Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Energy

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 287 posts

Re: Energy

#201

Post by jddw »

flgb wrote: post #140
beat wrote: post #20

I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up. Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up. Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require…

I suspect they will continue to trounce fission and fusion for a long time, at least until there is some some technical innovation in transmission and distribution. Transmission and distributed generation accounts for half the cost of electricity. The question for our electricity future is distributed versus centralized generation, and distributed will probably win.

So distribute fission and fusion, overcomes much of that. And distributed solar and wind needs backup which is usually fairly centralized. Unless you want to spend 3-5 times as much for your energy to buy batteries.

Re: Energy

#202

Post by ekianjo »

kolbe wrote: post #177

> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects. What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same…

> at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project.

How is that a measure of doing something meaningful ? Take EADS making the Ariane rocket launchers, they have been spending billions and billions of Euros making rockets for years, yet they have no project like SpaceX and yet they will be rapidly obsolete once SpaceX works as expected.

It's not about the amount you spend, it's about experimenting in new areas not explored yet. Now, about fusion, I have no idea what they plan to do, but in principle there's always new things worth trying (even if they end up failing).

Re: Energy

#203

Post by rtfeldman »

kolbe wrote: post #177

> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects. What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same…

For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in retrospect after every major breakthrough.

YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism is not the best default.

Re: Energy

#204

Post by kolbe »

rtfeldman wrote: post #203
kolbe wrote: post #177

> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects. What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same…

For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in retrospect after every major breakthrough. YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism is not the best default.

I am literally asking "what?" Because I don't know of any common idea that is even in the realm of this. I'm hoping someone knew something about the process they're pursuing that is not commonly known among cargo cult physicists like myself.

Re: Energy

#205

Post by titanomachy »

kolbe wrote: post #204
rtfeldman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in retrospect after every major breakthrough. YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism is not the best default.

I am literally asking "what?" Because I don't know of any common idea that is even in the realm of this. I'm hoping someone knew something about the process they're pursuing that is not commonly known among cargo cult physicists like myself.

> The Helion reactor will fire a steady stream of plasmoids from each side into a chamber, where the fuel is crushed by magnetic fields until fusion begins. Within one second, the fusion products are channelled away just as the next pair of plasmoids hurtles in. “The analogy we like to make is to a diesel engine,” says the company's chief executive, David Kirtley. “On each stroke you inject the fuel, compress it with the piston it until it ignites without needing a spark, and the explosion pushes back on the piston.”

http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstart...

EDIT: This admittedly isn't very much information, but it's more than I could find on their official site.

Re: Energy

#206

Post by jddw »

curtis wrote: post #87
andy_ppp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll counter your wikipedia links with the issues and costs associated with decommissioning in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Decommissioning_Author... Current estimates for one Nuclear Power Plant Site (Sellafield): £114bn which seems A LOT!

Sellafield isn't an ordinary nuclear power station. It was part of the UK's nuclear weapons program and contained some of the UK's earliest (maybe the earliest) nuclear reactors. It's not going to be representative of the decommissioning costs of modern generation II or generation III reactors.

Also, AGR fuel needs to be condensed or reprocessed shortly after discharge. It's great in a gas reactor, not so much in a spent fuel pool. That means much of the UK's discharged fuel as been consolidated at Sellafield. But all that plutonium is a great fuel resource. Jealous of whoever gets to fuel their reactor with that goldmine.

Re: Energy

#207

Post by XorNot »

josu wrote: post #108
Eleutheria wrote: post #18

Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual. Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc. Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.…

>Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. The decentralization of production usually leads to a greater cost per unit due to economies of scale. This may not be true for solar, but it certainly is for nuclear, hydro, geothermal and probably wind. There are regions in our planet that don't get many hours of sunlight, how should they produce energy there?

No it is also a problem for solar. A distributed grid is non-trivial to build.

Re: Energy

#208

Post by themartorana »

kolbe wrote: post #204
rtfeldman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, this is the kind of comment that looks hilarious in retrospect after every major breakthrough. YC has demonstrated they aren't just throwing darts here, so vague pessimism is not the best default.

I am literally asking "what?" Because I don't know of any common idea that is even in the realm of this. I'm hoping someone knew something about the process they're pursuing that is not commonly known among cargo cult physicists like myself.

Cargo Cult physicists, Nobel winning physicists...

Re: Energy

#209

Post by jddw »

transfire wrote: post #33
andy_ppp wrote: post #26

Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives... From Wikipedia: Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few tho…

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-fundi...

This reactor eats some of the waste, but UPower can eat all of the waste, including this reactor's waste.

Re: Energy

#210

Post by jddw »

chinathrow wrote: post #65
hackuser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? That's an important question, but climate change is a far larger bill underwritten by the tax payer (and millions or billions more who can't afford taxes), so I don't think the question is a deal-breaker.

Yes it surely is. We need to take everything into the equation on where to go. - grey energy invested - full lifetime costs from start of construction until fully recovered land - inclusive recycling costs - inclusive environmental impacts

This is one of the great challenges nuclear has to overcome on paper. Most of these costs are based on absurd standards that have consistently been proven wrong. Fukushima's cleanup would be orders of magnitude less if they didn't have to treat nearby soil as waste when its radioactive signature is far lower than the soil found at the ski slopes in CO, and even less than beach sand in Brazil. We treat low level radiation as dangerous, it really isn't. Nobody at Fukushima was exposed to high level radiation, and no one will die early due to the exposures they had. And if everybody moved back to the town and land that was evacuated, they could live their whole lives out and be fine! Why waste money on cleaning up things that are not dangerous, just lied about? Changing the standards to actually reflect science would eliminate so many of these "nebulous" costs and perceived indirect costs of nuclear power.
Post reply on HN