501–510 of 827 posts
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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).
But the size of those wall plugs tho...
A shot of the pulse from within the reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMuOaTqdp4c
You can tell when someone didn't read the article, because the video is at the very top of it :)
> 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?
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…
Can someone explain something about fusion for me? To make a fusion reactor that's useful you have to solve two problems: First you have to build a working fusion reactor. Second, you have to capture that energy to do useful work. Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on technology to capture energy from the giant, already working fusion reactor in the sky?
I really wish we'd gone with Nixon's 1970s proposal to make our entire grid carbon-neutral using fission, but given how the politics of that worked out, I'm also incredibly grateful that people kept working on photovoltaic technology anyway.
We're building out solar pretty rapidly, and the technology has been advancing at an incredible rate, but we can work on multiple solutions simultaneously, and solar is a clear case study in why working on not-yet-viable technology is incredibly worthwhile pursuit.
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But the size of those wall plugs tho...
IMO they are not meaningfully larger than US plugs (I'm British, but have travelled to the US several times, as well as many other countries), but they are safer.
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The UK didn't float away or anything. It's still in Europe.
Consensus among geologists is that substantial portions of that island did in fact drift away from what we know as France.
They're still a very long way from getting a net gain in energy: https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
For those wondering, the Q for this particular result was 0.33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H99hvPlC4is&t=48m
Edit: Confirmed by this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/soc5xo/oxfords_jet_...
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It's 30 years time. It's always 30 years time. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
This is a very dumb meme that people use to avoid learning anything about the actual hurdles that are currently being faced by fusion researchers. At some point, fusion will be much less than 30 years away, and at that point, I guarantee you that lazy people will still be repeating this joke, because it is literaly the only thing they know about the subject.
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There’s nothing fundamentally expensive about a Tokamak. We’re in the phase of fusion of “computers have 1 Kb of memory and take up a whole basement.”
What does 'fundamentally expensive' mean? If it does not incluse precision engineering to build largest vacuum vessel, supercomputers, superconductors, generation and containment of hottest substance on the planet, and largest magnetic fields we can produce. If that's not 'fundamentally expensive', then what is? Especially when your interlocutor is asking for geothermal, a.k.a. a hole in the ground?
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That's kind of her thing. She is usually right, but also overly pessimistic in a way opposite from the popular press over-optimism. I get frustrated because it paints science in an undeserved negative light. It is at least truthful, in a way that most anti science writing is not. Mostly I find it unhelpful in that it points out problems without either explaining why they were reasonable or giving a real alternative.
Popular 'i f#@cking love science's type science deserves to be painted in a negative light. IFLS pushers are motivated by money, clicks, and clout and to a large extent misinform the public.
I suppose you could say that they also get benefits from appealing to the IFLS crowd, so live and die by the same sword. I believe IFLS does more harm than good, but it's hard to be sure.