31–40 of 162 posts
My father worked on the ITER project for many years. This article goes some way to express the shear scale of this project, it's absolutely vast. When I was a lot younger I was taken on a tour of JET ( http://www.efda.org/jet/ ) and was overawed with the size of it. ITER is an order of magnitude bigger. The machine that follows ITER is where things get really interesting. Called DEMO, it's still in the planning phase…
As a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."…
Take oil, for example; it is just a method of storing energy. In the same way, the hydrogen atom is the stored energy. Any of the methods you mentioned - sunlight, wind, streams, temperature gradients, etc. - are all examples of that same stored energy. The game is in converting it for our consumption. We're never actually "generating" energy.
With that in mind, the single item with the highest "energy density" is the hydrogen atom. When we are capable of "transporting" it's stored energy to one of our storage mediums, we will have all the energy we need.
Seems like it's worth the risk.
LHC didn't make me nervous and I laughed somewhat at the people who sued to keep it off for fear it might end the world. This one however, I dunno. Sounds like things could go wrong with that much energy. When they made the first atomic bomb, they had theories about what might happen but not 100% sure and there were some surprises. But I'll take death from this over death from fracking.
Comparison to existing powerplants: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts
TL;DR: We already have significantly bigger plants. ('average' coal and nuclear plant produces about twice as much power)
LHC didn't make me nervous and I laughed somewhat at the people who sued to keep it off for fear it might end the world. This one however, I dunno. Sounds like things could go wrong with that much energy. When they made the first atomic bomb, they had theories about what might happen but not 100% sure and there were some surprises. But I'll take death from this over death from fracking.
It's actually a lot less energy than it sounds like. The temperatures will hit 10-100 times the temperature of the sun, but the density inside will be very very low. This thing couldn't vaporize a car. Remember, this is only a 500 megawatt device, and the reaction is so unstable that if it somehow escapes the containment of the device it dies instantly. It can't "run away" like some fission reactions can. edit: Not a…
There's no unrequested fission surplus situation possible here...
As a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."…
As a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."…
To a first approximation a magical 100% effective explosion of a 500 MW fusion plant would be about as destructive as the explosion of a 500 MW coal plant. So yeah, dead stacked like cordwood and an impressive hole in the ground, but not much more than a nasty industrial accident. You'd lose a lot of windows but in bulk the building foundation would likely survive.
Why an explosion would magically be 100% as effective as splitting a steam boiler like a bratwurst is a mystery, as the short version of why it takes so long to build these things is before they work they fail containment a lot of times. So its like building that 500 MW coal burner and designing it to split in half and get put back together over and over until with some fine tuning it works.
In the long run, in like 2300 AD or whatever, I'm sure cheapskates will create some fascinating industrial accidents by neglecting to build in ablative shielding or liq H2 overpressure burst disks or whatever and the accidents will be quite exciting as a typical industrial accident.
As a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."…
Unlikely. The reaction is not self-sustaining; it needs the very high pressure provided by the containment, and without that it would fizzle rather than boom (a hydrogen bomb works by using a fission explosion to compress the hydrogen part enough to fuse). The tritium in the fuel is radioactive and releasing it into the atmosphere would be... not ideal, but the reactor doesn't use a lot of it and it's light enough to fly off into space fairly quickly.