31–40 of 49 posts
Is it really a 'scientific breakthrough' if it's just that they've firing fusion shots with 'net positive energy output'? Good work, but IMHO we're still a long way from using fusion for energy, if ever, even if only because it will be so expensive to build and run these ultra-high-tech plants. But also because of all the downsides of D-T fusion, like, where is the tritium, and that most of the energy comes of as fas…
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Who's we? If fusion is solved, the country that has will just become a net energy exporter (somehow, if it's the US, idk how they would ship that power). Nothing much will change for the rest of the world, they will just switch from one dependency to the other.
Interesting point that I hadn't considered. I just automatically assume that when fusion gets invented, it will be shared with the whole world so we can all partake in da utopia... but maybe it will be hoarded instead :(
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In many jurisdictions the cost of delivering a kilowatt-hour is already more than the cost of producing it. So cheap energy is not going to have a substantial impact on normal people unless we switch to wireless electricity delivery or something.
Not just cheap though - near zero. If we have an infinite tap of it, we can afford to waste a lot of it in the process of delivering it. The inefficient becomes efficient when you plug in infinities and zeroes
Is it really a 'scientific breakthrough' if it's just that they've firing fusion shots with 'net positive energy output'? Good work, but IMHO we're still a long way from using fusion for energy, if ever, even if only because it will be so expensive to build and run these ultra-high-tech plants. But also because of all the downsides of D-T fusion, like, where is the tritium, and that most of the energy comes of as fas…
how do you run before you can walk, and what has this level of cynicism done for you in life?
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You (or maybe Chamath Palihapitiya) are making a very very wrong assumption that a working fusion power plant would produce free energy. Nothing could be further from the truth: with any half-way plausible design today, fusion power will be the most expensive form of power generation known to man. While some of the fuel is nearly free (deuterium and to some extent even the tritium), it's more realistic to think of th…
I think he was talking about decentralized grids & renewable. Let's talk about fission - I used to say I'd build 70,000 nuclear reactors if I was in charge of a rich country. Would I have enough fuel to power them all? Your third paragraph painted a pretty vivid picture in my head, good writing.
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Don't get your hopes up yet: This just demonstrated that the released energy (in form of heat etc) is higher than the energy input – yet the released energy hadn't been converted to electricity that could have powered the lasers. Supposedly this would be done by a heat engine, with can normally extract 60% of energy input. So 2.5 * 0.6 = 1.5, so it is yet again not producing any surplus energy.
More importantly, laser efficiency is around 1%. At "scientific breakeven" you create more energy than the laser delivers. To make it a viable energy source you need to produce at least 100x more energy from a single pulse than scientific breakeven.
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You (or maybe Chamath Palihapitiya) are making a very very wrong assumption that a working fusion power plant would produce free energy. Nothing could be further from the truth: with any half-way plausible design today, fusion power will be the most expensive form of power generation known to man. While some of the fuel is nearly free (deuterium and to some extent even the tritium), it's more realistic to think of th…
I think he was talking about decentralized grids & renewable. Let's talk about fission - I used to say I'd build 70,000 nuclear reactors if I was in charge of a rich country. Would I have enough fuel to power them all? Your third paragraph painted a pretty vivid picture in my head, good writing.
A tenth might be ~zero (for certain values of zero) for certain kinds of people.
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The price of energy has always been approaching zero. Restated, the amount of energy available to an individual has generally grown exponentially, with pauses here and there because civilization. We might be resuming that growth in the next few decades. Fusion isn’t and won’t be solved in the immediate future. There is a long path towards commercial viability and a lot of milestones along the way… and not really a gr…
I think all progress will accelerate significantly with the dawn of true AI. The fusion scientist can now ask ChatGPT for ten (or 10,000) ideas on how to solve a particular roadblock, and a lot of the suggestions will be actually good. The cost of intelligence has suddenly become near-zero, and that will supercharge everything to do with innovation
Since the ChatGPT can't perform empirical experiments and update it's suggestions based on those experiments it has no way to tell a "bad" idea from a "good" one.
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how do you run before you can walk, and what has this level of cynicism done for you in life?
Scepticism. Prevented buying crypto, because I couldn't understand how it could be both a currency and an investment.
Consider that even too much water can kill a person and the original computers filled buildings.