11–20 of 49 posts
Can any physics experts chime in? This seems similar to stuff I’ve read over and over but I want to believe…
That is like using lasers to start a fire and then saying: Look the fire is producing energy in the form of heat! But the heat has to be turned to electricity to power the lasers. And then the fire better produce enough heat to produce enough electricity to power the lasers...
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Don't get your hopes up yet: This just demonstrated that the released energy (in form of heat etc) is higher than the energy input – yet the released energy hadn't been converted to electricity that could have powered the lasers. Supposedly this would be done by a heat engine, with can normally extract 60% of energy input. So 2.5 * 0.6 = 1.5, so it is yet again not producing any surplus energy.
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Who's we? If fusion is solved, the country that has will just become a net energy exporter (somehow, if it's the US, idk how they would ship that power). Nothing much will change for the rest of the world, they will just switch from one dependency to the other.
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Who's we? If fusion is solved, the country that has will just become a net energy exporter (somehow, if it's the US, idk how they would ship that power). Nothing much will change for the rest of the world, they will just switch from one dependency to the other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many jurisdictions the cost of delivering a kilowatt-hour is already more than the cost of producing it. So cheap energy is not going to have a substantial impact on normal people unless we switch to wireless electricity delivery or something.
Not just cheap though - near zero. If we have an infinite tap of it, we can afford to waste a lot of it in the process of delivering it. The inefficient becomes efficient when you plug in infinities and zeroes
Energy costs might drop an order of magnitude, which is significant, but isn't going to cause any sort of systemic change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price of energy has always been approaching zero. Restated, the amount of energy available to an individual has generally grown exponentially, with pauses here and there because civilization. We might be resuming that growth in the next few decades. Fusion isn’t and won’t be solved in the immediate future. There is a long path towards commercial viability and a lot of milestones along the way… and not really a gr…
I think all progress will accelerate significantly with the dawn of true AI. The fusion scientist can now ask ChatGPT for ten (or 10,000) ideas on how to solve a particular roadblock, and a lot of the suggestions will be actually good. The cost of intelligence has suddenly become near-zero, and that will supercharge everything to do with innovation
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think all progress will accelerate significantly with the dawn of true AI. The fusion scientist can now ask ChatGPT for ten (or 10,000) ideas on how to solve a particular roadblock, and a lot of the suggestions will be actually good. The cost of intelligence has suddenly become near-zero, and that will supercharge everything to do with innovation
LOL, no. Asking ChatGPT is no different than just googling the question, except the answer is more nicely formatted. ChatGPT has no actual intelligence in it.
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Don't get your hopes up yet: This just demonstrated that the released energy (in form of heat etc) is higher than the energy input – yet the released energy hadn't been converted to electricity that could have powered the lasers. Supposedly this would be done by a heat engine, with can normally extract 60% of energy input. So 2.5 * 0.6 = 1.5, so it is yet again not producing any surplus energy.
I recently heard the idea that the price of energy is going to start approaching zero from Chamath Palihapitiya on Lex Fridman's podcast. It hit me as a big, all-changing thing. If fusion is really solved, we can probably mass-produce it within years if not months, so we should start thinking of the implications now
Nothing could be further from the truth: with any half-way plausible design today, fusion power will be the most expensive form of power generation known to man. While some of the fuel is nearly free (deuterium and to some extent even the tritium), it's more realistic to think of the reactor itself as the fuel - since the reactor will be under constant very high energy neutron bombardment, it won't last for more than a few years, maybe a decade at best.
And since a fusion energy reactor will be one of the most highly advanced engineering accomplishments in human history (it requires extraordinary structural resistance to hold up the necessary equipment in the presence of the gigantic magnetic fields, extraordinarily advanced magnets, a blanket of liquid lithium and boron that gets pumped continuously and somehow recycled etc.), having to rebuild one every 10 years will be extraordinarily expensive (and we should expect something closer to 2-5 years for the initial designs, even assuming no explosions).
In contrast, a fission reactor is already extremely expensive, but has similar output to any contemplated fusion plant, has been proven to be able to be continuously operated for >50 years once built, and requires only slightly more expensive fuel (uranium is really not that expensive compared to its energy density - certainly nowhere near as expensive as gas or coal).
Edit: oh, and this seems to be related to a breakthrough at the NIH, presumably on their inertial-confinement fusion experiment, which (despite some rosy rhetoric) is a weapons research program, with no realistic possibility of ever being transformed into a fusion power plant.
Good work, but IMHO we're still a long way from using fusion for energy, if ever, even if only because it will be so expensive to build and run these ultra-high-tech plants. But also because of all the downsides of D-T fusion, like, where is the tritium, and that most of the energy comes of as fast neutrons, etc.