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More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

growthbusiness.co.uk

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Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#551

Post by felixmeziere »

slothtrop wrote: post #531
tsimionescu wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coercing the population to stop consuming is a non-starter. Right now we are doing the opposite of that though: the advertising industry, one of the largest in Earth, is mostly about brain-washing people into buying more stuff. We can easily put a stop to this tomorrow while listing nothing of value to society, but instead we fetishize growth so we don't.

You'd have to make a meaningful connection between growth and advertising, and you can't. The reason Western countries are increasing the immigration rate is precisely to perpetuate GDP, fertility rate is otherwise stagnant. This means people aren't individually increasing their rate of purchasing stuff over time, in fact many buy less than their parents did. Look around in your room and you'll probably see the avera…

Absolutely agree with tsimionescu

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#552

Post by DennisP »

Stevvo wrote: post #548
DennisP wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's quite clear: use REBCO superconductors. Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output. Modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER will manage. That's why CFS is building a reactor using REBCO which is much smaller than ITER, but should have the same performance. It'll be half…

SPARC's 2025 timeline is a joke. They haven't even started hiring engineers yet, let alone building the thing because they still have no idea how to make a big enough REBCO magnet.

They've already built a SPARC-size REBCO magnet, and demonstrated it at 20 Tesla for five hours.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-3240/mit-ramps-10ton-magnet...

https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusio...

It's pretty amazing that they did that without any engineers.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#553

Post by ncmncm »

ascar wrote: post #529
ncmncm wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such giant storms are rare, and short-lived. A few days' storage outlasts them.

A few days of storage is a lot though isn't it?

How much NG do utilities stockpile?

A few days' would be a lot of batteries, but you don't use batteries for that. A few days' pumped hydro, e.g., is not much at all.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#554

Post by smaudet »

nl wrote: post #422
smaudet wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you believe that even the worst nuclear accident at power plant will "instantly fry us all to molten pulp" in any appreciable range (while climate change is worldwide), the you are mistaken I am not wrong, in a world dotted with miniature fission reactors, as the most extreme pro-fission people would like to favor. If you can build one in space, and it powers the whole earth, that's obviously a very different st…

I'm sorry. I'm probably more antinuclear than you but a lot of the things you are saying are just ignorant. For example nuclear bombs melting flesh is because of the extreme heat, nothing that is unique to the nuclear process. You'd be a more effective advocate for anti-nuclear viewpoints by learning some stuff first.

Ok, well would you mind linking some good starting materials?

And I think you maybe are more ignorant than you care to admit as well:

"is that a very appreciable fraction of the energy liberated goes into radiant heat and light"

https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/med/med_ch...

To me that doesn't sound like "oh man the temperature in the room just went up", more like "oh man I just got a really bad sunburn".

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#555

Post by smaudet »

matkoniecz wrote: post #526
smaudet wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first of all energy storage, is not production, but as you asked: 1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps. 2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into…

> mechanical earth dams (store energy in potential energy mass, less dangerous than an actual water dam, a lot easier to build) a lot easier to build? This claim seems wrong, given that pumped-storage hydroelectricity is in actual use, when this is purely theoretical. "mechanical earth dams" gives info about water dams - is it existing even as a theoretic design?

https://www.energyvault.com/gravity

Its a company with as I understand it proven designs.

Besides, the concept is trivial and applicable and replicable by almost anyone. I don't understand why there is so much skepticism around these things...

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#556

Post by smaudet »

tlonny wrote: post #506
smaudet wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first of all energy storage, is not production, but as you asked: 1) Reduced need for energy storage. Right to repair for everything, write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. Taxes on unused compute cycles to help create incentives for this, perhaps. 2) For actual energy storage, something like the sand heat system recently put into…

> write code that is efficient and lower power, distributed systems which don't require complex centralized systems to run. huh?

It's marginal compared to the other power expenses to be sure, but computing is another rising power cost. Besides my AC, and cooking, I don't have any regular power expenditures other than digital devices, so it seems reasonable to me to want to optimize power expenditure there.

Regarding the distributed vs centralized, the reasoning is large data centers are inefficient and could be replaced mostly with local, low power systems which are barely on at all, versus constant-on, constant-ready server rack systems.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#557

Post by DennisP »

cycomanic wrote: post #419
manmal wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the sun is not always shining (and half the year not at the right angle), and wind is not always blowing. Unless a country has access to always-on sources (like sea currents), energy must be stored or things must be burned. Storage is hard and energy intensive to build, and many countries would need a few months worth of storage to never bother about burning stuff again. And that’s _a lot_, you wo…

If your grid is large enough (and that is already happening in Europe for economic reasons), you have enough geographic distribution to average out variations. There have been studies that showed you could run the US on something like 500% overcapacity with a fully integrated grid using only renewables and no storage. Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow, so even with a combined nuclear/…

Long-distance transmission is at least as slow to build as nuclear, at least in the US. There are projects that have foundered for decades.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#558

Post by DennisP »

manmal wrote: post #535
cycomanic wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your grid is large enough (and that is already happening in Europe for economic reasons), you have enough geographic distribution to average out variations. There have been studies that showed you could run the US on something like 500% overcapacity with a fully integrated grid using only renewables and no storage. Moreover nuclear are slow moving, they typically don't load follow, so even with a combined nuclear/…

Building wind and solar to 500% overcapacity sounds like a great waste of resources and space though.

And makes nuclear look a lot more cost-competitive by comparison.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#559

Post by Kukumber »

dotnet00 wrote: post #237
Kukumber wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX is not successful as an industry It is a government funded project at this point

Most of SpaceX's funding as well as most of their launches are private.

Weird my comment mentioning the source got removed, it was just a link so maybe it got detected as spam

Here is the link of the article: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

You have to be curious about who are their customers

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/will-the-ukraine-war...

The EU coming to subsidize them even more

And the fact that they are not profitable says it all

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#560

Post by throw0101a »

olejorgenb wrote: post #385
tejohnso wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so depressing. It's nearly impossible to form a confident opinion these days without a ton of effort. I heard Sabine, I said to myself...makes sense...and it looks like she's put a lot of work into understanding all of this, and she is a professional. So that was it. Now you're saying she's wrong. Very wrong. And you're a nuclear reactor physicist (thanks for comment!) Am I going to go read all of the relevan…

She address fast-breeders and thorium in the same video: https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k?t=734 (concluding that they are too complex and expensive)

> (concluding that they are too complex and expensive)

She states "To make a long story short, they didn't catch on, and I don't think they ever will."

She states her opinion, and there's nothing wrong with that, but (a) others may have a different opinion, and (b) it may be possible to make them more practical if more effort is put into them that has been in the past.

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