too late. Smaller yes, but I wouldn't call it negligible. > the more the economy grows before the switch to renewables is complete, the harder it becomes to make the switch. That one I think you got reversed. Think that one through, the economy now is way greater than it was in 1980, do you really think we were better…

>That one I think you got reversed. Think that one through, the economy now is way greater than it was in 1980, do you really think we were better prepared for the switch back then? I wasn't clear. We become better prepared to switch but the switch itself becomes harder. The 1980 economy was smaller, therefore it would have required fewer renewable energy sources to replicate using only renewable energy. Sure, renewa…

> We become better prepared to switch but the switch itself becomes harder.

But that’s the trick, for instance, now that solar is under the cost of gas, improvements in solar have slowed down, but now everyone is trying to make batteries.

It’s very unlikely that the pattern won’t repeat itself, in 2050 (or 2070), we will probably be in a better position to do the switch, even if total energy consumption has grown.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#484

Post by drran »

pfdietz wrote: post #339
drran wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but if you want to have cheap energy, then it better to start with something cheaper, like LENR, which is still pain to reproduce, but give it $100bn and 20 years and then compare with ITER.

As long as we're in fantasyland I suggest perpetual motion machines, or perhaps unicorn power. It's hard to make up for LENR's lack of existence with clever engineering. But even if LENR existed, how do you think it would get around the problem described? LENR would make heat, low grade heat.

A low-grade heat is OK for heating of buildings, so it can replace natural.

LENR is hard to reproduce even for those who can reproduce, but at this point we can be sure that LENR is not a fantasy land. Multiple scientists in multiple institutions are able to reproduce the experiment sometimes, so this is the science.

IMHO, external factors are involved, e.g. cosmic rays, which generate muons[0], or radioactive elements or gases decaying, and LENR devices are just boosting them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#485

Post by elihu »

epistasis wrote: post #435
elihu wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was more interest in electrifying our major roads and freeways (i.e. allowing cars to charge while they're moving) in part to reduce the necessity of hauling giant batteries around everywhere, but also to shift EV power use from mostly-nighttime to mostly-daytime when more solar power is available. Another option is to get some high-capacity high-voltage DC lines connecting continents so that countries a…

Eh, storage is a solved problem for passenger vehicles. It's really only long haul that's a problem. Electrifying roads is too expensive, for too little benefit. Electrifying rail, however, would be a fine idea. Nearly all vehicles are parked for most of the day. We should incentivize workplace charging, to help with that. But really, we must drastically reduce our need for driving. We simply can't scale EV productio…

I'm not sure that electrified roads would really be all that expensive relative to the benefits. I mean, if you only add electrification to a two mile segment every twenty miles on a few major interstate highways, it means that long haul trucking that uses those highways can be fully electric. That seems like a pretty big deal.

If all the major roads and highways are electrified for 100% of their distance (like we would have had to have done in order to switch to electric, say, back in the 70's during the oil crisis when lead acid was the best battery tech available), that would be far more expensive and probably not worth it.

Driving less, more workplace charging, more mass-transit, and electric rail are all good. It'd be great to see electric shipping too, but I'm not sure how to get there; you'd need multiple charging stations in the middle of major oceans or something.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#486

Post by ransom1538 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #479
ransom1538 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear fission once pulled off will make things much much worse. Doubling the population will make things worse in 40 years. How is this hard? Double chickens? Double cows? Double coal plants? wtf? lol. You are the fool. Trying googling "when does population double".

> Doubling the population will make things worse in 40 years. How is this hard? Double chickens? Double cows? Double coal plants? wtf? lol. You are the fool. Trying googling "when does population double". Ooooff. 1. The population isn't projected to double even in the next century much less the next 40 years. In the next eighty years, the population is expected to increase by only 40%. If you took your own advice ("G…

Ok! I will google for you. "a doubling time of 49 years"

https://theconversation.com/7-5-billion-and-counting-how-man...

"You're incorrectly assuming that the greenhouse gas emissions scales linearly with the population size *even as the emissions per MWh approaches zero."

No it will not be linear. If you have a population that is exponential.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#487

Post by pasabagi »

adrianN wrote: post #445
anfilt wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are other important uses hydrocarbons other than energy production. So calling them obsolete seems a bit of a stretch. For example take coal one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. Steel plants making carbon steel steel need to convert that coal into coke. Even an electric arc furnace needs coke to make carbon steel. Similar things with other hydro-carbons. So its not like we are gonna stop using them even if the grid…

You need a little bit of carbon to make carbon steel, but the vast majority of the coke is used for heat and producing a reducing atmosphere to reduce the ore. Both of those can also be done with a process using Hydrogen.

He sort of has a point in that there are some products (plastics, etc) that are only produced from crude oil. The problem is it's pretty doubtful that fracking would be worthwhile if that was the only demand - there's more than enough normal crude to produce plastics.

As I understand it, most fracking isn't even profitable right now - it is only profitable if oil prices are relatively high.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#488

Post by mrtranscendence »

willis936 wrote: post #441
mrtranscendence wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's a German physicist who has made a name for herself, I think, arguing that mathematical beauty should not be a factor when constructing solutions to problems in theoretical physics. I think construing her video as a "debunking" does it a disservice, for what it's worth. It's a call for journalists and laypeople to be cautious when interpreting lab results. She doesn't "dunk on" fusion power or say that it's not…

For a physicist she claims to know strikingly little about fusion energy research while still offering up opinions. Why did the good doctor fail to mention triple product? Why did the good doctor conflate ICF machines and MCF machines? Why did the good doctor imply that research progress is tied to Q (which is a metric that only progresses in times of large funding/when nuclear machines are being built)? It seems the…

For one, her channel is firmly oriented towards a lay audience; she explains topics in physics in relatively simple terminology. That limits the level of discourse.

Second, she's not a fusion researcher, she's a theoretical physicist. It's possible that she made an error (though I can't speak to whether that's actually the case, as I know next to nothing about physics generally).

Third, I don't think she really implied that research progress is entirely tied to Q. But YMMV.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#489

Post by Robotbeat »

tsimionescu wrote: post #411
smaddox wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 MJ is enough to vaporize roughly half a liter of water that started at room temperature. That's nothing to sneaze at. Obviously you would need to do with a high rate (e.g. once per second) in order for it to be viable for power production. No reason the lasers couldn't do that. The challenge is making the pellets cost effective at scale. Currently, they cost something like $10k each.

The bigger problem is the precision-machined hohlraum the pellets sit in for ignition. That costs millions of dollars, is crucial for actually achieving anything, and is destroyed in the process.

I think the marginal Hohlrahm shot cost may be lower, like $10,000 or something, but that’s way too high for just 1MJ (.3kWh thermal, roughly… 0.1 kWh worth of electricity). They need to figure out a mass production method (to get shot cost to pennies) plus they need to increase the yield per shot by at least an order of magnitude.

Re: Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

#490

Post by SuoDuanDao »

xondono wrote: post #483
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That one I think you got reversed. Think that one through, the economy now is way greater than it was in 1980, do you really think we were better prepared for the switch back then? I wasn't clear. We become better prepared to switch but the switch itself becomes harder. The 1980 economy was smaller, therefore it would have required fewer renewable energy sources to replicate using only renewable energy. Sure, renewa…

> We become better prepared to switch but the switch itself becomes harder. But that’s the trick, for instance, now that solar is under the cost of gas, improvements in solar have slowed down, but now everyone is trying to make batteries. It’s very unlikely that the pattern won’t repeat itself, in 2050 (or 2070), we will probably be in a better position to do the switch, even if total energy consumption has grown.

I too am cautiously optimistic, but I'm worried about complacency. Innovation doesn't just happen, it takes a lot of hard work. If we don't keep in mind the cost of not innovating, I'm concerned we won't adequately reward that work.
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