61–70 of 827 posts
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ITER is doing that, no? Large scale test of fusion energy output.
Problem with ITER is it's not 1 country, it's lots, and they all want their piece of the pie instead of doing it efficiently
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> ... If I understand your nonsensical ramblings correctly. If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand what I am saying. Yes, countries can "work together without being part of the same trading bloc" but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed. Brexit removes us from the international legal agreements that underpinned that trade. It also removed us from the free movement clause, which is crucial t…
> If you think they are nonsensical, you do not understand what I am saying. And I thankyou for clarification :) > but trade is not the limit of what Brexit changed. Here in lies the problem that many Brexitiers had with the EU - it wasn't just a trading bloc, the "club" had a lot of baggage that few people understood - and when people don't understand something, they fear/misstrust it. The message around leaving was…
The problem is they also came up against vile, populist hate about Syrian immigrants, Romanian neighbours, people not speaking english on buses, fake news about pillow regulations; it went on and on. And a lot of that stuff really was funded by deeply shady money.
Brexit was the first real demonstration of how good faith cannot possibly counter weaponised, well-backed bad faith, IMO.
It is what it is, I agree, and alas it is wholly irreversible. But at least within five years we won't have to worry about how Great Britain and Northern Ireland repositions itself within Europe, because the consequences of the vote will be the end of that too.
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I'm not quite sure why but I have this flashback-like feeling from blockchain with this Q_total < Q_plasma confusion.
Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance. How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, et…
In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current…
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Pardon the analogy, but bringing up Q_engineering in this context is like someone shopping for a car running into Ford's engine design department and complaining that the engineers are not using the car's fuel economy to increase the engine's performance. How much power the subsystems takes has no influence on the plasma's performance. How much power goes into the plasma (and what type of power and where and when, et…
But at the end of the day, if this is to be useful, we need the plant to produce more than it uses, right?
There are no showstoppers.
Here is a good (stellarator-focused) resource made by PPPL:
They're still a very long way from getting a net gain in energy: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
Sadge. But I think this is the best bet for sustainable and clean energy, so why not put all the enthusiasm we can into it? A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
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Thank you for clarifying. The confusion is because your comment could easily be interpreted as a criticism of lazy reporting (everything negative that occurs must be because of brexit) rather than actual criticism due to a real issue beyond how it is reported.
Ah!! I actually rewrote it to the form it is now, about 15 seconds after posting it, to try to remove any suggestion it's about the report; it's possible I suppose that some people reacted to it before I did. I went from "paragraph" (as in, in an article) to "parenthetical" in the colloquial sense. Like, literally every process or discussion about anything going on in the country has to have this sidebar about how mu…
It also doesn't help that you start with "Further evidence that...". You can't assume any of your readers are already on board with your conclusions. In my experience, the kind of people who make these kind of comments tend to be closed to debate and commenting in bad faith. For example "further evidence of political-correctness gone mad" is a classic one.
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"At Jet, two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments." So net power is -989MW, assuming both flywheels are at full pelt the whole time and no power is required before fusion is acheived.
Those are used for the confinement coils. Incredibly, JET uses copper coils. You can't run those all day, so the flywheels are used. The last machine I worked at worked the same way. 16 train motors with 1 ton flywheels spinning at 1600 RPM to be an 11 MW power supply for 1 second every few minutes. Plasma heating in JET is done via NBI+ICRH and is about 59 MW.
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Problem with ITER is it's not 1 country, it's lots, and they all want their piece of the pie instead of doing it efficiently
A $50b program from 1 country would likely have the same problem (as indeed would a large private program). Injecting a large amount of capital all at once into a project just isn't efficient.
SpaceX would beg to disagree here. The reason why they are so cheap, agile and sustainable (=reusable rockets) is precisely because SpaceX got a load of money without the "pork" requirements that were commonplace with ULA & friends. That enabled SpaceX to embrace vertical, on-site integration and go for what was technically the best option instead of what was required by some buffoons in Congress.
Although a point may be made that a "hand out cash" program needs a competent, strong and undisputed leader at the top. There's a lot of issues with Elon Musk, but it is undeniable that he is a very effective and inspiring leader.
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Sadge. But I think this is the best bet for sustainable and clean energy, so why not put all the enthusiasm we can into it? A breakthrough is a breakthrough, and that's good news.
In what sense do you think this is good for sustainable energy? Do you think it will cost less, or have less environmental impact than, say, newer deep well geothermal? I'm not so optimistic that costs could ever be competitive with geothermal.
I think both fusion and geothermal are very exciting, crazy thing is although geothermal sounds simpler, I have no idea what's holding it back technology-wise, yet I have a pretty good understanding of the state of fusion research right now.
Why couldn't we get geothermal without fracking? Is it so hard to establish a more controlled heat exchange channel down there? Harder than developing nuclear fusion?