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Fusion energy breakthrough

Fishies have VERY obscure, and in some cases, not uncommonly, very poor taste in humour.

I LONG ago learnt to attach a :)
 
Assume there's a real person behind the post, a person who enjoys life so much that injection of a little humour is seen as a good thing. Honestly, who doesn't like a little laugh now and again, whether the source be a perfectly timed fart, a pie in the face, or a football in the groin.


Joe
 
Anyone remember cold fusion? That didn’t do much either but at a vastly reduced price.
 
Seeker,

Sure, a non-bomb first in fusion. I'm not sure how the funk bomb is classified — fission, fusion, or just funky — but it was a first once upon a time, too. Now if only that energy could be sustained and controlled, our problems would be solved.

Joe
 
Joe P said:
Where the line is drawn between a breakthrough vs an important development
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Suppose the previous record had been 99% of energy put in. And someone achieves 101%. Is that a breakthrough in fusion technology? No.

"It was a bigger jump than that" you say.

But "a breakthrough ... by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time" said the headline. Reason given is not size of leap, not novelty of approach, but passing one particular metric.

Substitute the word breakthrough with "historic milestone"* and the headline makes more sense to me. Or maybe there really was a novel approach and huge leap, in which case the whole headline oughta** change.

*and I think it is
**to quote Alanis Morrisette
 
Darren,

Sure, I’m not fussed either way. I think more energy out than in is big news and worthy of the headline, but if others disagree that’s fine. It’s just the words we use to describe something.

Maybe we should develop a metric calibrated against technological achievements in Trek. I’d say that the recent fusion result is up there with the stolen Romulan cloaking device working just fine when plugged into the ship without any dongles or beta testing.


But it's not up there with the Dolman of Elas's neckless being a useable source of dilithium after the ship's dilithium crystals were fused by saboteurs.


Joe
 
Joe P said:
Darren,

Sure, I’m not fussed either way. I think more energy out than in is big news and worthy of the headline, but if others disagree that’s fine. It’s just the words we use to describe something.

Maybe we should develop a metric calibrated against technological achievements in Trek. I’d say that the recent fusion result is up there with the stolen Romulan cloaking device working just fine when plugged into the ship without any dongles or beta testing.

But it's not up there with the Dolman of Elas's neckless being a useable source of dilithium after the ship's dilithium crystals were fused by saboteurs.

Joe
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Incisive and unimpeachable.
 
It seems a lot of people think that Fusion energy production will solve all our energy problems. So it might - sort of, eventually - but it will also cause another environmental catastrophe.

We should note that all the luverly energy made by Fusion - limitless amounts for practical purposes - where is it going to end up? Well Thermodynamics and Physics tells us - it will all end up as Heat. All that released energy can only end up as additional heat into the Earth ecosystem - which can only respond with the atmosphere and ocean increasing in temperature. So the next challenge for mankind will to find a way to get rid of the excess heat - but we may well have died out (along with most other mammalian life) before we get the answer to that one.
 
I would understand the term breakthrough if the experiment had yielded more energy than was used for the experiment - that’s the holy Grail. But IIUC the lasers used to produce the 2 MJ described as “input” consumed something like 100-200 MJ in electrical power. So the yield is something like 2%, not 150%.
 
@JensenHealey The heat escapes into space at night. The problem we had isn’t that we are directly heating our planet - nothing we humans can do in terms of heat production compares to what the sun does every single day. The problem we have with climate change is that we’ve added enough extra CO2 into the atmosphere that too much of that heat from the sun is now getting trapped. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is the only thing that will fix this. Fortunately, plant life will do that for us, but first we’ve got to stop loading more of it into the atmosphere by burning stuff.

This experiment does deserve the “breakthrough” label because anything below 100% energy output proved precisely nothing about the viability of controlled fusion. For as long as every experiment showed a net energy loss, fusion was only ever going to be of academic interest. Someone could theorise that any increase in output above 1:1 was impossible for various plausible reasons, and until an experiment proved them wrong, they could use that argument to drive government energy policy, for example...

However, the moment that an experiment produces a net positive, that argument is gone forever, and the focus turns from possibility to efficiency. It is much easier to improve a working idea than to invent it (see the first fifty years of aircraft, for example)
 
What is the world going to do with unlimited energy? Make more bombs. Make more planes, more robots, more satellites and more (maybe quantum) computers. Yes, some of those things will create medical and biological breakthroughs - for the rich at least.

Hardly going to solve planetary heating, or the worldwide fresh water shortage - over which there will be wars fought - all sides having 'unlimited' energy supplies available to them.
 
Unlimited energy makes some other problems go away, or at least, recede to manageable proportions. Water shortages are less of a problem if you can easily run desalination plants on unlimited energy, for example, and pump the water hundreds of miles. And you can use energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it to liquid fuels by combining it with hydrogen and oxygen in chemical processes. Things that are not necessarily energy efficient when the energy is limited, become viable if the energy is freely available and at low cost.
 
KrisW said:
It was a joke.

Secondly, the clever soundbite about covering the Sahara ignores that the efficiency of PVs declines dramatically in high heat due to increased resistance (these are silicon P-N junctions, and obey the same physical laws as diodes and transistors). So, if you’re really going to cover a desert with PV panels, choose a cold one.

There’s also the problem of how one gets that energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed, but that’s not a technological question, but rather a commercial and political one, but deserts aren’t a great idea because you have to add a long and inaccessible HV-AC transmission links across hostile terrains to your plan.
Click to expand...

WRT efficiency, that may matter less when the panel costs/area are lower given how big the Sahara is. i.e. Just put out more panel area.

Also, I think they'd probably use HVDC rather than AC.

Also, if Silicon isn't optimum for this, then other materials can be developed. Lots of work on that already.

I'm more curious about climate change and what effect that has on the patterns of sunshine vs area and time.
 
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