I would love to see a huge effort towards fusion, on the same (or even greater) scale as the Manhattan project or the Apollo program. I had been disappointed in the way that fusion always seemed to be 30 years away no matter how many years went past, but I just assumed that that was because the science was hard and just the way it had to be.
In 1976, a number of plans for investing in fusion were described, and what actually happened was that less was invested in fusion even than the level at which the program plan predicted we would never achieve fusion. This is the kind of thing that anyone who cares about humanity in general should find upsetting.
Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities.
Working, economic fusion power has a chance to revolutionize life as we know it. The countries that have access to the technology first will be at the forefront of a huge economic, social, cultural, scientific change.
It's more important than going to Mars (and would probably make going to Mars significantly easier). It's more important than nearly anything we're working on.
This might sound a bit like a buzz-kill, but I don't think fusion power is necessarily competitively cheap. I think it will be comparable to nuclear power with a ~ 10 times higher capital investment to build a fusion-plant. Already now solar is said to be cheaper then nuclear.
But nevertheless humanity should explore fusion since it is more or less the only significant power source not (indrectly) depending on the sun.
As far as I can see the funding of fusion research is at about the same level as particle physics which definilty does not provide any other than philosophical progress.
NO... humanity should explore fusion because we might desperately need it to survive.
To what amount can you scale up solar in a particular region?!
Yeah, I know, we're into low-power everything nowadays... but let's say that you end up with a desperate need for smth like 1 TW of power for something like a sea-water desalination plant, massive irrigation needs because climate change fucked you up, or building a huge set of flood barriers (think what Nederlands has now, but you need them 100x larger, 5x cheaper and done FAST) because sea levels rose and people will die if you don't get the massive cheap energy needs for these projects ASAP. Or maybe a huge TW power laser for some space-dev project if you don't want to think of disasters. Or maybe to decontaminate large amounts of water/soil/air after the first large-ish nuclear/bio/chemical war that will take place on Earth.
If you're betting on solar and wind and you end up suddenly needing high levels of cheap (it can be "long-term like 100 years on cheap" if you're a country with a good credit score) power, you're.... fucked! Yeah, fusion won't be scalable to massive energy needs "out of the lab", but in 100 years from now when your grandchildren will need it to save their lives from the consequences of our planetary fuck-ups, it will be!
(And yeah, short term you can scale fission better probably. So investment into "dirt-cheap fission power that anyone can have" is also crucial. But longer term it hits other scalability bounds.).
In a perfect world where we don't totally fuck-up the planet, solar and hydro and geotermal and wind and waves would be enough.
In the real world, where we will fuck-up the planet, things like fusion are desperately needed to un-fuck regions of it and re-terraform them (and also to get into space exploration fast and big, not "snail-paced solar-powered").
It's not engineering problems. It's assumptions about how humans will behave!
Maybe the region where solar needs can be scaled is not in your country. Maybe you're at war with that country. Or maybe the company producing that power would only sell you the power at some outrageous price that you don't want to pay. Maybe you want to be the one selling not buying that power, you want to be the one making profit. Maybe your neighbor just considers you're an inferior race so he will not even sell you the power for the flood dams or the desalination plant. Or maybe you're the bad guy, but now because people won't sell you what you need at realistic prices you contemplate of... maybe nuking some sense into them, because if 1mil of your people might die of hunger, why not have 2mil of theirs die burned and irradiated?
Any solutions that assumes people working well together in some "perfect world order" are very dangerous. Humanity ain't "a giant organism". We're a bunch of warring tribes with carefully disguised racist, xenophobic and even purely sadistical tendencies just waiting for an excuse to come out!
We need more technologies that just work and can be used SUSTAINABLY in any random place and at any scale regardless of how bad we fucked up or we're planning to fuck up.
Energy diversity and energy security are important.
On the one hand, global trade can strengthen relationships between nations and make war less likely. On the other hand, look at how Russia uses the threat of turning off gas supplies to pressure european countries.
A solar farm has higher energy density than you might think. New York City could get ~100 gigawatts of solar power without importing anything. Further, if anyplace used close to as much energy as provided by sunlight it would get really hot.
There's other reasons you might want fusion power: any place you need a large source of power, but siphoning off ambient energy (i.e. wind, solar) isn't feasible or sufficient, fusion is the way to go or else you have to use fission or fossil fuels.
This applies to things like ships and submarines, and to spacecraft.
So yeah, solar/etc. sounds great in an ideal scenario in a perfect world, but what if you're not on this world? Solar power isn't sufficient to do serious mining operations in the asteroid belt or to redirect a large asteroid threatening to impact the Earth. It also won't power your aircraft carrier or cruise ship. A clean source of nuclear power would be ideal for all these things, if we can figure out how to make such a thing work.
Fission fits the bill perfectly in the scenarios you posit and we have almost fifty years of hard-won production experience with it. Fusion isn't really 'cleaner' than fission for most practical purposes, so why pin your hopes on something we can't even do in a practical manner at the moment? Fission also scales down much better (or at least we know how to scale it down effectively) so the power plant is much more likely to fit into the spaces available in these examples.
How is fission possibly as clean as fusion? Fission leaves behind radioactive waste material; fusion leaves behind helium. This doesn't make any sense at all.
Yes, we can't do fusion in any practical manner at the moment, but we can't do fission scaled-down either: if you disagree, please show me an example which is economically successful. US Navy ships don't count (not "economically successful"). Someone actually tried building a fission-powered commercial cargo ship ages ago; it didn't last very long. It cost so much to operate that it was retired in a few years and sent to a museum in Charleston SC. With absurdly expensive fuel, nasty waste which needs to be disposed of somehow, and extremely dangerous operation requiring highly-trained personnel, fission plants only make commercial sense when they're scaled up to gigawatt scale power plants. Fusion plants may not be practical yet, but they'll never be practical if no effort is spent on R&D to make them that way.
Neutron bombardment of your fusion containment vessel creates radioactive material. I am not sure where you get this idea that fusion is 'clean', but everything that involves pushing around fundamental particles creates radioactive waste. There are theoretical designs for fusion reactors that limit the radioactive side-effects somewhat but nothing in this area is clean.
Scaled down fission reactors like the Toshiba 4S can be sized to power an apartment building or city block. There are numerous micro reactor designs available and a variety of companies working to try to create a market for them.
When it comes to terrestrial reactors then fusion reactors will be enormous (need to generate a lot of power to compensate for the huge risk and the massive costs that it will take to build them) and if you are talking about putting reactors in space then it is foolish to consider anything but fission for at least our lifetime.
Do you need 1TW tomorrow? If so, you are fucked, sorry.
Fusion takes longer to scale than any kind of power supply we use. At least H2 + H3 fusion, that is the easiest kind does. You'd be much better building a huge solar array on demand.
If things are that fucked, any given government will have no qualms building fission plants everywhere. If you aren't super-duper paranoid about safety and radiation, fission is already pretty damn cheap.
> This might sound a bit like a buzz-kill, but I don't think fusion power is necessarily competitively cheap.
Buzz kill on hn is fine so long as you back up your opinions with rational arguments and / or citations rather than simply sharing more of your opinions as ersatz supporting evidence.
> I think it will be comparable to nuclear power with a ~ 10 times higher capital investment to build a fusion-plant.
This is my biggest problem when talking with people about nuclear -- the conflation of fission and fusion. Saying fusion compared to nuclear is like saying diesel compared to internal combustion engine.
> Already now solar is said to be cheaper then nuclear.
And solar means multiple things too - PVC and thermal, for starters. But who says this, and why, and [!?] where?
> But nevertheless humanity should explore fusion since it is more or less the only significant power source not (indrectly) depending on the sun.
Fission fits this bill too, but obviously is less desirable.
> As far as I can see the funding of fusion research is at about the same level as particle physics which definilty does not provide any other than philosophical progress.
There's no benefit from particle physics other than philosophical?
To be fair, "nuclear power" has been used for decades as a shorter way of saying "nuclear fission power". I don't think any confusion arises when saying things like "nuclear compared to fusion".
The very high cost of fission has a lot to do with how nasty, awkward, long-lasting and expensive the fuel and waste are. We really won't know until we try building a power plant.
Much of the nasty stuff comes from the fact that current (light water) reactors were actually meant to produce military plutonium. Bombs first. Energy was a by-product, and a very nice way to sell nuke-making to the civilians.
There is another way of doing fission, that was demonstrated (working prototype and all) in the 60's: molten salt. You basically dissolve the fissile matter in molten salt, provide initial heat, and you have a reaction going. This has multiple advantages:
- Originally designed for a nuclear plane, it is capable of reacting to load changes very quickly. It's basically easy to power-up, and easy to shut down.
- It is amenable to a passive security set up: when all goes wrong, the reactor shuts down by default. When it does, the radioactive matter is trapped in no-longer-molten salt, such that contamination is limited even if there is a leak.
- It consumes 90% of the fissile matter before it has to go to recycling. (Current reactors do about 10%.)
- It currently produces 5 times less waste than current reactors. There is hope to do even better.
- Last but not least, it can run off thorium, which is 4 times more abundant than uranium, and much better spread out geographically.
With one or two decades and a few billion dollars, we could make commercial grade reactors. They would almost certainly be significantly cleaner, and much safer than current light water reactors. They could adapt to changes of demand in the power grid, or compensate for the volatility of most renewable power sources without the need for a "battery miracle". Overall, they would make a terrific mid-term solution, that could last a couple centuries. More than enough time to come up with something better.
I'm sure with some extra R&D people could make those reactors reliable, but if you search the new generation reactors on Wikipedia, you'll see every one of them ended in some kind of failure.
I'll wager this was mostly because of the lack of funding. Those reactors were not as thoroughly researched as the light water ones. In a sense, they're still stuck in the 60's. (Really, putting molten salt reactors in the "new generation" bucket is a bit of a joke. It's old stuff that was shut down mostly for military and economic reasons, and only recently got more traction.)
Another possible cause is path dependence. We have a whole industry around solid fuel, light water reactors. Switching to molten salt throws much of that away.
Much research still need to be done. We may want cleaner salts, we want even less radioactive waste, and we definitely want to accurately assess the safety of this stuff ("passive security" is not enough by itself). This means more prototypes reactors, of various sizes, each more expensive than before. We want a few million dollars for the small ones, then a few billions for the big ones.
I was serious when I said I was sure some extra R&D would solve those problems.
It may not be just lack of founding. Materials science has advanced a lot since then, and those problems look solvable now, but I'm not sure they could be solved by the 60's.
I don't know who in the thorium boosters' club started the "light water reactors were meant for weapons plutonium" meme but it's nonsense.
To quote "Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction",
Reactor-grade plutonium recovered from civilian reactors differs from weapon-grade plutonium in the relative proportions of various plutonium isotopes. Reactor-grade plutonium has a higher rate of spontaneous fission reactions than weapon-grade, generating neutrons that can initiate the nuclear chain reaction during weapon detonation sooner than would be optimal. As a result, using reactor-grade plutonium in a first generation nuclear weapon can significantly reduce both the predictability and the expected yield of a weapon designed by a proliferant state.
None of the states that have either made nuclear weapons or attempted to do so appear to have selected anything but high-quality plutonium or uranium for their designs. Nevertheless,
from a technical perspective, reactor grade plutonium can be used to make nuclear weapons, and any state possessing significant quantities of separated plutonium should be considered to have the material needed to fabricate nuclear components for nuclear explosive devices in a short period of time.
If you want to seize on the part where it says that one could build bombs from civilian reactor waste even though it's less straightforward and no nuclear weapons state has ever done that, then I'll point out that the thorium fuel cycle likewise could be used for bombs even though no NWS has ever taken that path (Quoting LANL's "Thorium Based Power Systems and Relevant Safeguards Considerations"):
Thorium is not safeguarded until it is converted into fuel materials. It would seem that if the starting point for uranium safeguards is moved up and thorium begins to play a larger role in the global nuclear establishment, then thorium safeguards should move to the equivalent point in the thorium fuel cycle.
Unlike thorium, U-233 is subject to stringent safeguards. An SQ of U-233 is only 8 Kg, the same as plutonium. U-233 is a highly desirable weapons material despite any practical U-232 content. According to the material attractiveness studies done at LANL, PNNL and LLNL, the additional dose from U-232 decay products is insufficient to stop a determined adversary. While it may be somewhat beneficial to physical protection, the dose rate is not high enough to incapacitate workers. Dose rates can be greatly reduced with shielding and military personnel handling a fabricated weapon should be able to have reasonable dose rates using established techniques. For example, the pit can be stored in lead shielding and only placed in the weapon immediately before use.
The actual military lineage of civilian LWRs is that the US Navy developed pressurized water reactors fueled with enriched uranium to power vessels in the 1950s, starting with USS Nautilus. That variety of reactor had the fewest unknowns when the civilian nuclear industry first developed in the US and the path dependency effects continue today.
I'm inclined to believe modern civilian reactors are terrible at producing bomb worthy plutonium. Indeed, the main goals quickly became energy and safety.
However, this was probably not the case for the first reactors. If I recall my documentary properly "la face gâchée du nucléaire" (French and German only I'm afraid), the technology was initially chosen because it could produce plutonium. Therefore it got lots of research, and naturally ended up working best.
Submarines were of course responsible for much of the continued funding. Molten salt got cut off in no small part because the very idea of a nuclear plane was not very good.
That said, I'll need to study this subject more closely before I consider myself properly informed.
It is not surprising that a pro-thorium documentary includes the same misstatements about uranium fueled light water reactors that have spread in writing.
The very first reactors were indeed built for plutonium production. Those 1940s reactors built in Hanford, WA, USA used unenriched natural uranium for fissile material, used purified graphite as their neutron moderator, and did not generate any useful energy. In fact they were net energy consumers because they needed an external power source to move water through to keep them cooled.
Shippingport literally started with a surplus naval reactor from a cancelled aircraft carrier project. It was a pressurized light water reactor requiring enriched fuel like most reactors now operating commercially. Everything about it was different from the early plutonium reactors: the fuel, the moderator, the heat exchange... by a funny coincidence, Shippingport was also the only commercial reactor in the US to use the thorium fuel cycle, from 1977 to 1982.
>I don't know who in the thorium boosters' club started the "light water reactors were meant for weapons plutonium" meme but it's nonsense.
Maybe the misunderstanding started from the fact that the first British power-generation reactors were intended to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Those reactors were quite different from light-water reactors: graphite-moderated, gas-cooled, and using unenriched fuel.
Fusion produces energetic neutrons, and energetic neutrons are a very good way to make things radioactive. So all the popular approaches create waste that is more radioactive than fission waste, and probably comparable in volume.
The only up side is that the decay products have a shorter half life. So the waste will only be a problem for a century or so, instead of for millennia.
This may be better than fission, but it's definitely not clean by any realistic definition of the word.
The advantage with Fusion is that you can control what elements are exposed to the neutron flux and so control what sort of new elements or isotopes you get. For instance there's basically nothing in the air except for dust that will absorb a neutron and turn into something you have to worry about. And part of the design of a fusion reactor is to use lithium to absorb as many neutrons as possible to breed tritium to feed back into the reaction.
By contrast the byproducts of a fission reaction are set by the fuels used and include really nasty stuff like Strontium-90 and so on. But even fission plants are designed so that the radioactive byproducts are essentially all spent fuel or things contaminated by spent fuel. Neutron activation is a design consideration rather than a source of waste.
Of course the neutron flux will tend to enbrittle the metals used in it's construction which will have the effect of increasing maintenance costs.
Uranium mining is a nasty business. Deuterium concentration is, by comparison, just a bunch of water-filled centrifuges. Surly that would make a large difference all on its own, no?
> The only up side is that the decay products have a shorter half life. So the waste will only be a problem for a century or so, instead of for millennia.
This sounds like a tremendous underestimation of the problem - handling waste.
We have people who live 'for a century or so' but we don't even have languages (now!) that have lasted a millenia.
Our current "decay product" of energy generation (carbon) is going to impact our world for a lot longer than a century. I'll take known-quantity, manageable century-long decay products over unknown-quantity, nearly unmanageable (large-scale carbon sequestration is hard) any day.
You might make the case that MSA and Classical Arabic is an exception, but MSA is not spoken natively AFAIK. Other than that, I cannot think of any examples where a language spoken by someone a thousand years ago would be intelligible now. Languages change in sound, structure and vocabulary over time naturally. That's how we got the Romance languages from Latin (which is no longer spoken).
However, language standardization artificially slows down change, so current languages might last a lot longer. English hasn't changed that much since Shakespeare and the KJV.
Maybe interesting to you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conservative_(l...
Yes, for written form you could make that argument, though there are some differences between the two. Also, it didn't really "last" in the normal sense, since it was revived in modern times.
Also, Tibetan maintains the same spellings from 1200 years ago, but that really just means that it's very, very difficult to spell, since the pronunciation no longer matches spelling well.
These make interesting exceptions to the general rule, so I think the original point is still very valid. I'm curious about old vs. modern Syrian, if anyone knows about that.
Okay, point taken - we certainly do have some languages still in use that that have lasted more than a millennia.
I'd posit that storage is not a solved problem, and a big part of that is a lack of confidence that we can reliably communicate with the people who will have to deal with this waste in the distant future.
There's also the inherent disdain involved in passing on massive costs and risks to future generations to solve a comparatively short-term problem of ours.
Not really, fusion needs to keep the reaction in a near vacuum where fission uses a multi loop system which creates a lot more surface area and waste. Further the blanket needs to be made from lithium to make tritium in a DT fusion setup capturing those fast neutrons without creating long term waste.
Most importantly they are vastly safer and thus need far less security and far less insurance. Remember a huge benefit for PV solar and wind is they don't need guards.
PS: Another consideration is the half life is short enough that over 20 years things become a lot less radioactive. Fission has some half lives just long enough to be a real pain.
I don't think fusion power will be "too cheap to meter" just like fission wasn't anywhere near that. However, I do think we'll be able to make fusion reactors that are much more compact, like what Lockheed Martin is trying to build. I also think we'll achieve significantly more power/volume, which will be very useful for space ships in the future.
I agree - always been a bit mystified when fusion power is described as "cheap", fuel isn't a big component of the cost of fission power plants so even if the fuel is low cost it won't save you that much money.
[I guess decommissioning costs might be lower but are they actually included in the costs of operating normal nuclear plants?]
I bet regulatory compliance is a big chunk of the costs. Those regulations are bound to be much more strict for a fission plant that can potentially blow up and contaminate a large area compared to a fusion plant with a safe failure mode by default (the plasma just shuts down).
The worst case scenarios for an accident at a fusion plant aren't nearly as bad as those at a fission plant so you should be able to get by with somewhat less in terms of paranoid safety measures and overbuilding.
> Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities.
What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar? Why is so difficult to harness that source? Maybe the same obstacles make fusion so difficult to pursue.
Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a relatively average nuclear plant.
The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers 25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per 1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant.
That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve as the world's primary source of electrity.
More importantly, with fusion, energy could become significantly cheaper allowing us to do things which weren't economically viable.
Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting aluminium rather than steel + concrete.
Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of land.
Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source.
A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.
> Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities, allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.
Please, no. Some of what you said I'm onboard with, but definitely not this. The human impact of perpetual day is large and negative. The negative impact of massive artificial lighting on astronomy is also quite massive.
Until recently the limiting factor on utility scale solar was high costs. Now intermittency looks like the most important constraint. Land availability is not the bottleneck for the US or most other countries. There are some countries that have a dense enough population and/or low enough insolation that land availability is a significant constraint on solar deployment (Japan, Taiwan, UK, Belgium...) but that's not common.
The real annualized power of the Topaz Solar Farm comes to 6 megawatts per square kilometer, using its 2015 generation total of 1,301,337 MWh. At that areal productivity[1], if you could ignore intermittency, it would take ~95,000 square kilometers to supply the 2013 US electricity demand of 4,986,400,000 MWh.
The US Corn Growers Association estimated that 27% of US corn grown in 2011 was for ethanol, and corn covered 92 million acres:
Converting 27% of 92 million acres to square kilometers, the US is using about 100,500 km^2 to produce ethanol.
But you can't ignore intermittency, so (barring much improved storage, which may happen but can't be assumed) solar PV is not a drop-in replacement for nuclear power.
[1]Other areas of the US get less sun than central California, but newer farms with more efficient panels and single axis tracking increase areal productivity significantly over the fixed-tilt CdTe construction of Topaz, so I think that 6 MW/km^2 is a reasonable number to use.
Because there's a hard upper limit of 1367 watts per square meter.
And, practically speaking, you're not going to reach 10% of that (panel efficiency, angles, cloud cover, air transmissivity, weather, damage, dust/dirt, night/dawn/dusk, conduit resistance, storage loss, etc).
That means the only way to scale up is land surface area, about 10,000 square kilometers of solar panels for 1TW power production, covering about 0.1% of the USA.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm just presenting objective numbers. I'm thrilled about Tesla / Solar City pushing rooftop solar with "invisible" tiles, and think every home should be built with at least the whole roof covered with solar panels. Independence is a big deal, and having at least substantial off-grid power is important.)
If we could use the concept of space elevators and instead floated solar "panels" in the sky we could achieve two things, unimpeded surface area for installation and second a sunshield to cool things off a bit and forestall climatologically induced planetary change.
Yes, although one wonders what the impact might be on ecosystems with less energy coming in (even if we limited the sunshields to underproductive polar regions).
Yes, we already have a clean fusion reactor with wireless power transfer to every location on earth (weaker signal at poles). All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver!
All we need to invent is the wireless energy receiver!
We did, and we've already hit the quantum limit of how efficient they can be.
It isn't enough.
Well it is enough, but there isn't an efficient method to store or transmit the captured power. Solar is awesome, but the places it is most available also happens to be where it is least needed, in general, I'm aware of Saudi Arabia.
It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy. Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient.
It should also be pointed out that Solar is the most [1] green house gas producing method of green energy.
... but still tiny compared to any form of fossil fuel or biomass!
Presumably the carbon footprint of solar is largely made up of fossil fuel used in the production and installation of PV panels themselves. This would decline over time as the grid, and vehicles, become greener. Eventually, new panels would be produced using energy from existing panels, closing the loop.
Wind, Nuclear, Hydro-Electric, and Tidal are all vastly more carbon efficient.
The difference is pretty small according to the table you posted. They're all much, much better than fossil fuels.
So, the word "vastly" above might be overstating things.
Solar certainly isn't the most efficient, but it's pretty damn efficient compared to anything produced by biological processes.
I'm not comparing Roof Top solar to Coal or Natural Gas yes very clear winner there. I'm comparing it to Hydro-Electric, Nuclear, Tidal, and Wind where it is by far the dirtiest.
You know, I edited out a sentence that read something like "unless you're playing statistical games with percentages" because I thought to myself that this was an unfair projection of what you might be thinking.
Thank you for making it clear that I was not being unfair, even in my pre-edited state.
They are a small difference compared to extractive mining. Statistics rhetorical tricks aside, the world would be much better off if we were using any mix of the non-extractive power technologies, even if that mix heavily weights rooftop solar.
Fundamentally the fact that rooftop solar is something I can put some money into tomorrow and see the results in six months means it is effective, which offends many people who would prefer that we spend our efforts in ineffective ways, either for ideological reasons (amusing that nuclear doesn't appeal to these types) or because they wish to maintain the status quo. Since the science shows that status quo is going to drown the island I live on inside of 75 years, I'm not a big fan of this point of view. My island is probably already dead, and the 80K people that live here need to find a new home in our or our children's lifetimes, but I am motivated to make choices that don't produce more stories like mine.
When you say "it isn't enough", what exactly are you referring to? It isn't enough for what?
It doesn't have to do everything. But it's something, and something you can personally choose to do. As opposed to, oh, for example a geothermal facility, which I can't exactly put in my back yard.
The tilt and rotation of the earth also has a blocking effect, resulting in significant seasonal and daily variations in signal strength. Weather phenomena also effects it in many areas.
Still, the virtually unlimited energy available via this means is making it increasingly promising. Moving forward, storage technology will help overcome some of the limitations.
Said variations cause significant motion in the fluid surrounding the receivers. Building alternative secondary receivers to extract this indirect energy can yield additional gains.
I kind of agree. I'm no expert whatsoever but I am under the impression that the energy issues we face are more a problem of storage than production.
If we could store energy cheaply and efficiently, we would not need fusion plants. We would just use solar power. And if we had fusion plants without a cheap and efficient way to store energy, there would still be energy problems like in transportation, wouldn't there? I mean the reason most cars for instance are not electric nowadays is not because we can't generate enough electricity, it's because we can't store enough electric energy in a car.
> What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar?
Perhaps we should not go "all on" anything. Solar is available now, it's getting cheaper by the day, and it's very easy to install and use. But it's intermittent, requires storage, it's not portable except at low levels, and energy density is not that great.
Fusion is obviously not available now. But when figured out, it would have all the strengths of classic nuclear energy without most of its weaknesses.
We should keep deploying solar as fast as possible, while aggressively pushing for fusion research.
For an early glimpse of this fusion powered future upopia, check out the power of present day fusion power. New generation is coming online at 2.5 cents US per kWh. Compare that to retail electric rates of 15 cents / kWh in parts of the US. Incredible!
And this new fusion power is completely clean and emission free, and what's more, generates no nuclear waste whatsoever! Worst case accident: oops, Fred dropped a solar panel on his toe.
> I would love to see a huge effort towards fusion, on the same (or even greater) scale as the Manhattan project or the Apollo program.
You are. It's just not happening in the US, which has apparently decided that since coal was good enough for the 19th century, it's good enough for the 21st.
My Physics of Electrical Power Generation lecturer told us pretty flatly that we should not expect or bank on fusion power in our lifetimes. He said we should concentrate on renewables (which seems to be the way most countries are going in Europe at least).
Re: 2) it's already working, it's just the energy in isn't less than the energy out yet (but it's constantly getting better).
Harnessing fossil fuels for cheap energy was so revolutionary that it's necessary for almost all aspects of our life. It would be great to do that with hydrogen too.
I get what your saying, but I wouldn't consider something to be working if it requires more energy in than it produces.
It's not like people are questioning whether we could ever produce a fusion reaction. We're questioning whether it's actually viable as an energy source.
There was a reddit AMA in 2011 where a guy went to China and got stem cell treatments for his paralysis[1] and could walk now. Nobody on Reddit believed him. They basically spent the whole AMA trying to tell him it didn't happen. Then America did it 2016 and everyone was like "The Future is here and we did it first!"[2]. No, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed, or maybe it's already happening somewhere in China.
We do tend to diminish achievements from Asia historically. They discovered America first (the whole notion of "discovering" first a place where there already are people is absurd), they got printing first, they mastered gunpowder first... and yet most westerners will name Columbus, Gutenberg, and Europe.
>We do tend to diminish achievements from Asia historically
Except Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. I think a healthy skepticism of China is warranted. Especially a People's Daily article. The newspaper that was a driving force during the Cultural Revolution.
For what it's worth, I'm in France and it's common knowledge here that China invented gunpowder. I don't think I've ever heard someone saying Europe did.
Apparently, back in the 19th century people credited Berthold Schwarz [0] with the inventiom of gunpowder. I remember reading Beyond Good and Evil and reading in the preface that "the Germans invented gunpowder" and being rather puzzled, but it turns out that that was considered a fact at the time.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if gunpowder was discovered independently in Europe, or at least partly so because nobody walked out of China with a recipe for it.
The whole notion of "discovering" first a place where there already are people is not absurd.
You discover that this continent exist from your point of view. There were people already living there but they were totally ignorant of where they were living, in fact most of them were in Stone or bronze's age.
"they got printing first, they mastered gunpowder first"
Nobody will tell you this ever(that they got printing first). They will tell you that printing in metal last hundreds of times more than printing in porcelain or wood, and making it possible was a significant contribution that changed the world. How much typography do you see done today in porcelain? I have seen wood printing in China as an an art form, but not as something serious.
Gunpower was mastered by Europe with the invention of gunpower without fumes of course, that is absolutely true. You should try yourself a weapon done with black gunpower to see the difference. It happened in Europe because of the scientific revolution that happened only in Europe because of the Gutenberg press among other things. Not just that but dynamite, TNT...
The reality is that Asia created achievements until XV century, but they remained stagnant for 4 or 5 centuries. This is not something that I say, it is something that any Chinese will tell you.
If you're basing the claim that they discovered America first on the book 1421 (which many people do) then you should know it's generally considered to be very poor quality historical research by most historians.
Reminds me of the story of a young boxer from my gym. He eventually became very popular and gotten a World Kickboxing champion title. HE was very humble and trained at our gym all the time. There was this guy that challenged him few times over the span of his title and every time he endup KO the champion. So it was funny watching him being an undisputed champion on the TV, yet knowing he got beaten to KO few times by someone who hasn't been boxing professionally or did not make a career out of his box..
Do you automatically disbelieve everything coming out of Europe, the United States, or any other country that carries out scientific research or has a regulatory framework for medicine? If you don't believe in the ability of China to run a life and death regulatory agency without systemic fraud, what is your reason for trusting their journalists?
It took only a few minutes to track down the original source for this claim to an article by the Economic Information Daily [1]. I don't speak or read the language but Google Translate did a pretty good job: the CFDA (Chinese FDA equivalent) report was neither made public nor shown to the journalist and the article is based on "an anonymous source within the agency." Putting aside the reliability of the source, according to the article their definition of fraud includes omission of adverse reactions and other clinical data.
I'm sorry to break it to you but no other medical regulatory agency on earth is much better. There have been no conclusive studies on omission of data in clinical trials in the US or Europe so for all we know 100% of their trials fall under the definition of fraudulent used by the SFDA. This is a problem the FDA is painfully aware of because of their very public failures, like Rofecoxib (Vioxx), which were due to clinical data withheld by pharmaceutical companies. Regulations for mandatory reporting were only enacted by the FDA in 2008 and since then the system has been plagued by fraud driven by our top institutions [2].
Without access to that report and the raw data, the article is classic FUD. The same problems are systemic in agencies like the FDA which has nearly a century more experience regulating drugs than the CFDA.
That is an unfortunate place to be in. Generally the question is what is said vs what is not said which can often provide the extra color commentary about how surprising the breakthrough actually is.
So for example, they have a "file" photo rather than the current apparatus. One of the challenges everyone is working on is "apparatus erosion" in which containment causes parts of the assembly to become, well, more plasma.
Then there is energy output, not a lot of details about how much energy they were getting out vs how much they were putting in. Running for 60 seconds should make possible a number of fairly accurate measurements of their efficiency. This is important because it is "easy" to make non-net energy plasmas that last for a long time, it is "hard" to create a plasma that providing the necessary environment for fusion to occur. Here is a great description of "H mode" confinement : https://www.euro-fusion.org/glossary/h-mode-h-regime/ which discusses that it is suceptible to ELM's (or bursts of plasma out of the side that eat away at your tokamak :-)
As a result of what they do not say, and do not show, I think the term "breakthrough" is probably a bit over used here, more like "progress along the path of building a tokamak unit." And progress is good, you learn new things with each step.
It is quite possible that most of the new inventions will be coming from China, and also most of China's scientific production will be rubbish. China has been great with scaling up its scientific community, but the problem of establishing an academic culture of scientific honesty is harder.
I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you implying that "an academic culture of scientific honesty" is something the non-Chinese world has but China doesn't?
You are demonstrating awareness of the point being made: if scientific fraud was as rampant here as it is in China, Theranos wouldn't even be remarkable and still unknown. But it is in fact rare enough to cause scandal.
If you want to keep that attitude and make non-contributory quips, go back to Reddit. It is not appreciated here.
Most of Big Pharma's medicines don't actually work.
As in, they don't work to cure the underlying condition. They work to treat the symptoms, and thereby require you to take the medicine fairly indefinitely if you want to by symptom free, side effects notwithstanding. Thereby extracting economic value from the generally unwell and ageing population and concentrating it in the hands of Big Pharma.
In that way I see most of medicine as being fraudulent.
Also, you're probably being down-voted for your last sentence, as it is, as you say not appreciated here.
If Big Pharma developed treatments-rather-than-cures as a deliberate strategy to milk recurring revenue, biotech startups could ignore those recurring treatments and take over the market with easier-or-equally-difficult-to-find one shot cures that doctors, patients, and insurance companies would all prefer. But it turns out that Biology is Hard and the indefinite treatments are still used because neither incumbents nor startups have been able to find drugs that are once-and-for-all cures for diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson's, etc. It's the same reason we don't have Mr. Fusion powering our cars instead of liquid hydrocarbons: not because the sinister oil cartels are suppressing technology, but because developing that sort of breakthrough is extremely hard.
And then you get to this convoluted certification and approval process that more or less guarantees that the startup is going to be dead before it starts selling anything.
Certainly, it's an issue throughout the West as well, to a degree. For that matter, my guess would be that the culture of honesty is improving in China while it worsens in, say, the U.S..
Quite a few Chinese with PhDs earned it from abroad (US, Europe). With the lack of resources in the US for students obtaining professorship, many of them are going back to China with lucrative offers. They will bring back whatever they learned in the US - and if they saw scientific integrity in the labs here, then they will transform it in China.
In parallel, like how China has been cracking down on political corruption because it doesn't benefit the people, I imagine/hope they do the same for academic dishonesty.
Perhaps, but catching up is easier than surpassing. We've seen the same with Japan where trajectories were set to overtake the West two decades ago (on science, economy, etc), but when they reached parity the progress slowed down considerably.
The difference is that China has made epic investments in education and training, while the US, the UK, and some other Western countries have worked hard to make education and training more expensive and less accessible.
There's also been a hollowing out of independent inquiry in Western academia, and its replacement by a for-profit-only paper production sweatshop, with universities becoming corporations that have no respect for their employees and only care about short term profitability.
I think we're probably somewhere close to parity now. Both systems are broken in their different ways, but the bottom line for investors is that the Chinese system has a lot more potential to grow than the system in the US.
Trump is likely to make things worse rather than better. I suspect he literally doesn't understand what scientific and technological research is, never mind appreciate why it needs to be supported.
Interestingly, the only western power actually still doing something is Germany, which just started a program to invest another 200 billion EUR into education over the next few years.
We might see a return of Germany surpassing the US in science output again.
That program was being discussed as part of the reinvestments over the next 10 years, funded by the tax surplus.
The idea was to spread it to about 20 billion a year, and a similar amount being spent on infrastructure, which would roughly match the 48 billion EUR tax surplus.
It was supposed to be voted on earlier, but I’m not sure what’s being discussed right now, it’s all still unclear.
I do know that some states have already started investing into education, under the assumption they’d get the money back through that.
I would say producing and designing interesting things that work at half the price of the rest of the world might have a better correlation with China's reputation.
> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887,[1] to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry (Merchandise Marks Act - Oxford University Press).[2]
I like to look at the discussion of wikipedia article. Note that the reference "[2]" is not pointing to oxford university press but rather to a spiegel article.
The actual act can be found here [1].
"With regard to direct false indications of origin the matter is simple enough. If knives are imported marked Sheffield when they have been manufactured in Germany, it will be evident that a fraud has been committed."
"But in the case of indirect indications of origin the matter is not so simple. The use of the English language in descriptive expressions such as "superfine make" on a label applied to goods coming from a foreign-speaking country is undoubtedly, under the ACt a false indication of manufacture"
"In addition to these indications of British manufacture, there are many other wordsused on goods in other languages which might be false or not according to the country from which they are imported. Such words, for instance, as "Mode de Paris,""
In other words, the focus of that act was not things that have been intentionally mislabeled, but rather the junk that people nowadays consider hip combined with the fact that people probably knew even less foreign languages back then than they do now. But anyway I guess it's a matter of opinion whether you take an interpretation of the original text or someones understanding of the understanding of someones thesis.
I don't really know what your point is because I don't understand the language discussion.
In any case, there is no doubt that Germany copied major parts of the industrial revolution from Britain. Or do you think they (we) developed all the same things just a bit later independently, by chance?
The point is that all people copy, in response to a specific comment about China. Yeah... and after reading your comment three more times I still don't understand what point you are trying to make? I think you are trying to say something about the intent of why "Made in Germany" was introduced, but I don't see anything about that in the linked page, just some obscure discussion about language but no larger context. It seems to me the linked page is about some obscure details.
Schuyler Towne has an amazing discussion of this, how Europeans routinely were laughing at American inventions... until they suddenly very much weren't.
I'd link directly to the relevant five minutes but it's hard to justify doing that sort of harm, depriving you of the other great 45 minutes there.
(Ok, let's say it's 34ish to 41ish. Still, that entire thing is probably better than the other way you were going to spend some 50 minute block today.)
It's also the origin of "Made in Germany" which initially was supposed to warn British consumers against the simple copies from Germany...alas it has turned into more of a seal of quality later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany
I suspect it's your unequivocal use of the word "had". All we know for sure that they had was one unreplicatable experiment which has since been shown to be deeply flawed in both execution and observation.
It was a big scandal at the time (late 80s), and a cautionary tale shared quickly with us Utah phd students. Cold fusion is (or was) synonymous with research break throughs promoted too early that are later found to be BS.
People downvote the smallest things. I've found it's not as much of an obstacle to continuing the thread as you might think; certainly compared to, say, any moderately popular subreddit.
I wasn't aware of that. Their companies have the same problem with financial reporting when they're listed on U.S. exchanges. By default, you're supposed to be (extra) skeptical.
EAST seems to be connected to ITER, and is testing confinement methods like those planned for ITER. Here is an ITER press release about EAST hitting that 32 s H-mode confinement: https://www.iter.org/newsline/291/1783
Hm, so I think the experiment this article alludes to is not exactly the same as the February one. This article seems to be based on this press release:
http://www.ipp.ac.cn/xwdt/tpxw/201611/t20161102_352924.html which (using Google Translate) says "In a new round of physical experiments launched in August 2016, the EAST team achieved steady-state, high-confinement-mode plasmas for more than 60 seconds in mid-October by further optimizing the steady-state operation integrated control at long pulse time scales".
It seems they reported their latest results at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (17–22 October 2016); I'm guessing that they did a press release based on that, and that's why it's getting picked up by news.
Anyone remember that really old game Outpost? It ran on Windows 3.1; used a CD recording of The Planets as its soundtrack. That's the first time I've heard of Tokamak reactors.
What these are trying to achieve is pretty amazing. I hope one day, one of these reactors will be able to sustain a greater output than input. It has the potential to move the planet into a completely different energy age. Imagine if we could build something with that kind of energy output on Mars.
Funny, the picture instantly reminded me of the Shinra and its reactors in Final Fantaisy VII :) [1]
Regarding Mars, I would love someone who knows to tell us how this would compare to raw sun energy exploitation. Each time I think of solar energy, I can't help but think it's a waste to try to collect it under the atmosphere, given one of its useful properties is precisely to protect us from the sun. My thinking usually then go into thinking a solar farm would be way more efficient in space, or on Mars. Could someone debunk or confirm this?
The biggest problem with setting a solar farm in space is efficient energy transfer [1]. Bezos proposes to build also industrial zones in space, but then the problem is raw material transfer [2]. The easiest thing to do is to reap what you can here on surface of the Earth.
Orbital solar is such a fantastic idea, until you realize that any kind of energy transfer at useful scales is almost by necessity going to be strategically equivalent to a BF laser beam. Needless to say, that's going to be a tricky subject in the current geopolitical climate.
I'm reminded of the book "The Mote in God's Eye", which featured an alien race using an enormous orbital laser array to launch an interstellar solar sail vehicle. The launch was pretty much the crowning achievement of the race, and also the pretty much the last one, as the launch laser was almost immediately turned back on the planet itself.
God, I hated that game; Outpost was my No Man's Sky. It was an overhyped game that did not deliver on the promised features and was peddled by computer magazine shills as the greatest thing.
You're thinking about the novel Earth by David Brin. Outpost 2 had gray goo gobbling up a space colony that was made up of the last remnants of Earth that escaped an asteroid strike.
Hmm, you might be thinking of the second one, the RTS? The first had Earth struck by an asteroid that split in two when trying to defend. The entire game was on a far planet you travelled to, turn based strategy I believe.
I personally enjoyed the novella that came with it more than the game itself. I got frustrated having to beat these stupid levels in order to read the next chapter..
For someone more knowledgeable about the state of fusion research: is this really a "breakthrough" or just another incremental step? It seems they only kept it stable for about twice as long as they did four year ago and that's not much of a breakthrough even if we did break the arbitrary one minute limit (or maybe its not arbitrary and becomes harder to keep stable approaching a minute for some reason?)
At this point it seems that the only real breakthroughs we can make in fusion research is maybe another technique like magnetic or inertial confinement and a power neutral/positive reactor, along with breakthroughs in orthogonal fields like material science.
It's an incremental step on a long road. To be sure, the ultimate goal is to understand how to control the plasma well enough to support indefinitely long pulses. But incremental improvements add up, or rather they compound like interest.
Yep, steam turbines. For more exotic fusion scenarios that don't produce neutrons, Direct Conversion is a possibility, but that's even more pie-in-the-sky at this point.
Yes. That also makes it difficult to scale up to energy production - now you need to route a bunch of cooling water plumbing and heat exchangers around it, engineer it to transfer the bulk of the reactor heat output to the cooling water without melting any heat exchangers, then build a turbine/generator rig to attach to it. Might possibly need an extra water loop too, depending on how much neutron flux ends up hitting the water and plumbing when running at a reaction rate sufficient to generate power.
Actually no, the heat needs to escape to keep the temperature under control. The temperature is what has to be kept in the proper range for Fusion to occur at the planned rate. I don't know as much about control of fusion reactions as I'd like, but I think the reaction rate is highly temperature-dependant, so we'll want to keep the temperature in a tight range. Too low a reaction rate, and the plasma cools down too much and would have to be re-heated externally; too high and you might burn up fuel faster than you can resupply it, causing what I guess you would call a stall, also requiring a restart.
All of the reactions we've generated so far have a low to nonexistent reaction rate, because the reaction generates lots of heat, and the research reactor designs we're using don't have a way to extract that heat at power-generation levels. To build a power reactor, we'll have to maintain the reaction temperature, at which massive amounts of heat are generated, and extract that heat to keep the temperature stable.
Designing the heat transfer for that is sure to be fun. I don't know the temperature of the burning plasma, but I'm sure it's insanely high compared to any kind of conventional material or process. So somebody has to design a system to transfer GigaWatts of heat from a burning plasma at effectively infinite temperature to some perfectly ordinary water at a controlled rate without melting anything.
I don't think the plasma being too hot is a problem in a tokamak. The average ion energy is not enough for fusion; we rely on the high-energy tail end of the Maxwellian distribution. Any potential source of heat loss from the ions is a liability, including the natural predilection for ions to transfer their energy to electrons, not to mention radiative losses. Keeping the plasma hot enough is really the essential problem.
AFAIK, the goal is not necessarily indefinitely long pulses, but pulses long enough to allow for a net positive energy output. This is the reason why there is also pulsed laser research, etc. The bar is high, but we don't need perfection to make a lasting impact.
Seems like an important and expected increase in capability. Bit late though, original plan seems to have been 2014: https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916
It's incremental, but, really, pretty much every development in fusion energy is going to be incremental, just given the scale and complexity of the facilities.
Just a quick note that this report comes from people.cn, a mouthpiece media of the CCP. Perhaps more coverage from other sources would make this more persuasive.
People.cn is the website of the [People's Daily][1], which is a longstanding, official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Not figuratively or in the sense of having a slant or something, but it's literally the Party's official newspaper.
It's tempting to equate it to Voice of America, but even VoR is managed quite differently. There's not a direct equivalent in the US press, because the systems work differently.
There is probably an analogy to the early days of US democracy, where the newspapers were just owned by major politicians or their leg-breakers. The Adams-Jefferson contest in Congress was apparently conducted largely through newspapers hosing each other in bile.
What you don't seem to realize is this: Depending on what they are reporting on, papers like the NYT, Reuters, etc, are quite literally official newspapers of the US govt.
And that applies not just to newspapers, but also to TV and radio stations.
That's not what I've read above. It seems to me that some on this thread are saying they distrust science (and therefore science reporting) out of China because of the low quality of historical science and science journalism from China.
Kadin's comment, which I replied to, never mentioned anything about science or science reporting. He only talked about press in general and made the point that since the news organization is not trustworthy, any news out of it can't be trusted. You were the only one talking about science reporting out of all the comments in the whole thread. That's kind of irrelevant to the specific discussion.
Edit: Or are you saying the science news reporting from People.cn are separated from the political reporting and thus can be trusted? You were making the point that science reporting and political reporting are different.
Compared to the stellerator, tokamak is an older design. Germans have sucessfully built and tested the second generation stellerator, Wendelstein 7-X[1]. Now it will run for 32 minutes, where the Tokamak design is targeted for 1000 seconds, or 16 minutes. (Yes, a stellerator is much harder to build, but it's easier to control the plasma with; building one became feasible only after doing finite element analysis optimizations.)
That they got the tokamak design to work is a testament to "when in doubt, use brute force" maxim by Ken Thompson. It shows what can be done when banging on something until it works, but I don't think it's the best way forward, because the stellerator design already works, is easier to control plasma with, and is now in its third revision.
"This is not the first time that EAST has generated enduring plasma. In 2012, plasma in a similar environment was maintained for 32 seconds, breaking the world record at that time. Since then, EAST has had its tungsten diverters and auxiliary heating system upgraded, laying the foundation to create long-pulse, high-confinement plasma.
Officially established in 2006, the EAST fusion reactor is run by the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, which aims for plasma pulses lasting up to 1,000 seconds."
6 years after establishment, it got to 3.2% of its goal.
What was the new record time?
So after 10 years, it's 10.2% of their goal. ~3% in 6 years to ~7% in 4 years. The rate may keep rising or they may find something sooner. Hopefully it won't take another 50 years to reach their goal.
But solar/wind is good reason to. I was amazed at how low the energy payment time for solar is - 0.5-1.5 years. With span of 20 - it gives 10 EROEI ... that is respectable. Not as oil in eras past (1 to 100) but in line with current 1 to 13
The Manhattan Project cost about $26bn in 2016 dollars, while ITER is expected to cost over $20bn by the time it's done.
The problem with trying to solve something like this by throwing money at it too early, is what if the technological approach chosen doesn't work out? The more money you put into it, the more you would waste. Right now there at least half a dozen possible ways Fusion could be achieved commercially, but we don't know which one(s) will pan out. Even then, to be viable some of them may require the development of enabling technologies we haven't even thought of yet. So yes they are worth pursuing, but on the basis of a measured assessment of cost and benefit.
The Manhattan project took place over about 5 years. The US has been investigating fusion since at least the 40s.
ITER is also an international effort, funded by 36 countries, not just the US. The US also withdrew from funding it for 6 years in 2000 so I don't know what its total involvement will be, but so far it will be well short of its involvement in the Manhattan project.
I agree that the money that should be invested in fusion shouldn't all be spent on a single approach though.
Doesn't fusion pose the ability to overcome our energy needs without threatening the environment? Also, if one nation were to gain exclusive access to fusion, wouldn't they have an extreme advantage?
Should we be doing a Manhattan project to get fusion powerplants?
>Should we be doing a Manhattan project to get fusion powerplants?
All the evidence I see is that politicians are primarily concerned with enriching themselves and the people who financially support them. The moment America's position as a global leader comes is when this will happen, as long as the scientific community calls for it as they did with the atomic bomb. Right now, it appears the right incentives are not in place for politicians to put this forward, even if it is the right thing to do for the welfare of humanity and the long-term success of the US as a global leader--the politicians who could make this happen probably believe they will be dead by the time it would matter to them.
Yes it probably exempts us, in theory, from greenhouse gas related global warming. That said, energy generation isn't the only problem — energy transport is important too, and fossil fuels are still king (hard to have a tokamak in your car).
Even then we only have a few more doublings before we start reaching thermodynamic limits of our planet's ability to radiate heat into space.
You can make a lightning rod with a plasma creating laser. Could you make a fusion container with a 3d printed plasma cage, through which you channel lightning? Or at least patch existing unwinding containment with this?
And I don't mean to demonize fission power at all. Just wanted to point out that a fusion reaction must be sustained while a fission reaction must be controlled. Of course there's more to that story as well since a fission reactor could be designed with some kind of passive failsafe (e.g. a frozen plug which seals the reactor core or something similar).
The "nuclear waste is.. nuclear waste" bit is a thoughtless, easy jab that plays on the unfounded fear of nuclear energy. Safely stored nuclear waste isn't a danger to anybody.
I also don't like how the rest of the video continues to try to put nuclear in a bad light, going as far as implying it's not "clean energy".
Is it more dangerous than Global Warming, though? If Global Warming is really coming, and really as dangerous as people say, then who gives a damn about some nuclear waste? Build the plants now, we'll have plenty of time to figure out what to do with any waste when we aren't underwater.
Its byproducts, spent material, can be safely stored indefinitely in appropriate facilities. Running nuclear plants doesn't pollute the environment. How is it not clean?
Much of the actual, exiting waste however is not stored safely. And the two INES scale 1 incidents we had did pollute the environment pretty badly. So yes it is pretty dirty so far.
You don't get very far in life relying on best-case scenario planning.
Yea, and even best case scenario is an indefinite nuclear waste facility somewhere inside Yucca mountain for the world to worry about for thousands of years to come.
It's interesting that it may be cleaner than traditional fossil fuels, but suggesting nuclear waste does not pose any environmental risk because it can be safely stored is exactly as you say: it's like saying anything does not pose risk because it can be safely averted. I could use the same logic to argue cars do not pose any safety risk because we can safely avert accidents. It's just wishful thinking to say we are capable to not make mistakes, and it's not logical to say there is no risk when there is.
https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_...
In 1976, a number of plans for investing in fusion were described, and what actually happened was that less was invested in fusion even than the level at which the program plan predicted we would never achieve fusion. This is the kind of thing that anyone who cares about humanity in general should find upsetting.
Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top priorities.
Working, economic fusion power has a chance to revolutionize life as we know it. The countries that have access to the technology first will be at the forefront of a huge economic, social, cultural, scientific change.
It's more important than going to Mars (and would probably make going to Mars significantly easier). It's more important than nearly anything we're working on.