851–860 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.
No you can't because solar isn't a continious source and fusion is. No amount of investment into solar power can make the sun magically shine 24 hours a day.
HN people has three orders of magnitude more technical background and education than politicians, yet when it's about fusion, fision, renewables and climate warming, we only manage to output a miserable 0.01 % consensus and the rest dissipates in waste argument. It comes to reason, the politicians are going to produce only 0.00001% of consensus. Conclusion: things are looking rather bad. We are not going to achieve C…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes. fusion funding has been sliding downwards for decades which is a large reason why it takes so long to do anything. It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything. 1. Shortage of funding 2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding 3. extremely low risk tolerance 4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high 5. projects are over engi…
"Funding" isn't really a good answer IMO. I don't know a ton about Fusion research specifically, but NASA is horrifically inefficient with money compared to private competitors. Giving them more money won't magically make them more efficient. Reasons why include: - Their incentive is to optimize for political approval, which means spreading facilities among as many congressional districts as possible, which creates a…
Ummm.. I thought remote work was no less efficient?
> LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…
I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones. I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How easy is to write $1T, but with that you can basically install enough solar cell to power all of USA energy need.
No you can't because solar isn't a continious source and fusion is. No amount of investment into solar power can make the sun magically shine 24 hours a day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but the Wrights were following research from all over the world, including England and Germany. You might as well say that the Wrights were also funded by the British government.
Yes, that's how research works. What's your point?
> LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE) Yesterday, everyone was complaining about the 2.2:2.0 ratio, but now we're working with 3.15:2.05. With modern lasers, that'd be a total Q of 0.375 assuming 100% ef…
> It's nice to see this milestone recognized, even if the funding it still rather small. Just wait until the DoD figures out they can use this for some military application and it will get 100x funding overnight.
Here's your most exciting paragraph > LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE). Many advanced science and technology developments are still needed to achieve simple, affordable IFE to power homes and busines…
The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?! Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the (otherwise excellent) channel is supposed to soon post an adv... I mean informer... I mean "exclusive documentary" about "repeat after me we're totally not a scam - we just play one on YouTube" fusion startup Helion. Which I'm going to watch, because even though everything I hear about this company gives me insane Theranos vibes... Well, if they pull it off... They might light a bulb with fusion in my lifetim…
The Helion approach seems plausible to me. Can you point me towards some of the sources that give you vibes?
(And I though I had seen a similar segment on "Answer with Joe", but I can't find it.)
None of those would be opposable source, of course - there won't be any until they open a plant, publish data, etc...
In the meantime, I see a hype cycle brewing, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable - but, we'll see.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't mean it's wrong.
It probably is though. Sure, they didn't have as much distractions, but they also didn't have the sum total of the world's knowledge at their fingertips in the same way we do today. People having been saying "this next generation is inferior to the last one" since the ancient Greeks. If that was consistently true we would already be in an Idiocracy scenario.
Been on Twitter, Facebook, or Hacker News lately ?
More seriously, I really fear this kind of stuff is, to some extend, new : https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones...
(Although, maybe it's comparable to the "opium epidemics" of the 1800s ?)
Ironically, I should stop having this kind of conversation... On social network.