531–540 of 906 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
We miniaturized fusion 70 years ago and they named a bathing suit after it. Keeping it going is the hard part, and it was messy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
> it's the miniaturization that's the hard part We don't have a working fusion system to miniaturize. Stellar fusion happens at much lower temperatures than what we're trying to do on Earth.
And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it.
So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
The method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals). If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days. If this is real, it'll change society quickly and perman…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I were a lad ... I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form)…
Very true. I remember cheering since the mid 80's every time the temperature for superconductivity went up, sometimes with 20 degrees K in one go. And then it was quiet for a long long time with a plateau. More recently, two major jumps, the last one of > 50 degrees (2017, H2S), and now this... https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002...
If superconductance can be reliably demonstrated at RTP (you wear a light cotton shirt, instead of 1cm thick fancy weaves involving an awful lot of rubber) then we are laughing all the way to ameliorating climate change.
Even if this result is confirmed then I think it will take at least 20 years to dig in to reversing climate change.
We live in unpleasant times.
The method to produce this material as described in the related paper [1] is fairly simple and could be done at home with a $200 home metal melting furnace from amazon and the precursors (which also seem to be fairly standard easy to obtain metals). If this is real, I'd expect some smart people from hackaday / youtube to reproduce this within weeks if not days. If this is real, it'll change society quickly and perman…
Looking forward to the inevitable Nile Red & Applied Science videos
Guys, even if everything in this paper is true, the material as it is might have limited applications. From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current de…
When I were a lad ... I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form)…
I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).
Which business do I invest in assuming this is real and has IP protection? It would be like buying Intel in 1971 or getting shares in Edison in 1878.
Who knows though, maybe we'll be able to finally launch ships into space without rockets?
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Yes, but chernobyl produced a lot of useful electricity (at first)
For years, and then after the explosion too. The last reactors were decommissioned around 2015 (it takes years, so the dates are bit washy). Chernobyl wasn't the accident people seem to think. It wasn't inevitable, it was the result of numerous self-serving decisions exacerbated and even required in the very messed up Soviet system of management that enforced following the party instructions over all other possible c…
And much of the cost of nuclear is hedging against these decisions, whether by profit-seeking or the tyranny of a totalitarian state
Guys, even if everything in this paper is true, the material as it is might have limited applications. From what they show, the critical field and critical current seem very low. 2500 Oe is like 0.25 Tesla. Even REBCO at 77K is >1T. And 2500 Oe is not even at critical temperature but much lower. From skimming through the article I couldn't find the sample size of the current measurement to get the critical current de…
When I were a lad ... I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form)…
The 1980's discoveries were of the first "high temperature" superconductors (where "high temperature" means "above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen").
Liquid nitrogen is much easier to deal with than liquid helium.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
We miniaturized fusion 70 years ago and they named a bathing suit after it. Keeping it going is the hard part, and it was messy.