101–110 of 194 posts
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cheers https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26434203/nature13008.pdf
No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.
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I talked to a friend who works there, this is more of a PR move. Back at the lab it is business as usual.
The PR guys often work on a different schedule than the actual science, but those times do usually correlate well with the funding deadlines for some strange reason... It's probably work as usual at the NIF because everyone is working on a big, long, grinding project that's slowly making progress rather than bashing out stunning Eureka moments complete with Dom Perignon showers like you see in a Hollywood flick.
Right now they are 3 orders of magnitude off (10^15 they get, 10^18 or better 10^19 they want).
This is newsworthy despite "They didn't get more fusion power out than they put in with the laser"? After decades of work they are orders of magnitude away from break-even. Makes me wonder if the goal is actually break-even and/or power generation. Not really; but it's a revealing question. I'm no great fan of the budgets these huge projects pull down; I think the bang-for-the-buck is greater elsewhere. But modelling…
From one of my nuke profs, depending on how fusion is achieved its not all together clear that it would be any cleaner than fission. Something like 16MEV neutrons are going to cause neutron activation in tons of shielding. So all we do is swap tons of spent fuel from fission plants for tons of activated material from fusion plants, assuming we can even get there.
> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…
Do not want to argue with the main thrust of your argument (because I agree with it), but at least part of the reason why people had an issue with the NIF as energy research, but less so as a nuclear test simulator is because the NIF as a device is pretty clearly designed to simulate nuclear detonations. If the problem is "you're wasting taxpayer money", the issue isn't the dollar amount spent, its the return on the…
Source: Search for the Ultimate Energy Source: A History of the U.S. Fusion Energy Program, by Stephen O. Dean, who was a major figure in the U.S. fusion program.
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Those PDFs are normally watermarked with a unique identifier for your account. It's not worth it.
I didn't log in. For almost all of these they detect that I'm connecting from my campus IP block and unlock everything.
"Come now, editorial board of Nature. Do you expect me to pay for a subscription?"
"No, Mr. Finster -- we expect you to fuse!"
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cheers https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26434203/nature13008.pdf
No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.
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No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.
This isn't protesting the law with civil disobedience, it is breaking the law because the direct expected value of breaking the law (people having access to this specific paper) is greater then the expected cost of breaking the law (~0).
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No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.
This isn't protesting the law with civil disobedience, it is breaking the law because the direct expected value of breaking the law (people having access to this specific paper) is greater then the expected cost of breaking the law (~0).
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> we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future I have a feeling that if we had fusion plants providing limitless cheap power, we'd get back on an 8% yearly growth track for energy consumption, like with oil consumption before 1970. Then within a century or so, we'd be producing an amount of power equivalent to 20% of what the earth receives from the s…
I don't think fusion power plants are going to be that much cheaper to run than current nuclear power plants. Fuel costs are a small part of the operating costs of a nuclear plant (16% to 28%) and the capex costs probably won't be that different (e.g. they will still be based on heating water to create steam to power turbines to turn generators). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plan...
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No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.
YC companies aren't funded by taxpayer dollars