161–170 of 827 posts
OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless. Isn't that what solar power offers? Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar takes up quite a lot of space, but most importantly only works for a portion of a 24 hour cycle.
The Chinese & Japanese governments are investing in space based solar which solves the nighttime problem: https://wonderfulengineering.com/china-is-aiming-to-build-a-... https://nextrendsasia.org/japan-pioneer-of-transferring-sola... But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
As an uneducated observer to nuclear physics, I could not tell the significance of this achievement. Did we finally learn how to extract more energy from a fusion rector than we supplied to operate it? Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?
No.
> Could anyone more in the know here explain in simpler and more practical terms please?
It's impossible to tell because the story is incoherent. The central claim is that they "release[d] a record 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy" but this makes no sense. One can talk about sustained power (over a period of time) but "sustained energy" is a category error because energy is just power integrated over time. You can get 59 megajoules out of your wall socket if you wait long enough.
They apparently did something that had never been done before, but there's no way to tell exactly what that was from what is written in this story.
(This kind of obfuscation is not unusual in fusion research. A cynic might argue that this is because if they were clear about the actual state of things their funding would cease.)
The title is unfair in suggesting this is a result coming from Oxford institutions alone. As correctly put in the EUROfusion official press release, the EUROfusion consortium comprises "4,800 experts, students and staff from across Europe, co-funded by the European Commission". Edited to add the link (now on HN front page): https://www.euro-fusion.org/news/2022/european-researchers-a...
The title is as misleading as calling ITER French because it's located in France.
According to Sabine Hossenfelder, published numbers are frequently mis-stated on purpose. When you look at frequently reported Q Plasma (or plasma efficiency) we are not that far from it being > 1. However, we should look at Q Total (total efficiency), which is still way below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY For years, I was hoping fusion is close. After watching Sabine's video, I'm not so optimistic anym…
I love how one of the articles on the HN frontpage says "Oxford", the other says "European researchers"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solar takes up quite a lot of space, but most importantly only works for a portion of a 24 hour cycle.
The Chinese & Japanese governments are investing in space based solar which solves the nighttime problem: https://wonderfulengineering.com/china-is-aiming-to-build-a-... https://nextrendsasia.org/japan-pioneer-of-transferring-sola... But we really need more energy storage, and there are plenty of good ideas in this area too: better batteries, gravity bases systems, crowd sourced storage, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one will get funded with that mentality in such a high-risk high-reward area like fusion. But indeed after so many headlines I agree with you that no one gets excited about these news anymore.
I'm not really sure about that. The promise of fusion power is so great that it would be idiotic not to throw money at it. The US was spending a billion a week in the Afghanistan war.
OK so with fusion everybody loves it because the fuel would be clean and nearly endless. Isn't that what solar power offers? Nobody wants to deploy solar due to high upfront cost. However, wouldn't the startup on a fusion reactor be much greater?
Fusion is having our own little portable sun that can be utilized more efficiently.