341–350 of 1001 posts
The most surprising thing I've learned from this is we're only allocating $624 million / year to this program. We really need better mechanisms for deciding how to allocate taxes.
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Tangentially related, but I think this is an interesting fact, all the atoms in our universe/galaxy/solar system with a mass up to that of iron are formed in the core of stars in stellar fusion. Hydrogen fuses into helium, and as a star nears the end of its lifetime you get heavier elements like lithium, carbon, and so on. Under normal stellar fusion no elements heavier than iron will be produced, and iron is only el…
we are all made of star stuff
"Stars are made of quarks"
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The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security
Is the bottleneck for fusion money though?
It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything.
1. Shortage of funding
2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding
3. extremely low risk tolerance
4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high
5. projects are over engineered to reduce chance of failure
6. projects are over budget and over schedule
7. projects only make minor incremental progress
8. lack of fast/exciting progress drives decrease in funding
9. GOTO 1
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What information available to the public suggests this is reproducible and consistent? They do hundreds of shots every year. Why do we think that this energetic shot wasn't just a result of getting luckier this time than they did a few years ago?
Because they’ve been able to do it multiple times, which is better than the zero or one times before.
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Why should I agree with this article of faith? The obstacles appear quite grave to me. Moreover, even reaching that Q doesn't mean we're there. That's a necessary, not sufficient, condition. A large, complex machine that explodes the equivalent of 500 lb. bombs to generate heat to drive a turbine sounds like an engineering nightmare.
An answer matched in tenor and tone to the question, but nonetheless entirely serious, is that because while the obstacles are grave, the consequences of failing to overcome them are much graver still, and to the best of our collective knowledge, industrial scale fusion would be the least bad answer to our energy demands for the next epoch. That is true but also does not obviate the need for other parallel efforts an…
Why is that? Fusion is not needed, although if it turned out to be cheap that would be nice.
I'm still a little unclear on the benefits that fusion offers compared to things like wind and solar. I understand that we need to develop better storage technologies for the energy produced by wind and solar, but that seems so much easier than the challenges currently facing fusion. Wind and solar just seem so far ahead of fusion already - they're pretty cheap and very widely deployed on a global scale. In compariso…
Also, you could eventually put one on a spaceship or other planet. For that Star Trek future.
I’m glad we might see fission power plants in my lifetime (next 30-50 years). My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear Dick Tracy’s watch. Yet I’m concerned that shortly thereafter, the giant robotic laser death spiders will destroy entire cities. This might also be be before we’ve built the arcologies to launch into outer space to escape the giant robot laser death spiders.
> fission power you probably meant "fusion" > My father still finds it novel that he basically gets to wear Dick Tracy’s watch. Well, except for the front-facing camera, but that's trivial to add at this point. And as a 50 year old, I agree. I feel like being incarnated in '72 has gotten me ethereal tickets to the greatest technological expansion/brouhaha in all of human history, and I don't know what my soul did to…
I haven't read Dick Tracy in a long time, but if it's still being made I bet Tracy's watch has been upgraded with a bunch of new features the Apple Watch lacks.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm taking this particular moment just to swell with pride and excitement for this achievement by science and forget about the details of how much more needs to be done to create the first power plant. I'm remembering when I first learned about fusion energy development, how distant and unfeasible it seemed, and regardless of how long the road ahead still is it's incredible how f…
So the important point here is, there was no net energy gain. They spent 300 megajoules to get 2.5 out. The scientists only talk about the 1.8 megajoules of laser energy sent to the target, not about the 300 megajoules of electricity needed to send 1.8 megajoules to the target.
I hate to ask this, but have to ... is there any danger of these discoveries being weaponized easily by hostile countries? i.e. does this make unconventional weapons more accessible to countries who otherwise have embargoes on technology and material to make atomic weapons?
Oops, answered my own question I guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_fusion_weapon That ain't good. Although fusion is clearly the future of energy, we have to get our sh*t together on earth so we don't kill ourselves off or devolve with endless wars. Or give up and use fusion to leave the planet efficiently.