471–480 of 833 posts
One thing to consider: Even if you prefer solar, you still need to initially make those solar panels and that is an energy intensive process. I think we're still probably 20 years away from commercialization of this, but I still think this is a very big deal.
> you still need to initially make those solar panels Can't you use energy produced from existing solar panels to create more of them?
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"Places where sun availability makes solar inefficient" is still a niche so massive that "niche" seems like a bad descriptor.
Keep in mind HVDC. 3300 KM north of the Sahara desert, and you are relatively close to the Arctic circle. North of that is still a "niche," but now we're talking about a million people living hugely spread out. Most of those people living in Russia, Norway, and Sweden with easy access to an abundance of hydro, to the level that energy flows north to south in the Scandinavian countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…
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So they are ignoring the laser efficiency as well as the thermal to electric efficiency? If you did the same for a tokamak, stellerator or Bussard, would you get a similar ratio?
Jup. Fusion research is necessary and funding should be provided. But it is not close to commercial or generative viability. So there is at the moment no working design for a generator as a plant that produces more electricity than it takes in.
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> This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods,…
How many times have you or literally anyone you know achieved a state of the art breakthrough in the production of energy from a nuclear fusion reactor? Is this just another Monday to you?
It certainly sounds like just another Monday to me.
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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".
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For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers' flight 40 years…
For the vast majority of people, the Wright Brothers' flight was also "just another Monday [or whatever day it happened to be]". It's a bad criterion for judging something noteworthy.
15 years after whatever this breakthrough is will anything have changed outside of the lab? That remains to be seen, but I'll believe it when we see the data.
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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".
That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been debugged in ways the new stuff has not. All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.
Cars, TVs, phones, take your pick.
Good write-up to temper expectations at https://twitter.com/wilson_ricks/status/1602088153577246721 My TLDR (from a layman): * The output is greater than the energy *in the lasers*, but the lasers deliver 1% of the energy required to power them. Need 100x improvement to break even. * Converting the generated energy into electricity would cut the output in half. We need a further 2x improvement here, so it's ~200x to…
Look, it's really simple:
1. This is a very hard and expensive problem.
2. Progress IS being made.
It's not clever or cute to diminish progress on this problem.
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 scientists are humans after all and they (much like people who rejected bitcoin when it was at $3 and now have to justify their pre-held beliefs) have to justify why they didnt think it was possible or "real" even in the face of multiple fusion breakthroughs.
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For most people, yes it's just another Monday. Same way the observation of the Higgs Boson was just another day. Maybe worth an hour or two of curious investigation, but of no immediate consequence. Question is, are we watching the first Wright Brothers' flight, or are we watching one of the marginal glider improvements in the 19th century that would eventually contribute to the first Wright Brothers' flight 40 years…
Like the ARPANET? That was even less of a notable Monday to the general populace, because I doubt any significant part of the public had a great interest in some universities being able to connect their at least fridge-size, expensive computers together similarly to how they were already able to do before, but now using "packets".