Nah he’s afraid they will have arc reactor iron man suits.
True, but it was our direct forebearers, we also did not invent stone tools, sex, but we make them better.Recent evidence suggests that Homo Sapiens were not the first to control fire.
Food is limited by arable land. I read something a while back that claimed we could feed ten billion people with the land available. Don't know if that included chopping down the rain forest or not.Cause energy -> food? You could desalinate seawater and tons other stuff.
Food will not be limited by arable land. You don't actually need lots of land to grow food, but we will need lots of clean energy to use other methods.Food is limited by arable land. I read something a while back that claimed we could feed ten billion people with the land available. Don't know if that included chopping down the rain forest or not.
Food is limited by arable land. I read something a while back that claimed we could feed ten billion people with the land available. Don't know if that included chopping down the rain forest or not.
Dump back on ocean to restore salinity.
That we are going to lose since time is running out and we are not getting any smarter.
Skynet, probably
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Pretty sure there's no salt shortage in the oceans, climate change has slowly been increasing the salinity of all oceans hasn't it? If anything should get dumped it should be basalt and limestone, it's the pH that needs to be restored I do believe.
Pretty sure there's no salt shortage in the oceans, climate change has slowly been increasing the salinity of all oceans hasn't it? If anything should get dumped it should be basalt and limestone, it's the pH that needs to be restored I do believe.
The government agency that is most interested in small reactors is NASA for obvious reasons. Darpa has also funded both hot and cold fusion studies. Look up Condensed Matter Physics. If they get it working for spacecraft it will immediately be adopted for military applications.Cheap is relative, especially if we're talking economies of scale that differ.
Personally I think a warship packing cruise missiles with unlimited range, but presumably without the radiation issues, sounds pretty meaningful. I think it's a given whatever successful design happens, making it smaller and more flexible will happen the same way it did with fission reactors.
Fair enough, but that doesn't really help us today, now does it? The comment I was responding to was presuming that fusion+carbon scrubbers will save us all, I was countering that with something resembling data.First of all, open air carbon capture is not at all a viable idea until carbon emissions are reduced to zero. It is a major failing of that article to fail to point that out. Right now it doesn't even matter what is their power source. They can use geothermal as that plant in Iceland does, or burn dirty coal. Either way, it's the same thing. Because the renewables they use would be replacing fossil fuels for general energy use if not used for that purpose. It will always be more effecient to use renewables to reduce emissions than it is to remove carbon. Hence, any such plant is causing more emissions as it removes carbon. Open air carbon capture is for the future after emissions are at zero, not before. These existing plants are just a proof of concept for the future.
No, I did. They are orders of magnitude too incapable to materially affect our climate for the foreseeable future. If we had a million of these plants, it'd take 250 years to pull 1T tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.It doesn't say that the scrubbers aren't efficient enough.
I would assume as much in regards to a self-contained commercial reactor. I wondered if that was the measurement here with an experimental reactor, or if it were focused on raw energy intake at the reactor and raw output at the reactor in the form of heat. Being that the ignition is still requiring far above the resulting output, I figured it was input vs output directly at the reactor. It's just an assumption though.If you put 1000MW of electricity in and it is 10% efficient and it is really 10% out then you don't get 1100 MW of heat out but 1100 MW of electricity.
Send it to the northern and midwestern states for the roads in winter!The possibilities with desalination fusion would open up too, would pretty much save American AG in the west wouldn't it?
Next up: what do we do with all that damn salt? Ha
They seem to only look at the secondary x-ray radiation directed at the target with is stated as 1.9 mega joules. They got 2.5 MJ out from there. They seem to ignore that it took a laser and capacitor bank occupying 3 football fields outputting 500 MJ to generate the x-rays. They must have a really efficient way to generate those x-rays in their back pocket somewhere in the future./sI would assume as much in regards to a self-contained commercial reactor. I wondered if that was the measurement here with an experimental reactor, or if it were focused on raw energy intake at the reactor and raw output at the reactor in the form of heat. Being that the ignition is still requiring far above the resulting output, I figured it was input vs output directly at the reactor. It's just an assumption though.
Send it to the northern and midwestern states for the roads in winter!
Not thinking big enough. With a sufficient quantity of free power, you just warm the pavement with embedded electric heating elements.Send it to the northern and midwestern states for the roads in winter!
Not thinking big enough. With a sufficient quantity of free power, you just warm the pavement with embedded electric heating elements.
How will we keep the animals (or homeless?) from trying to sleep on it? Perhaps low voltage pulses?Not thinking big enough. With a sufficient quantity of free power, you just warm the pavement with embedded electric heating elements.
Take the 'wildlife bridge' approach. Set up 10x10 warming pads every mile offset from the road for the critters instead. Put a lil' fence between it and the road to encourage them to move in a different direction if they get spooked.How will we keep the animals from trying to sleep on it? lol
I'm not just saying it. I'm asserting as an absolute. As I said, we already have fusion bombs, which operate by using a fisile reaction of uranium or plutonium to produe the heat necessary to fuse the hydrogen fuel supply. This is the only possible way to miniaturize a fusion reaction small enough to put it into a bomb.
Which won't happen until they change their form of government. I'd rather not wait for that to happen, as climate change is occurring now, and rapidly.
Cheap plentiful power whether from fusion or renewables is going to be one way we can pull major CO2 out of the atmosphere. It also enables manufacturing of carbon neutral fuels for the aviation industry and international shippingFair enough, but that doesn't really help us today, now does it? The comment I was responding to was presuming that fusion+carbon scrubbers will save us all, I was countering that with something resembling data.
No, I did. They are orders of magnitude too incapable to materially affect our climate for the foreseeable future. If we had a million of these plants, it'd take 250 years to pull 1T tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I'm not saying fusion isn't grand, presuming we can ever build a fucking plant. I'm saying it won't matter if we can't stuff 1.5T tons of CO2 back into the dirt before the effects of it murder a sufficient percentage of human civilization to render future efforts on creating a fusion reactor irrelevant.
They seem to only look at the secondary x-ray radiation directed at the target with is stated as 1.9 mega joules. They got 2.5 MJ out from there. They seem to ignore that it took a laser and capacitor bank occupying 3 football fields outputting 500 MJ to generate the x-rays. They must have a really efficient way to generate those x-rays in their back pocket somewhere in the future./s
Stop thinking small. Think Replicators. The E=Mc2 works both ways.Not thinking big enough. With a sufficient quantity of free power, you just warm the pavement with embedded electric heating elements.
I’m happy this is happening but is there a reason we aren’t building gen3/gen4 fission reactors all over the place? It seems like if we put our minds to it we could eliminate dependency on fossil fuel rather quickly, between that and solar/wind. Using nuclear for “base” electrical supply to at least cover load during nighttime makes too much sense. I get nobody wants them in their backyard, but aren’t the new designs much safer? Instead, the only plants left running are ancient, which is sort of setting up for a self fulfilling catastrophe
They’re expensive too, so maybe it would require government funding Free property tax rebates for 50 years if a nuclear plant is built within 1 mile? Would that be enough for the NIMBYs?
Fission plants take long enough to permit and build, that every day that goes by that we aren’t slapping them down left and right infuriates me. Starting the process now and we can have that capacity reliably in 20 years.
Or we can wait for fusion to be viable in 2050, and get capacity in 2070? That’s if we don’t shift the goal posts any more and say it’s not good enough, now we need to wait for antimatter reactors
Don’t get me started on the countries shutting down perfectly good operating nuclear plants because reasons
Humans are so terrible at judging cost/benefit analysis of any events that fall on either extreme end of the spectrum for low risk, high probability and high risk, low probability.
Everyone thinks about Chernobyl and no one considers the daily value these plants offer, the lives they support and make modern standard of living possible through the power we personally depend on and the commerce they support
Only scientifically understood way for such a small component to produce so much energy is with anti-matter. If we had anti-matter, we could actually do it pretty easily. It's a good thing we don't though, because one wrong move and it's adios muchachos for humanity, the planet, and possibly the entire solar system. Yet we're continuing to find ways to either efficiently manufacture it or find it out there in the solar system!