131–140 of 162 posts
I read this article, and I couldn't help thinking — Couldn't they spend these billions on something like deep geothermal energy and get a much better (and more likely) return?
www.withouthotair.com
Is it harder to build smaller tokamak? And if so, why?
Check this out, Japan is going their own way instead of this experiment According to researchers at a demonstration reactor in Japan, a fusion generator should be feasible in the 2030s and no later than the 2050s. Japan is pursuing its own research program with several operational facilities that are exploring several fusion paths. http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004 Also, they are already planning the succe…
You can get the date fusion power will become feasible by adding 30 years to the current year. Been holding steady at 30 for quite some time.
"We're only 30 years away? Bah, what's the rush?"
the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years oh, ok
Second only to matter/antimatter annihilation, nuclear fusion is the most energy-dense process in the universe. And the fuel consists of about 0.03% of the world's oceans.
Obviously the tech is really awesome, but I was curious how the projected power level compares (500 megawatts) 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)
The fact that it's "only" half a coal plant is hardly a criticism.
> will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. This is a strange sentence. (1) Notice Height of object-A; (2) Notice Weight of object-A; (3) Compare Weight of object-A to Weight of object-B where object-B is known more for its property of Height than of its Weight. The sense here (I think) is that the Eiffel tower is significantly taller…
I think you're overanalyzing it. 23,000 tons is hard to visualize. Eiffel Tower is easy to visualize.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some who propose that Iraq was invaded in response to Saddam's switch to use Euros rather than Dollars as reserve currency [1]. From a plutocratic viewpoint, that might well be a considered as vile an act as say, using bio-weapons on the Kurdish separatists. [1] http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/03/22/the-usa-attacked-iraq...
Call me naive, but I think it was Junior surrounding himself with folks who wanted him to finish the job that Pops started. I think they (like most who start wars) dramatically underestimating the costs and complexity. I'm less inclined to believe that it has to do with gassing their own people (why start caring now?) or going to the Euro. But I do agree with the above points that we spend an awful lot of time fighti…
It also leaves out a very significant factor : vote winning. Patriotism wins elections, because it, in of itself, is just another form of groupthink.
Obviously the tech is really awesome, but I was curious how the projected power level compares (500 megawatts) 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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I do think that alternative fusion paths should be better funded, cranks aside, I don't think that it's the fault of ITER that it's the most promising and best developed and so the best funded one. The entire field is ridiculously underfunded for what it can offer and we shouldn't be having to risk it all on one or two projects.
Exactly. This article just makes me mad - they are penny-pinching on quite simply the most important piece of technology that humanity has ever tried to develop. If commercial reactors are switched on by 2040, the planet's CO2 output will have dropped drastically by 2060 - way more than all but the most optimistic estimations linked to climate change. $10b is nothing compared to what was destroyed in the GFC. It's no…
" As the meeting ended, he noted that there was not enough time to vet the components that occupy the third floor: plans had to be gathered, specifications brought up to date, problems reconciled. “It is not reasonable,” he said. “It means that we would need to process thousands of data points in three weeks.” Chiocchio asked if things would speed up after early floors were finished, but there were simply too many details to work through before delivering drawings to the contractor. “We have no more float,” Cordier said. “If we delay now, we will have a real delay. The only way to avoid a schedule loss is to increase our resources to cope with it.”
That afternoon, Chiocchio joined me for lunch. He seemed exhausted. iter, by the time it is finished, will contain ten million individual parts, but he had only twenty-eight people working for him. He later showed me a room near his office where three men sit at workstations every day to hunt down conflicts. Before each man, there was the huge iter puzzle in miniature, filling up two computer screens. Up close, the design looked as though someone had taken the industrial landscape that runs alongside the New Jersey Turnpike and compressed it into a cube the volume of a Holiday Inn. “We have to check everything, from clashes to interfaces—like here,” one of the men said, pointing to a schematic where a support structure for the tokamak was not lining up with an embedment plate."