ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly • Hacker News Board

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#411

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #405

perl4ever wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? 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...

> Formation 1997 That's 6 years before the invasion, so slightly longer than a single election cycle, and significantly shorter than the duration of the war itself. I wouldn't exactly call that 'future oriented', especially since 3 of those years were spent under the Clinton administration; Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld pulled the trigger pretty quickly once in power. It's also incredibly short-term compared to its contempora…

I don't see the term "future oriented" as having any firm meaning in a vacuum, as a somehow absolute judgment; it's meaningful in a relative sense and that's how I used it.

After 9/11, most Americans became more future oriented than immediately before; both advocating for the invasion and addressing "root causes" in different ways are different forms of that. Either was more focused on the future than maintaining sanctions and occasional airstrikes.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#412

Post by cartoonfoxes » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

petschge wrote: post #13

usui wrote: post #7

I am going to need some help on this one as my knowledge on physics is limited: What makes scientists believe that the solution to nuclear fusion power is only a matter of scale? I desperately want nuclear fusion to work because nuclear power is the only realistic way to solve the looming energy crisis of the 21st century while still maintaining the same standard of living for everyone. It's also 500% more important…

The simple answer is that the surface only goes up a factor of 4 if you increase the radius by a factor of 2, but the volume goes up by a factor of 8. So the ratio of (energy containing) volume to surface (where energy get's lost) if getting better with increasing size. There is of course much more complicated answers, all the way up to full-device simulations using gyrokinetic codes like Gene or Gkeyll that take mil…

> Gkeyll contains ab-initio and novel implementations of a number of algorithms, and perhaps is unique in using a JIT compiled typeless dynamic language for its implementation.

LuaJIT. Neat. I assumed this stuff was still all in FORTRAN.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#413

Post by landryraccoon » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #247

landryraccoon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without giving a strong opinion either way on whether this particular project is a good investment or not : Science, as an institution imo undervalues good marketing and good PR. For profit enterprises are under no illusion that they can succeed without good marketing and public perception. If large expensive projects like this are needed to increase public awareness and support for basic scientific research then I a…

Might be better if, when trying to promote your passion, you don’t bash others. I’d argue getting people excited about sport, and society as a whole playing more of it, is an unbounded good. I even know some research scientists who play sport recreationally, and follow professional-level sport. Plenty of room and resources for both!

I absolutely agree with you. Sports are good.

But it's an arbitrary good, because it's determined culturally. The rules of soccer could be changed at any time, and it would probably be just as exciting. Soccer is fun because we all agree it's fun, and no other intrinsic reason.

There's no reason we can't get excited about a monument to science the same way. If we have to spend billions just to get excited about science (without producing actual research), we should do it, just as we spend billions on sports just for fun and not because it produces any physical goods.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#414

Post by 0xffff2 » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #375

nucpal wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a dumb question. The answer is kinda dumb though, most working fusion reactors don't have a way to extract heat yet. But the plan is to use the same turbine (heat water into steam) technology from fission reactors. So you have cutting edge plasma physics in one part of the reactor and old school victorian-era steam turbines in the other.

So it all boils down to boiling water?

We really only have a few ways to generate electricity:

- PV solar generates electricity more or less directly

- Wind turbines use mechanical energy from the wind to spin a turbine

- Hydro converts potential energy to kinetic energy to spin a turbine

- Nearly every other form of generation in existence heats water to create steam and uses that steam to spin a turbine.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#415

Post by mytailorisrich » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #400

mytailorisrich wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that does not change anything to the point of the importance of nuclear (fission) power.

That depends on how quickly you think the storage problem can be solved. If it can be solved in 10 years then it makes little sense to build more nuclear (fission) capacity, because it will be obsolete by the time it is built.

Storage is only part of the problem, though a big one. The area that needs to be covered with solar panels and windmills is another one.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#416

Post by hlfy_hn » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

dane-pgp wrote: post #406

hlfy_hn wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is the same bullshit as your first one: https://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy...

> This graph is from Tim's website and illustrates the relationship λ (lambda) between the world't total accumulated wealth (C, the integral) and our ever-accelerating energy consumption rate (a, measured in 10^21 joules per year) It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP). What are the error bars on the calculation for how much the entire planet is worth in dol…

"It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP)"

No, it isn't. If you own a house that has already been build it does not influence GDP. Yet you need to finance repairs and maintenance (and therefore Energy).

The problem with most infrastructure is actually not to build it but to sustain it.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#417

Post by chriswarbo » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #411

chriswarbo wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Formation 1997 That's 6 years before the invasion, so slightly longer than a single election cycle, and significantly shorter than the duration of the war itself. I wouldn't exactly call that 'future oriented', especially since 3 of those years were spent under the Clinton administration; Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld pulled the trigger pretty quickly once in power. It's also incredibly short-term compared to its contempora…

I don't see the term "future oriented" as having any firm meaning in a vacuum, as a somehow absolute judgment; it's meaningful in a relative sense and that's how I used it. After 9/11, most Americans became more future oriented than immediately before; both advocating for the invasion and addressing "root causes" in different ways are different forms of that. Either was more focused on the future than maintaining san…

> After 9/11, most Americans became more future oriented than immediately before

I really can't tell if you're trolling at this point.

Declaring war against an intangible form of political violence, as a knee-jerk reaction to a specific incident, which ends up perpetuating that form of violence, is a classic example of short-term thinking.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#418

Post by irthomasthomas » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

nucpal wrote: post #337

irthomasthomas wrote: post #304

I'm surprised that we're still chasing moon shots in strong force fusion, while weak fusion, which has actually been demonstrated already, gets little attention. Chemically assisted/low energy nuclear reactions have been proven to produce clean energy and useful transmutation. This process can be used to turn radioactive waste into inert material. For example, technetium-99 is a particularly pernicious by-product of…

You're confusing the strong and weak nuclear forces from particle physics with the fission and fusion nuclear reactions. The (residual) strong force underpins the energy release in both fission and fusion reactions. You've also linked to the debunked pseudoscience of 'cold fusion', (dressed up as low energy nuclear reactions...) from Pons and Fleischman. Plenty of work is being done in the field of handling radioacti…

From the first link: " It was only in 2006, with the publication of a landmark paper in the European Journal of Physics C, that neutron-induced transmutations, as something distinct from cold fusion, began to emerge as a viable theory. The paper predicts that electrons on a metal surface coated with hydrogen, deuterium, or tritium atoms can behave collectively (as Einstein had predicted) when driven by an oscillating electromagnetic field at a particular frequency. This collective behavior can give them enough energy to combine with the hydrogen, deuterium, or tritium to make neutrons.

The paper goes on to say that the resulting neutrons travel very slowly, slow enough, in fact, to get gobbled up by a nearby atom before they can even leave the microscopic vicinity of their birthplace. The atom then becomes unstable and might burp out radioactive decay byproducts like a gamma ray or energetic electron. A separate paper by the same authors calculates that microscopic surfaces of electrodes, like those that tend to produce low-energy neutrons, are efficient absorbers of radioactive gamma rays. So radioactive decay can be transformed into a bath of innocuous heat. And of course heat energy can readily be converted into electricity."

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#419

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 7:03 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #402

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... It also happens to be wrong. If more projects that require nuclear physicists get funded, more people can become nuclear physicists. We're nowhere near the point that we're going to run out of potential nuclear physicists who could be trained if there was more demand for them. At some kind of abstract level there are a finite numb…

>> The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... >> It also happens to be wrong. Wow. The startup guy gave an actual example of the tradeoff. Am I correct that you see that not as a tradeoff but as a loss?

Sure, because the trade off wasn't real. There is a whole market full of people who could've done that work, it didn't have to the exact person who did it who happened to be one of the ones who would have gone to the other project, and the market expands when there is more demand because supply comes to meet it.

So the trade off wasn't between physics and software. We could've had both of those at the "cost" of fewer divorce lawyers or lower unemployment, neither of which are actually costs.

There is a theoretical point where having people do physics is less productive than having them do anything else they might've done, but we're nowhere near it. We still have people working in advertising only to cancel out the work of other people working in advertising.

Re: ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

#420

Post by dane-pgp » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

hlfy_hn wrote: post #416

dane-pgp wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This graph is from Tim's website and illustrates the relationship λ (lambda) between the world't total accumulated wealth (C, the integral) and our ever-accelerating energy consumption rate (a, measured in 10^21 joules per year) It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP). What are the error bars on the calculation for how much the entire planet is worth in dol…

"It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP)" No, it isn't. If you own a house that has already been build it does not influence GDP. Yet you need to finance repairs and maintenance (and therefore Energy). The problem with most infrastructure is actually not to build it but to sustain it.

That's an interesting point. To give a sense of scale, at least in the context of the US market:

"According to US News and Freddie Mac, homebuyers should actually budget up to 4% of the property’s value in annual maintenance costs." [0]

"house price rises have averaged more than 5 percent over the last few years." [1]

[0] https://www.upnest.com/1/post/what-is-the-annual-cost-of-mai...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/us-house-prices-are-going-to...