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I first heard about fusion power when I was seven in 1966 in a science & technology comic strip in the LA Times’ Sunday funny papers. Fusion sounded promising.
So, I’ve become a bit jaded over the last 56 years about fusion energy coming Real Soon Now. But, from today’s Financial Times, it appears Lawrence Livermore has finally achieved the first major milestone: getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than you put in.
US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough
Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels
Tom Wilson in London 9 HOURS AGO
US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.
Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.
The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.
Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of the hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years.
… The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.
Of course, we’ve been doing fission reaction for 80 years, but we’ve failed to get all that cost-effective at it.
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A new installment in the never ending “why we can’t have nice things anymore” saga.
(AKA why we don’t stop to help people in distress anymore. AKA our new low-trust society.)
Previous episode:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/223000-here-223000-there/#comment-5687308
What ever happened with the proposal to use fusion to fuel a breeder reactor to make U-235 decades back?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-020-00004-9
Probably the most expensive 0.4 megajoules of energy ever produced. It’s a long, long way from being the cheap and abundant source everybody is dreaming about.
OT: The NHL-lauded trans-hockey tournament in Wisconsin results in a male-to-female tranny laying out his her its their female-to-male opponent for 17 minutes with a check (or perhaps something much less - see the video), and the female-to-male goaltender subsequently having a crying fit along the corner boards to delay the game further. Reminds one of Michael Sam, the openly homosexual outside linebacker for the University of Missouri: Drafted by the St. Louis Rams (taking one for the NFL in exchange for their departure for L.A.), cut by the Rams and signed by the Cowboys, cut by the Cowboys and signed by the CFL Montreal Alouettes, and left the game due to "emotional problems".
https://quillette.com/blog/2022/12/09/ignoring-biological-reality-puts-female-hockey-players-at-risk/Replies: @AndrewR
Where does Ice-9 fit into all of this?
https://youtu.be/lBIvS046uUU
“… by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, ..”
Hydrogen bombs achieved this a long time ago. Doesn’t mean it will lead to a practical way to generate electricity.
Speaking of heat energy. The homeless in Southern California have the right idea. Imagine being old and homeless in Boise Idaho with winter upon us.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/homelessness-worsens-in-older-populations-as-housing-costs-take-toll-11670733558
Can't they be used to move homeless people to, uh, California? It could be like the triangle slave trade. (Though that may not be the ideal appellation.)
Now...what does California have that Texas and Florida need? No, seriously.
The latest round of buyouts here in the northern part of the state were corporate groups. They raised the average farm price by ten times previous prices. $225 k resold for $2.5 mil. The farms are so far sitting empty.
But it's similar all across the nation. You can try and run for any whitetopia ... but if there's any jobs or amenities there, other people are running there as well and housing has spiked. And because Americans are not allowed to have a border, the immigrants will be flooding in as well. Coastal metros now have Asiatic housing costs.
The immigrationist loons--maybe immigrationist "zealots" gets at the truth of it--have finally managed to destroy the traditional American birthright of available land, affordable housing. They have destroyed "affordable family formation".
And yet ... where are the Republicans picking up this $1 trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk--talking about housing prices and immigration, talking about the destruction of affordable family formation and the future of your children?Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Jim Don Bob
She is only 65 and has self diagnosed lung problem, so can't work (or chooses not to soil her hands).
In her photo she is shown holding her small poodle type dog. Has relatives in town but says vaguely that their place is "too small" for her and doggie.
So she mostly hangs around some homeless shelter for oldsters.
What is wrong with this picture?
Woman can work (at something, but won't) Has money for doggie but not her self support. Has family home to share but again, won't. Poor pitiful her. Prefers mooching.
Probably saved nothing from work. 'Social work" is all govt. paid with pensions and/or Social Security. Oh, and has income of around $1,800/month.
This is laughable. No she doesn't live like Hillary Clinton but is far from a homeless begger.
Boise is paradise for her compared to say, 90% of the world.
But I am very hard-hearted...
Fission seems pretty cost effective. https://twitter.com/mining_atoms/status/1599578758125850625?s=46&t=ijyfCmSyJCwoQKt-x-RYzQ
OT:
I want to drive a bus for $240k or be a street light repair worker for $196k or a sign painter for $145k!
2) Do you want to work at prisons or in Chicago dealing with "the public"?
As an oil man who will be professionally destroyed by this technological development…
Goddamn this is a great country. The people, the land, the resources, the self concept- we really lucked out. What a blessing to be born in West Virginia, USA. I just hope I can contribute enough to deserve such providence.
-Otto von BismarckReplies: @SFG, @xyxxyz
I met an former oil geologist who age 30 decided on a change of career.
Interviewer - "no grants for second degrees - how do you propose to support yourself?"
"I'll just have to cancel the order for the yacht"Replies: @GeologyAnonMk6
One last bit from the WSJ
https://archive.ph/M9EM1
Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns
Tl;dr Because they don’t have to
It’s all I can do to refrain from quoting this excellent essay in its entirety here (and BTW I am not a Republican):
"They get all their talking points from Fox News!" they scream, while swimming in a bubble of constant Deep State Blue propaganda. NPR in the morning, NY Times for reading, MSNBC/CNN for daily updates, COlbert/Kimmel/Maher to give them psychic "laughs" about the enemy.....
Meanwhile, the people I know who aren't Deep State Blue aren't watching Fox News. Whether Dissident Left or Alt-Right, they avoid the corporate press.
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-i-am-mystified-i-know-only-one-person-who-voted-for-nixon-pauline-kael-109-60-04.jpgReplies: @Colin Wright
“Nuclear fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be.”
Of course, if the population of the Earth HAD BEEN ALLOWED to stabilize at 2 or even 3 billion, we would not need fusion. We could get a lot of our power from hydro, and we would have centuries at least to transition away from fossil hydrocarbons. But where is the profit in that? Breed like rodents, because Elon Musk wants low wages and the kind of bulk economic growth that does not benefit the average person, serf!
Go away, kill your babies somewhere else, fed.
So the option would be to kill off at a minimum, half the population immediately, or continue to extract, grow, and develop. I don't think the point of life, in general, is to limit yourself to whatever the environment dictates. It is to develop and overcome those limitations, growing more complex and able, ultimately to give the gift of life to the barren rocks floating silent and desolate in the void.Replies: @Kim
Actually, it is the oldest and most common source of energy. It has been going on in trillions of reactors for over 13.7 billion years. Most energy produced on earth is fusion energy directly or indirectly. It is just very hard for humans to replicate it.
The earth's population hit 3 billion when I was still a kid (1960) before there was even a whole lot of focus on the issue. Limiting it to 3 billion would have required an agreement between the West, the Soviet Union and (after 1964) China, to put aside their differences in order to run death squads in the 3rd world.
But what certainly could--should--have been done is to encourage population stability in the 3rd world and to allow the stability in the developed world to stick--with all the associated environmental benefits--simply by not allowing foreigners to flood in and keep pushing "Western" populations up, even as fertility dropped below replacement.Replies: @epebble
https://rense.com/1.mpicons/slider20200710/ub.jpgReplies: @epebble
I’m sure this story is completely credible and not at all fake.
Elizabeth Holmes is kicking herself in prison, wondering why she didn’t go the whole fusion route.
“Cold fusion” was popular for a while as a buzzterm in movies before “clean energy” became the new mythical buzzword to fix energy problems.
"Net positive" includes only the energy into and out of the plasma. The overhead equipment, for example large containment magnets, require quite a bit more. True net positive needs the beam to produce about 10x as much energy as going into the plasma. Economical fusion power will require more like 30x.
It's quite an accomplishment, but very far removed from an energy source.
So fusion remains "the energy source of tomorrow".
For context, they were talking break even, as described here , in the 80s. That the small improvement to break even took close to 40 years shows that controlling the plasma is really hard.
Vaclav Smil wrote about this in his Energy and Civilization. Fission became absurdly over-regulated, especially in the US, under pressure from anti-nuclear activists. With new regulations appearing each day, it became prohibitively expensive to build new nuclear power plants. The low costs on your Twitter link (from Ontario) are probably low because they pertain to plants built before hyper-regulation. Plants built today would have enormous fixed costs and would have higher energy prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Rosatom are building a 4-reactor, 4.5MW version at Akkuyu in Turkey for around $22 billion, which seems very reasonable when compared with what the UK are throwing away on unproven and problem-plagued French reactor designs (thanks to Blair's 1998 decision to stop all new nuclear build, which destroyed nuclear engineering as a UK career).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
What I can't understand is why so little money is being spent on molten salt reactor research, which has the potential to be
a) extremely safe
b) provide an ability to burn (i.e. render much less long-lived and dangerous) existing nuclear waste, the storage of which is an ongoing headache for pretty much all nuclear powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
This ultra-high-tech, lasers and magnetic confinement stuff has been promising fusion in the next twenty years for the past sixty years.
If we end up paying huge fees to China for rendering our waste safer, and/or huge fees to clone their reactors - shame on us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1Replies: @AnotherDad, @That Would Be Telling
“all that breeding is a creation by the man!” says the anti-God, anti-humanist.
Go away, kill your babies somewhere else, fed.
How many kids do you have or plan to have?
So as to improve the gene pool.
(By the way, I notice TG has not answered your question: methinks I smell a troll.)
The purported breakthrough does beg for replication; forgive my skepticism in the interim.
OT: The NHL-lauded trans-hockey tournament in Wisconsin results in a male-to-female tranny laying out his her its their female-to-male opponent for 17 minutes with a check (or perhaps something much less – see the video), and the female-to-male goaltender subsequently having a crying fit along the corner boards to delay the game further. Reminds one of Michael Sam, the openly homosexual outside linebacker for the University of Missouri: Drafted by the St. Louis Rams (taking one for the NFL in exchange for their departure for L.A.), cut by the Rams and signed by the Cowboys, cut by the Cowboys and signed by the CFL Montreal Alouettes, and left the game due to “emotional problems”.
https://quillette.com/blog/2022/12/09/ignoring-biological-reality-puts-female-hockey-players-at-risk/
Financial Times. The pink ‘un. Quite timely for Gaudete Sunday.
The Financial Post is in Canada. As easy to confuse as fusion and fission, I guess.
When political parties cross-endorse a candidate, as in New York, this is called fusion. Fission would be the opposite, as in 1912.
“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
-Otto von Bismarck
Supposedly Talleyrand warned him when selling Jefferson Louisiana he’d be making a giant super country that would overshadow Europe; Napoleon figured it would screw the British and he wouldn’t have to worry about it for 150 years.
We were lucky. Oh, those people are bright and hardworking, but there’s probably some similar fellow growing rice in rural China or dodging the draft in Russia. This country’s greatness is not inevitable-which is why defeating the ethnomasochistic left is so important.Replies: @JR Ewing, @GeologyAnonMk6
Holland and Ireland. The Dutch with their commercial expertise and freed of maintaining the dikes
would make Ireland a paradise. The Irish brought to Holland would drink, fight, drink, fornicate, drink and neglect the dikes. The sea would break in, problem solved. Bismarck thought this was funny, so do I.
,
Hydrogen bombs achieved this a long time ago. Doesn't mean it will lead to a practical way to generate electricity.Replies: @TG, @Hypnotoad666, @AnotherDad
ROTFL. Yes, hydrogen bombs did this a long time ago! And of course, there is also Mr. Sun. It’s the locally controllable part that’s the stickler…
https://archive.ph/M9EM1Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never LearnsTl;dr Because they don't have toIt's all I can do to refrain from quoting this excellent essay in its entirety here (and BTW I am not a Republican):Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Reg Cæsar, @Veteran Aryan
I’ve swum with the Big Blue fishes. These people really are oblivious–and projection-filled.
“They get all their talking points from Fox News!” they scream, while swimming in a bubble of constant Deep State Blue propaganda. NPR in the morning, NY Times for reading, MSNBC/CNN for daily updates, COlbert/Kimmel/Maher to give them psychic “laughs” about the enemy…..
Meanwhile, the people I know who aren’t Deep State Blue aren’t watching Fox News. Whether Dissident Left or Alt-Right, they avoid the corporate press.
Or Brown 25?
Wow!
That’s about 0.11 kWh.
If it lasted an hour. It likely lasted a millisecond or less.
NIF has been described as the most complex piece of machinery ever built by man. I remember colleagues calculating that the lab would never keep all the lasers focused on target before loosing one, but they kept hammering away at it.
But NIF will never be the true path to fusion. Too much of a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s a brute force approach that isn’t “sustainable” as the libs like to say.
The best path would be plasma fusion but that’s hard too. The path to controlling it is complex, and highly nonlinear. Earlier this year googles deep mind successfully kept tokamak fusion (laser fusions competitor) going beyond the nonlinear point calculated That was a real success.
If I had to guess, this is to keep the incoming Congress happy, and keep funding going. NIF has always been a red headed step child. They sell it to the military types by claiming it’s used for material research (hydrodynamics – basically metals flowing like water under nuclear conditions). They used to do that stuff by blowing up real bombs, but that’s no longer kosher.
They also sold it as a path to fusion. There had been a billion dollar tokamak on LLNL site prior to NIF. The laser guys saw it as a competitor and not only mothballed it but got it dismantled and sold as scrap. I heard the scrap got them $50k. But Livermore was forever out of the magnetic fusion race at that point and the laser scientists couldn’t have been happier. After all, they have never really had to deliver on the fusion energy part, unless they were trying to satisfy Congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
I don't think the ICF and MCF guys were in much competition back then. They had separate budgets and the ICF guys were almost entirely funded out of the weapons end of DOE's coffers. 1970s budgets permitted two mainline MCF concepts; 1980s budgets permitted only one. MFTF-B was cancelled because it was in competition with Tokamaks, which looked like a better prospect at the time. Although, Tokamaks probably won't lead to a practical fusion reactor either.Replies: @Deadite
I couldn’t tease it out from that FT article, but I suspect they meant that they got as much energy out of the pellet as was incident on it in the form of laser light (or perhaps incident on the walls of the Hohlraum target. But what is the efficiency of the lasers? 10% at most? Probably less than that.
And, how would you do that 10 times per second while the targets are enshrouded in blankets of molten flibe? They have no more idea of how to do that than they did 30 years ago.
This was a breakthrough in press releases, not a breakthrough in fusion.
Maybe it's time to convince DoE to renew the research grant.
Allowed? Perhaps there was a “solution”, mayhaps a “final” one per chance? That would “allow” that form of stability?
I can’t remember what it was. Maybe if I “concentrate” I’ll remember it. Oh well, off to take a shower!
And tomorrow, off to get another vax booster. Number 8 or 9? I can’t seem to remember that either.
Here is the output from a tokamak that is using AI to encapsulate the plasma.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633
Unlike NIF, it produced a respectable 16 kWh for 5 seconds. Which shows promise for the cheaper. More elegant AI/tokamak technology.
Did they count the power required to run the magnetic confinement?
Thank you for the good news!
That’s about 0.11 kWh.
If it lasted an hour. It likely lasted a millisecond or less.
NIF has been described as the most complex piece of machinery ever built by man. I remember colleagues calculating that the lab would never keep all the lasers focused on target before loosing one, but they kept hammering away at it.
But NIF will never be the true path to fusion. Too much of a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s a brute force approach that isn’t “sustainable” as the libs like to say.
The best path would be plasma fusion but that’s hard too. The path to controlling it is complex, and highly nonlinear. Earlier this year googles deep mind successfully kept tokamak fusion (laser fusions competitor) going beyond the nonlinear point calculated That was a real success.
If I had to guess, this is to keep the incoming Congress happy, and keep funding going. NIF has always been a red headed step child. They sell it to the military types by claiming it’s used for material research (hydrodynamics - basically metals flowing like water under nuclear conditions). They used to do that stuff by blowing up real bombs, but that’s no longer kosher.
They also sold it as a path to fusion. There had been a billion dollar tokamak on LLNL site prior to NIF. The laser guys saw it as a competitor and not only mothballed it but got it dismantled and sold as scrap. I heard the scrap got them $50k. But Livermore was forever out of the magnetic fusion race at that point and the laser scientists couldn’t have been happier. After all, they have never really had to deliver on the fusion energy part, unless they were trying to satisfy Congress.Replies: @Mr. Anon
It wasn’t a Tokamak, but rather a magnetic mirror device, MFTF-B. And it only cost about $370 million (in early 1980’s dollars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
I don’t think the ICF and MCF guys were in much competition back then. They had separate budgets and the ICF guys were almost entirely funded out of the weapons end of DOE’s coffers. 1970s budgets permitted two mainline MCF concepts; 1980s budgets permitted only one. MFTF-B was cancelled because it was in competition with Tokamaks, which looked like a better prospect at the time. Although, Tokamaks probably won’t lead to a practical fusion reactor either.
That tech would have cost a billion in mid 2000’s dollars, so it’s a fair comparison on cost
However, I have to disagree. The laser folks are huge competitors for the other types of tech, and they are all fighting on limited dollars.
But I will agree NIF is a big pile that will never be useful for anything I think the AI approach does help with the issues that have kept tokamaks from progressing, because the AI doesn’t need to know the physics. It predicts what the magnetic bottle has to do on the fly, so that actually is a huge breakthrough. It’s like the google translate tool. You didn’t need to know the rules of language. You basically let the neural net work it out.
Your other comment was good. But I was limited to 3 comments so couldn’t make a reply.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-020-00004-9Replies: @Inverness, @Hodag
Breeder reactors are something that can only work in a high-trust society. If then.
https://archive.ph/M9EM1Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never LearnsTl;dr Because they don't have toIt's all I can do to refrain from quoting this excellent essay in its entirety here (and BTW I am not a Republican):Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Reg Cæsar, @Veteran Aryan
A lady told Adlai Stevenson that all the intelligent people would be voting for him. He replied that that wouldn’t be enough. He needed a majority.
This attitude has been around for a long time!
Repeat above, with Pauline Kael.
A real-life anecdote. A Berkeley matron I knew -- quite intelligent, too -- remarked in 1980 that she couldn't understand how Reagan had won.
Nobody she knew had voted for him.
And, how would you do that 10 times per second while the targets are enshrouded in blankets of molten flibe? They have no more idea of how to do that than they did 30 years ago.
This was a breakthrough in press releases, not a breakthrough in fusion.Replies: @International Jew
LOL.
Maybe it’s time to convince DoE to renew the research grant.
True of fission reactors too.
If only it all weren’t used as yet another rationalization for not building more fission plants now.
Fine: we’ll go with fusion when it actually works. Meantime, should you actually want to do something about global warming, there’s this proven technology that some countries have been using for sixty years now.
There was a secondary optimum of climate between 400 and 1200 A.D., the peak being 800-1100 A.D. This was on the whole a dry, warm period and apparently remarkably stormfree in the Atlantic and in the North Sea. It was the time of great Viking voyages and the settlement of Iceland and Greenland. The early Norse burials in Greenland were deep in ground which is now permanently frozen.
In the great survey of 1085 (Domesday Book) 38 vineyards were recorded in England besides those of the king. The wine was considered almost equal with the French wine. The northernmost vineyards were near York [northern England]. This implies summer temperatures 2°C higher than today and freedom from May frosts. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1000 A.D. to 1200 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures warmer by about 1.5°C . Wheat and oats were grown around Trondheim, Norway, suggesting climates about 1.5°C warmer than present.
A warmer climate would benefit humans tremendously. Sadly the planet seems to have stopped warming 22 years ago and the planet has been cooling over the past 5 years as the Sun has weakened and some are predicting another mini ice-age. Thankfully with higher CO2 levels crops can survive in colder, dryer climates.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Colin Wright
Once I realized that the fusion that powers the sun would only work as an energy source if we achieved and harnessed temperatures as hot as the Sun here in Earth, my perspective immediately changed.
How can we do that, safely, at all, ever? How could we do it for years?
These various articles don’t ever come out and say directly that we have to have mini Suns on Earth to get power from fusion. They would be teeny tiny vs real Sun but still, Suns on Earth. How can the most important detail always be left out?
I am very discouraged about replacing fossil fuels. It is a goal I agree with but with 8 billion people in and more still coming, I just don’t know when we are going to achieve it. Replace all that energy with what, for everyone, everywhere? Solar and wind won’t do it and I do not trust nuclear power in First Works countries, much less poorer countries.
Fusion on earth is very different than fusion in the Sun. A fusion reactor would not be a "mini-Sun" but something else entirely.Replies: @notsaying
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-i-am-mystified-i-know-only-one-person-who-voted-for-nixon-pauline-kael-109-60-04.jpgReplies: @Colin Wright
‘…Repeat above, with Pauline Kael.’
A real-life anecdote. A Berkeley matron I knew — quite intelligent, too — remarked in 1980 that she couldn’t understand how Reagan had won.
Nobody she knew had voted for him.
Those buses that governors Abbott & DeSantis use to ferry migrants to Chicago and NYC. Do they return empty?
Can’t they be used to move homeless people to, uh, California? It could be like the triangle slave trade. (Though that may not be the ideal appellation.)
Now…what does California have that Texas and Florida need? No, seriously.
That is about 0.1 kWh which costs a little over a penny from Portland General Electric. So, it is very Blue-Sky research where they used $100 Billion facility to produce a penny.
1) Are you black?
2) Do you want to work at prisons or in Chicago dealing with “the public”?
Aww crap. More WSJ. “So you don’t have to..”
Women send their photos in to some AI manipulator, to generate more attractive versions of themselves.
Then they get mad because the new “avatars” look better than they do. Some complained that it made their boobs look bigger.
https://archive.ph/r6Agg
In the developed world stabilizing population would have been easy. The elites lost interest in the idea because of their commitment to immigration and cultural dissolution of the west.
There was initial concern among some Manhattan Project scientists that an atomic bomb might cause a runaway reaction, setting the atmosphere on fire. This caused Manhattan scientists to get out their slide rules, and calculate that such event was impossible; the hydrogen in the atmosphere would not get sufficiently ticked-off. I found myself wondering whether this new fusion technology has caused some scientists to consider the possibility of a runaway reaction.
Still and all, setting the atmosphere on fire would have been a spectacular culmination of decades of effort, marred only by its negative effects on all known forms of life.Replies: @Renard
The Financial Post is in Canada. As easy to confuse as fusion and fission, I guess.
When political parties cross-endorse a candidate, as in New York, this is called fusion. Fission would be the opposite, as in 1912.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
Childish. To achieve controlled fusion, it takes a whole another level of technology we still don’t possess.
Without dragging us hopelessly off topic, until the recent unpleasantness Ukraine was providing a lot of electricity to places like Moldova, thanks to its many nuclear generators, of which Chernobyl is most notorious but the ZPPP is most in the news today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Rosatom are building a 4-reactor, 4.5MW version at Akkuyu in Turkey for around $22 billion, which seems very reasonable when compared with what the UK are throwing away on unproven and problem-plagued French reactor designs (thanks to Blair’s 1998 decision to stop all new nuclear build, which destroyed nuclear engineering as a UK career).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
What I can’t understand is why so little money is being spent on molten salt reactor research, which has the potential to be
a) extremely safe
b) provide an ability to burn (i.e. render much less long-lived and dangerous) existing nuclear waste, the storage of which is an ongoing headache for pretty much all nuclear powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
This ultra-high-tech, lasers and magnetic confinement stuff has been promising fusion in the next twenty years for the past sixty years.
If we end up paying huge fees to China for rendering our waste safer, and/or huge fees to clone their reactors – shame on us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
In contrast, there's a lot of immediate--get going in the next decade or two--opportunity in the fission space. Ramping up Gen3/4 designs, but then on to breeders, molt salt designs, thorium cycle.
It's the kind of stuff doable in a high trust nation with a border and eugenic fertility. Whether we'll lead in doing any of it in our prospective Latinized, Africanized "slumping toward Brazil" future seems doubtful.
For current design reactor cooling and moderation will transmute some hydrogen into deuterium and tritium (actually valuable stuff) ... I should look up what happens with the oxygen. Of course water is also insanely corrosive stuff but we've got experience with that problem since the Iron Age, maybe also the Copper and Bronze Ages.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @QCIC
We’ll still need oil for all sorts of things, I wouldn’t sign on at the unemployment bureau yet. For young geologists there are all kinds of opportunities, though admittedly few as lucrative as oil.
I met an former oil geologist who age 30 decided on a change of career.
Interviewer – “no grants for second degrees – how do you propose to support yourself?”
“I’ll just have to cancel the order for the yacht”
When people wonder what a geologist "even does", a question I get a fair amount, I remind them that most of Earth, almost all of it actually, is underground.
OT: The NHL-lauded trans-hockey tournament in Wisconsin results in a male-to-female tranny laying out his her its their female-to-male opponent for 17 minutes with a check (or perhaps something much less - see the video), and the female-to-male goaltender subsequently having a crying fit along the corner boards to delay the game further. Reminds one of Michael Sam, the openly homosexual outside linebacker for the University of Missouri: Drafted by the St. Louis Rams (taking one for the NFL in exchange for their departure for L.A.), cut by the Rams and signed by the Cowboys, cut by the Cowboys and signed by the CFL Montreal Alouettes, and left the game due to "emotional problems".
https://quillette.com/blog/2022/12/09/ignoring-biological-reality-puts-female-hockey-players-at-risk/Replies: @AndrewR
My total lack of interest in the NFL makes it very hard for me to recall more than a few NFL team names off the top of my head, but this seems like a hilarious coincidence (or was it a coincidence)? “The Rams” and “the Cowboys” are probably the gayest names besides (of course) the Packers and perhaps the Raiders (do they still exist?)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-020-00004-9Replies: @Inverness, @Hodag
I think breeder reactors got outlawed in one of the nuclear arms control treaties. Or we did not do it because of proliferation concerns .
Being unable to use the toilet or shower by myself already sounds far worse than death. Adding homelessness on top of that sounds like the tenth layer of hell. I hope these people all have the capacity to end their lives if that’s what they want.
-Otto von BismarckReplies: @SFG, @xyxxyz
Managed to grab the middle of the North American landmass while Europe was busy fighting Napoleon. Having the biggest fully industrialized economy is a big advantage (which China may soon take from us).
Supposedly Talleyrand warned him when selling Jefferson Louisiana he’d be making a giant super country that would overshadow Europe; Napoleon figured it would screw the British and he wouldn’t have to worry about it for 150 years.
We were lucky. Oh, those people are bright and hardworking, but there’s probably some similar fellow growing rice in rural China or dodging the draft in Russia. This country’s greatness is not inevitable-which is why defeating the ethnomasochistic left is so important.
Once you understand that the progressive left thinks of the American economy, and its constituent employers and owners of capital, as nothing more than golden egg laying geese, their actions make a lot more sense.
Bankers are such bizzare creatures.
Supposedly Talleyrand warned him when selling Jefferson Louisiana he’d be making a giant super country that would overshadow Europe; Napoleon figured it would screw the British and he wouldn’t have to worry about it for 150 years.
We were lucky. Oh, those people are bright and hardworking, but there’s probably some similar fellow growing rice in rural China or dodging the draft in Russia. This country’s greatness is not inevitable-which is why defeating the ethnomasochistic left is so important.Replies: @JR Ewing, @GeologyAnonMk6
I came to this conclusion about 12-13 years ago during the Obamacare wars.
Once you understand that the progressive left thinks of the American economy, and its constituent employers and owners of capital, as nothing more than golden egg laying geese, their actions make a lot more sense.
Sabine Hossenfelder has the best Fusion / physics coverage I have seen:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sabine+hossenfelder+fusion
Right. Forget fusion. All of this country’s self-proclaimed energy woes could be solved within 10-20 years if we were just allowed to embrace fission energy.
Everyone could have an electric car and carbon emissions would drop by 90% or more as gasoline and fossil fuel electricity production was phased out and additional electric infrastructure were built out. About the only fossil fuel consumption left would be chemical and industrial processes that can’t be easily electrified.
If you ask leftists, they’ll tell you that “nuclear waste” is unsafe and hard to store, but that’s not really true anymore, at least the storage part, and new reactor designs are infinitely safer than they were fifty years ago.
One silly Jane Fonda movie – and a typically inept Russian industrial accident – ruined the future.
All that being said, opposition to nuclear power gives away the game for the “climate agenda”. No more gasoline, no more oil drilling, no more refining, no more coal… you’d think that would outweigh the “risk” of fission energy to these guys. But they really aren’t worried about “climate change”, they are worried about what they are always worried about: insufficient command and control of the unwashed masses.
Simple example: every medical device used by First world doctors, particularly in hospitals and medical labs analyzing bodily fluids, has as a fundamental part of its "construction" plastics of differing density, porosity, hardness, chemical structure. And said plastics, as polymers, are produced by reacting appropriate monomers with initiators. If we stop refining oil to create the feedstocks for such plastic polymers, we will be compelled to make EVERYTHING from glass!!! Which is breakable!!! Imagine any lab technicians willing to work in a lab where all specimen containers are made of glass and said technicians are asked to analyze blood samples infected with EBOLA!!!!! As a consequence, we will "accept" the finest medical practice of the year 1847!!!!!Replies: @Jack D, @Intelligent Dasein
Hydrogen bombs achieved this a long time ago. Doesn't mean it will lead to a practical way to generate electricity.Replies: @TG, @Hypnotoad666, @AnotherDad
We’ve gone from 50 megaton reactions in 1972 to 29 megajoules in 2022. And that’s progress?
The current breakthrough is not nearly enough. First of all , it can only fuse a single BB sized pellet of hydrogen at a time. On a commercial scale you would need something akin to a machine gun so you could fire pellet after pellet. 2nd when they are counting this as net positive they are only comparing the energy in the laser beams hitting the pellet vs. the energy produced from pellet, but the lasers are much less than 100% efficient so the entire device (which BTW is enormous and costly - far too enormous and costly to be commercially viable) still consumes more energy than it produces. Even with the current breakthru we are still decades away from commercial fusion power even if this breakthru leads directly to it.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Eternally Antifascist
Athelstan Spilhaus? I haven’t thought about him and his comic strip in decades. He was always promoting some sort of experimental city that, because it grew by design rather than just randomly, would be vastly superior to all other cities. It seemed so futuristic at the time, but now it just seems weird and elitist.
https://seagrant.sunysb.edu/content/blog-18/imgs/50thAnniversary-SpilhausIIIA.jpg
It turns out the so-called, “Merchant of Death,” is a reasonable, thoughtful, well-spoken guy with a better command of English than half the people in my plant:
As one of the respondents there said, Viktor Bout sounds like he loves America than the creature we traded him for.
Fission powered commerical nuke plants started going on-line only in the late 50s and did not appear en masse until the 60s–that’s “yesterday” in historical terms. The technical obstacles involved in developing viable fusion plants are, as I understand it, mind-numbing. Thus, it comes as no surprise that it has taken this long for the process to take off. But it will happen-eventually. Not a question of “if”, only “when.”
Here we have the other major and completely different approach, and I'm very uncertain it can ever be made practical except as a spaceship drive where all the overhead could be worth it (and, hey those lasers might also make for a good weapon). We could well need another method to compress the pellets where the action happens.
Note you'll seldom hear in regards to these current DT fusion experiment the neutron flux issue; take a gander at the chamber at LLNL in which the laser beams converge, it's made out of very thick concrete.Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Eternally Antifascist
Steve Sailer has a vague idea what science is? The way he cooperated with the Covid Lockdown Hysteria made him sound like a blue-haired liberal.
The point of that 2 year lockdown, which destroyed children’s lives, killed a lot of people, and led to old people dying alone, was to get rid of Trump.
Neither Sailer nor Greg Cochran have shown the slightest reflection on what they did. Their loyalty seems to be a “system” or some set of “elites”, not to any particular people, and not to the truth.
Not fake, but incomplete.
“Net positive” includes only the energy into and out of the plasma. The overhead equipment, for example large containment magnets, require quite a bit more. True net positive needs the beam to produce about 10x as much energy as going into the plasma. Economical fusion power will require more like 30x.
It’s quite an accomplishment, but very far removed from an energy source.
So fusion remains “the energy source of tomorrow”.
For context, they were talking break even, as described here , in the 80s. That the small improvement to break even took close to 40 years shows that controlling the plasma is really hard.
The population explosion in Boise is entirely due to California. Five years ago a friend sold his house he bought for $150 k for three times that.
The latest round of buyouts here in the northern part of the state were corporate groups. They raised the average farm price by ten times previous prices. $225 k resold for $2.5 mil. The farms are so far sitting empty.
1961.
“US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time …”
Should we stop reading at “limitless”? The fusion power of the sun will last only a few more billion years. And the fusion power of all the stars in the universe is finite.
To gain a true perspective on how much energy was actually gained, you would need to measure the energy produced in this reaction and compare it to the energy required to build Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and maintain it lo these many decades.
Hint: The answer is deeply, deeply negative.
Steve, I’m not PhysicistDave and never worked as a physicist, but I do have a B.S. in Physics. Please read the scientific media report on the experiment. https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-fusion-announcement-from-the-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory/
The experiment used 500 mega joules of electric energy to fire 2.1 mega joules of laser energy into the pellet, that released 2.5 mega joules of energy in the fusion reaction. Not even remotely a self sustaining system.
How can we do that, safely, at all, ever? How could we do it for years?
These various articles don't ever come out and say directly that we have to have mini Suns on Earth to get power from fusion. They would be teeny tiny vs real Sun but still, Suns on Earth. How can the most important detail always be left out?
I am very discouraged about replacing fossil fuels. It is a goal I agree with but with 8 billion people in and more still coming, I just don't know when we are going to achieve it. Replace all that energy with what, for everyone, everywhere? Solar and wind won't do it and I do not trust nuclear power in First Works countries, much less poorer countries.Replies: @Mr. Anon
You actually need temperatures hotter than the core of the Sun (by a factor of 7 or more), because you can’t attain the densities present in the core of the Sun. The reaction used in fusion devices on Earth (the D-T reaction) is different than the primary reaction in the Sun (the proton-proton chain).
Fusion on earth is very different than fusion in the Sun. A fusion reactor would not be a “mini-Sun” but something else entirely.
The FT headline is misleading and false. There is really no fusion experiment that has shown any net energy gain. Ever. Even this result from Livermore is not showing net energy gain. When fusion scientists talk about energy gain in such experiments, they mean the gain in fusion products compared to just the heating energy put into the plasma. This DOES NOT count the energy required to run the lasers and the systems needed to run the experiment. It also does not say how the fusion products can be used to produced power. This is a hard problem, and capturing fusion output and converting it to electricity will incur further losses.
Fusion is very far from being an “unlimited source of energy”. Very, very far. If it happens in our lifetime (say by 2050) it will be surprising. A better approach is to do nuclear fission. We know how fission works, we have working power-plants and the power is cheap and abundant. There are hurdles in nuclear waste disposal, but they are not as insurmountable as it appears.
I should say that this misunderstanding of fusion energy “gain” is very widespread in the media. I do not know if the scientists involved are doing this deliberately. They are not technically lying as the paper will describe everything accurately, but they are also not telling the full truth and perhaps let the media be fooled into thinking that they really produced net energy. I would not trust anything that comes out of the Energy Secretary’s mouth. She is not qualified to understand this level of technical details, and any case, Biden WH is hell-bent on politicizing science, and they are more than happy to let media do the misleading for them.
Madison, WI Mayor Rhodes-Conway-Lightfoot-Hochul-Inslee-Pritzger sent out a mailing of her “push” “Affordable Housing” initiative.
I am all for people being able to afford rent or house payment, but what does affordable housing in Newspeak translate into in ordinary English?
I also feel for where my wallet is when I hear political leaders use the word “push.”
The experiment used 500 mega joules of electric energy to fire 2.1 mega joules of laser energy into the pellet, that released 2.5 mega joules of energy in the fusion reaction. Not even remotely a self sustaining system.Replies: @Roger, @another physicist
Yes, it is not really a net energy gain. Just another over-hyped research story.
Boise prices have spiked–as elsewhere across the inter-mountain west–because of people fleeing from the much more naturally pleasant California due to the costs and pressures of immigration.
But it’s similar all across the nation. You can try and run for any whitetopia … but if there’s any jobs or amenities there, other people are running there as well and housing has spiked. And because Americans are not allowed to have a border, the immigrants will be flooding in as well. Coastal metros now have Asiatic housing costs.
The immigrationist loons–maybe immigrationist “zealots” gets at the truth of it–have finally managed to destroy the traditional American birthright of available land, affordable housing. They have destroyed “affordable family formation”.
And yet … where are the Republicans picking up this $1 trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk–talking about housing prices and immigration, talking about the destruction of affordable family formation and the future of your children?
The Rs, led by some dipshit Senator from NC, are busy colluding with the Ds on yet another "immigration reform" bill that includes "a path to citizenship" for another couple hundred thousand invaders. They hope to ram this bill through in the current lame duck session of Congress. Big business continues to moan that it cannot find enough workers, so the obvious solution is another couple million 85 IQ peasants.Replies: @Peterike
As I recall, the original nuclear chain reaction was initiated in the city of Chicago by scientists who were not absolutely sure it could be contained (they relied on calculations by Enrico Fermi but the procedure was unprecedented).
I met an former oil geologist who age 30 decided on a change of career.
Interviewer - "no grants for second degrees - how do you propose to support yourself?"
"I'll just have to cancel the order for the yacht"Replies: @GeologyAnonMk6
Ha! That’s a good one. I think we will mostly migrate over to increasingly focusing on extraction of Lithium from flowback water in evaporite reservoirs. Oil and Nat gas will still be around for decades as you point out, but the companies and geologists who start thinking of themselves as more generally, experts at finding things under ground and either bringing them to the surface or sequestering them will likely end up with the whip hand.
When people wonder what a geologist “even does”, a question I get a fair amount, I remind them that most of Earth, almost all of it actually, is underground.
This is a common tactic I take when butting heads with the “climate scientists” aka excel sheet fraudsters who make up about half of the geoscience academe at this point. The planet without hydrocarbon has a carrying capacity of about 1.5 billion apex predator hominids. When you run the system at 5x over red-line for decades, yeah, shit is probably going to start breaking, one way or another.
So the option would be to kill off at a minimum, half the population immediately, or continue to extract, grow, and develop. I don’t think the point of life, in general, is to limit yourself to whatever the environment dictates. It is to develop and overcome those limitations, growing more complex and able, ultimately to give the gift of life to the barren rocks floating silent and desolate in the void.
Supposedly Talleyrand warned him when selling Jefferson Louisiana he’d be making a giant super country that would overshadow Europe; Napoleon figured it would screw the British and he wouldn’t have to worry about it for 150 years.
We were lucky. Oh, those people are bright and hardworking, but there’s probably some similar fellow growing rice in rural China or dodging the draft in Russia. This country’s greatness is not inevitable-which is why defeating the ethnomasochistic left is so important.Replies: @JR Ewing, @GeologyAnonMk6
The best part is the Bank of England gave us the loan to make the purchase, despite Napoleon publicly stating the only reason he was pursuing the sale was to generate cash to build an invasion fleet. Of England.
Bankers are such bizzare creatures.
agree this is only a breakthru in PR. i follow this topic peripherally and hadn’t heard about this ‘event’ until today, a nearly 100% accurate sign it’s a bunch of nothing. most fusion power press releases are similar. we get one every 5 years at least.
smart guys are still slowly working on ITER and other projects which are well know, huge, very expensive, and progress steadily (maybe). there are no surprises in this field. every slightly viable project is known and tracked. there will never be some small project with no coverage that suddenly turns on the fusion age. working on viable fusion reactors is like working on big ass missiles and spacecraft. you can’t do this stuff in a garage or hide it from inquiring minds.
i do think net positive fusion reactors at the output level to power cities is something which is possible, like 100 years from now, as long as technological progress continues, which is no sure thing at this juncture. dyson spheres don’t make sense, as i’ve posted before, probably one of the reasons we never observe them (just as possible there are no aliens within detection range who could build them). in a few hundred years of human progress (again no guarantee), humans should be able to build fusion reactors in orbit which have an output similar to the sun.
But it's similar all across the nation. You can try and run for any whitetopia ... but if there's any jobs or amenities there, other people are running there as well and housing has spiked. And because Americans are not allowed to have a border, the immigrants will be flooding in as well. Coastal metros now have Asiatic housing costs.
The immigrationist loons--maybe immigrationist "zealots" gets at the truth of it--have finally managed to destroy the traditional American birthright of available land, affordable housing. They have destroyed "affordable family formation".
And yet ... where are the Republicans picking up this $1 trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk--talking about housing prices and immigration, talking about the destruction of affordable family formation and the future of your children?Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Jim Don Bob
An easy place to start would be to require employers to insure not only their immigrant workers, but the entire families thereof. That gets the “cheap labor” aspect into voters’ minds without being too explicit about it. What’s the other side going to say? “We need them, but we can’t pay them?”
Another step would be to exact an entrance fee to cover the windfall not paid for by generations before them, as in contrast to the case with natives. When I worked in London on a student-exchange visa in the Thatcher years, nearly all my first (“meagre”) paycheck was taken in some “emergency” fee, to cover any future welfare costs. This wasn’t aimed at foreigners– we weren’t eligible for anything other than NHS treatment– but for all workers.
But here these could be used to screen immigrants. The first one could be enacted by the states.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains the hype here
Meanwhile we could immediately start producing essentially unlimited quantities of energy using safe, economical, and clean fission power plants. These plants are scalable. We could build them to service a local neighborhood, or industrial park, or to supply most of the power needs of a metropolitan area. Using local, scalable fission power plants would eliminate the need for much of the power distribution systems we have now.
The only thing preventing the rapid expansion of fission power is an irrational fear, despite France’s successful use of fission power for over half a century. One technique for discouraging the expansion of fission power generation is insisting, for over a half century now, that fusion power is just around the corner. It isn’t.
For the Invade the World, Invite the World, increasingly high time preference West I'm more and more certain nuclear fission power generation is a very bad idea. There are also some societies like Japan's which have safety cultures that are incompatible with it. That was obvious long before Fukushima and does not seem to be shared by the PRC or South Korea (past a certain point there's no hiding a bad accident...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Rosatom are building a 4-reactor, 4.5MW version at Akkuyu in Turkey for around $22 billion, which seems very reasonable when compared with what the UK are throwing away on unproven and problem-plagued French reactor designs (thanks to Blair's 1998 decision to stop all new nuclear build, which destroyed nuclear engineering as a UK career).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
What I can't understand is why so little money is being spent on molten salt reactor research, which has the potential to be
a) extremely safe
b) provide an ability to burn (i.e. render much less long-lived and dangerous) existing nuclear waste, the storage of which is an ongoing headache for pretty much all nuclear powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
This ultra-high-tech, lasers and magnetic confinement stuff has been promising fusion in the next twenty years for the past sixty years.
If we end up paying huge fees to China for rendering our waste safer, and/or huge fees to clone their reactors - shame on us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1Replies: @AnotherDad, @That Would Be Telling
Agree, YAA. Pellets and lasers–essentially like hydrogen bombs–are perhaps the most promising approach but fusion will still be “25 years away” for decades.
In contrast, there’s a lot of immediate–get going in the next decade or two–opportunity in the fission space. Ramping up Gen3/4 designs, but then on to breeders, molt salt designs, thorium cycle.
It’s the kind of stuff doable in a high trust nation with a border and eugenic fertility. Whether we’ll lead in doing any of it in our prospective Latinized, Africanized “slumping toward Brazil” future seems doubtful.
Hydrogen bombs achieved this a long time ago. Doesn't mean it will lead to a practical way to generate electricity.Replies: @TG, @Hypnotoad666, @AnotherDad
One fusion energy proposal is to simply drop a bomb down a shaft, pump in water, use the heated water for power. When the heating is insufficient … drop in another bomb. (Man made geothermal.)
Of course, we’ve been doing fission reaction for 80 years, but we’ve failed to get all that cost-effective at it.
They’ve gotten it to work well in France. Then again, there is no affirmative action in France. (I remember reading somewhere that the Three-Mile Island accident was due to an incompetent female AA hire.)
Anyway, fusion is stupid. When engineers finally figure out a way to safely store and transport hydrogen (a major challenge in and of itself) it will be easier to simply combust the stuff to generate electricity, as with natural gas. (And yes, I know that there is no net energy gain with hydrogen combustion, but the point of that is not to get something for nothing, the point is to serve as a stable reservoir for wind and solar energy, the supply of which is effectively unlimited, but irregular.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Rosatom are building a 4-reactor, 4.5MW version at Akkuyu in Turkey for around $22 billion, which seems very reasonable when compared with what the UK are throwing away on unproven and problem-plagued French reactor designs (thanks to Blair's 1998 decision to stop all new nuclear build, which destroyed nuclear engineering as a UK career).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkuyu_Nuclear_Power_Plant
What I can't understand is why so little money is being spent on molten salt reactor research, which has the potential to be
a) extremely safe
b) provide an ability to burn (i.e. render much less long-lived and dangerous) existing nuclear waste, the storage of which is an ongoing headache for pretty much all nuclear powers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
This ultra-high-tech, lasers and magnetic confinement stuff has been promising fusion in the next twenty years for the past sixty years.
If we end up paying huge fees to China for rendering our waste safer, and/or huge fees to clone their reactors - shame on us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1Replies: @AnotherDad, @That Would Be Telling
It’s right there in your Wikipedia link, at the end of the introduction:
“Insanely corrosive” is a bad phrase for engineers. The latter detail I hadn’t considered but it’s also likely a big one.
For current design reactor cooling and moderation will transmute some hydrogen into deuterium and tritium (actually valuable stuff) … I should look up what happens with the oxygen. Of course water is also insanely corrosive stuff but we’ve got experience with that problem since the Iron Age, maybe also the Copper and Bronze Ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1rMeYnOmM
In lieu of this technology which is now seen as novel and risky (despite being proven), the Russian lead-cooled breeder reactor technology seems the best. Not bad for a gas station posing as a country.
Fortunately, the two main reasons NOT to build fission reactors are on display in Ukraine. These are genomic damage caused by radioactive contamination (see Chernobyl dead zone) and the serious risk of massive contamination and death due to terrorist attacks on nuclear reactors. Good data from Fukushima is difficult to find, but the contamination released there is mind-boggling. Zaporizhzhia could be much worse.
The experiment used 500 mega joules of electric energy to fire 2.1 mega joules of laser energy into the pellet, that released 2.5 mega joules of energy in the fusion reaction. Not even remotely a self sustaining system.Replies: @Roger, @another physicist
Inertial confinement fusion also has a very low duty cycle. The lasers need to cool down for hours before they’re ready to fire again. The real purpose of the program at LLNL (going on since the 1970’s) is to be able to study fusion explosions without a bomb.
But they could only sell it to Congress if they told everyone it was dual use. So every few years they come out with some bullshiite about the fusion part.
I had thought this was all about funding but it seems it’s propaganda designed to make it easier to kill off oil and gas. Whodathunkit?
But it's similar all across the nation. You can try and run for any whitetopia ... but if there's any jobs or amenities there, other people are running there as well and housing has spiked. And because Americans are not allowed to have a border, the immigrants will be flooding in as well. Coastal metros now have Asiatic housing costs.
The immigrationist loons--maybe immigrationist "zealots" gets at the truth of it--have finally managed to destroy the traditional American birthright of available land, affordable housing. They have destroyed "affordable family formation".
And yet ... where are the Republicans picking up this $1 trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk--talking about housing prices and immigration, talking about the destruction of affordable family formation and the future of your children?Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Jim Don Bob
Me! Me! Call on Me!
The Rs, led by some dipshit Senator from NC, are busy colluding with the Ds on yet another “immigration reform” bill that includes “a path to citizenship” for another couple hundred thousand invaders. They hope to ram this bill through in the current lame duck session of Congress. Big business continues to moan that it cannot find enough workers, so the obvious solution is another couple million 85 IQ peasants.
Global warming brings far more benefits to mankind than harms. This is why people prefer to live in warmer areas and few people live above the 50 degrees north, less than 5% of humans. Why are the temperatures recorded 100 years ago deemed better for humanity than the current temperatures? 2,000 years ago humans thrived during the Roman Climate Optimum when temperatures were 2 degrees warmer. Why do people want to cool the planet ? It would be far better for us if the Earth warmed another 2 degrees than if we cooled 1 degree.
There was a secondary optimum of climate between 400 and 1200 A.D., the peak being 800-1100 A.D. This was on the whole a dry, warm period and apparently remarkably stormfree in the Atlantic and in the North Sea. It was the time of great Viking voyages and the settlement of Iceland and Greenland. The early Norse burials in Greenland were deep in ground which is now permanently frozen.
In the great survey of 1085 (Domesday Book) 38 vineyards were recorded in England besides those of the king. The wine was considered almost equal with the French wine. The northernmost vineyards were near York [northern England]. This implies summer temperatures 2°C higher than today and freedom from May frosts. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1000 A.D. to 1200 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures warmer by about 1.5°C . Wheat and oats were grown around Trondheim, Norway, suggesting climates about 1.5°C warmer than present.
A warmer climate would benefit humans tremendously. Sadly the planet seems to have stopped warming 22 years ago and the planet has been cooling over the past 5 years as the Sun has weakened and some are predicting another mini ice-age. Thankfully with higher CO2 levels crops can survive in colder, dryer climates.
As real as COVID 19 and Safe And Effective, the energy budget was woefully incomplete and non comprehensive.
Obvious hoax is obviousness.
To the extent I’ve delved into the details of aneutronic magnetic confinement fusion reactors I’m uncertain the physics will cooperate. There’s a potential roadblock there in extracting the energy from the plasma. Well, aside from very crude means of actually tapping the plasma which sounds very hard without destabilizing the containment or moderating how much you draw..
Here we have the other major and completely different approach, and I’m very uncertain it can ever be made practical except as a spaceship drive where all the overhead could be worth it (and, hey those lasers might also make for a good weapon). We could well need another method to compress the pellets where the action happens.
Note you’ll seldom hear in regards to these current DT fusion experiment the neutron flux issue; take a gander at the chamber at LLNL in which the laser beams converge, it’s made out of very thick concrete.
Way back when I was a graduate student in nuclear physics, part of my thesis work was to get a semi-commercial 14 MeV neutron generator operating (the "commercial" system was shipped as components to be assembled by purchaser). Well, there was nothing cheaper, for the purchaser, than to employ energetic naive graduate students enthusiastic about nuclear physics who would perform scientific research in an area mostly totally unexplored, namely the radioactive decay of short lived isotopes. Said radioactive isotopes were created in the neutron generator through the standard (d, T) reaction producing 14 MeV neutrons that then "bombarded" a highly pure isotope of a particular element, encased in a plastic "bag" taped onto the outside housing of the generator "next" to the metallic target containing tritium diffused into it.
Because this neutron generator was housed in a campus building that contained other laboratories (basement floor + three stories of labs/offices) and two large lecture halls through which wandered hundreds of students, the shielding for the generator had to be particularly compact (finite floor space) and extremely effective for thermalizing fast neutrons and then capturing thermal neutrons.
A conventional "cube" was created from concrete building bricks with a very large opening for the electrostatic generator to be motor-driven into the cube. This part was quite conventional.
But the opening into which the generator would be placed to begin the production of neutrons could become a source of deadly neutrons if those were not stopped! I designed a backshield that incorporated steel plates both for mechanical support and to provide some stopping ability for the fast and thermal neutrons. Around the steel plates I installed paraffin "bricks" that were saturated with Lithium nitrate powder "deposited" in the center of the brick. The paraffin ensured the "thermalizaion" of the fast neutrons, and the Li7 isotope, in the lithium nitrate, ensured the absorption of the thermal neutron into the lithium nucleus. The lithium nitrate was commercial grade material used for making ceramics. So the entire neutron shield was quite inexpensive, for both those days and now. The radiation technicians, from the Atomic Energy Commission. could NOT measure ANY neutrons at all at the outside hallways outside of the lab!! So we operated that unit successfully for the four years that I was there!Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
Misleading statement of the day, year, century…
Let’s hear why “we’ve failed to get all that cost-effective” at using a perfectly-good technology to generate clean, affordable, inexhaustible energy.
Let’s hear why, because the reason ain’t the technology itself.
Just to clarify, the fission reaction itself is quite reasonable, it’s all the safety measures that are so expensive. Negative pressure containment, radiation monitoring, spent fuel storage and transport, heat exchanger turbine isolation, etc. Would fusion reduce that, or would it actually get worse?
Meanwhile we could immediately start producing essentially unlimited quantities of energy using safe, economical, and clean fission power plants. These plants are scalable. We could build them to service a local neighborhood, or industrial park, or to supply most of the power needs of a metropolitan area. Using local, scalable fission power plants would eliminate the need for much of the power distribution systems we have now.
The only thing preventing the rapid expansion of fission power is an irrational fear, despite France's successful use of fission power for over half a century. One technique for discouraging the expansion of fission power generation is insisting, for over a half century now, that fusion power is just around the corner. It isn't.Replies: @That Would Be Telling
Problem there is that France demonstrably started losing its nuclear power mojo a couple of decades ago, a decade and a half at minimum. Fast forward to this year and almost half of them have been offline for most or much of the year. First easy statistic I could find was 26 out of 56 are still offline as of the end of October.
For the Invade the World, Invite the World, increasingly high time preference West I’m more and more certain nuclear fission power generation is a very bad idea. There are also some societies like Japan’s which have safety cultures that are incompatible with it. That was obvious long before Fukushima and does not seem to be shared by the PRC or South Korea (past a certain point there’s no hiding a bad accident…).
https://archive.ph/M9EM1Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never LearnsTl;dr Because they don't have toIt's all I can do to refrain from quoting this excellent essay in its entirety here (and BTW I am not a Republican):Replies: @R.G. Camara, @Reg Cæsar, @Veteran Aryan
Why it’s almost like the longer you spend at the institute of indoctrination, the more likely you are to become indoctrinated. Not a exactly groundbreaking discovery, is it?
Here we have the other major and completely different approach, and I'm very uncertain it can ever be made practical except as a spaceship drive where all the overhead could be worth it (and, hey those lasers might also make for a good weapon). We could well need another method to compress the pellets where the action happens.
Note you'll seldom hear in regards to these current DT fusion experiment the neutron flux issue; take a gander at the chamber at LLNL in which the laser beams converge, it's made out of very thick concrete.Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Eternally Antifascist
Line it with U-238 and that’s your Plutonium breeder reactor. Even Greenpeace would approve!
Due to it being unprecedented of course they couldn’t be “absolutely” sure but Fermi was also a top notch experimentalist, the only physicist of the era who was great at that and theory.
So the first “pile” was built with extreme paranoia. Like the control rods at the top were as is standard practice for PWR reactors held up by electromagnets, and the circuit powering them had a relay to open it based on neutron flux. They were kinda surprised in a physical/emotional sense when they slammed home the first time they lit it up, the sensor was initially set very low. As I recall they also had men up there with axes to cut the ropes if all other systems failed.
What you won’t hear unless you dig deep, I think this is in Rhodes’ book, is that the only reason they were doing it in the middle of Chicago instead of way out in the Argonne Forest was due to labor troubles. FDR wasn’t going to let the war get in the way of reelection; see Industrialists in Olive Drab (PDF of entire four hundred page book, or get it fairly cheap with free shipping in the US from the GPO) for an excellent account of just the US Army’s interventions during the war when things got too out of hand.
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/img/museum/reactors/fuel-from-cp-1-encased.jpghttps://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/img/museum/reactors/graphite-from-cp-1.jpg
This should be a problem solvable with vision and will and we could eliminate at least three unconstitutional Federal departments and all the unconstitutional foreign aid to pay for it. But we lack vision and will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
I don't think the ICF and MCF guys were in much competition back then. They had separate budgets and the ICF guys were almost entirely funded out of the weapons end of DOE's coffers. 1970s budgets permitted two mainline MCF concepts; 1980s budgets permitted only one. MFTF-B was cancelled because it was in competition with Tokamaks, which looked like a better prospect at the time. Although, Tokamaks probably won't lead to a practical fusion reactor either.Replies: @Deadite
Thanks for keeping me honest on the tech.
That tech would have cost a billion in mid 2000’s dollars, so it’s a fair comparison on cost
However, I have to disagree. The laser folks are huge competitors for the other types of tech, and they are all fighting on limited dollars.
But I will agree NIF is a big pile that will never be useful for anything I think the AI approach does help with the issues that have kept tokamaks from progressing, because the AI doesn’t need to know the physics. It predicts what the magnetic bottle has to do on the fly, so that actually is a huge breakthrough. It’s like the google translate tool. You didn’t need to know the rules of language. You basically let the neural net work it out.
Your other comment was good. But I was limited to 3 comments so couldn’t make a reply.
Signs of elite college education:
It’s better to impoverish and feudalize the population for a thousand years than it is to build weird and kinda scary fission reactors.
Millions and millions and millions and millions of immigrants have nothing to do with comparative increases in land and housing prices. Rather, oppressive systems create the homeless (although the systems didn’t decades ago).
Blacks are 50 percent of the population, gays another 25 percent.
Your ignorant opinions must be banned.
….
Even worse! At the one end we have the Tsar Bomba, at the other we have the W54 warhead.
You’d think we could develop a way to usefully harness the energy of a mere 10 ton TNT explosion. (I am picturing the world’s biggest V8 engine running with 4,000 gigajoule per stroke.)
https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/4/43/DavyCrockettBomb.jpg/375px-DavyCrockettBomb.jpg
https://armyhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ord_7-500x404.jpg
https://infogalactic.com/info/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
https://armyhistory.org/the-m28m29-davy-crockett-nuclear-weapon-system/
The M388 carried the W54 warhead, the smallest nuclear weapon deployed by U.S. armed forces. The W54 weighed fifty-one pounds and had an explosive yield of .01-.02 kilotons of TNT (the equivalent of approximately 10-20 tons)
*Actually smoothbore. With a range of 1.25 miles.Replies: @Veteran Aryan
For current design reactor cooling and moderation will transmute some hydrogen into deuterium and tritium (actually valuable stuff) ... I should look up what happens with the oxygen. Of course water is also insanely corrosive stuff but we've got experience with that problem since the Iron Age, maybe also the Copper and Bronze Ages.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @QCIC
No, that’s why we need to spend money on research. Sorting out corrosive fluids, even hot ones with slowly changing composition, is likely to have a lot shorter payback time than attempting to confine a fusion reaction 24/7/365.
True , but it is still less costly to drill for more oil and gas. We have plenty of both and no reason not to expand drilling and build some more pipelines to keep it affordable and plentiful for centuries. Electric cars will most likely be banned in a few decades when the environmental destruction caused by mining for lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, etc… becomes more widely known.
The average price of a barrel of oil in the period 1920-1970 was $22 USD in current inflation-adjusted dollars. Today it is $78 USD. Unless a number of giant fields are found, and they won't be, the EROI of oil will never improve. In fact it will continue to get worse.
And it should be noted well that the old saw, "the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices" is perfectly wrong. What matters is the energy cost of getting oil out of the ground, not the illusory dollar cost. And that is never going to improve.
The basic problem with this is that we are faced with ongoing social degeneration because it is not possible to use $78 oil to maintain a society built with $22 oil.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
Let's hear why "we've failed to get all that cost-effective" at using a perfectly-good technology to generate clean, affordable, inexhaustible energy.
Let's hear why, because the reason ain't the technology itself.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
A people that once developed a nuclear-powered Navy now lack the capacity for cheap, effective nuclear power. Tragic.
Yes it is because fusion does not create the radioactive byproducts of fission. If (it’s still a big if) fusion power could be created on a commercial scale it would solve a lot of problems without creating problems of its own the way that fission does.
The current breakthrough is not nearly enough. First of all , it can only fuse a single BB sized pellet of hydrogen at a time. On a commercial scale you would need something akin to a machine gun so you could fire pellet after pellet. 2nd when they are counting this as net positive they are only comparing the energy in the laser beams hitting the pellet vs. the energy produced from pellet, but the lasers are much less than 100% efficient so the entire device (which BTW is enormous and costly – far too enormous and costly to be commercially viable) still consumes more energy than it produces. Even with the current breakthru we are still decades away from commercial fusion power even if this breakthru leads directly to it.
Or you could use the D-He3 reaction, but it's even harder to do, and still produces some neutrons (albeit at lower energy - only about 2.5 MeV). Or you could do p-B11, except you probably can't as it's just a complete pipe-dream.There was no breakthrough. There was a press release.Replies: @Dr. DoomNGloom
Any commercial reactor will have parts, pieces, and systems that incorporated steel (iron + other elements such as nickel, manganese, chromium, sulfur, phosphorus, others), copper wiring, some brass (copper, zinc). All of these elements have various numbers of isotopes. There are two primary nuclear reactions that fast neutrons can create in any isotope: the (n, 2n) reaction and the (n, p) reaction. I am reasonably confident that with exposure time to fast neutrons, these parts, pieces, systems, and copper wiring will become radioactive and some of them may mechanically fail because either reaction can create another element, than the original element in the component, which can change the structure of the component microscopically leading eventually to macroscopic failure.
Shielding designs for fast neutrons is the key to preventing such results.Replies: @Jack D
“Nuclear fusion is the energy of the future, and always will be.”
Actually, it is the oldest and most common source of energy. It has been going on in trillions of reactors for over 13.7 billion years. Most energy produced on earth is fusion energy directly or indirectly. It is just very hard for humans to replicate it.
Must be grant renewal time. The only way this distant hope is an iSteve story is if they manage to push some diversity scientists into camera range for the presser with that dopey Granholm tomorrow.
As someone who has been sent out to report on several technological fantasies I hold more faith in someday seeing the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1603044487739088896Replies: @roonaldo
So the Chinese are going to have fusion. That’s nice for them.
The only way anything gets banned on environmental grounds is if it’s useful to people who work for a living. Roadside lithium bombs are toys for the ultra-wealthy. They could pollute much more — say, as much as a Learjet — and they’d be protected.
The Rs, led by some dipshit Senator from NC, are busy colluding with the Ds on yet another "immigration reform" bill that includes "a path to citizenship" for another couple hundred thousand invaders. They hope to ram this bill through in the current lame duck session of Congress. Big business continues to moan that it cannot find enough workers, so the obvious solution is another couple million 85 IQ peasants.Replies: @Peterike
More like 4-5 million, at least. They always lie about these things.
Ah yes, our energy secretary, the woman who doesn’t know where oil comes from. Her autobiography has some very funny passages.
Money spent on fusion is money well spent, but what’s the exact claim? Wind farms produce net energy if you ignore the energy and minerals used in producing the turbines.
Several other important developments in fusion have occurred this year.
59 megajoules (JET – EU, UK, Canada)
Not quite forty years ago I heard a talk at Oxford about the Joint European Torus. The speaker emphasised that it was planned to be the first of four reactors to to be built over forty years, each one solving questions needed to build the next one. The last one, ITER is now under construction in France.
Plasma at over 100 million kelvin for 20 seconds (KSTAR – Korea)
59 megajoules = quantity of heat, 100 million kelvin = intensity of heat.
Nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets (First Light – UK)
Inertial confinement, no lasers or magnetic confinement. Potentially much cheaper, but the engineering challenge has barely begun.
What he is saying is true right now, but they are working on both more efficient lasers and increasing the output. Until now, the best they ever did was getting 70% of the laser energy back and now they are getting more than 100%. Over 100% was a milestone even if it doesn’t take into account the overall efficiency of the system. It’s possible that they are going to stall there and it’s never going to get much further, but it’s also possible that they are going to achieve some kind of exponential breakthru where in a few iterations they’ll get back 10x and then 100x (enough to run the whole show) and then 1,000x and then 1M X etc.
By the way, to show what a baby step this is, 1 megajoule is equal to 278 watt hours or enough to run a 100W bulb for less than 3 hrs (and the fusion reaction produced 2.5 MJ or enough to run the bulb for 7 hrs. Unfortunately, it produce this energy in a single pulse that lasts like a trillionth of a second so harvesting useful energy out of this is going to be difficult.
The nuclear weapons industry should be held accountable and anything that comes out of it should be scrutinized very carefully. Think about it, this industry is really the birthplace of the WMD. The goal of the enterprise is to kill millions of people at the snap of a finger or better yet, hold billions of people hostage. Security is high so there is little incentive to tell the truth and probably massive legal barriers are in place to prevent it.
Naturally the history of these technologies is complicated and the people involved have unique motivations. But don't let that obscure the facts: many of the people involved are dangerous and not to be trusted. Sadly this is very similar to the case of the pharma/bioweapons axis. In the case of nuclear power, which was spawned by nuclear weapons, the ideas to view critically include genomic effects of radiation damage, safety of nuclear fission reactors and nuclear fusion.Replies: @Jack D
So the option would be to kill off at a minimum, half the population immediately, or continue to extract, grow, and develop. I don't think the point of life, in general, is to limit yourself to whatever the environment dictates. It is to develop and overcome those limitations, growing more complex and able, ultimately to give the gift of life to the barren rocks floating silent and desolate in the void.Replies: @Kim
Not even close. The number of such hominids on planet Earth was 1.6 billion in the year 1900, admitttedly before the discovery of ammonia synthesis contributed to the agricultural and population explosions of the 20th C but still a period when large amounts of Chilean and Peruvian-mined nitrogen had already been applied to fields and, too, by 1900 the world was well into the hydrocarbon industrial revolution, so everything that was operating then would have to be rolled back at least to 1750, population one billion.
But the situation would be much more dire than that as we also need to consider the role that hydrocarbons have in so many industrial activities, like steel making. Without steel, I can’t see the human population on earth getting above 100 million – much respect as I have for stone axes – and the future human world will not have the ores and fuels lying about the surface in the abundance of days of yore.
For current design reactor cooling and moderation will transmute some hydrogen into deuterium and tritium (actually valuable stuff) ... I should look up what happens with the oxygen. Of course water is also insanely corrosive stuff but we've got experience with that problem since the Iron Age, maybe also the Copper and Bronze Ages.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon, @QCIC
This is a solved problem. The Molten Salt Thorium-fueled Breeder Reactor developed at Oak Ridge was close to a functioning technology. It matured at a bad time politically. The main problem of the design was proliferation as the reactor naturally produced useable Uranium-233. There are many people promoting modern versions of this technology. As another commenter suggested, if wise people were actually convinced of a global warming “problem” these things would be sprouting up everywhere.
In lieu of this technology which is now seen as novel and risky (despite being proven), the Russian lead-cooled breeder reactor technology seems the best. Not bad for a gas station posing as a country.
Fortunately, the two main reasons NOT to build fission reactors are on display in Ukraine. These are genomic damage caused by radioactive contamination (see Chernobyl dead zone) and the serious risk of massive contamination and death due to terrorist attacks on nuclear reactors. Good data from Fukushima is difficult to find, but the contamination released there is mind-boggling. Zaporizhzhia could be much worse.
Seems if the reaction were that close to instability, it wouldn’t be so hard to maintain.
Still and all, setting the atmosphere on fire would have been a spectacular culmination of decades of effort, marred only by its negative effects on all known forms of life.
The issue with oil, etc is not how much exists underground, the issue is price (or EROI if you like, how much energy is required to acquire a certain amount of energy, with price being just a poroxy for that calculation).
The average price of a barrel of oil in the period 1920-1970 was $22 USD in current inflation-adjusted dollars. Today it is $78 USD. Unless a number of giant fields are found, and they won’t be, the EROI of oil will never improve. In fact it will continue to get worse.
And it should be noted well that the old saw, “the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices” is perfectly wrong. What matters is the energy cost of getting oil out of the ground, not the illusory dollar cost. And that is never going to improve.
The basic problem with this is that we are faced with ongoing social degeneration because it is not possible to use $78 oil to maintain a society built with $22 oil.
Alaska could easily double output if we allowed more drilling in Alaska. Thanks to the pipeline drilling in Alaska would be profitable at $35 per barrel.
Natural gas today is still less costly than the 1980s. Oil was not much cheaper during the 80s when we adjust for inflation. The average price of a barrel of oil was $20 during the 80s which is equivalent of $60 in today’s devalued currency.
This result is vaguely interesting if NIF is seen as a scientific sandbox. Most long-time fusion aficionados will simply do a mental correction for the grossly dishonest breakeven claims. The appropriate lasers will eventually be fairly efficient. However, they are a small aspect of the problem of making this practical!
The nuclear weapons industry should be held accountable and anything that comes out of it should be scrutinized very carefully. Think about it, this industry is really the birthplace of the WMD. The goal of the enterprise is to kill millions of people at the snap of a finger or better yet, hold billions of people hostage. Security is high so there is little incentive to tell the truth and probably massive legal barriers are in place to prevent it.
Naturally the history of these technologies is complicated and the people involved have unique motivations. But don’t let that obscure the facts: many of the people involved are dangerous and not to be trusted. Sadly this is very similar to the case of the pharma/bioweapons axis. In the case of nuclear power, which was spawned by nuclear weapons, the ideas to view critically include genomic effects of radiation damage, safety of nuclear fission reactors and nuclear fusion.
With that in mind, this is a breakthru because it involves actual self sustaining fusion. An efficiency greater than 1 means that some of the fusion is being lit by the reaction itself and not just the energy from the lasers - the fusion equivalent of a chain reaction. You can take the "match" away and the fuel will continue to "burn". This is important to weapons designers even if it isn't remotely practical as a commercial source of energy. They can potential build model hydrogen bombs that don't violate the test ban treaty.Replies: @QCIC, @Mr. Anon
There was a secondary optimum of climate between 400 and 1200 A.D., the peak being 800-1100 A.D. This was on the whole a dry, warm period and apparently remarkably stormfree in the Atlantic and in the North Sea. It was the time of great Viking voyages and the settlement of Iceland and Greenland. The early Norse burials in Greenland were deep in ground which is now permanently frozen.
In the great survey of 1085 (Domesday Book) 38 vineyards were recorded in England besides those of the king. The wine was considered almost equal with the French wine. The northernmost vineyards were near York [northern England]. This implies summer temperatures 2°C higher than today and freedom from May frosts. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1000 A.D. to 1200 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures warmer by about 1.5°C . Wheat and oats were grown around Trondheim, Norway, suggesting climates about 1.5°C warmer than present.
A warmer climate would benefit humans tremendously. Sadly the planet seems to have stopped warming 22 years ago and the planet has been cooling over the past 5 years as the Sun has weakened and some are predicting another mini ice-age. Thankfully with higher CO2 levels crops can survive in colder, dryer climates.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Colin Wright
I agree, a warmer climate is certainly much better than a return to the little ice-age we experienced during the 18th century. It is difficult to understand why people want a colder planet. If they enjoy colder weather they could move to Maine or upstate New York. Yet people are fleeing these regions to live in warmer climates.
True…
But they could only sell it to Congress if they told everyone it was dual use. So every few years they come out with some bullshiite about the fusion part.
I had thought this was all about funding but it seems it’s propaganda designed to make it easier to kill off oil and gas. Whodathunkit?
From 1962:
The current breakthrough is not nearly enough. First of all , it can only fuse a single BB sized pellet of hydrogen at a time. On a commercial scale you would need something akin to a machine gun so you could fire pellet after pellet. 2nd when they are counting this as net positive they are only comparing the energy in the laser beams hitting the pellet vs. the energy produced from pellet, but the lasers are much less than 100% efficient so the entire device (which BTW is enormous and costly - far too enormous and costly to be commercially viable) still consumes more energy than it produces. Even with the current breakthru we are still decades away from commercial fusion power even if this breakthru leads directly to it.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Eternally Antifascist
It doesn’t create Actinides and the daughter products thereof, but it would produce radioactive waste, and potentially a lot of it. 80% of the energy from a D-T fusion reaction comes out in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons which can activate the materials that the fusion reactor is made of. So it becomes very important what you build it out of. Silica-carbide composites would be best, but nobody knows how to build large structures (including vacuum vessels) out of it, and even it would be subject to considerable neutron damage.
Or you could use the D-He3 reaction, but it’s even harder to do, and still produces some neutrons (albeit at lower energy – only about 2.5 MeV). Or you could do p-B11, except you probably can’t as it’s just a complete pipe-dream.
There was no breakthrough. There was a press release.
the US would require about 25 metric tons of He3.
The yearly US production of He3 is about 15 Kg, with very limited capacity to scale.
Currently the primary source is refreshing the fusion weapons (Tritium decays to He3 with a short half life)
https://www.explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html#:~:text=The%20involved%20nuclear%20reaction%20here,no%20waste%20and%20no%20radiation.
The most likely source is mining the Lunar surface (the moon is a big solar wind trap because it has no atmosphere or magnetic poles) Let that sink in.
The bottom line is that the more you look at it, the more you realize a lot of other technologies need to pan out.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Cato wrote to Dave Pinsen:
I want to highly recommend Smil’s book just published this year, which I just finished a few days ago: How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future.
The tl;dr version: There is no chance of reaching net-zero carbon emissions in the next few decades — it simply is not going to happen. Yes, the globe is warming and renewables and increased efficiency can help a bit. But for the next few decades, fossil fuels are here to stay.
Fusion on earth is very different than fusion in the Sun. A fusion reactor would not be a "mini-Sun" but something else entirely.Replies: @notsaying
OK, so if it is unlike what happens inside the Sun but will reach much higher temperatures, how doable is this? How safe?
We hear a lot about this but no full details so as I said, the public just wonders what it is really all about. We hear about the wonderful potential but is it really ever going to happen?
net gain? you mean that guy who was charged twice with theft and then fired?
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/non-binary-biden-official-charged-with-second-felony-suitcase-theft/
Sam is plenty fusion alright.
Still and all, setting the atmosphere on fire would have been a spectacular culmination of decades of effort, marred only by its negative effects on all known forms of life.Replies: @Renard
There was also some concern that the chain reaction might cause all of the world’s water to vanish.
Right, but there’s a little sliver of land along the West Coast which is neither too hot in summer or cold in winter.
Priceless territory. So we decided to cram tens of millions of third-world immigrants in there.
Or you could use the D-He3 reaction, but it's even harder to do, and still produces some neutrons (albeit at lower energy - only about 2.5 MeV). Or you could do p-B11, except you probably can't as it's just a complete pipe-dream.There was no breakthrough. There was a press release.Replies: @Dr. DoomNGloom
Part of *hard* is finding the He3. He3 is rare on earth, very rare (only 20ppm of Earth based helium)
the US would require about 25 metric tons of He3.
The yearly US production of He3 is about 15 Kg, with very limited capacity to scale.
Currently the primary source is refreshing the fusion weapons (Tritium decays to He3 with a short half life)
https://www.explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html#:~:text=The%20involved%20nuclear%20reaction%20here,no%20waste%20and%20no%20radiation.
The most likely source is mining the Lunar surface (the moon is a big solar wind trap because it has no atmosphere or magnetic poles) Let that sink in.
The bottom line is that the more you look at it, the more you realize a lot of other technologies need to pan out.
There is no “HAD BEEN ALLOWED to stabilize” at two or three billion. No such stability was ever in the offing.
The earth’s population hit 3 billion when I was still a kid (1960) before there was even a whole lot of focus on the issue. Limiting it to 3 billion would have required an agreement between the West, the Soviet Union and (after 1964) China, to put aside their differences in order to run death squads in the 3rd world.
But what certainly could–should–have been done is to encourage population stability in the 3rd world and to allow the stability in the developed world to stick–with all the associated environmental benefits–simply by not allowing foreigners to flood in and keep pushing “Western” populations up, even as fertility dropped below replacement.
So will this power those flying cars that are always “just 10 years away”?
And the the W54 was widely deployed as the warhead in the Davy Crockett. What was the Davy Crockett? Before the A-10, one of the plans to stop Soviet armor from coming through the Fulda Gap was… a nuclear recoilless rifle*:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
https://armyhistory.org/the-m28m29-davy-crockett-nuclear-weapon-system/
The M388 carried the W54 warhead, the smallest nuclear weapon deployed by U.S. armed forces. The W54 weighed fifty-one pounds and had an explosive yield of .01-.02 kilotons of TNT (the equivalent of approximately 10-20 tons)
*Actually smoothbore. With a range of 1.25 miles.
It isn’t that is unsafe, per se. The fusion reaction can’t run away and explode or melt-down. Although some of the auxiliary systems in a fusion reactor, magnetic field coils and/or cooling blankets, would contain a lot of energy that could do some damage if things go sideways.
It is the doable part that is in question for me. It’s really hard to do. That’s why it hasn’t been done yet, after having been worked on consistently and pretty hard for 70 years. The dominant Magnetic Confinement concept for achieving fusion is the Tokamak. An international consortium is currently building the World’s largest Tokamak in France, called ITER:
https://www.iter.org
It’s already years past schedule and billions of dollars over budget. When it is done and operating (sometime this decade), it will produce a burning plasma that will operate for something like 20 minutes to an hour at a time, generating 500 MW of thermal power when it is running (which will not be often). It will produce exactly zero electricity. It’s an experiment. On the basis of that, it’s proponents (who by that time might be an entirely new generation of plasma physicists than the ones who work there today) will say: okay, now we can build a reactor that will run all the time and actually produce electricity, except it will probably be too expensive for any utility to take a gamble on. Or they will say: you know, we still don’t understand this problem sufficiently; we want to build a next generation Tokamak experiment, that’s even bigger and more costly.
Then there is the Inertial Confinement approach, like the NIF machine from which this “breakthrough” came. They double-sell the concept as both weapons research (which is classified) and energy research. The reactor concepts – i.e. how to actually turn it into a reactor – are rather ludicrous, and make the Tokamak seem practical by comparison.
Those are the two big state-backed concepts. Then there are a number of other concepts, less well developed, many of which now have venture capital backing. Some of them or one of them may prove to be a practical path to fusion. Someday.
Ask me in ten years, and I would probably be able to give you the same summary.
the US would require about 25 metric tons of He3.
The yearly US production of He3 is about 15 Kg, with very limited capacity to scale.
Currently the primary source is refreshing the fusion weapons (Tritium decays to He3 with a short half life)
https://www.explainingthefuture.com/helium3.html#:~:text=The%20involved%20nuclear%20reaction%20here,no%20waste%20and%20no%20radiation.
The most likely source is mining the Lunar surface (the moon is a big solar wind trap because it has no atmosphere or magnetic poles) Let that sink in.
The bottom line is that the more you look at it, the more you realize a lot of other technologies need to pan out.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Indeed. When your plan for cheap, plentiful energy involves sifting thousands of square miles of the Lunar surface for a rare isotope produced in the Sun, you should probably examine your definition of “cheap” and “plentiful”.
The nuclear weapons industry should be held accountable and anything that comes out of it should be scrutinized very carefully. Think about it, this industry is really the birthplace of the WMD. The goal of the enterprise is to kill millions of people at the snap of a finger or better yet, hold billions of people hostage. Security is high so there is little incentive to tell the truth and probably massive legal barriers are in place to prevent it.
Naturally the history of these technologies is complicated and the people involved have unique motivations. But don't let that obscure the facts: many of the people involved are dangerous and not to be trusted. Sadly this is very similar to the case of the pharma/bioweapons axis. In the case of nuclear power, which was spawned by nuclear weapons, the ideas to view critically include genomic effects of radiation damage, safety of nuclear fission reactors and nuclear fusion.Replies: @Jack D
Yes, what people are missing is that this was fundamentally a nuclear weapons experiment. Under the test ban treaty nuclear weapons developers can’t really test their weapons directly so they need alternatives. Imagine that you were building a new model of stealth jet but there were rules that you couldn’t fly the plane before war broke out. How would you know if it was going to work the way it worked on paper? In the middle of a war would be a bad time to find out that your design doesn’t really work. One way would be if you could build a small scale model plane and see if that worked.
With that in mind, this is a breakthru because it involves actual self sustaining fusion. An efficiency greater than 1 means that some of the fusion is being lit by the reaction itself and not just the energy from the lasers – the fusion equivalent of a chain reaction. You can take the “match” away and the fuel will continue to “burn”. This is important to weapons designers even if it isn’t remotely practical as a commercial source of energy. They can potential build model hydrogen bombs that don’t violate the test ban treaty.
The role of laser driven implosion experiments in weapons design may still be controversial. At one point a recognized DOE lab expert publicly stated that these experiments had little or no relevance to weapons design. I think the argument is time scales, dimensions and energy densities are too different between the regimes to give valid predictions. I don't know the real story, but I assume this criticism has been papered over.Replies: @Jack D
All I can say is...........good luck with all that.
With that in mind, this is a breakthru because it involves actual self sustaining fusion. An efficiency greater than 1 means that some of the fusion is being lit by the reaction itself and not just the energy from the lasers - the fusion equivalent of a chain reaction. You can take the "match" away and the fuel will continue to "burn". This is important to weapons designers even if it isn't remotely practical as a commercial source of energy. They can potential build model hydrogen bombs that don't violate the test ban treaty.Replies: @QCIC, @Mr. Anon
I haven’t read the paper. It sounds like they are claiming strong alpha heating which they first reported a year or two ago.
The role of laser driven implosion experiments in weapons design may still be controversial. At one point a recognized DOE lab expert publicly stated that these experiments had little or no relevance to weapons design. I think the argument is time scales, dimensions and energy densities are too different between the regimes to give valid predictions. I don’t know the real story, but I assume this criticism has been papered over.
The average price of a barrel of oil in the period 1920-1970 was $22 USD in current inflation-adjusted dollars. Today it is $78 USD. Unless a number of giant fields are found, and they won't be, the EROI of oil will never improve. In fact it will continue to get worse.
And it should be noted well that the old saw, "the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices" is perfectly wrong. What matters is the energy cost of getting oil out of the ground, not the illusory dollar cost. And that is never going to improve.
The basic problem with this is that we are faced with ongoing social degeneration because it is not possible to use $78 oil to maintain a society built with $22 oil.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco
Oil and natural gas prices would fall significantly if the US and Europe allowed more fracking and drilling. Unfortunately politicians have banned drilling across most of the US and this is the main reason prices are so high today.
Alaska could easily double output if we allowed more drilling in Alaska. Thanks to the pipeline drilling in Alaska would be profitable at $35 per barrel.
Natural gas today is still less costly than the 1980s. Oil was not much cheaper during the 80s when we adjust for inflation. The average price of a barrel of oil was $20 during the 80s which is equivalent of $60 in today’s devalued currency.
I’m not going to be dumping my Uranium stocks on the basis of this.
The role of laser driven implosion experiments in weapons design may still be controversial. At one point a recognized DOE lab expert publicly stated that these experiments had little or no relevance to weapons design. I think the argument is time scales, dimensions and energy densities are too different between the regimes to give valid predictions. I don't know the real story, but I assume this criticism has been papered over.Replies: @Jack D
One thing I have learned about scientists is that they are human and science is subject to the same petty disputes and quarrels and egos and personal agendas as every other field of human endeavor. Recently I mentioned in another thread that we see on this forum two wildly opposing views of who is “winning” the Ukraine war and one of these views is by definition almost completely, totally wrong but we don’t know yet which one. The same thing goes on in science, especially at the cutting edge.
As we’re looking at tomorrow never comes fantasy items, there’s this.
https://www.the-sun.com/motors/6900140/new-pininfarina-with-swappable-hydrogen/
You must admit the Italians know what a rear-end should look like.
The earth's population hit 3 billion when I was still a kid (1960) before there was even a whole lot of focus on the issue. Limiting it to 3 billion would have required an agreement between the West, the Soviet Union and (after 1964) China, to put aside their differences in order to run death squads in the 3rd world.
But what certainly could--should--have been done is to encourage population stability in the 3rd world and to allow the stability in the developed world to stick--with all the associated environmental benefits--simply by not allowing foreigners to flood in and keep pushing "Western" populations up, even as fertility dropped below replacement.Replies: @epebble
There is no need to inflict any harsh measures to stabilize the population. Just make sure Levonorgestrel and Mifepristone are as widely available and at the same price at aspirin. The magic will happen tomorrow. It is just the political dispute that prevents it from happening. Oh, and the cost will be a tiny fraction of one of those carriers or subs.
https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/4/43/DavyCrockettBomb.jpg/375px-DavyCrockettBomb.jpg
https://armyhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/ord_7-500x404.jpg
https://infogalactic.com/info/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
https://armyhistory.org/the-m28m29-davy-crockett-nuclear-weapon-system/
The M388 carried the W54 warhead, the smallest nuclear weapon deployed by U.S. armed forces. The W54 weighed fifty-one pounds and had an explosive yield of .01-.02 kilotons of TNT (the equivalent of approximately 10-20 tons)
*Actually smoothbore. With a range of 1.25 miles.Replies: @Veteran Aryan
…and the limitation that you’ll definitely want to be firing that thing downwind.
The population issue of the ‘3os will be the great die-off.
https://www.coinbase.com/price/unvaxxed-spermReplies: @Veteran Aryan
She had an autobiography written for her, did she? One suspects that what the reader found hilarious, the credited writer found insight-projective, and the ghost writer didn’t give a whit.
The odds of laser fusion becoming practical are even less than those of Ukraine winning. The chances of a Ukrainian victory still include the influence of politics at the Empire level so nothing is over until it’s over. Fusion depends on physics and engineering. I think fusion power generation will become practical eventually, but not this approach. On the other hand, I am impressed that a stupid phone uses 5 nm chips.
I'm not saying that in 30 years they will be selling "Mr. Fusions" like in Back to the Future" but at some point they are going to crack this technological egg in a way that might seem beyond the limits of technology. It will certainly be beyond the limits of CURRENT technology but technology evolves. Right now the lasers required cost $$$ and are 1% efficient but future lasers could be much cheaper and much more efficient. I'm old enough to remember when a laser (any laser) was a big deal lab device and not something that was sold in Dollar Stores to confuse your cat.
There was a secondary optimum of climate between 400 and 1200 A.D., the peak being 800-1100 A.D. This was on the whole a dry, warm period and apparently remarkably stormfree in the Atlantic and in the North Sea. It was the time of great Viking voyages and the settlement of Iceland and Greenland. The early Norse burials in Greenland were deep in ground which is now permanently frozen.
In the great survey of 1085 (Domesday Book) 38 vineyards were recorded in England besides those of the king. The wine was considered almost equal with the French wine. The northernmost vineyards were near York [northern England]. This implies summer temperatures 2°C higher than today and freedom from May frosts. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1000 A.D. to 1200 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures warmer by about 1.5°C . Wheat and oats were grown around Trondheim, Norway, suggesting climates about 1.5°C warmer than present.
A warmer climate would benefit humans tremendously. Sadly the planet seems to have stopped warming 22 years ago and the planet has been cooling over the past 5 years as the Sun has weakened and some are predicting another mini ice-age. Thankfully with higher CO2 levels crops can survive in colder, dryer climates.Replies: @Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco, @Colin Wright
‘Global warming brings far more benefits to mankind than harms…’
In theory, yeah. In practice, there are problems.
For one, there’s the rate of change. If Pine A died out between five thousand feet and eight thousand feet over a thousand years and is replaced by Pine B, that’s one thing. If it happens over a hundred years, you get a belt of dead trees and catastrophic forest fires.
For another, what if we start getting positive feedback loops? All the frozen peat thaws, etc — and we go back to the climate of the Jurassic? Tropical swamps in Seattle would be a bit much.
I think global warming does need to be addressed. I just think we need to actually address it; not engage in virtue signaling, trying to tell Southeast Asian peasants they should walk six miles to market instead of using a motor scooter, etc.
Build nuclear power plants, produce electricity with them, and then electrify the shit out of everything. It’s not hard. Meantime, we can start by putting all we can back on choo-choos. They’re a lot more efficient than trucks no matter how they’re fueled, they can easily be electrified, and half the right-of-ways are still there.
This — like a lot of things — is a problem that’s perfectly soluble, and soluble without much pain. It just requires a little rational thought and a willingness to focus on outcome rather than moral posturing.
The global temperatures rise more during Roman times Without rising CO2 levels. The climate then cooled. Then warmed again by 2 degrees during the 9th century without any rise in CO2 and then cooled during the little ice-age without any change in CO2. Then warmed again from 1850-1950 without any significant increase in CO2. There has been little warming since 1999 despite an increase in CO2 levels...Arctic sea ice has been growing for a decade and we have record snow cover across a North America and Europe in 2022 despite predictions of snow being a thing of the past, something our children would never experience . The planet has been cooling for 5 years despite rising CO2 levels...so cutting CO2 levels may have a negligible effect on our planet but cost us trillions of dollars.
if the planet cools for another decade will we still keep spending billions of dollars a year in a lame attempt to reduce CO2 emissions ? How many decades of cooling will be required to falsify the global warming theory ?Replies: @PhysicistDave
-Otto von BismarckReplies: @SFG, @xyxxyz
Otto was a jokester. He proposed solving the “Irish problem” by an exchange of populations of
Holland and Ireland. The Dutch with their commercial expertise and freed of maintaining the dikes
would make Ireland a paradise. The Irish brought to Holland would drink, fight, drink, fornicate, drink and neglect the dikes. The sea would break in, problem solved. Bismarck thought this was funny, so do I.
,
https://rense.com/1.mpicons/slider20200710/ub.jpgReplies: @epebble
I thought it is a joke. It exists as some sort of cryptocurrency. Its value is low, though.
https://www.coinbase.com/price/unvaxxed-sperm
The main star of the WSJ’s “homeless in Boise” story is some self proclaimed “homeless” former social worker.
She is only 65 and has self diagnosed lung problem, so can’t work (or chooses not to soil her hands).
In her photo she is shown holding her small poodle type dog. Has relatives in town but says vaguely that their place is “too small” for her and doggie.
So she mostly hangs around some homeless shelter for oldsters.
What is wrong with this picture?
Woman can work (at something, but won’t) Has money for doggie but not her self support. Has family home to share but again, won’t. Poor pitiful her. Prefers mooching.
Probably saved nothing from work. ‘Social work” is all govt. paid with pensions and/or Social Security. Oh, and has income of around $1,800/month.
This is laughable. No she doesn’t live like Hillary Clinton but is far from a homeless begger.
Boise is paradise for her compared to say, 90% of the world.
But I am very hard-hearted…
Exactly – once things begin to scale they can (sometimes) scale exponentially. In 1985 (not that long ago) , the fastest computer in the world was the Cray-2 , at around 2 gflops. It weighed 5,000 lbs. and cost $30 million. Modern phones are much more powerful and fit in your pocket.
I’m not saying that in 30 years they will be selling “Mr. Fusions” like in Back to the Future” but at some point they are going to crack this technological egg in a way that might seem beyond the limits of technology. It will certainly be beyond the limits of CURRENT technology but technology evolves. Right now the lasers required cost $$$ and are 1% efficient but future lasers could be much cheaper and much more efficient. I’m old enough to remember when a laser (any laser) was a big deal lab device and not something that was sold in Dollar Stores to confuse your cat.
There is little evidence that CO2 is the cause of the slight warming of the planet over the last century. Much of the warming took place after the little ice-age, prior to any significant rise in CO2 levels.
The global temperatures rise more during Roman times Without rising CO2 levels. The climate then cooled. Then warmed again by 2 degrees during the 9th century without any rise in CO2 and then cooled during the little ice-age without any change in CO2. Then warmed again from 1850-1950 without any significant increase in CO2. There has been little warming since 1999 despite an increase in CO2 levels…Arctic sea ice has been growing for a decade and we have record snow cover across a North America and Europe in 2022 despite predictions of snow being a thing of the past, something our children would never experience . The planet has been cooling for 5 years despite rising CO2 levels…so cutting CO2 levels may have a negligible effect on our planet but cost us trillions of dollars.
if the planet cools for another decade will we still keep spending billions of dollars a year in a lame attempt to reduce CO2 emissions ? How many decades of cooling will be required to falsify the global warming theory ?
The physics is pretty solid (and has been going back at least to Arrhenius a century ago) that anthropogenic CO2 does have a warming effect.
Is it possible that in forty years the planet will be cooler? Sure -- maybe we are moving into another Maunder Minimum. Indeed, just for fun I make that my official "prediction."
I wouldn't seriously bet on it though.
Does anybody in the masochistic left have any comprehension of how many “everyday” industrial, scientific, and medical products are produced from refined oil that are not EVER “combusted”?????
Simple example: every medical device used by First world doctors, particularly in hospitals and medical labs analyzing bodily fluids, has as a fundamental part of its “construction” plastics of differing density, porosity, hardness, chemical structure. And said plastics, as polymers, are produced by reacting appropriate monomers with initiators. If we stop refining oil to create the feedstocks for such plastic polymers, we will be compelled to make EVERYTHING from glass!!! Which is breakable!!! Imagine any lab technicians willing to work in a lab where all specimen containers are made of glass and said technicians are asked to analyze blood samples infected with EBOLA!!!!! As a consequence, we will “accept” the finest medical practice of the year 1847!!!!!
About 2/3 of oil is used as transportation fuel- 45% as gasoline and another 20% as diesel fuel. If we could find another source of energy to power transport (e.g. electric cars charged by nuclear power plants) we could reduce petroleum consumption by 2/3 while allowing all other current uses such as petrochemical feedstocks.
Simple example: every medical device used by First world doctors, particularly in hospitals and medical labs analyzing bodily fluids, has as a fundamental part of its "construction" plastics of differing density, porosity, hardness, chemical structure. And said plastics, as polymers, are produced by reacting appropriate monomers with initiators. If we stop refining oil to create the feedstocks for such plastic polymers, we will be compelled to make EVERYTHING from glass!!! Which is breakable!!! Imagine any lab technicians willing to work in a lab where all specimen containers are made of glass and said technicians are asked to analyze blood samples infected with EBOLA!!!!! As a consequence, we will "accept" the finest medical practice of the year 1847!!!!!Replies: @Jack D, @Intelligent Dasein
Arguably we should be conserving our irreplaceable petroleum feedstocks and not burning them up.
About 2/3 of oil is used as transportation fuel- 45% as gasoline and another 20% as diesel fuel. If we could find another source of energy to power transport (e.g. electric cars charged by nuclear power plants) we could reduce petroleum consumption by 2/3 while allowing all other current uses such as petrochemical feedstocks.
With that in mind, this is a breakthru because it involves actual self sustaining fusion. An efficiency greater than 1 means that some of the fusion is being lit by the reaction itself and not just the energy from the lasers - the fusion equivalent of a chain reaction. You can take the "match" away and the fuel will continue to "burn". This is important to weapons designers even if it isn't remotely practical as a commercial source of energy. They can potential build model hydrogen bombs that don't violate the test ban treaty.Replies: @QCIC, @Mr. Anon
Not for long. It is an impulsive event. Once the compression of the pellet stagnates, the plasma begins to expand, causing the density and the reaction rate to drop. The increase in density is a key feature of inertial confinement fusion, as the reaction rate scales with the square of the density. There is only so much energy you can extract from each pellet and that’s it. I don’t know what the burn-up fraction is, but it is probably fairly low. In this experiment the hohlraum target is poised on the end of a sting in the middle of the chamber. In a reactor, you’d have to drop the the target in and zap it at just the right time, i.e., you have to hit that moving target with 192 fixed lasers. And you have to do that once every second (or perhaps more). The lasers they have can’t do that. Oh, and you have to do all that, drop in targets and fire lasers, through a 50 cm thick curtain of molten salt, which they envision as the first wall in their reactor designs.
All I can say is………..good luck with all that.
Here we have the other major and completely different approach, and I'm very uncertain it can ever be made practical except as a spaceship drive where all the overhead could be worth it (and, hey those lasers might also make for a good weapon). We could well need another method to compress the pellets where the action happens.
Note you'll seldom hear in regards to these current DT fusion experiment the neutron flux issue; take a gander at the chamber at LLNL in which the laser beams converge, it's made out of very thick concrete.Replies: @Joe Stalin, @Eternally Antifascist
Concrete, for “moderating 14 Mev neutrons down to thermal energies, a few mev, there is a 6 orders of magnitude difference in energies, is a somewhat cumbersome moderator.
Way back when I was a graduate student in nuclear physics, part of my thesis work was to get a semi-commercial 14 MeV neutron generator operating (the “commercial” system was shipped as components to be assembled by purchaser). Well, there was nothing cheaper, for the purchaser, than to employ energetic naive graduate students enthusiastic about nuclear physics who would perform scientific research in an area mostly totally unexplored, namely the radioactive decay of short lived isotopes. Said radioactive isotopes were created in the neutron generator through the standard (d, T) reaction producing 14 MeV neutrons that then “bombarded” a highly pure isotope of a particular element, encased in a plastic “bag” taped onto the outside housing of the generator “next” to the metallic target containing tritium diffused into it.
Because this neutron generator was housed in a campus building that contained other laboratories (basement floor + three stories of labs/offices) and two large lecture halls through which wandered hundreds of students, the shielding for the generator had to be particularly compact (finite floor space) and extremely effective for thermalizing fast neutrons and then capturing thermal neutrons.
A conventional “cube” was created from concrete building bricks with a very large opening for the electrostatic generator to be motor-driven into the cube. This part was quite conventional.
But the opening into which the generator would be placed to begin the production of neutrons could become a source of deadly neutrons if those were not stopped! I designed a backshield that incorporated steel plates both for mechanical support and to provide some stopping ability for the fast and thermal neutrons. Around the steel plates I installed paraffin “bricks” that were saturated with Lithium nitrate powder “deposited” in the center of the brick. The paraffin ensured the “thermalizaion” of the fast neutrons, and the Li7 isotope, in the lithium nitrate, ensured the absorption of the thermal neutron into the lithium nucleus. The lithium nitrate was commercial grade material used for making ceramics. So the entire neutron shield was quite inexpensive, for both those days and now. The radiation technicians, from the Atomic Energy Commission. could NOT measure ANY neutrons at all at the outside hallways outside of the lab!! So we operated that unit successfully for the four years that I was there!
But while it takes an act of Congress to create a "permanent" building at LLNL, they got that and built their whole system custom from the basement up. So a lower floor of capacitors and switching gear, long floor of lasers above that which with mirrors led to the laser convergence chamber which was a small part of their space budget. So cheap concrete, maybe with some additions to the typical mix was quite fine for their purposes to shield the chamber.
Here I'm talking about Nova, the top picture gives us an idea of the scale of the lasers, in the third you can see the concrete shielding in the background. The National Ignition Facility is where this latest feat was accomplished, and we can see it's to such a scale the concrete shielding is cylindrical instead of a cube. Looks like they also put the capacitors on the same vertical level as the lasers.
The current breakthrough is not nearly enough. First of all , it can only fuse a single BB sized pellet of hydrogen at a time. On a commercial scale you would need something akin to a machine gun so you could fire pellet after pellet. 2nd when they are counting this as net positive they are only comparing the energy in the laser beams hitting the pellet vs. the energy produced from pellet, but the lasers are much less than 100% efficient so the entire device (which BTW is enormous and costly - far too enormous and costly to be commercially viable) still consumes more energy than it produces. Even with the current breakthru we are still decades away from commercial fusion power even if this breakthru leads directly to it.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Eternally Antifascist
It is somewhat of a misstatement to write that the fusion process does NOT create radioactive byproducts. Any “realistic” commercial fusion reactor will create a “reasonable” level of fast, i.e. 14 MeV, neutrons. It is “expected” that, somehow, these fast neutrons will “transfer” some or all of their kinetic energy to heating some unnamed undescribed fluid which could then cause turbines to rotate and create electrical energy. And it could be that the neutrons are somewhat “moderated” before the transfer of energy.
Any commercial reactor will have parts, pieces, and systems that incorporated steel (iron + other elements such as nickel, manganese, chromium, sulfur, phosphorus, others), copper wiring, some brass (copper, zinc). All of these elements have various numbers of isotopes. There are two primary nuclear reactions that fast neutrons can create in any isotope: the (n, 2n) reaction and the (n, p) reaction. I am reasonably confident that with exposure time to fast neutrons, these parts, pieces, systems, and copper wiring will become radioactive and some of them may mechanically fail because either reaction can create another element, than the original element in the component, which can change the structure of the component microscopically leading eventually to macroscopic failure.
Shielding designs for fast neutrons is the key to preventing such results.
However, some materials (water) only become temporarily radioactive as a result of neutron bombardment (a matter of minutes before they decay back to their ground state) and other materials only become lightly radioactive, e.g. iron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation#Examples
In other cases, useful radioactive materials (e.g. cobalt-60 used in nuclear medicine) can intentionally be produced.
So yes, this is one of many problems that will have to be dealt with, but overall it is less of an issue than the Actinide byproducts of a fission reactor.Replies: @QCIC
Any commercial reactor will have parts, pieces, and systems that incorporated steel (iron + other elements such as nickel, manganese, chromium, sulfur, phosphorus, others), copper wiring, some brass (copper, zinc). All of these elements have various numbers of isotopes. There are two primary nuclear reactions that fast neutrons can create in any isotope: the (n, 2n) reaction and the (n, p) reaction. I am reasonably confident that with exposure time to fast neutrons, these parts, pieces, systems, and copper wiring will become radioactive and some of them may mechanically fail because either reaction can create another element, than the original element in the component, which can change the structure of the component microscopically leading eventually to macroscopic failure.
Shielding designs for fast neutrons is the key to preventing such results.Replies: @Jack D
I understand that bombardment by fast neutrons is very damaging to materials (and will need to be controlled somehow) . Also that some materials become radioactive. This is true in current fission reactors as well.
However, some materials (water) only become temporarily radioactive as a result of neutron bombardment (a matter of minutes before they decay back to their ground state) and other materials only become lightly radioactive, e.g. iron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation#Examples
In other cases, useful radioactive materials (e.g. cobalt-60 used in nuclear medicine) can intentionally be produced.
So yes, this is one of many problems that will have to be dealt with, but overall it is less of an issue than the Actinide byproducts of a fission reactor.
Yancey Ward wrote to TG:
Let us pray the answer is zero.
So as to improve the gene pool.
(By the way, I notice TG has not answered your question: methinks I smell a troll.)
The global temperatures rise more during Roman times Without rising CO2 levels. The climate then cooled. Then warmed again by 2 degrees during the 9th century without any rise in CO2 and then cooled during the little ice-age without any change in CO2. Then warmed again from 1850-1950 without any significant increase in CO2. There has been little warming since 1999 despite an increase in CO2 levels...Arctic sea ice has been growing for a decade and we have record snow cover across a North America and Europe in 2022 despite predictions of snow being a thing of the past, something our children would never experience . The planet has been cooling for 5 years despite rising CO2 levels...so cutting CO2 levels may have a negligible effect on our planet but cost us trillions of dollars.
if the planet cools for another decade will we still keep spending billions of dollars a year in a lame attempt to reduce CO2 emissions ? How many decades of cooling will be required to falsify the global warming theory ?Replies: @PhysicistDave
Hernan Pizzaro del Blanco wrote to Colin Wright:
Your history is basically correct, but what you have proved is that humans are not the only cause of warming.
The physics is pretty solid (and has been going back at least to Arrhenius a century ago) that anthropogenic CO2 does have a warming effect.
Is it possible that in forty years the planet will be cooler? Sure — maybe we are moving into another Maunder Minimum. Indeed, just for fun I make that my official “prediction.”
I wouldn’t seriously bet on it though.
However, some materials (water) only become temporarily radioactive as a result of neutron bombardment (a matter of minutes before they decay back to their ground state) and other materials only become lightly radioactive, e.g. iron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation#Examples
In other cases, useful radioactive materials (e.g. cobalt-60 used in nuclear medicine) can intentionally be produced.
So yes, this is one of many problems that will have to be dealt with, but overall it is less of an issue than the Actinide byproducts of a fission reactor.Replies: @QCIC
DT Fusion has serious radiation issues combined with extreme complexity. Fission has very serious radiation issues combined with simplicity. After Fukushima I am no longer a fan of fission technology, though actinide-burning fission reactors can be made.
Way back when I was a graduate student in nuclear physics, part of my thesis work was to get a semi-commercial 14 MeV neutron generator operating (the "commercial" system was shipped as components to be assembled by purchaser). Well, there was nothing cheaper, for the purchaser, than to employ energetic naive graduate students enthusiastic about nuclear physics who would perform scientific research in an area mostly totally unexplored, namely the radioactive decay of short lived isotopes. Said radioactive isotopes were created in the neutron generator through the standard (d, T) reaction producing 14 MeV neutrons that then "bombarded" a highly pure isotope of a particular element, encased in a plastic "bag" taped onto the outside housing of the generator "next" to the metallic target containing tritium diffused into it.
Because this neutron generator was housed in a campus building that contained other laboratories (basement floor + three stories of labs/offices) and two large lecture halls through which wandered hundreds of students, the shielding for the generator had to be particularly compact (finite floor space) and extremely effective for thermalizing fast neutrons and then capturing thermal neutrons.
A conventional "cube" was created from concrete building bricks with a very large opening for the electrostatic generator to be motor-driven into the cube. This part was quite conventional.
But the opening into which the generator would be placed to begin the production of neutrons could become a source of deadly neutrons if those were not stopped! I designed a backshield that incorporated steel plates both for mechanical support and to provide some stopping ability for the fast and thermal neutrons. Around the steel plates I installed paraffin "bricks" that were saturated with Lithium nitrate powder "deposited" in the center of the brick. The paraffin ensured the "thermalizaion" of the fast neutrons, and the Li7 isotope, in the lithium nitrate, ensured the absorption of the thermal neutron into the lithium nucleus. The lithium nitrate was commercial grade material used for making ceramics. So the entire neutron shield was quite inexpensive, for both those days and now. The radiation technicians, from the Atomic Energy Commission. could NOT measure ANY neutrons at all at the outside hallways outside of the lab!! So we operated that unit successfully for the four years that I was there!Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
Very cool and in the best traditions of hacking.
But while it takes an act of Congress to create a “permanent” building at LLNL, they got that and built their whole system custom from the basement up. So a lower floor of capacitors and switching gear, long floor of lasers above that which with mirrors led to the laser convergence chamber which was a small part of their space budget. So cheap concrete, maybe with some additions to the typical mix was quite fine for their purposes to shield the chamber.
Here I’m talking about Nova, the top picture gives us an idea of the scale of the lasers, in the third you can see the concrete shielding in the background. The National Ignition Facility is where this latest feat was accomplished, and we can see it’s to such a scale the concrete shielding is cylindrical instead of a cube. Looks like they also put the capacitors on the same vertical level as the lasers.
Way back when I was a graduate student in nuclear physics, part of my thesis work was to get a semi-commercial 14 MeV neutron generator operating (the "commercial" system was shipped as components to be assembled by purchaser). Well, there was nothing cheaper, for the purchaser, than to employ energetic naive graduate students enthusiastic about nuclear physics who would perform scientific research in an area mostly totally unexplored, namely the radioactive decay of short lived isotopes. Said radioactive isotopes were created in the neutron generator through the standard (d, T) reaction producing 14 MeV neutrons that then "bombarded" a highly pure isotope of a particular element, encased in a plastic "bag" taped onto the outside housing of the generator "next" to the metallic target containing tritium diffused into it.
Because this neutron generator was housed in a campus building that contained other laboratories (basement floor + three stories of labs/offices) and two large lecture halls through which wandered hundreds of students, the shielding for the generator had to be particularly compact (finite floor space) and extremely effective for thermalizing fast neutrons and then capturing thermal neutrons.
A conventional "cube" was created from concrete building bricks with a very large opening for the electrostatic generator to be motor-driven into the cube. This part was quite conventional.
But the opening into which the generator would be placed to begin the production of neutrons could become a source of deadly neutrons if those were not stopped! I designed a backshield that incorporated steel plates both for mechanical support and to provide some stopping ability for the fast and thermal neutrons. Around the steel plates I installed paraffin "bricks" that were saturated with Lithium nitrate powder "deposited" in the center of the brick. The paraffin ensured the "thermalizaion" of the fast neutrons, and the Li7 isotope, in the lithium nitrate, ensured the absorption of the thermal neutron into the lithium nucleus. The lithium nitrate was commercial grade material used for making ceramics. So the entire neutron shield was quite inexpensive, for both those days and now. The radiation technicians, from the Atomic Energy Commission. could NOT measure ANY neutrons at all at the outside hallways outside of the lab!! So we operated that unit successfully for the four years that I was there!Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Jack D
Reading this in conjunction with your post below about the effects of fast neutrons, it sound as if , while as you say these known effects (embrittlement of materials, conversion of elements to radioactive isotopes, etc. ) would have to be taken into account in fusion reactor design, doing so would be far from impossible and possibly not very expensive. Common materials (concrete, lithium nitrate, paraffin, molten salt, etc.) could be used in a properly designed system and would not end up as highly radioactive themselves, at least in comparison to a fission reactor.
Obviously the big challenge is getting a fusion reactor to work in the 1st place. Secondary issues such as shielding and radioactive waste can probably be dealt with but first you have to have a viable fusion reactor to begin with.
I agree with you about Fukushima. Japan is not a perfect society but it is better than most. Their safety record with high speed trains (“Shinkansen”) is better than anyone’s. If they weren’t able to figure out how to secure reactors in a black swan event, then chances are no one can. Maybe Americans would not have made the same mistake in the same black swan event but maybe in some different black swan event they’d make an even worse mistake. Cheap energy is not cheap if you have to spend $500 billion on cleanup costs. There may be idiot proof reactor designs that can withstand complete electrical failure but not the ones that we have now.
The containment of the reactors was poorly designed and probably would not have worked in a design base accident. I used to live within 100 miles of two similar reactors in the US. Activities to close them down began soon after Fukushima. I assume they were long known to be unsafe. The spent fuel pool arrangement is foolish. The cooling and emergency power arrangements were also stupid. Let's see, "Tsunami", what country has powerful earthquakes and large tidal waves throughout recorded history? Oh, Japan.
I don't think much new technical information was learned from the accidents. The flaws were already known and the people who tried to stop it early in the design process were pressured to shut up or drank the Kool-aid and didn't care.Replies: @Jack D
https://www.coinbase.com/price/unvaxxed-spermReplies: @Veteran Aryan
I can beat that price. I won’t be undersold!
The Trillions of dollars to electrify everything to slightly reduce CO2 is a waste of our resources. Thus far the models predicting doom have been proven false. The planet is not warming quickly, and has not warmed at all over the past decade. The United States could electrify everything and CO2 levels will still rise, as all industry relocates to Asia where they are building hundreds of coal fired plants each year. Using electric cars just adds more emissions in Asia, Africa and South America where they mine for the elements required for our “clean” electric cars. Our solar panels and Wind Mills are produced with hydrocarbons, much of it coal and diesel which pollute more than Natural gas. They are not zero emissions , the production of solar panels and batteries result in significant CO2 emissions and leave behind toxic waste.
As someone who has been sent out to report on several technological fantasies I hold more faith in someday seeing the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator
https://youtu.be/QuUJfYcn3V4Replies: @CCZ
Fusion energy WILL BE “equitable….diverse and inclusive” says the US Secretary of Energy!!!!
I don’t give anyone a pass on Fukushima, the entire situation is criminally stupid. I think most of the design work and approval process for Fukushima was very US-centric and I imagine the Japanese simply followed US carelessness. It is related to what I wrote in another comment: if the goal of your industry is to kill millions of people, how seriously will people take safety? This is a contradiction built into the nuclear industry.
The containment of the reactors was poorly designed and probably would not have worked in a design base accident. I used to live within 100 miles of two similar reactors in the US. Activities to close them down began soon after Fukushima. I assume they were long known to be unsafe. The spent fuel pool arrangement is foolish. The cooling and emergency power arrangements were also stupid. Let’s see, “Tsunami”, what country has powerful earthquakes and large tidal waves throughout recorded history? Oh, Japan.
I don’t think much new technical information was learned from the accidents. The flaws were already known and the people who tried to stop it early in the design process were pressured to shut up or drank the Kool-aid and didn’t care.
There were some lessons that SHOULD have been learned long ago but weren't, like "don't put your emergency generators in the basement".
Some of it was just a poor understanding of what the maximum possible tidal surge was or the appropriate risk level - in the Netherlands they build stuff to the 1,000 year surge and not the 100 year level. Apparently after the tsunami they noticed old (like 500 year old) stone monuments that said things like "Don't build anything between here and the ocean" but I guess in crowded Japan after 100 years or 200 in which nothing happened that kind of vacant land was too tempting to leave empty.
https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1603044487739088896Replies: @roonaldo
Ah yes, she declares Biden’s bold plan for commercial fusion within a decade, and maintained a straight face!
The local PBS station has English language foreign newscasts–France24, dw the day (Germany), one from Japan, and of course BBC–they all featured the ridiculous fusion-breakthrough story.
I remember the traveling carnivals–hall of mirrors, dwarves, strong man, and my favorite, Gorilla Girl–“gorilla, gorilla, grilla, girrlla, girrll, girl!!”–and now the gorilla was a real girl!
The containment of the reactors was poorly designed and probably would not have worked in a design base accident. I used to live within 100 miles of two similar reactors in the US. Activities to close them down began soon after Fukushima. I assume they were long known to be unsafe. The spent fuel pool arrangement is foolish. The cooling and emergency power arrangements were also stupid. Let's see, "Tsunami", what country has powerful earthquakes and large tidal waves throughout recorded history? Oh, Japan.
I don't think much new technical information was learned from the accidents. The flaws were already known and the people who tried to stop it early in the design process were pressured to shut up or drank the Kool-aid and didn't care.Replies: @Jack D
At least according to the Americans, a lot of it was Japanese decisions – their reactor design said you should have emergency generators of a certain size but it was up to the locals to decide where to site the generators.
There were some lessons that SHOULD have been learned long ago but weren’t, like “don’t put your emergency generators in the basement”.
Some of it was just a poor understanding of what the maximum possible tidal surge was or the appropriate risk level – in the Netherlands they build stuff to the 1,000 year surge and not the 100 year level. Apparently after the tsunami they noticed old (like 500 year old) stone monuments that said things like “Don’t build anything between here and the ocean” but I guess in crowded Japan after 100 years or 200 in which nothing happened that kind of vacant land was too tempting to leave empty.
Simple example: every medical device used by First world doctors, particularly in hospitals and medical labs analyzing bodily fluids, has as a fundamental part of its "construction" plastics of differing density, porosity, hardness, chemical structure. And said plastics, as polymers, are produced by reacting appropriate monomers with initiators. If we stop refining oil to create the feedstocks for such plastic polymers, we will be compelled to make EVERYTHING from glass!!! Which is breakable!!! Imagine any lab technicians willing to work in a lab where all specimen containers are made of glass and said technicians are asked to analyze blood samples infected with EBOLA!!!!! As a consequence, we will "accept" the finest medical practice of the year 1847!!!!!Replies: @Jack D, @Intelligent Dasein
You can derive the monomers (i.e. cellulose, vinyl, ethylene, lactate, etc.) from other natural sources, it’s just a lot more expensive than utilizing petroleum at a large scale. I can imagine that in a post-industrial world of exhausted carbon fuels, there would still be a specialty market for thermoplastics, but they would be restricted to niche applications like medical devices and fine art media.