351–360 of 375 posts
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> "Top physicists?" Fusion is an engineering problem." So are refrigerators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
> It has been suggested that most of the actual inventing was performed by Szilárd, with Einstein merely acting as a consultant and helping with the patent-related paperwork.[1] Plausible, since he had the experience.
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
"As Tom McGuire, who is leading the Lockheed team, notes, however, the circular magnetic fields which coil around a tokamak’s doughnut become unstable if the plasma’s pressure is too high."
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Those oil, has and coal subsidy numbers are completely bogus if they are generated from the iea numbers. Iea is just a solar/wind lobbying front - and the bulk of the numbers are made from countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran directly subsidising the cost of petrol for their citizens. It is laughable for anyone to suggest that oil, coal or gas energy is subsidised when these numbers are calculated on wooly figures li…
A Harvard study a few years ago found the externalized cost of coal to be about $350 billion per year in the U.S. alone: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/usa-coal-study-idU... . You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to bring government subsidies for renewable into the discussion, you also have to consider the externalized cost of legalized pollution. The only defensible calculation is to look…
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
It's always a safe bet that the top Hacker News comment will always be "won't work, it's too hard." It's like sitting around for a year trying to sell a project at my current employer, with everybody and their lead telling you "that'll never work," then you implement in a weekend and those same people start nitpicking what you've come up with. (What happened to it'll never work? "Well, your CSS isn't great.") Honestl…
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And it's always a safe bet the top response to that comment will be somebody criticizing it without any solid facts or reason but with fuzzy "you just need to believe harder!" kind of nonsense.
Actually, I subtly said "get the hell out of the way if you don't think it'll work," not warm and fuzzy smarminess. But it's much easier for you to mock if you read warm and fuzzies out of it, and I get that. What I said, reworded, was the people who sit on the sidelines of anything and tell you, while you are trying something, that it won't work are among the worst people in the profession. I didn't say believe hard…
You know what demoralizes a team like nothing else? And endless litany of projects that failed because nobody wanted to listen to the people pointing out problems.
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Actually, I subtly said "get the hell out of the way if you don't think it'll work," not warm and fuzzy smarminess. But it's much easier for you to mock if you read warm and fuzzies out of it, and I get that. What I said, reworded, was the people who sit on the sidelines of anything and tell you, while you are trying something, that it won't work are among the worst people in the profession. I didn't say believe hard…
The naysayers do us all a valuable service. They remind us that hope, dreams, and belief do not solve engineering problems. You know what demoralizes a team like nothing else? And endless litany of projects that failed because nobody wanted to listen to the people pointing out problems.
When people on the team think they are pointing out problems, but are doing so without support, by simply saying "That won't work" instead of "That won't work because of ...".
This does nothing to further a project and leaves the burden of proof for a working solution on the person who proposed the solution in the first place, and the way for them to prove their solution is to continue working on it, with no actionable feedback to revise their project on.
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The only solution is one that can't be applied here: LockMart shouldn't make extraordinary claims ("Check out this cool fusion reactor!") until they have extraordinary proof to go with them. Right now, this entire story is just a waste of space on a hard drive somewhere in Palo Alto, and no comments pro or con are going to change that.
I don't know about that. What you are suggesting doesn't really fit the MO of Skunkworks where they work on advanced projects for years before revealing them. It's not like they announced stealth aircraft in the 90s just to drive up their stock price, they'd been working on it for nearly 4o years by that point and the planes were flying missions for decades. Also someone on reddit made an interesting observation abou…
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
"Top physicists?" Fusion is an engineering problem. The thing to check here is what plasma temperature/densities they have achieved with their new confinement scheme. They've basically said the results are preliminary, and some of the results are from simulation (which should not be trusted; aka look at how well the NIF simulations worked). This is not particularly interesting. Shielding was mentioned, though not eno…
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A Harvard study a few years ago found the externalized cost of coal to be about $350 billion per year in the U.S. alone: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/16/usa-coal-study-idU... . You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to bring government subsidies for renewable into the discussion, you also have to consider the externalized cost of legalized pollution. The only defensible calculation is to look…
I wouldn't be surprised if coal use is a net loss to the economy (i.e. the value of the energy generated by coal is less than the environmental cost of coal use) That doesn't make any sense. Net loss to the economy ? If you were to say a net loss overall, including environmental costs, I might agree.
Coal is an energy dense naturally occurring product. The environmental damage from coal relates to mining, shipping and burning it. The environmental benefits of coal are that extraction, transport and burning doesn't happen to other things - ie, biomass, otherwise known as timber.
England has more forest now than it has for centuries, because a more energy dense substitute for energy was extracted (coal). In many developing countries, access to coal would be a net benefit, because it would reduce clearing and burning of vegetation, and because the ensuing affordable energy allows for more intensive food production, and the keeping of food inventories, further lessening the pressure on the environment.
Of course, everything that applies to coal also applies to natural gas even more so, and obviously to fusion even more than that. But this meme of 'coal is evil and must be stopped' ignores the reality of the situation and completely ignores the benefits of efficient energy production, especially in the case where real, persistent and preventable environmental damage is taking place because there is a lack of efficient energy productin.