651–660 of 827 posts
A shot of the pulse from within the reactor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMuOaTqdp4c
What would happen if you stood in that
I am a strong proponent of Fusion energy and did some work on the subject in undergrad. 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.
I used to like the idea of fusion energy, but practical application has always seemed to be 40 years in the future, and it's starting to sound more like 60 years now. I hope it will be possible some day, but it's not going to help with out energy needs in our lifetime. (Unless that longevity research is going to pay off, I guess.)
You have to understand that fusion has been funded at "fusion never" levels for 5 decades now.
The amount of money that we poured at the mining engineering that later became "fracking" was larger.
Had we funded fusion at the amount we have funded petroleum extraction, we'd have free energy by now. :(
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Apparently, about 12% of the land or 29,690 sq km in order to meet current energy demands (electricity, petrol, oil and gas). Apparently, only 6% of the country is currently built on which suggests that for any country of a similar latitude, you can estimate a land total of double that currently used per person. This does not take into account energy storage and assumes no energy is generated at night. https://www.fi…
Of course that 6% only counts land usage by humans . How many (additional) non-human habitats would you have to decimate to cover 12% of the land with (ugly) solar panels? Maybe thats acceptable in some deserts, but pretty terrible in other places. 1 step forward, 1 step back. Plus that figure is for our current energy usage, which is only going to increase over time.
Production is very near the usage sites (for BEVs, very near). It keeps the cars cooler in summer. And you can't make the parking lots any uglier.
(I am aware there aren't enough parking lots, but this deals with a fraction of the needed space.)
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You will find, especially after reading the comments, that fusion is not about creating electricity (it never will), it is about sparking people's imagination. Many people grew up reading science fiction and there is seriously nothing it the last 50 years that comes close to the amazing breakthroughs in the physical world that happened in the 50 years before that. The idea of fusion is the best thing going right now.…
If fusion is the best thing right now, that would be incredibly sad, because it barely seems to be making any progress at all. Fortunately we've seen tons of progress in other fields: computing, quantum computing, solar energy, medical, gene therapy. Even superconductors are slowly getting better.
I am a strong proponent of Fusion energy and did some work on the subject in undergrad. 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.
I used to like the idea of fusion energy, but practical application has always seemed to be 40 years in the future, and it's starting to sound more like 60 years now. I hope it will be possible some day, but it's not going to help with out energy needs in our lifetime. (Unless that longevity research is going to pay off, I guess.)
But of course, it also means that we should not rely on nuclear fusion being available in the short term...
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You will find, especially after reading the comments, that fusion is not about creating electricity (it never will), it is about sparking people's imagination. Many people grew up reading science fiction and there is seriously nothing it the last 50 years that comes close to the amazing breakthroughs in the physical world that happened in the 50 years before that. The idea of fusion is the best thing going right now.…
If fusion is the best thing right now, that would be incredibly sad, because it barely seems to be making any progress at all. Fortunately we've seen tons of progress in other fields: computing, quantum computing, solar energy, medical, gene therapy. Even superconductors are slowly getting better.
Do you remember ten years ago when nobody had heard of mRNA or CRISPR? Or fifteen years ago when neural networks were a dead end and SVM were all the rage?
I'm not saying fusion is the "best thing" or have any insight as to where it might be in the curve of adoption, but it feels weird to be making a race out of fusion with these other technologies.
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If fusion is the best thing right now, that would be incredibly sad, because it barely seems to be making any progress at all. Fortunately we've seen tons of progress in other fields: computing, quantum computing, solar energy, medical, gene therapy. Even superconductors are slowly getting better.
I don't get comments like this. Is there a measure of progress we should be using for this? Not only does this resemble the "where's the flying car I was promised?" complaint but it ignores the very real realities that a lot of progress is measured in increments that have a way of sneaking up on you exponential-style. Solar energy, for instance, was not a huge announcement, but it was a steady trickle of learning cur…