This is of course a quote from John Prine. The future arrived yesterday 60 years ago the world changed with the advent of the laser. And one of if not the greatest scientific quest mankind has ever undertaken began. The world of science spent those decades piecing together the materials, procedures the diagnostic tools and the experience all in a world where trillionths of a second where as good as a mile and temperatures twice the center of our sun. Yesterday they announced the birth of FUSION energy. 2 megajoule's in and 3 and a half megajoule's out. https://abcnews.go.com/US/scientific-breakthrough- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/nuclear-fusion-passes-major-milestone-net-energy.html And of course there are and will be a million more links of this. Hey it's our future! Christ, it may even save the planet Rejoice here comes the Sun!
Daniel, Please do me the courtesy of reading my ENTIRE post before you start responding. I sometimes get the impression that you only read about 2 lines of what I post and then get pissed off and start writing. I realize we all need some good news (and this really is good news) but I've got to rain on your parade a little bit and bring some reality to the hype train that's been regurgitating this dross for the last two days: While this is the first time we have achieved 'ignition', this was only a single experiment. In that respect, it is much like the record-breaking experiment that occurred at the NIF last year. It needs to be REPEATED. While this experiment did create more energy than it consumed AT THE TARGET, it still was a net energy LOSS. Yes, we put the energy of 192 lasers on the pellet, with a total energy input of about 2 Megajoules. Yes, we estimate the reaction produced a total output of about 3 Megajoules. HOWEVER, the SYSTEM CONSUMED 330 Megajoules!!! (In other words, from a system perspective we got back about 1% of the energy we put in). From the above, we can see that we need to increase efficiency by over 100x JUST TO BREAK EVEN! This achievement required a level of exacting engineering that we don't yet have the foggiest clue how to replicate at scale (and barely even in the lab, at this point). Do be clear: this is an AMAZING achievement, because it proves that it ACTUALLY IS POSSIBLE to create a controlled fusion reaction and get more energy out than we put in. Up to this point it's all been theory. Can we overcome the hurdles I've outlined above? Dunno, it's too early to tell. It certainly requires more research and more investment of resources, which I have no problem with. But the folks breathlessly exclaiming that we will have practical fusion within 10 years are IMO either idiots or charlatans. We have ZERO basis for making that claim (at least, not at the current research funding levels). Again, this is a FANTASTIC achievement, because it proves that we actually CAN create a fusion reaction in a controlled fashion, and have it produce more energy than it takes to initiate. Maybe the NIF's approach to fusion using inertial confinement really is the best approach, or maybe it isn't; time will tell. But this research really is a BIG DEAL for EVERYONE in the fusion energy space. It's just not practical, yet, and likely won't be for another 20 years.
My friend I always read your posts with the utmost attention. I will al ways yield my "opinions" in the face of superior knowledge. As I tried to explain to Patti: We've been hunting a unicorn for 60 years. No one could say for sure that the unicorn even exists. But on Tuesday hunters returned with the news that we have at last found it's tracks, we know now appositely where it lives and where to consecrate our effort. We now know that there are unicorns I am told that the Guys hunting with magnets may be closer to sustained ignition and a production power plant. What "Closer" may mean I have no idea. While I recognize that I can be quite stubborn in my views concerning metaphysics ; I simply don't know enough to be invested in my "opinions" concerning scientific findings. Thank you for bringing these findings into a better perspective, This is America! We never get excited we always get over excited, tire and slip back into our depression.":O)
Chris, I can't recall ever getting mad at you. I recall a brief period in which the planet Mars came between us/ What I recall is that you were experiencing tremendous difficulties at home and work.You were in my opinion wrapped pretty tight... As anyone would be in your circumstance. But this never angered me. Your my friend how should I ever be angry with you. Both you and TR have consistently failed to fix my computer sound. Over the years you have fixed everything else that's gone wrong with my computer. So it seems to me that I have every right to expect you to fix it this time! Tell me I'm wrong!! ( I just can't keep a straight face as I type this!LOL Chris, you have been one of the bright lights of my life. You needn't answer. I won't be able to hear you. I'm having a bit of trouble with my SOUND. ":O)
Always glad to help. Interestingly, in the Amazon Prime Show "The Expanse", they appear to be using inertial confinement fusion drives. For myself, based on the research I've done, I think Inertial Confinement will prove to be the better technology. It just seems to me to be a much more elegant solution; the Tokamak design really is a very 'brute-force' way of getting there. Interestingly (again), the Tokamak is actually a Soviet design and the Soviets were very,VERY good at the whole 'brute-force' approach to things. There's something to be said for "just get it working", which I why I suspect that we'll get Tokamaks working first, but then replace them with Inertial Confinement (or something similar). I was also reading that the NIF experiment was only expecting to get 'break-even' or thereabouts: the fact that they exceeded break-even by 50% was WAY more than they were expecting.
You watch THE EXPANSE!!?? Only the best Sci Fi series EVER! ":O) I can't get Prime any more. No internet or phone because my provider owes me $5000 and so wont answer my calls. So I can only us those services that I had before cut off. Because they want a phone number they will never call. ROKU gets me past on a lot of things as it just tags it using my Past info. But Prime wants a computer check in a phone check in, on top of my ROKU check in. Pleas tell me there's another way to get it?
Here's something that I'm sure has been considered, but The People Who Know Things aren't openly talking about, and most of the rest of us haven't even though about. First, to preface: Solar power is gaining traction, but still has a ways to go before it can fully displace fossil fuels. There are a number of issues that have to be overcome as well, chiefly storage. We can generate more power than we can use, and right now that excess is being thrown away because we have no good way to store it. ALL energy must eventually become heat. The electricity that comes into your home might run your air conditioner to cool your house, or it might run your heater to warm your house; it might power your computer, your television or any of a myriad of other electronic devices in your home; it might cook your food or heat your water, but eventually, after you have extracted useful work from it, whatever is left gets lost as heat. Second, electricity usage in the United State is projected to be about 4,027 BILLION KWh this year, or an average of just over 11B KWh per day. Third, Solar panel efficiency is about 20% (though that figure is rising). That means that a solar panel converts about 1/5 of the sunlight it receives into usable electricity; the rest is lost to heat. That's not as big a deal as it sounds though, because if the solar panel weren't in the way, ALL of that sunlight would have become heat. Fourth, the United States receives, on average about 4 KW/(square meter)/day of sunlight (averaged over the entire country for the entire year). This figure is known as Solar Irradiance. Let's think about the implications of all of this for a second. In terms of Solar Irradiance, the United States consumes the equivalent of about 53,000 SQUARE KILOMETERS of energy. For perspective, that's an area slightly smaller than West Virginia, or twice the size of Massachusetts. At 20% efficiency, that means that we'd need to basically cover the entire state of Nevada with solar panels. If we get all of our power from renewables, that's not a big deal, because all of that energy would have ended up as heat anyway. But we aren't getting all of our power from renewables, and we haven't been for the last two centuries, PARTICULARLY for the last 100 years. AND OUR POWER NEEDS ARE GOING UP!!! Now, lets suppose that we converted all of our fossil-fuel requirements instead to electricity generated by Nuclear Fission or Fusion? What do you suppose the environmental consequences of that much heat being added to the ecosystem would be (or rather, ARE, since we've basically been doing it with Coal and Oil for decades)? Granted, it's gonna be a helluva lot better than what we are doing now because we won't be increasing the GHG concentration, but it's still going to have an impact. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be working on fusion energy (or even fission for that matter; the new breed of SMRs are looking pretty interesting too), but only that we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing that once we get this problem licked, we can wash our hands and say "Job Done". We should be thinking about this NOW, so that we don't get into trouble LATER.
As far as I know (pretty low bar) We have yet to safely dispose of a single once of nuclear wast. Those waste facilities we haphazardly created are decaying rapidly for which I have yet to hear a single solution. So while the security of nuclear plants remains extremely problematic (shooting up power stations is becoming the new stupid how long before power plants are targeted.?) Even if power plants COULD be made safe in peace times they are the target of choice in an all out conflict. We are still faced with the truly horrifying shit they produce as wast. Fusion can (or so I'm told) eat radioactive waste as fuel. All I can think is that it better eat a whole big bunch every day because we have and are producing a shit load of it. Most of which is currently being stored on site . supper magnifying the potential dangers in case of accident or attack. Last point of terror. The new plants claim to be "Very safe" Exactly what we were told about the first plants all of which have grown very old. Many of which are poorly maintained. Many of which are located on Rivers to better catty away nuclear waste if/when there a leak or melt down. Personal I think in the long run Nuclear may be the worst thing we've done to our planet. Even if we shut it all down and make no more plants .10,000 years is a very very long time to wait for dissipation. I can think of just so many better things to do with the world we were given. Remember that world? It can still be seen on TV. Again Thank you Chris, lots of good info in your post much of it new to me.
So .I try but I can't think of a single reason not to completely cover Nevada with something, it may as well be Solar pannels. Wind machines, there pretty cool. but I don't think they could ever cover up enough of Nevada But who would even notice if we made it the nuclear storage state?
50 years ago when I was a mere lad of 23 Birth control made a bid to control world population, It was a poorly realized hope. But still it was hope. But while science never sleeps it has created a nightmare or two. This one was particularly painful to me. The hormones used in birth control are flushed every day down our toilets. From there they row genitally down the stream into our coastal waters, Where fish use those hormones to sterilize and mutate themself s. So Danie's big hope became just another way to kill the planet. But it also reveal a truth we have yet to accept. We live in a world so interconnected, so complex that for telling consequences becomes all but impossible. In short for every thing we know there are a thousand things we either don;t knowb or don't properly understand, And we are living in a time that demands immediate answers. "One step forward two steps back with nothing there to take up the slack.
Before selecting a tune I let my mind go blank until something pops Not much of a system I know. but it did come up with this.":O) about the dancers? Art begets art.
<IFF> we pursue nuclear power through fission, we really should pursue thorium molten salt reactors, IMO. There has been a lot of research done on them, especially in the last decade or so. If you want to learn more about them, I'd recommend starting with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Molten-Salt Experiment. Thorium MSRs were the original direction the US wanted to go with nuclear reactors because of their inherent safety factor (the design of an MSR makes it PASSIVELY safe; if ANYTHING goes wrong with the reactor, it just stops, in addition you can't easily use a Thorium reactor to breed things like Plutonium). The reason the US didn't go that path back in the 50s was because the DoD wanted Plutonium for weapons, which requires a breeder reactor; in other words NOT Thorium. In addition, Thorium reactors can 'eat' all of the waste from older reactors. While Thorium reactors DO produce some very high-level waste, this is actually a good thing; it means that the waste decays to safe levels within a few decades, rather than a few millennia, and there is SUBSTANTIALLY less of it, making storage easier. Further, the small amount of highly radioactive waste that is produced is actually TOO radioactive to make a viable weapon from (I'm talking like a bomb; there are obviously OTHER ways that a person intent on mayhem could take advantage of highly radioactive nuclear waste, but those other ways apply to a large amount of other poisonous materials as well, so again it is a manageable problem). The big problem holding Thorium MSRs back right now is that the regulatory regime in the US is so nightmarishly convoluted and so stuck in the 1970s that getting a new reactor type qualified for use is nigh impossible. With respect to waste, we should also objectively discuss some things about radioactivity. In general, I'm not concerned about waste that takes 10,000 years or longer to decay. Do you know why it takes that long? Because it's only BARELY radioactive!!! Waste that decays in weeks to months is HIGHLY radioactive; that's why it decays so fast. That's commonly referred to as HLW, or high-level waste. Store this for a few decades and it is essentially inert. Even most MLW (medium-level waste) is only hazardous for a couple of hundred years at most. IMO, this is the stuff we probably should be MOST concerned about, as it generally has rather high levels of radioactivity and hangs around for a while (on human timescales). Still, this problem should be manageable, if we really want to do so. There are a lot more details and nuance than I have gone into here. It is frustratingly difficult to find detailed and accurate information with which to assess the risks, because it's all surrounded by political grand-standing (both for and against). Obviously, a rational person in such an environment is going to choose the least risky option, but how exactly do you evaluate that, when one side of the conversation is sowing FUD as fast as they can, and the other side of the conversation is trying to white-wash everything? The political environment is so toxic that anyone who tries to approach the subject objectively seems to either risk being labeled as a corporate shill or having their research funding pulled, or even both. All of the above might actually be moot, though. We seem to finally be making some progress on battery technologies that will be able to displace Lithium Ion, and be economical enough to be useful as grid storage. If we can crack that nut, we can start storing the excess solar and wind power we are generating and making better use of it. Once that happens, conversations about nuclear (fission OR fusion) no longer make sense except for very specific applications. I think we can all agree that such an outcome is probably the most desirable.
This is true. Which is why it's critically important we call out the lies we know, even if those lies may favor our viewpoint. Acknowledging that we are imperfect creatures with finite knowledge, it is still possible for us to make reasonably good guesses about outcomes, but we have to be dealing with the truth as best we can define it first. Honestly, since all of this boils down to politics, I don't know how we get around that tendency to lie or at least intentionally distort to favor our own position. We have allowed the politicians too much sway in what we think, but I don't know a better solution.
And yet, even Scientists are subject to politics and political infighting. Science is at some point a social endeavor; eventually we have to agree that what a scientist has produced is useful or the results of the work never gets distributed. In the case of something like building a better plow, the results are readily apparent and easily tested by anyone who cares to take the time. What about the expansion of the universe? At some point a scientist has to convince others that their work has value, and when that happens, politics gets involved. Once that happens, we no longer have science as a guide, at least not readily.
