71–80 of 686 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.
Thanks for pointing that out. What would be your suggestion/alternatives?
A forum.
One novel approach to clean energy deployment would be to spend some of this money to deploy enough solar, wind and batteries to provide the enormous amounts of energy needed for all these sub-breakeven fusion experiments. Then, whether we get a viable fusion reactor or not, we all win.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.
Thanks for pointing that out. What would be your suggestion/alternatives?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.
I agree the cost is important. I disagree in the breaking point at witch it’s “not worth it”. To me, assuming our battery tech doesn’t find a similar breakthrough before, if fusion reaches one order of magnitude above the cost of solar, it is worth it, as a backup. Better to have it and use it when there’s clouds instead of coal or gas
Getting above unity is important but it's still a very long way from systemic over unity of the entire lifecycle of the process that turns fusion into electricity on the grid. And that simply won't happen in my lifetime or most of your lifetimes.
What will likely happen during our lifetimes is we develop large-scale electricity storage mechanisms. Together with decentralized microgrids, storage will enable most of the world's electricity to be generated by renewables. The sun is a giant fusion engine, and it's the only fusion engine that will be practical for us during at least the next 50 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One advantage of other technologies over solar is space efficiency. Obviously we're not physically lacking in space to install solar, but when even solar farms installed in the desert can be shut down by "climate activists" [1], then we really need all the help we can get [1] https://apnews.com/article/technology-government-and-politic...
The article you linked to states this as the reason for the project being scrapped: > But a group of residents organized as “Save Our Mesa” argued such a large installation would be an eyesore and could curtail the area’s popular recreational activities — biking, ATVs and skydiving — and deter tourists from visiting sculptor Michael Heizer’s land installation, “Double Negative.” I also searched the page and the word…
For another actual example of this happening, see the scaling back of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility
> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion 59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.
59 megajoules of sustained energy ^over the course of a few seconds^. Ideally this energy output would be sustained for days within ITER. JET is not designed to do this, as it has a copper magnet system, which means if you try to sustain such a plasma (confined with around 5 T magnet and around 2 MA plasma current) for longer than a few seconds, you would melt the magnet. Edit: ITER would operate at 5-10 T, and aroun…
There's a huge amount of hype in fusion these days. Companies are getting big investments just by saying "we're over unity." None of their investors will recoup any money. Getting above unity is important but it's still a very long way from systemic over unity of the entire lifecycle of the process that turns fusion into electricity on the grid. And that simply won't happen in my lifetime or most of your lifetimes. W…
We’re seeing something similar happening in self driving cars
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the profits in 1 year from silicon valley can solve world hunger by buying every single man woman child 3 meals a day, every day.
700 million people live in poverty 3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$
a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person.
700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m
Total $149.1m/day
I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about.
1 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-s...
2 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Gra...