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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#441

Post by unilynx »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #438
louwrentius wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for being like this but what I like most about that remark is the joyful optimism that there will be a society to power in the first place, and secondly one that can (still) build and operate such technology. Edit: maybe I’m needlessly pessimistic but I feel societies are much more fragile than they seem. We had it unreasonably good in ‘the west’ for the last 77 years but that time span is so short in the grand…

Are there any studies on what the world might look like in 50 years, based on a reasonable, realistic projection of climate change, human change in behaviour etc etc? Just to be clear, I 100% believe in climate change, and do what I think is a fair amount to help (cycle as much as I can, don't take long haul flights, take train instead of short haul flights, drive EV, insulate house, don't eat much meat, Solar PV pan…

Don’t worry, Earth is pretty fault tolerant. It will still be here long after we’re gone

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#442

Post by ComputerGuru »

soheil wrote: post #401
ComputerGuru wrote: post #297

> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. This made me laugh. How much more British can you get?

You'd probably be surprised to learn that the UK is not at the top of the list of countries with the highest tea consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tea_consu...

Not even remotely surprised. I'm decently surprised they made it to number 4; I thought some southeast asian countries might have a higher per-capita tea consumption. Come to think of it, I think the list is probably highly skewed towards countries that import their tea and countries with local tea production will be a lot harder to pin down more accurately. Many countries missing from the list as well!

There are other "oddities" that make me suspicious. e.g. Saudi Arabia and UAE have extremely similar native population (bedouin Arab origins) and neither culturally drink black tea, but KSA ranks much higher than UAE. My immediate guess is the massive (underpaid) southeast asian labor force in KSA¹, which I know firsthand consume tea ceaselessly - but India supposedly has a lower per-capita consumption rate than the UAE. In fact, I'm sure both KSA and UAE are up there because of their foreign laborers, lending credence to my suspicion that countries with local tea production (such as India) are massively under-represented in that list.

¹: KSA does admittedly have a higher percentage of Levantine and North African permanent residents.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#443

Post by soperj »

danny_taco wrote: post #420
soperj wrote: post #265

Quoted post unavailable.

Despite his flaws as a human being and damage done by Microsoft in the 90's, overall his contributions to humanity greatly exceed his shortcomings. What are your contributions to humankind? Have you done anything to make the world a better place? The answer is, probably not, or at least not as much as Bill. So be wary of passing judgement to others so easily lest you be judged yourself.

[flagged]

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#444

Post by dghughes »

dfdz wrote: post #80

> This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997. The experiment produced > 11 megawatts of power and at Jet > two 500 megawatt flywheels are used to run the experiments log_2(2*500/11)*(2022-1997) + 2022 = 2185 At this rate we will have fusion by 2185 I guess?

Or it could be like Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#445

Post by moreati »

seanw444 wrote: post #392
johnzim wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also quite a helpful metric. Most British people are aware that the national grid used to spend a lot of time making sure they had the power available to draw during the commercial breaks of mass-media TV events (series finales, half time in a cup match etc) purely for the nation boiling water with electric kettles en masse. Great intersection of hard science (energy necessary to boil water + extremely efficient…

Wasn't there a relevant Tom Scott video on the subject?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI about pumped hydro at Dinorwig Power Station

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#446

Post by dahfizz »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #351
dahfizz wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind + Solar are near useless without storage, and we do not have anything close to the storage necessary.

Not nessesarily, alternative approach is to overbuild them 10x so thay we always generate more wnergy than we need and have continent spanning super-grid because it's always windy and sunny somewhere.

Today Boston has a sunrise at 11:47 am utc and Los Angeles has a sunset 1:30am utc. That is 10+ hours where the USA gets zero sunlight. Inconveniently, we also hit peak energy usage during those 10 dark hours.

So if you want to ignore the storage problem, you need to rely on wind only. And if you have to dramatically over provision production to be able to meet demand, the cost benefits disappear.

Storage is a must for renewables to really take off.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#447

Post by jjoonathan »

jedberg wrote: post #417
jjoonathan wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the British go with 240V because it makes tea faster? I don't know the history... but I want to believe.

I think you mean 230V, but it was picked because it's more efficient and cheaper (you can use smaller wires for the same output).

Well, yeah, but 300V allows smaller wires still, and 1000V even smaller, and so on. Hell, you could just wire distribution voltage straight to the socket, make the wires tiny, and eliminate the need for a zillion transformers! Of course, we don't do that for safety reasons, so the choice of socket voltage represents a compromise between safety and efficiency/power. The US and Britain made different tradeoffs, which probably means the constraints were slightly different. I could see "brews tea faster" as a significant factor in a country that once spent 10% of its GDP on tea. That would be a fun fact, if true. But maybe it isn't, and the whole thing is dumb luck and poor coordination around transformer tapping. Shrug.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#448

Post by soperj »

spockz wrote: post #358
soperj wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who visited Jeffery Epstein's island and has also been removed from the board of directors of the company they started for inappropriate relationship isn't an OK dude. There's also the whole bit with Paul Allen where they tried to take all of his shares when he had cancer.

I read Paul Allen’s biography. There it seemed Gates could be (quite) a bit of a jerk. However, this thing about shares isn’t mentioned. And was Gates removed from the board of Microsoft? Where did you get that information?

Seriously?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/30/microsoft...

He "left" the board, which is the equivalent of "You can't fire me, I quit". He was removed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/17/bill-gates-m...

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#449

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #341
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We haven't invented commercial fusion power We don't have working fusion power, at all. > Solar and batteries are nice but they're not yet cost effective "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet someho…

> We don't have working fusion power, at all. Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable. > "Cost effective" is a judgement call, not physics. If I told you that the cost of coal-generated electricity was that your great-grandchildren would live in an impoverished and difficult world, you might not view that a particular cost-effective either, yet somehow that's the…

> Sure we do. Look no further than this article. We can make it, but its not commercially viable.

Q total is way below 1 (translation: it took far more energy to make the energy that was produced, than was produced). We do not have working fusion power, if "working fusion power" means "you get more out than you put in".

As for the rest of this, I have no idea who you think you're replying to. Just one follow up, neverthless:

> And yet, I guarantee you, we cannot go full solar now.

The USA spent more than US$300M per day on the war in Afghanistan, for 20 years. I guarantee you that if "we wanted to go full solar" now, we could. US$2T buys you a lot of anything, including even today's vaguely clunky battery tech.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#450

Post by [deleted] »

soperj wrote: post #443
danny_taco wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite his flaws as a human being and damage done by Microsoft in the 90's, overall his contributions to humanity greatly exceed his shortcomings. What are your contributions to humankind? Have you done anything to make the world a better place? The answer is, probably not, or at least not as much as Bill. So be wary of passing judgement to others so easily lest you be judged yourself.

[flagged]

[deleted]
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