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Will we ever get fusion power?

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Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#181

Post by pydry »

bratbag wrote: post #153
pacificmint wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany, one of the most progressive nations on the earth, went and shut down all of its nuclear plants as a knee jerk reaction. Anti nuclear sentiment had been building in Germany since at least the 70s. Then Chernobyl happened in 1986 and it got even stronger. It was part of what propelled the Greens into the administration 1998. That administration reached an agreement for the nuclear exit in 2000 and the first…

50 years of many individual short sighted knee jerk reactions.

It's wildly overpriced and never formed a huge part of Germany's electricity mix anyway.

Given the extortionate cost of building and maintenance and nonzero risks, its only really "benefit" is for the military industrial complex to keep a ready supply of nuclear skills and supply chains.

It's the latter that formed the basis of the American led PR campaign to shame Germany. Pioneering a low carbon zero nuclear generation mix was threatening to established nuclear. It had fuck all to do with the environment. None of them ever gave two shits about Poland's chronic coal addiction next door.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#182

Post by nindalf »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173
tedd4u wrote: post #150

From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind. South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar accounted for 100 per cent of local demand. No other…

[flagged]

It’s terrifying that people are using chatgpt for questions like this. Isn’t it obvious what it is and isn’t good for?

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#183

Post by philipwhiuk »

rmbyrro wrote: post #95

In 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age, archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences. They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.

They will assume they are religious centres like the stone circles found elsewhere. In 100,000 years, the difference between 2000AD and 3000BC is quite small.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#184

Post by Qwertious »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #180
howerj wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that fact that the UK would depend on another country for power generation in a serious way really really dumb. There is no other way of putting it. If we did that we might as well sell off our armed forces and declare global peace unilaterally, that is how naive that option is. It would make the UK, or any country that did that, incredibly vulnerable. We cannot ever lose power.

Just wait until you find out how much oil and gas the UK imports.

Pretty sure UK needs to import uranium, too.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#185

Post by Qwertious »

m463 wrote: post #149
rmbyrro wrote: post #95

In 100,000 years from now, after we're past the next ice age, archeologists will unearth tokamaks all around the world. Regular people will speculate aliens and a worldwide connection between the peoples of the world to explain the multiple occurrences. They'll have unlimited energy based on some quantum shit.

> They'll have unlimited energy based on ...probably mining the center of the earth after finding it is methane or similar like thomas gold theorized, something like jupiter.

The centre of the earth is iron, it's how compasses work.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#186

Post by Qwertious »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #40
audunw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it’s clear that solar panels are absolutely working extremely well today, at least as long as you don’t live too close to the poles. Renewables all together is growing faster than nuclear ever did. And solar is now a huge part of that. We have models where solar or solar+wind is providing all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands. Some small countries a…

> all the power to everything from small remote weather stations through houses to large islands Not without very large capacity gas/etc. plants available on standby (unless you’re fine with will below 99% availability)

Or batteries.

Batteries have huge potential, simply due to the fact that they're so broadly defined - must store energy, output it as electricity on demand, and be cheap. There's a high chance that we find some way to make grid-scale batteries extremely cheaply, in the future.

In the mean time, getting to 90% will basically stop climate change in its tracks, giving us time to research dirt-cheap batteries.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#187

Post by Qwertious »

ethn wrote: post #35
choilive wrote: post #11

We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year. We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine. This technology is relatively…

Schockley-Quiesser limit

Only applies to single-junction cells. 68%-efficient solar panels are quite theoretically possible, they'll just be incredibly difficult to manufacture cheaply. The current world record for solar panel efficiency is 47.6%.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#188

Post by anakaine »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173
tedd4u wrote: post #150

From 2 years ago. Large region of Australia running fully on solar/wind/storage for 10+ days. Seems like the focus has to be on storage and continued improvement of grid-scale and rooftop solar and wind. South Australia has just chalked up what is undoubtedly a world first – a run of more than 10 consecutive days over which the average production of wind and solar accounted for 100 per cent of local demand. No other…

[flagged]

ChatGPT fails miserably at questions like this. It cherrypicks various data points and arbitrarily runs sums.on them, convoluting nuance and meaning, conflating disparate or overlapping measures, and presents them as fact.

Always ask it to quote all its sources, and check them.

You've been heavily downvoted for good reason.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#189

Post by Qwertious »

audunw wrote: post #30
fragmede wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harvesting energy from this "sky fusion reactor" (if it really exists) has this small pesky problem of being unavailable if you can't see the fusion reactor, in a daily phenomena known to scientific experts as "night", as well as this other intermittent problem dubbed "clouds" by scientific experts in weather and weather-related fields, so I can think of at least two places to improve upon sky-fusion-energy-harvestin…

Just by buying an electric vehicle I already have more than enough batteries to solve these problems for my household. The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change, and well on the way - implies battery production that’s already within an order of magnitude of storing enough solar to supply power year round. As long as you’re not too close to the poles, but most people don’t live there an…

>The transition to EVs - which is a hard necessity to solve climate change

If we're talking about batteries, trains don't need them. While we'll never get rid of cars/trucks entirely, we are massively overdependent on cars/trucks for the bulk of our transport and (land-based) shipping needs. Especially in cities.

Re: Will we ever get fusion power?

#190

Post by lambdaone »

ethn wrote: post #35
choilive wrote: post #11

We already have a zero maintenance fusion power plant that will last billions of years and that outputs millions of times more energy per second than humanity uses in a year. We already have technology that can take the electromagnetic waves this fusion power plant produces and directly convert it into electricity without needing pesky intermediaries like boiling water to turn a turbine. This technology is relatively…

Schockley-Quiesser limit

That's certainly a hard limit for a cell with a single P-N junction. However, with a bit of ingenuity, we can do much better than that; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley%E2%80%93Queisser_limi...
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