391–400 of 466 posts
Who contributes how much ? Because at face value this sounds like real international (that is, beyond little war games) cooperation. Sort of "mankind" project.
FTA : "Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction." Who contributes how much ? Because at face value this sounds like real international (that is, beyond little war games) cooperation. Sort of "mankind" project.
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I am struggling to make any sence of your post. COVID demonstrates lack of being prepared and future orientated, we did not have PPE stockpiles and did not takw actions that would contain the virus to save the economy now. The more future oriented you are, the safer you are.
You're talking about predicting the future correctly and making the right tradeoffs. Being future oriented means trading off short term goals for long term ones; preparing for the future says nothing about whether we are prepared in hindsight. You can use "future oriented" to mean being prescient or omniscient, but I think that's a useless way to define the word, because it's not a thing that exists. The US invasion…
Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? Thinking it was "mission accomplished" in 2003? Having no exit strategy? Creating a power vaccum, which was eventually filled by Islamic State? Aquiring oil, in a world which is trying to divest from it, and which is being damaged by its use?
What downsides are there to fusion power, assuming it's commercially viable in a couple of decades? What negative externalities are there that could make it prohibitive? Fossil fuel has pollution etc, solar takes up lots of space and is apparently also ugly, wind energy is ugly and makes noise (according to NIMBYs). What argument could a NIMBY person have against fusion power, besides the big building in their back y…
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Think of it like the construction of a legendary cathedral. The prolonged commitment required is part of its impressiveness.
With a legendary cathedral, the layperson can walk up to it at any time and easily perceive its ever-waxing size and majesty. This is something a fusion reactor doesn't have (I guess they could do tours or something maybe?).
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You're talking about predicting the future correctly and making the right tradeoffs. Being future oriented means trading off short term goals for long term ones; preparing for the future says nothing about whether we are prepared in hindsight. You can use "future oriented" to mean being prescient or omniscient, but I think that's a useless way to define the word, because it's not a thing that exists. The US invasion…
> The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? Thinking it was "mission accomplished" in 2003? Having no exit strategy? Creating a power vaccum, which was eventually filled by Islamic State? Aquiring oil, in a world which is trying to divest from it, and which is being damaged by its use?
The planning of it, which, you know, happened before "mission accomplished" and all the things that went wrong. It has been widely reported and asserted that the planning started considerably before 9/11, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
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The steam turbine has to endure super heated steam, requiring very specific materials. Steam turbines also require boilers, cooling, etc. Wind turbines have the potential to require far less in terms of the input materials. And with solar, who knows how efficient we can get with that! We have been optimizing steam turbines for more than a century, but are just barely getting started on optimization for wind and solar…
Mist of this post is badly wrong, wind turbines are essentially a close cousin of steam turbine, and are massively more expensive per Mw of power. A single steam turbine can generate a GW and will weigh less than a wind turbine that generates a MW, a thousand time less! We run steam turbines as high pressure because that gives us efficiency, not because we have to. "he rate of improvement hasn't start to slow at all,…
The learning rate will not stop overnight with wind turbines; there is more than enough research and industrial improvements that are in the works that we will start to see a slowing of the learning rate before it suddenly stops.
Also, airdynamics and not well understood as it relates to wind farms, and new research comes out all the time to improve efficiency of future designs.
For somebody who's claiming that the other person is not providing any evidence, you are operating without any links, only with certainty that I must be wrong about predictions that I admit are tricky to make.
I think fusion is cool, but I also think it distracts from more important and promising approaches to clean power. No one has ever demonstrated a self-sustaining, net positive fusion reaction. It will probably take >30 years to make this technology cheap , safe and reliable and another >20 years to deploy it at scale. We don't have 50 years to wait on clean energy, we need it today. We should be focusing our attentio…
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You generate hydrogen using excess renewables, then turn that into methane and store it to burn in conventional gas power plants. Look up various versions of Power2Gas. It's not economical right now because we have few times when renewable production exceeds demand but is a natural component of a fully renewable power grid.
Or, just store the hydrogen.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.05290.pdf
" 4.7. Methanation scenario - In the Methanation scenario the conversion of hydrogen to methane is allowed, which can then be fed into the natural gas network for use both in the heating and electricity sectors. Since the carbon dioxide required for the methanation is captured from the air, the methanation has a low overall efficiency (60%), but the resulting methane is extremely valuable to meet the peak heating demand.Despite the costs of the methanation equipment, total system costs reduce by 11% compared to the Heating scenario. In the heating sector, a substitution of heat pumps with gas heating can be observed in Figure 9. Significantly reduced CO2pricesand average marginal prices for electricity and heating are also seen in Table 3. Furthermore, the benefit of transmission reinforcement is weakened, since the methanation allows the use of cheap gas storage to smooth synoptic and seasonal variations of renewables. Optimal transmission reduces the total systems costs by only 17%, compared to 25% in the Heating scenario,and the optimal transmission volume is also lower. The total volume of synthetic methane produced with no transmission is 708 TWhth, compared to 795 TWhth from natural gas. With optimal transmission the volume of synthetic methane reduces to 263 TWhth as transmission smoothes more synoptic variations of wind."
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My bet is that large scale storage is a much, much easier problem to solve than power-generating nuclear fusion.
Yes, but that does not change anything to the point of the importance of nuclear (fission) power.