41–50 of 167 posts
Tell that to the Sun. We already have a fusion reactor sufficient to meet all of humanity's energy needs, it's a gravitationally contained fusion reactor with a projected lifetime of at least one billion years, so why not just rely on that? Seems to have done wonders for the biosphere for the last one billion years, hasn't it?
> There are other ways of creating tritium but these techniques are too expensive to be used for the quantities required, and they will likely remain the reserve of nuclear weapons programs Too expensive for clean power, just right to threaten the world
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No shit. Turns out a daily detonation of a fusion bomb tends to wear on things and when those things fail... you've just detonated a fusion bomb.
We’re facing a catastrophe. I and others have described elsewhere that the path we’re on is much, much worse than even the most dire of predictions the IPCC makes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947756 Teller et al anticipated your objection. It’s why the reactor is supposed to dig into sold rock. If there’s a catastrophic failure then it’s yet another subsurface nuclear test. And the more advanced designs co…
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It seems like every fusion post is bound to have at least one commenter point out that the sun is a working fusion reactor, as if literally anyone in these threads will learn something from this observation.
Roughly $50 billion has been spent globally on fusion research since the 1950s with nothing material to show for the effort; at what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? This strikes me as the learning from these posts.
Just a quick reminder, we already have practical fusion with tens of thousands of years of runway available to us today. We choose not to do it because it sounds dangerous and it’s not politically expedient. For those unfamiliar, I am talking about Project PACER. The fusion reactor proposed by Teller after the creation of the thermonuclear weapon. It may sound fanciful but it’s based on a simple precept. We can alrea…
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No shit. Turns out a daily detonation of a fusion bomb tends to wear on things and when those things fail... you've just detonated a fusion bomb.
We’re facing a catastrophe. I and others have described elsewhere that the path we’re on is much, much worse than even the most dire of predictions the IPCC makes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947756 Teller et al anticipated your objection. It’s why the reactor is supposed to dig into sold rock. If there’s a catastrophic failure then it’s yet another subsurface nuclear test. And the more advanced designs co…
We also don't end up creating a literal nuclear weapons manufacturing plant in every nation that wants to use this (since the "fuel" for this reactor is constantly detonating nukes).
I'm not sure about the scale here, but is it really as crazy as the article says to use tritium that is formed from fission? What's the ratio of fusion:fission energy you'd need? I can't imagine even if it was 50% or 25% that it wouldn't be worth doing seeing as you'd just be fuelling a clean energy source from the waste stream of another energy source that doesn't produce CO2.
The reaction is supposed to be self-sustaining. The reactor walls are supposed to emit more than enough tritium to satisfy your needs. Whatever you bring from outside is just to bootstrap it once you turn it on. (I imagine they are not collecting the tritium between runs, but it's something you are expected to do.)
Didn't know that fusion generators produced its own fuel! If it produces more than enough, then the excess tritium is considered radioactive waste?
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I'm very unimpressed by the "we must only consider short term solutions to global warming" idea. We don't know the future, and we keep being surprised by it!
if we want to significantly curb global warming, long term solutions aren't where we need to focus effort
If we want to fund more renewables than we are now, then the place to cut back is the many fossil fuel projects that we're still investing in. Until we've done that, I think any positive effort deserves applause instead of complaints about focus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re facing a catastrophe. I and others have described elsewhere that the path we’re on is much, much worse than even the most dire of predictions the IPCC makes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30947756 Teller et al anticipated your objection. It’s why the reactor is supposed to dig into sold rock. If there’s a catastrophic failure then it’s yet another subsurface nuclear test. And the more advanced designs co…
Or we could chose a number of WAY safer fission reactors for the same cost and same power output (Pick your favorite Gen IV reactor). We also don't end up creating a literal nuclear weapons manufacturing plant in every nation that wants to use this (since the "fuel" for this reactor is constantly detonating nukes).