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More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
131–140 of 686 posts
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#132Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go? I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as…
It is a valid question, but to put it in perspective, the sun bathes us in dramatically more kWh than we need to annually power the world every few minutes. So fusion would be a drop in the bucket at a global scale.
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#133> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion 59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.
The first human flight lasted 12 seconds, don't judge achievements by the numbers.
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#134I wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in crypto startups in the past few years. (I don't mean the value of crypto or the amount of money that was traded into it -- just the amount VCs invested into crypto startups.) I don't know if that means people that allocate capital think crypto has a better chance of changing the world than nuclear fusion -- or if it's something else. But it is strange to c…
i wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in autonomous driving startups
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
700 million people live in poverty 3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$
beans, $700 / metric ton [1] rice, $500 / metric ton [2] a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person. 700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m Total $149.1m/day I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quan…
You didn’t include shipping. UPS isn’t gonna deliver canned food to each tent in places like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War#Humanitarian_crisis
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).
> no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though. The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant
Yes, I should have said electrical power. ITER isn't even attempting to produce any. DEMO is a concept, not a planned facility; the plans will be drawn up based on the results of ITER, hopefully by 2030. Note that DEMO won't even be a particular plant, several countries participating in ITER are hoping to go on to construct DEMO plants.
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.
But climate change hasn't been a priority in most western countries (in most countries really).
Cheap, sustainable power is in the interest of most governments that haven’t been essentially paid off to stay on fossil fuels. But because the existing tech is more invested in various political campaigns and parties across most of the world they’ll keep progress from happening in areas of public funding. From our left you’ll get the anti-nuclear zealots and from the right you’ll get the anti-government spending zealots, so it’s pretty much a political loss until fairly recently with the EU designation of nuclear as an option to support nuclear of any sort. While climate change is serious and matters it bothers me deeply when I see older nuclear facilities shutdown while new coal power plants show up the same year. It really seems like backwards progress in much of the US in our energy sector anywhere that hasn’t had massive renewables investments.
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#138The article doesn't seem to mention why exactly but I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) visible climate change (extreme heat, wildfires, drought, etc.) so people want better energy sources and 2) the mayhem Russia started seeing as it is one of the bigger energy providers. Or has there been anything else?
Those things might explain some rising investment in alternative energy in general, but I don't think either them would be specific to fusion.
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#139This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
It is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission.
It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction.
I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable).
Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.
Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade
#140Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go? I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as…
It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing" which is the amount by which the world is heating. Radiative forcing is currently something like 1000 TW. All of human civilization is powered by something like 20 TW.
If we want to stop global heating we need to use a fraction of those 20 TW to "turn the ship" of size 1000 TW.