Fusion Energy

[Nibblewitz]

A step in the right direction for actual green energy.

Doubtful this technology will become portable enough to rival the capacitance of fossil fuels.

[Basanos]

Originally Posted by Smoofers [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Middle east cucks on suicide watch.

Hope those sovereign wealth funds are enough to sustain you after your only card is played out.

That's no way to talk about America's most reliable conservative allies outside of Israel

[magnetaress]

Dry fallen dead trees. Dried excrement. And animal fats are the perfect green energy solutions engineered by g-d and forged thru nature and we cannot even come close.

The problem with those solutions is that they don't power rockets and war machines in their immediate forms. And cannot sustain high population densities let alone billions of people.

The siberian yakut gets by just fine with them though.

[reznor_]

Some interesting takes in this thread.

Anyway, cool that they managed to breakeven, but as was mentioned it took a whole lot of external power to focus 2.1 MJ (return was 3.1 MJ), (by the way, mega is M, milli is m).

The biggest thing you need to remember is the type of fusion device -- the breakthrough occurred with inertial confinement fusion, where lasers are focused into a tiny area and compress a ball of fuel, causing fusion (the real answer takes longer to type out and I'm on a short break). How is that scaled up to production? Giant lasers on a giant ball of fuel? That answer is unknown and will take time to figure out.

The other type of fusion is the magnetic confinement, which is probably most well known. The Tokamak style of device uses high magnetic fields to contain a plasma, which is approximately 200 million Kelvin. That's the ITER plant, being built right now. Their theoretical return is 10x the input, which would be really cool. The thought is that the size of the thing (which is massive compared to any other fusion test device) may help with that.

There's also the even more pressing challenge of materials. Just imagine: you have a superheated, 200 million K plasma about a foot away from supercooled, superconducting magnets, which are around 4 K, separated by a magnetic field and some steel. The material degradation is immense, thermophysical stresses are incredible, and that's not even counting the particle flux from the plasma, the damage it causes to the structure (neutron and ion bombardment displace the atomic lattice and cause embrittlement among a host of other phenomena).

The good news is that yeah, fusion is still probably 50-100 years away, so we have some time to solve the material problems. If you take anything away from my response, it should be this: materials are always the weakest point, even moreso than physics and mathematics. I do hope that fusion becomes a reality, it might happen when I'm near death or dead -- hoping the world is around long enough for that to happen.

As an aside, it was an interesting point about AI help -- that might be more promising than I think. For now, we'll keep working on materials research to help stand up to these extreme environments. I'm hoping the next couple fission reactors built will help restore some confidence in the nuclear field, they are a great stopgap against fossil fuels, when combined correctly.

[Danth]

Originally Posted by Botten [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Realistically ... maybe 20 to 30 years before the reactor is running.

They've been saying that since before I was born. It's always twenty or thirty years off. Somehow the decades keep going by and it never gets any closer. I'm a huge proponent of development of new forms of energy, especially fusion or antimatter-based energy, but it'll get here when it gets here. I suspect one of those things will lead to the other anyhow. We need it if our species is ever going to get off this rock and get to a better existence.

Originally Posted by reznor_ [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I do hope that fusion becomes a reality, it might happen when I'm near death or dead

I've believed for awhile that we live during an era that future history will kind of gloss over as "boring." We've long since finished the first Age of Exploration and aren't quite arriving at the next, yet. Today amounts to the boring filler between the exciting bits.

Danth

[Barik]

Hi, welcome to Chili's

[Barik]

Originally Posted by Nibblewitz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

A step in the right direction for actual green energy.

Doubtful this technology will become portable enough to rival the capacitance of fossil fuels.

Pretty much this.

[Jimjam]

Best way to harness fusion is a solar panel. Or as M sez eat a plant and burn the excreta.

[MrSparkle001]

This is great. I've been waiting for this since 1985.

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[Botten]

Nuclear Fusion Will Change Everything. Really.

@Jib

The announcement of a stable fusion reaction is a really big deal, maybe the biggest deal any of us will hear about in our lifetimes. The only thing bigger might be the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life. (Never mind the jokes.)

Current projections are for fusion-power distribution in around 20-30 years, although the Biden administration has set a goal of providing a commercially viable plant in 10.

And I love edgy talk directed at Saudi Arabia. Need Saudis to get concerned even when in reality fusion isn't ready and won't be for a bit.

The world’s geo-political structure and economic order will change profoundly. Countries that are now politically important because of their accidental fossil-fuel supplies—their power derives from their power—will no longer be gatekeepers or be able to influence geo-politics in the way they can now by withholding; once-dependent nations will then be free to tell the Adnan Khashoggi-killing Saudis to stuff it and the homophobic Qataris to pound hot sand. Fossil fuel providing nations’ revenues will contract.