631–640 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?
Solar panel manufacturing and disposal is far from clean though.
This is not a major breakthrough, it's a benchmark.
A major breakthrough would be materials that could withstand the neutron bombardment longer, the ultimate limiting factor for fusion energy plants after we achieve positive net energy.
> The fusion announcement is great news but sadly it won't help in our battle to lessen the effects of climate change. > There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades. > And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is urgent - and the gove…
This has gotta be one of the most important investments for humanity and our planet. Hard to fathom these timeline predictions in the same world where mRNA vaccines and various spacecraft have scaled in <1 year.
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The US grid (the last-mile bits anyway) isn't 110 volts, it's 220. It's just our houses that are wired for (mostly) 110 V. Edit: I would love to see some sort of hybrid 110/220 V residential wiring/plug standard take hold in the US. It would require more expensive cable in the walls (since you need one additional conductor) and plugs, but it's totally doable. Most electrical products and appliances made these days ar…
> The US grid (the last-mile bits anyway) isn't 110 volts, it's 220. It's just our houses that are wired for (mostly) 110 V. Similarly, in most of continental Europe phase-to-phase is 400V but most outlets are 230V. E.g. in my apartment only the stove has a 400V three-phase (4-wire) connection.
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The US grid (the last-mile bits anyway) isn't 110 volts, it's 220. It's just our houses that are wired for (mostly) 110 V. Edit: I would love to see some sort of hybrid 110/220 V residential wiring/plug standard take hold in the US. It would require more expensive cable in the walls (since you need one additional conductor) and plugs, but it's totally doable. Most electrical products and appliances made these days ar…
I kinda like that all but a couple outlets in my house can't kill me. Also, I boil my water on an induction stove plugged into 50 amps at 220 volts. I'm not waiting around, to put it mildly.
Perhaps it's because all houses have residual current devices which trigger much faster than fuses if current leaks to earth (eg through a person).
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You could just run US-style appliance circuits to your kitchen, etc. Those are sometimes three conductor and other times four conductor. However, I doubt it'd pass inspection if they were easily accessible from the counter-top. If you're going to flout building codes anyway, it'd probably be easier/more practical to just run circuits with foreign outlets instead. Also, it might be easier to find appropriate GFCI brea…
EU is on 50hz AC, where as the US is on 60hz. It would work fine for purely resistive appliances, and possibly devices with switching mode power supplies, but some devices would be unhappy plugging in to the wrong frequency at 220V. I'm not sure about the phase alignment but that may be an issue as well. US is split phase, but Europe has 220 on a single conductor?
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The insane thing that people should realize about the 20T CFS test back in September was that it was them completing the first of 18 coils, and it performed incredibly well. The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they b…
> in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of power that they're putting into it Does this mean 9/10ths of the power can be sold and the other 1/10th can be re-used to power the reactor endlessly? How much power does this produce compared to a nuclear reactor?
The device will cycle between a hot dense implosion (similar to NIF) and a cold, rotating cloud, at a very high frequency in a large Penning trap.
I have more information at my website, http://www.DDproFusion.com
If things go well, I should begin building the first prototype in a few months. I just acquired the main magnet, an old permanent magnet MRI machine, that will provide the field for the giant Penning trap.
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Wow. A typical induction hob in the UK is 32A at 230V. 230V is of course the nominal voltage of a single phase, although in practice in the UK the voltage is closer to 240V. That's only 7.35kW of power. Do you have significantly more powerful cookers?
400V is only used for stoves or instant water heaters, but e.g. our stove uses 11kW actually. If you don’t have these amounts of energy available, the temperature your instant water heater can reach or the speed with which you can cook obviously suffers (which I suspect is one of the reasons why americans prefer gas stoves so much).
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The insane thing that people should realize about the 20T CFS test back in September was that it was them completing the first of 18 coils, and it performed incredibly well. The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they b…
ReBCO tape is the specific high-temperature superconducting material they're using. Another important material is FLiBe, which is a liquid that I think absorbs the energy from the fusion reactor. I don't really understand the properties that make it particularly well suited to the task, but I gather it's important. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/breeding-bl...