China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough • Hacker News Board

Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough

#231

Post by evgen » Sun, Nov 13, 2016, 7:17 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #218

nnq wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO... humanity should explore fusion because we might desperately need it to survive . To what amount can you scale up solar in a particular region?! Yeah, I know, we're into low-power everything nowadays... but let's say that you end up with a desperate need for smth like 1 TW of power for something like a sea-water desalination plant, massive irrigation needs because climate change fucked you up, or building a huge…

There's other reasons you might want fusion power: any place you need a large source of power, but siphoning off ambient energy (i.e. wind, solar) isn't feasible or sufficient, fusion is the way to go or else you have to use fission or fossil fuels. This applies to things like ships and submarines, and to spacecraft. So yeah, solar/etc. sounds great in an ideal scenario in a perfect world, but what if you're not on t…

Fission fits the bill perfectly in the scenarios you posit and we have almost fifty years of hard-won production experience with it. Fusion isn't really 'cleaner' than fission for most practical purposes, so why pin your hopes on something we can't even do in a practical manner at the moment? Fission also scales down much better (or at least we know how to scale it down effectively) so the power plant is much more likely to fit into the spaces available in these examples.

Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough

#232

Post by Grishnakh » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 2:57 AM UTC

evgen wrote: post #231

Grishnakh wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's other reasons you might want fusion power: any place you need a large source of power, but siphoning off ambient energy (i.e. wind, solar) isn't feasible or sufficient, fusion is the way to go or else you have to use fission or fossil fuels. This applies to things like ships and submarines, and to spacecraft. So yeah, solar/etc. sounds great in an ideal scenario in a perfect world, but what if you're not on t…

Fission fits the bill perfectly in the scenarios you posit and we have almost fifty years of hard-won production experience with it. Fusion isn't really 'cleaner' than fission for most practical purposes, so why pin your hopes on something we can't even do in a practical manner at the moment? Fission also scales down much better (or at least we know how to scale it down effectively) so the power plant is much more li…

How is fission possibly as clean as fusion? Fission leaves behind radioactive waste material; fusion leaves behind helium. This doesn't make any sense at all.

Yes, we can't do fusion in any practical manner at the moment, but we can't do fission scaled-down either: if you disagree, please show me an example which is economically successful. US Navy ships don't count (not "economically successful"). Someone actually tried building a fission-powered commercial cargo ship ages ago; it didn't last very long. It cost so much to operate that it was retired in a few years and sent to a museum in Charleston SC. With absurdly expensive fuel, nasty waste which needs to be disposed of somehow, and extremely dangerous operation requiring highly-trained personnel, fission plants only make commercial sense when they're scaled up to gigawatt scale power plants. Fusion plants may not be practical yet, but they'll never be practical if no effort is spent on R&D to make them that way.

Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough

#233

Post by mSparks » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

sonium wrote: post #92

kybernetikos wrote: post #84

I would love to see a huge effort towards fusion, on the same (or even greater) scale as the Manhattan project or the Apollo program. I had been disappointed in the way that fusion always seemed to be 30 years away no matter how many years went past, but I just assumed that that was because the science was hard and just the way it had to be. https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Article…

This might sound a bit like a buzz-kill, but I don't think fusion power is necessarily competitively cheap. I think it will be comparable to nuclear power with a ~ 10 times higher capital investment to build a fusion-plant. Already now solar is said to be cheaper then nuclear. But nevertheless humanity should explore fusion since it is more or less the only significant power source not (indrectly) depending on the su…

This is the one thing I wholly side with the conspiracy crew on.

Energy is one big scam, all energy sources are artificially suppressed and sold at grossely inflated prices.

Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough

#234

Post by evgen » Mon, Nov 14, 2016, 8:58 PM UTC

Grishnakh wrote: post #232

evgen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fission fits the bill perfectly in the scenarios you posit and we have almost fifty years of hard-won production experience with it. Fusion isn't really 'cleaner' than fission for most practical purposes, so why pin your hopes on something we can't even do in a practical manner at the moment? Fission also scales down much better (or at least we know how to scale it down effectively) so the power plant is much more li…

How is fission possibly as clean as fusion? Fission leaves behind radioactive waste material; fusion leaves behind helium. This doesn't make any sense at all. Yes, we can't do fusion in any practical manner at the moment, but we can't do fission scaled-down either: if you disagree, please show me an example which is economically successful. US Navy ships don't count (not "economically successful"). Someone actually t…

Neutron bombardment of your fusion containment vessel creates radioactive material. I am not sure where you get this idea that fusion is 'clean', but everything that involves pushing around fundamental particles creates radioactive waste. There are theoretical designs for fusion reactors that limit the radioactive side-effects somewhat but nothing in this area is clean.

Scaled down fission reactors like the Toshiba 4S can be sized to power an apartment building or city block. There are numerous micro reactor designs available and a variety of companies working to try to create a market for them.

When it comes to terrestrial reactors then fusion reactors will be enormous (need to generate a lot of power to compensate for the huge risk and the massive costs that it will take to build them) and if you are talking about putting reactors in space then it is foolish to consider anything but fission for at least our lifetime.

Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough

#235

Post by fooker » Fri, Nov 18, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #205

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of Big Pharma's medicines don't actually work. As in, they don't work to cure the underlying condition. They work to treat the symptoms, and thereby require you to take the medicine fairly indefinitely if you want to by symptom free, side effects notwithstanding. Thereby extracting economic value from the generally unwell and ageing population and concentrating it in the hands of Big Pharma. In that way I see mo…

If Big Pharma developed treatments-rather-than-cures as a deliberate strategy to milk recurring revenue, biotech startups could ignore those recurring treatments and take over the market with easier-or-equally-difficult-to-find one shot cures that doctors, patients, and insurance companies would all prefer. But it turns out that Biology is Hard and the indefinite treatments are still used because neither incumbents n…

And then you get to this convoluted certification and approval process that more or less guarantees that the startup is going to be dead before it starts selling anything.