151–157 of 157 posts
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I would imagine since, combined, we're spending tens of billions of dollars on Fusion research - someone must have some ideas for step 2, right?!
10s of billions... Over many decades. We spend very little on fusion research overall.
Globally we are definitely spending $10B+ per year.
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> We can all think of numerous projects going unfunded that would have much higher chances of success I can think of far more things getting funded that are either even less likely to succeed or likely to succeed and, in so doing, will cause harm and death to many people. There are so many things we're spending so much money on that do nothing but harm it's absurd to laser focus on something you consider merely point…
Not many of those get billions of dollars, year in and year out.
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Well fusion reactors are likely to cost a huge amount of money when they do become operational. No point having them sinking in a storm. Probably just safer to charge a huge battery and put it on a ship (if you don’t want to use fossil fuels). Avoids a lot of unfoseen commercial risk. Even though you could use water for shielding, the metal container and other things that hold the reactor would be highly radioactive…
> Probably just safer to charge a huge battery and put it on a ship Large container ships burn through 16 tons of bunker oil per hour, and each journey can last up to 3 weeks - any idea what size of battery such a ship would need? I have no clue how to calculate that), but I'm guessing it would be completely impractical, even if we made huge strides in battery energy density.
- The energy density of LiIon batteries (or molten salt, or liquidy nitrogen etc) is roughly 100x smaller than that of gasoline/diesel/bunker fuel in weight terms and 40x smaller in volume terms
- The efficiency of electric motors is roughly 2x that of large diesel engines
So the amount of batteries needed for the same performance is 50x larger in weight and 20x larger in volume than the oil it carries (which for a big container ship is 6,000-10,000 tons I think). Which would be impractical.
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It ought to interest securities fraud investigators, anyway. Anyone else, not so much.
Any specific reasons why you think its fraud?
That hasn't mattered much thus far because Q is so far off, and investors pour money in regardless.
Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, I hope that the ongoing/coming energy crisis will help all nuclear fusion technologies tokamak/stellarator become real. We’re still a few years away from having them in actual power plants and a few decades away from solving our energy problems for every, but I hope w…
> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, … I don’t think it’s actually evolved all that much. They just deployed something that wasn’t really tested. I recall learning about theoretical mRNA vaccines back in 2014-2019 (granted they were killing the hosts and stuff). As someone who’s studied bioengineering…
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Stellerators aren't really in a torus, they are in a weird fractally twisted torus, sort of like a many-twisted Mobius strip. You really need to see a picture to understand.
I would say,it's like a roller coaster in a donut?
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I'm not coming up with anything, but the first and glaring problem is that we can't store the energy created in any meaningful capacity. Sure we have some ideas like power2x but that doesn't really help for grid scale storage covering periods of several days where no power is created due to the weather. So imo the biggest problem is that it's just not a reliable source of energy. Here in Denmark we've spent billions…
Ok, the "can't store energy" canard. No, we can, in multiple ways. Batteries of many different flavors, pumped hydro, storing as thermal energy (via resistive heaters or heat pump cycles), hydrogen (electrolyzers have crashed in price) and other e-fuels. Costs of these are declining rapidly as demand picks up and the scent of trillion dollar markets entices a wide range of enterprises and investors. Storage has not b…
You are claiming that e-fuel costs are declining rapidly, but you forget to mention that there's no meaningful market anywhere on earth meaning we don't really have any experience with it and don't know how much it'll cost and how it will work exactly(will it be hydrogen, ammonia etc.) it's simply not a solved problem and there's no infrastructure to support it. It might make sense in the future to use e-fuels together with wind but what we're trying to do here in Denmark is to use wind and solar for the grid which sucks. Electricity prices fluctuates wildly at the mercy of the weather gods. Thermal energy storage is also still experimental and hydro only works in very very specific locations where it's already utilized. If we where to build new hydro we would destroy even bigger ecosystems than we already have.
Edit: I'm not even necessarily arguing against wind and solar, I'm just off the opinion that it makes much more sense to build out nuclear to support the grid first giving everyone cheap and stable electricity as well as providing district heating where it's already built out.