381–390 of 833 posts
We can't just stop using energy. We can't buy our way forward with "carbon offset" fees. And, most importantly, we can't just redirect all of our environmental conservation efforts to eliminating energy use. Remember when we were going to save the rainforests? Don't forget why we called these "green" initiatives in the first place.
After a few more major breakthroughs we'll be where fission was in 1942 after Fermi made the first man made neutron chain reaction. After that, we can see what a practical electricity producing plant looks like, and see how much people actually care about small amounts of tritium radiation. At the moment fuel costs in fission are like 5-10% of total costs for a fission fleet. In fusion it could be lower, but that wil…
Personally I think fission power's failure is a political and marketing one. I don't agree that the waste disposal issues, or the safety issues, are quite the big deal people make of them. (Not saying there are no unsolved issues, just that the issues that exist are not significantly worse than those present burning fossil fuels, and are better in some dimensions. They're just different, and in some ways very emotion…
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>vaporware Have you never heard of ITER? Its set to power on in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
I remember hearing about ITER back in school, a long time ago, and being told that they were just about to finally assemble the thing now. That's pretty much the definition of vaporware, but maybe it will actually go the route of Duke Nukem :)
It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea. The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are contrarians, it a function of the machine.
Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas, available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you see here.
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The state you live in has one of the highest potentials for wind power in the country, easily backed by transmission, batteries, and as a last resort, natural gas. High level, the energy transition isn't simply a fossil->renewables story, but also a centralization->highly decentralized story.
Totally agree, though I don’t know how wind performs in extended and deep subzero / heavy snow conditions. Hydropower is the traditional baseload for the Midwest, but it’s tough to square the destruction to natural beauty that entails in comparison with a remote nuclear set-up. EDIT: It seems not too badly [1]. [1] https://empoweringmichigan.com/how-do-wind-turbines-work-in-...
It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy.
I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual research results and their implications, rather than on the poor coverage.
Good news! FTL travel when?
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Many on HN have the same response to many things in every domain, not just research.
For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted responses to every new product announcement are essentially "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine".
When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors of this site get very excited and positive, from things like the Rust language all the way to solar power and reusable rockets.
A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely) quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus, actual generation.
We are still far away from the latter, alas.
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Many on HN have the same response to many things in every domain, not just research.
Yeah its the same here about most new technology like ai and improvement in solar and battery technology. One thing I have noticed is that some of the most vocal people have formed their opinions years ago and now they are not aware or ignore all the changes/improvements that have occured since.
Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long time ago.
But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but has it's own flaws.
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The NIF is using old laser technology. Current tech can get above 20% efficiency. Sure, that still means more improvement is needed, but 200x is probably an overstatement by an order of magnitude. > So we might be as close as 10-20 years away, as always! I don't really get the cynicism here. This is a huge milestone that's been passed. Maybe with this, we actually will be 10-20 years away. Or maybe it's more like 30-…
Anyone have insight into how this new development differs from this article from back in 2014 about the NIF, entitled: "Fusion Leaps Forward: Surpasses Major Break-Even Goal" https://www.livescience.com/43318-fusion-energy-reaches-mile...
This time, they're comparing to the total energy in the laser beams.
They're ignoring the inefficiency of the laser devices, but that kinda makes sense because they're using really old, inefficient lasers and much better ones are available now.