Yes, desalination. And also the food supply. Think vertical farms within say 10 miles of major population centers. Right now the power cost of indoor lighting is why they aren't being built except as propotypes.
You're gonna have to actually support this claim as it sure sounds like you're just making shit up or pulling it out of your ass. (You have to be a dad, "turn off the damn lights, don't you know how much it costs!!!") Further, have you ever heard of this thing called a greenhouse? If the cost of the lighting was the issue we'd be seeing vertical greenhouses built like that instead. The capital needed for trying to rent/buy/build near dense urban areas is likely the actual prohibitive cost.
I agree. Fusion is new and exciting, the next (and possibly last?) major hurdle in power generation technology. However, I don't believe we should put all or the majority of efforts, hopes, dreams, funding, time, etc. into it at the cost of other clean energy types. Wind, solar, geothermal, and even tidal have already progressed and advanced for decades already. We can't be trying to hop-skip over them into fusion.My opinion on the fusion thingi is that owing to the unknowns, how far off commercial facilities are or even if the technological challenges can be mastered, it is better to keep development dollars and intellectual talent devoted to the effort small enough that it does not negatively impact the growth rate of solar, wind, tide, transmission line, and storage solutions where real progress and increasing supply are already happening and need to be further accelerated. I think it could be a pipe dream that too much faith in is being manufactured by that industry and politicians generally to find their own personal reasons to hype. I would go with what we have that will work and deemphasize fusion for better times.
That’s the odd thing, can generate far higher temps in a laboratory than even in the core of the sun. Unsure if the magnetic fields generated are comparable. But yeah having over 1x10^30 hydrogen atoms, the sun has an slight advantageYeah fusion seems to eternally be 20-50 yrs away. I'm not 100% certain we can overcome the technical challenges and get a true positive output, but hope we do.
The sun has many advantages over us when it comes to fusion, not sure we can ever mimic those.
Point taken. Still, with Tokamaks, the increases in size necessary to hit sufficient next power will not be commercially viable due to initial cost (no investors would be willing to sink that much money into a project with such long lead times till revenue generation). There is also the problem of not having enough Tritium at present to support more than one fusion reactor.This was a big step that the fusion industry has been stuck on for a long time. However over the last 50 years plasma performance has improved by 10,000 times from the first devices in the 50’s. Approximately one more order of magnitude jump will make fusion commercially viable.
Yea, like massive gravity.Yeah fusion seems to eternally be 20-50 yrs away. I'm not 100% certain we can overcome the technical challenges and get a true positive output, but hope we do.
The sun has many advantages over us when it comes to fusion, not sure we can ever mimic those.
My opinion on the fusion thingi is that owing to the unknowns, how far off commercial facilities are or even if the technological challenges can be mastered, it is better to keep development dollars and intellectual talent devoted to the effort small enough that it does not negatively impact the growth rate of solar, wind, tide, transmission line, and storage solutions where real progress and increasing supply are already happening and need to be further accelerated. I think it could be a pipe dream that too much faith in is being manufactured by that industry and politicians generally to find their own personal reasons to hype. I would go with what we have that will work and deemphasize fusion for better times.
Good point but I did watch a Biden official gushing up and down over the recent breakthrough including all the new interest from commercial investment and college students in fission. I think that commercial fusion is a long long way off down the road, sometime after climate disaster will become full blown.The US government spends about $700 million per year on fusion research. It's set to spend $6.25 trillion in total this year. We could triple our investment in fusion and no one would even notice.
Good point but I did watch a Biden official gushing up and down over the recent breakthrough including all the new interest from commercial investment and college students in fission. I think that commercial fusion is a long long way off down the road, sometime after climate disaster will become full blown.
Yes, it likely won't come soon enough to help us reduce carbon emissions to zero. But if we're in a bad way say by 2070 and it comes along, it may help us get out of it by way of powering free air carbon capture. Either way, we need to increase funding because the sooner it comes, the better.
If we had increased funding for it 30 years ago, who knows, we might be a lot closer now. But then, we've slowed walked everything that could help us avert this crisis.
Nah Artimus mission was preparation to make a moon beam!!!I have been interested in the question of free energy since I was a child. That was sometime back. The simple answer that fusion could provide was always clear to me and in all that time of special interest. Over that period of time and with that of special interest, I have developed a feeling that the technical complexities of containment are best left to a gravity well. perhaps some day we will build a Dyson Sphere, but I think something similar can be done on earth. I believe the Earth should be guarded around the equator with a solar powered electrical grid. The sun shines somewhere when it is dark here. That is what we should have funded long ago, in my opinion.
And the massive pressure at the core.That’s the odd thing, can generate far higher temps in a laboratory than even in the core of the sun. Unsure if the magnetic fields generated are comparable. But yeah having over 1x10^30 hydrogen atoms, the sun has an slight advantage
That's mostly all I listened to when I lived in Chicago, then I hear Sultans of Swing on the radio decided for another try at rock and roll.
There are fusion projects that are looking at small reactors. I recall seeing a Youtube channel cover one such project and theirs woud fit in a trailer. One of the use cases was using it for emergency power after a natural disaster. This version would fire two fuel pellets at each other to achieve fusion. Not sure how feasible it was though.
Saw that, but I didn't see anything mentioned about actual net energy output with that method in that video (or I missed it).Check out this video then, maybe it is the one you saw?
Either way, P&N may be interested.
Very early days for Helion. Pretty new tech compare to Tokamaks and Stellarators.Saw that, but I didn't see anything mentioned about actual net energy output with that method in that video (or I missed it).
And doesn't appear to be a government funded project. So private entity going to charge a lot for it if it makes it to marketVery early days for Helion. Pretty new tech compare to Tokamaks and Stellarators.
Look up Carnot efficiency for heat engines. Even if the individual components were 100% efficient, the overall heat cycle would not be.At this point we can't do it cost effectively with fusion. We'd need some order-of-magnitude increases in capabilities of carbon scrubbers to even approach the idea of a fusion-powered carbon farm. Hell, we're closer to the fusion part of that than the scrubber part of that.
Eh? Condensing boilers are like 90% efficient. Steam turbines are above that. It's trivial to hook up thing that generates heat to water cycle that drives a turbine. That said, you'd need quite a bit above 10% net to make something like this worthwhile to build, but I bet if they hit 50% net they could build a prototype reactor and start looking for more efficiencies to build off of.
Or Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. If Chernobyl happened in the US, I'm pretty sure we would've taken out the entire watershed. Because I don't believe we would've ordered people to go in and risk their lives immediately.It's what I call an irrational risk fixation. People become fixated on certain risks. For example, one person is so obsessed with bridges collapsing that he'll drive 50 extra miles to avoid crossing one, but the higher risk of merely driving in a car with the attendant MVA fatility disk doesn't cause any anxiety.
I suspect people have psychologically associated nuclear plants with nuclear weapons.
I’m outside the immediate danger zone if something happens at the Pickering nuclear power plant here in the northern Toronto area. Unsure where else we’d get our power from without it with proposed decommissioned of it slated in 2025.Or Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. If Chernobyl happened in the US, I'm pretty sure we would've taken out the entire watershed. Because I don't believe we would've ordered people to go in and risk their lives immediately.
TMI just shows how little you can trust companies, as they continued cutting cutting corners all the way through the clean up.
Regardless, the problem with current nuclear is that while the probability of failure is very low, the consequence is extremely high.
With a space elevator, if achievable, we could move manufacturing off planet as well as energy production, but without that I do not fancy the idea of using microwaves to send energy from space to earth.Nah Artimus mission was preparation to make a moon beam!!!
And the imagination is seldom interested in probability. You could even say that's why it's called imaginative, not probabilisticly sound. I think fear is really rapid mind movement, or uncontrolled associations that spirel out of control when traumatic memory threatens to break from it's usual repressed state by some triggering external stimulus. Fear of nuclear disaster provided a fertile field for such paranoias to flourish. And, as we know, bring people around to rational thinking isn't easy owing to the fassive levels of stress we have in our society today.Or Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. If Chernobyl happened in the US, I'm pretty sure we would've taken out the entire watershed. Because I don't believe we would've ordered people to go in and risk their lives immediately.
TMI just shows how little you can trust companies, as they continued cutting cutting corners all the way through the clean up.
Regardless, the problem with current nuclear is that while the probability of failure is very low, the consequence is extremely high.
Or Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. If Chernobyl happened in the US, I'm pretty sure we would've taken out the entire watershed. Because I don't believe we would've ordered people to go in and risk their lives immediately.
TMI just shows how little you can trust companies, as they continued cutting cutting corners all the way through the clean up.
Regardless, the problem with current nuclear is that while the probability of failure is very low, the consequence is extremely high.