Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

Post by reubenswartz » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:48 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #646

iaw wrote: post #632

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.)

Post by user_7832 » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #678

tsol wrote: post #494

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It's strange to me how low India is on the list. As an Indian all the Indians I know drink huge amounts of tea. Might just be an economics thing-- they can't afford to buy as much tea as they'd like to. That or it's something to do with the way the stats are collected

Actually, tea is about as cheap as clean water there. I commented separately, but tl;dr I think local tea consumption in countries that produce tea is being massively undercounted.

Post by brutusborn » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #683

bsder wrote: post #652

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> 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. 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 petr…

Who is "we"? Fracking was funded with private money. It was "conventional" technology, no edge-of-science stuff, so private entrepreneurs could afford it, and the rewards were quick to materialize. Nuclear fusion? There's this urban myth that fusion could have been achieved if only we'd have poured more money into it, but where's the evidence? Plasma modeling requires a lot of computational power. What you have now i…

Post by treis » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 2:08 AM UTC

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #650

treis wrote: post #615

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Sure because you develop technology while working on achievable goals. As an example, what could someone in 1920 do to help develop fusion power? Pretty much nothing that would be practically useful today. But they had stuff they could achieve which laid the groundwork to what we're doing today.

But then you run into things that you only discover while trying to do something practical. Like the space shuttle having to land--NASA developed grooved runways specifically for this purpose and now they're on our highways. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Groove.... There are technologies, materials, and methods we've developed, tested, and perfected because of some specific need. I mean, how mu…

Post by jessaustin » Thu, Feb 10, 2022, 2:11 AM UTC

xxs wrote: post #636

thedougd wrote: post #628

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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?

it's 230 (+-10%) nominal not 220. At my house it's around 235. It's 230v phase/live to neutral and 400V between live wires in 3phase. Nowadays 3-phase (120degree between each) is a commodity.