[HN Gopher] Fusion Foolery
___________________________________________________________________
Fusion Foolery
Author : rohansingh
Score : 183 points
Date : 2023-08-17 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dothemath.ucsd.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (dothemath.ucsd.edu)
| i-use-nixos-btw wrote:
| If you have to explain that you aren't being sarcastic when you
| congratulate an effort, you know you've pushed too hard in the
| other direction.
| dekhn wrote:
| I lived with somebody who worked on NIF --- back in the early
| days, before anything was built (they did theory modelling on the
| laser/holraum interaction). They said the entire project was
| really just busywork to keep american scientists from working on
| other country's defense projects. And also predicted that while
| NIF might eventually break even, it was never a design that would
| be useful for power generation, and was only slightly useful for
| stockpile stewardship.
| iaw wrote:
| I always saw NIF as bomb research by another name, frequency of
| ignition required is absurd. TOKAMAKs have much more promise
| but still face massive challenges.
| ironborn123 wrote:
| I get the feeling the article preaches to the choir.
|
| The serious sources have always portrayed NIF's work as technical
| achievements. But they are read mostly by scientist and engineer
| types.
|
| Mass media which hypes things is read, well by the masses, who
| dont have the patience or inclination to delve into technical
| details.
|
| This dichotomy will always exist. I remember once reading a
| Chekov story where two intellectuals discuss how the townspeople
| are more interested in silly affairs and scandals rather than
| recognizing intellectual achievements.
| [deleted]
| reedf1 wrote:
| Every few years we get an order of magnitude or two closer to
| efficacy. It is not ridiculous to celebrate that.
| jahnu wrote:
| The author does celebrate it but points out something that the
| media should have:
|
| "So this news is both good and bad. Hats off for cracking into
| single-digit yield! But that leaves less room to improve. Even
| at 100% efficiency, we'd get just 25 times more energy out, or
| 75 MJ. That's still not enough to pay for the price of
| admission (400 MJ, just for the laser part)."
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| The author also misses a really relevant fact, that modern
| lasers are an order of magnitude more efficient, so the 400MJ
| would be dramatically less, low enough to pass breakeven.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| Might want to rephrase that, because if you go from 10%
| distance to the goal to 1% to 0.1% etc, but never reach the
| goal, it doesn't matter if that happens every few years or
| every second, you still never reach the goal.
| KorematsuFredt wrote:
| You can write a same gloomy article about invention of an
| electric bulb or even a wheel. Imagine cutting down an entire
| tree that also kills Fred when the tree fell, herculean efforts
| to then slice it off to create a wheel in which Cole the lost his
| fingers, and what do you do with that wheel ? Create a claypot ?
| You could have just used a wooden pot instead. Not to mention the
| clay pot broke.
|
| Scientific "stunts" which author correctly points out pretend to
| be graceful but come at an extreme cost and failures. But anyone
| has done any science knows this far too well that this is how you
| push boundaries of science and make progress.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I agree, there is lots of wishful thinking involved with Fusion
| and I was always a sceptic, but lately there were news about the
| Wendelstein 7-X
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37092212
|
| And someone linked a podcast of a interview with the director (in
| german, http://alternativlos.org/36). And after listening, I do
| became convinced that with the Stellerator design, a working
| Fusion plant is possible.
|
| Maybe still not in 20 years, because it is hellish complicated,
| but some day.
|
| (till then I would bet on harvesting more our existing very big
| fusionreactor called the sun)
|
| In either case, controlling fusion is awesome technology and
| research, with lots of potential applications and deserves
| further funding. But yeah, please more of civil projects like
| Wendelstein and less disguised weapon research.
| Kydlaw wrote:
| It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging
| (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality. Definitely
| going to reuse in some arguments.
|
| Also, this one should be shouted louder for those in the back.
|
| > "Many in our culture truly believe in "the amazing future,"
| uncritically extrapolating our fossil-fueled joy ride into ever-
| more impressive innovations and technologies."
| rob74 wrote:
| My gripe with this article is that it only talks about the NIF
| - and the NIF is not called the National _Ignition_ Facility
| for nothing! Its purpose is studying fusion (mostly for weapons
| research), not producing a viable commercial fusion power
| plant. The technology it uses to generate fusion is not
| scalable, and that 's obvious to everyone who cares to look
| into it a bit deeper. Now, there are some other fusion startups
| with interesting claims about their technology (not to mention
| ITER) - I'm not enough of an expert to judge these, but I'm
| pretty sure any of these approaches is much more likely to
| eventually lead to a viable fusion power plant than what the
| NIF is doing.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _It is a nice piece of napkin maths and shows how challenging
| (nearly impossible?) commercial fusion is in reality.
| Definitely going to reuse in some arguments._
|
| The computer was in the same category 50 years ago, as was the
| ball point pen 100. Just making aluminum cheap, was a miracle.
|
| And before you think aluminum isn't a biggie, it revolutionized
| so many industries. Including airflight, missles, and more at
| the time.
|
| Things impossible, became possible. And now these things are
| trivial.
|
| The only question is, when it becomes cheap and easy to use
| fusion power, will it be the optimal power source at that time?
| mbb70 wrote:
| Calling out aluminum and pens is like picking lotto numbers
| after the drawing. You're ignoring the mountain of failures
| that were all incredibly promising and had incredibly smart
| people spending incredible amounts of time and money on them.
|
| Scientific advancement comes from exploring every path at
| once, quickly pruning failed paths and doubling down on
| successes, with enough stochastic jumps to keep us out of
| ruts for too long.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I think you missed the point.
|
| Fusion power is 100%, hands down possible. There is no
| question in this.
|
| It's all about cost, and my point was, _when_ , not _if_
| fusion power is a net positive, will other things be
| cheaper?
|
| I find it incredible how people on HN, a more technical
| site, seem to consider 10 years a long time, or even 100.
| Or that money is "wasted" because the research and work
| will "vanish", which is beyond absurd. Every penny spent on
| fusion, and cold fusion comes back to us in many wsys,
| there is no waste.
| Veedrac wrote:
| This would be a much more sensible criticism of commercial fusion
| if anyone was doing NIF-style commercial fusion. As it is, it
| misses the point entirely and repetitively. The reason to be
| excited about NIF reaching ignition is scientific.
|
| For sure a lot of people don't know obvious truths about fusion,
| but a lot of people don't know obvious truths about a lot of
| things. That doesn't cause all CPUs to ignite and planes to fall
| out of the sky.
| dale_glass wrote:
| The criticism for commercial fusion is very similar.
|
| Most noise you hear in the news is about something generating
| more heat than power is put into the plasma. But that's a very
| misleading thing for commercial power generation because not
| all the power spent on heating the plasma actually goes into
| the plasma, not all the power that comes out of the plasma can
| be turned into power, and there's other things that also
| require power for the whole thing to work.
| Veedrac wrote:
| > Most noise you hear in the news is about something
| generating more heat than power is put into the plasma.
|
| Unless you consider ITER commercial, I don't believe you.
| Most news about commercial fusion is 'X had a big investment
| round' or 'Y made a really hot plasma', and _if we were_ in
| the world where a startup 's tokamak hit ignition (we're
| not), we'd be in a world actually qualitatively pretty
| excitingly close to net energy, even if it didn't break even
| end to end.
| [deleted]
| alkonaut wrote:
| I thought the laser "ignition" was just a demonstrator for being
| able to create circumstances where fusion occurs, not something
| that could ever be scaled up to a power plant? But this article
| talks about repetition rates? Would we theoretically have fusion
| powerplants where we ignite a plasma over and over again from
| scratch, using lasers? I thought that's what tokamaks and
| stellerators were for: keeping the fusion reaction going once
| ignited?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The whole purpose of this lab is to do nuclear weapons research.
|
| Which is very similar to inertial confinement fusion. This is a
| nice side effect, but don't confuse it with the existence purpose
| of the lab.
| hliyan wrote:
| This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room
| temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-
| degrading EVs, machine learning and others:
|
| "In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a
| lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense
| of desperation. I think people sense that the "bad news" side of
| the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it's starting to dawn on
| people that the future could possibly be worse than the present.
| This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative
| is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these
| competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of
| temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the
| dream all the more strongly."
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's important to recognize that the bad news side of the
| ledger is overcrowded because that's what the ledger keepers
| want. There's a reason that the reaction counts for more
| engagement than thumbs in the FB algorithm.
| megaman821 wrote:
| You can't just group all those things together and say they are
| alike. Fusion in particular is a bit more physics experiment
| than the future of energy. Even in a world where we master than
| engineering and physics around fusion it won't be an economical
| source of power generation. It will only be used in areas where
| fusion's power generation to physical footprint ratio is highly
| valued.
| hliyan wrote:
| Not grouping those advancements together -- they're wildly
| different. Suggestion is that the reaction by (a section of)
| the public to those advancements is similar, and reveals
| something about our collective psychology.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What if room-temperature superconductors were real and led to
| improved efficiency in tokamak reactors?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The only difference between existing superconductors used
| for tokamaks and a RT version would be the energy cost of
| cooling the magnets to keep them below the critical
| temperature. Cooling does take a significant amount of
| energy, but I don't think that just getting rid of that
| would mean fusion produces enough energy compared to the
| cost of building the plant to compensate.
|
| And of course, a room temperature superconductor can have
| better or worse qualities than existing conductors in other
| ways. If it were much heavier, or required more expensive
| raw materials, or had lower critical current, it could in
| favt be worse than the existing solutions (the extra
| construction costs could offset the extra energy output).
| megaman821 wrote:
| The economic "problem" is that ultimately fusion is a heat
| source that turns water into steam which turns a steam
| turbine. Solar and wind are approaching the cost of just
| the steam turbine alone. There is hardly any room for fuel
| and operational costs.
|
| Even today steam turbine plants produce higher cost
| electricity that natural gas combined cycle plants.
| dTal wrote:
| This is a weird comment. There is no reason to expect that a
| hypothetical economically viable fusion power plant would
| have an unusually good "power generation to physical
| footprint ratio". At the same time - you really don't
| consider "uses water as fuel" an advantage?
| permo-w wrote:
| come now, strip back the layer of bullshit verbosity and what
| does this really say?:
|
| ~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited
| about potential good news~
|
| as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over
| scientific breakthroughs
|
| this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the
| media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the
| actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this
| well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats
| and re-explains it 5 or 6 times
|
| the useful information in this article could be imparted in
| one, maybe two paragraphs
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the good
| news that we do have -- like solar and wind power.
|
| Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech
| as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is
| literally more than a _million_ times cheaper.
|
| It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to
| operate a coal plant.
|
| Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all
| they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such
| a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw
| at the challenges.
|
| It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so
| that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite
| straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using
| the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper
| & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short
| term storage and it'll be 99%.
|
| And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're
| currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that
| 5% is increasing by about 50% annually.
|
| There is _way_ more good news than bad news about solar. But
| good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see
| the bad news.
| dahfizz wrote:
| How do you power the grid with 90% solar when the sun only
| shines 40% of the day during the winter?
|
| Renewable optimists consistently under-estimate the storage
| problem by orders of magnitude. We don't have enough
| batteries on Earth to hold one single day's worth of
| electricity. And for us to actually rely on solar, we would
| need to store multiple months of electricity to survive the
| winter.
|
| Solar is cheap because you're comparing a generation source
| that works on occasion with a generation source that works
| 24/7.
|
| I'm not anti-solar at all. But I am realistic about what we
| can and can't do with it. The thing that will make a solar
| grid practical _today_ is focusing on variable loads. When
| the sun is shining, we should be cranking the AC of every
| home and office, smelting aluminum, filling dams, etc.
| mordae wrote:
| Exactly! We have led seasonal lives for thousands of years.
| This is no biggie.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Having heat in the winter is, in fact, a biggie.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Brownouts and blackouts lasting for weeks during windless
| winter weeks are hardly solution.
|
| Trying to sell it as "no biggie" will not work well.
| croes wrote:
| >How do you power the grid with 90% solar when the sun only
| shines 40% of the day during the winter?
|
| Where?
|
| Maybe we should try a more global approach to energy.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > Where?
|
| Almost the entire world? The sun is up for less than 9.5
| hours in winter unless you are very close to the
| equator.[1][2][3][4]
|
| And that's assuming 0% cloud coverage. In reality, places
| like Germany only get an hour or two of real sunshine a
| day in the winter[5].
|
| [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york
|
| [2] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
|
| [3] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/spain/madrid
|
| [4] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/china/beijing
|
| [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/982758/average-
| sunshine-...
| jmopp wrote:
| The middle of winter in Europe, North America, and Asia
| is the middle of summer in South America, Southern Africa
| and Australia. Yes, global transmission of electricity is
| a problem. But the problem is not a global lack of
| sunshine.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Land - and thus population - is not evenly distributed
| across the globe, there is far more of both in the
| northern hemisphere.
|
| Global transmission of electricity isn't a "problem,"
| it's non-existant.
| concordDance wrote:
| Long distance power transport is tricky for security
| reasons and also transmission losses (1% per 100 miles or
| so?).
| burnished wrote:
| Transmission losses seem like a huge impediment to a
| global approach.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Europe tried a very global approach to energy with
| Russia, went swimmingly for them.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Which is why it's so important to make Russia pay dearly.
| They didn't just attack Ukraine, they attacked
| civilization. Every human alive will suffer to at least a
| small extent as a result.
|
| Russia must be confronted with economic, political, and
| yes, military incentives to behave very differently in
| the future, or at least to take more responsibility for
| the reckless actions of their leaders. In the meantime,
| working towards independence from fossil fuels has become
| even more important, even for those who aren't otherwise
| known for advocating good climate stewardship.
| delecti wrote:
| The comment didn't say "90% solar", it said "90%
| renewables". That includes hydro and wind, which don't stop
| at night or in the winter.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Thats a myth. You cannot have baseline power with
| renewables only throughout the year. Hydro only works in
| very specific places and the same for wind.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, you may need various kinds of storage as well,
| filled by renewables. E-fuels can be used to shift energy
| across seasons.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Why? Build more. Interconnect with HVDC.
| concordDance wrote:
| https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
|
| Wind can be very low for days and low for weeks.
|
| Hydro is ecologically devastating and there aren't enough
| sites for it.
| awestroke wrote:
| Unlike oil and coal which are very ecologically
| beneficial?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| That's not a fair reply at all. If we don't care about
| the ecology, then we might as well just continue to use
| petroleum!
| awestroke wrote:
| Ecosystem damage from hydro is local, ecosystem from
| fossil fuel is global. We are heading for extinction as a
| species, and under such circumstances it makes sense to
| cause local ecosystem damage in the form of flooding.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > We are heading for extinction as a species, and under
| such circumstances [...]
|
| We absolutely are _not_ headed towards extinction as a
| species. We are like cockroaches and the human _species_
| will survive. Using "oh no, the human race is dying out
| altogether and we must preserve it all costs" is a
| ridiculous argument.
|
| > [..] it makes sense to cause local ecosystem damage in
| the form of flooding.
|
| It isn't just the (risk of) flooding. It's hubris to
| believe we can actually foresee all the second-order
| ramifications from such large-scale terraforming
| projects. (Hydroelectric) dams have devastated the local
| wildlife, transformed the surrounding permaculture for
| the worse, and set off horrible chain reactions with
| devastating consequences for the local flora and fauna
| _which have global ramifications down the line_ , as we
| are discovering today. Nothing happens in a bubble.
|
| This same argument was once made of fossil fuel emissions
| (when we thought that smog in the biggest industrial
| cities was our biggest problem and outsourcing them to
| developing nations was a great win-win /s). That
| obviously wasn't true. Why would you wish to repeat the
| same mistake?
| [deleted]
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There are really interesting innovations in hydro power
| ecology in the last many decades. Things like salmon
| runs, salmon ladders, and salmon cannons. (They benefit
| other freshwater fish, too, we just tend to like salmon
| the best in our naming scheme bias.) "Devastating" is a
| bit strong given all the work going into sustainable
| hydro power and environmentally aware hydro projects.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| Current and near-future grid cannot handle such a balance
| of renewables, especially hydro takes a lot of beating
| when the water level goes up and down constantly.
| delecti wrote:
| Nobody is blind to the fact that the grid will need to be
| updated to be more flexible.
| [deleted]
| cgeier wrote:
| There is an already pretty old (2013) study from
| Fraunhofer, which shows how 100% renewable energy in
| electric power and heating is possible in the medium term
| future (2050). Their ideas for storage are battery storage
| (52Gwh), pumped storage (60Gwh) and methane storage (86Twh)
| on the electric side.
|
| See [1] for a very short English description and [2] for
| the German original.
|
| [1] https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/blueprint
| -100-... [2] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlic
| hungen/studien...
| pfdietz wrote:
| You combine it with wind, batteries, and storage via an
| e-fuel like hydrogen.
|
| The latter is crucial. The cost of providing "synthetic
| baseload" in Germany doubles if you don't include it.
|
| See https://model.energy/ for optimization of an energy
| system using these to provide synthetic baseload, using
| various tweakable cost assumptions and historical weather
| data. The cost is not outrageous, likely well below new
| construction nuclear.
|
| In a place like India, you don't even need wind and
| hydrogen. PV and batteries will do just fine.
| NickC25 wrote:
| > _How do you power the grid with 90% solar when the sun
| only shines 40% of the day during the winter?_
|
| Maybe not the national grid, but there are plenty of places
| in the US where the sun shines a _lot_ more than 40% of the
| day during the winter. Start there. If Southern CA, AZ, NM,
| TX, FL, etc.. which all get a ton of sun no matter the
| season can reduce their reliance on the federal grid, that
| 's a hell of a start, and we should be celebrating that as
| a great first step and building off of that.
|
| I thought the whole point of alternative energy sources is
| acknowledging that certain locales have potential for
| different energy sources (solar, hydroelectric, wind,
| etc..) and we should as a society should take full
| advantage of that? We know oil isn't going away any time
| soon, but why aren't we saying "oh City XYZ or State ABC is
| abundant in (alternative energy source), let's make use of
| that as best as we can"?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Maybe not the national grid, but there are plenty of
| places in the US where the sun shines a lot more than 40%
| of the day during the winter.
|
| It looks like Los Angeles only averages about 37% for
| _the year as a whole_ , and Albuquerque averages about
| 38%, so I'm skeptical that there's anywhere that gets "a
| lot more than 40%" in winter. You have to take clouds
| into account as well, remember. Cloudy days exist even in
| desert areas.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_
| dur...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Thats 39% in ABQ of _all hours in the year_ including
| night time.
|
| Nobody is pretending that solar can provide electricity
| via night time generation. That's what storage systems
| and alternative sources are for.
|
| The daylight story in ABQ is this:
|
| > "It is sunny 78.9% of daylight hours. The remaining
| 21.1% of daylight hours are likely cloudy or with shade,
| haze or low sun intensity. "
|
| http://www.albuquerque.climatemps.com/sunlight.php
| NickC25 wrote:
| Exactly - I've lived in AZ, FL, and spent a lot of time
| in SoCal. There is plenty of sun in those places.
|
| If you can generate solar power 80% of daylight hours,
| that's a pretty good place to start.
|
| Again, it's not an end-all-be-all solution. But you're
| talking about some very highly populated areas that could
| be using solar energy a hell of a lot more than they are
| now. Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, Dallas, LA, San Diego,
| Houston, Miami, Orlando, Las Vegas....that's a lot of
| places that could be utilizing solar power in a way that
| does move the needle. That's some 30-50 million people
| (if not slightly more) that could reduce their use of the
| federal grid in a measurable way.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I'm about 50 miles north of ABQ. I have a 6.7kW ground
| mount array. Using its rated output, and the average of
| 9.28 hours of sunshine per day, and no adjustment for
| hourly insolation variation I should get about 1.9MW a
| month. I actually get about 1MW, with not much variation
| from month to month.
|
| I am optimistic that Santa Fe will soon see a new utility
| scale PV generation install that ought to generate power
| (with storage!) corresponding to roughly 1/3 of the
| city's residental use. The standard NIMBY-but-I'm-all-
| for-solar-have-some-myself crowd is out in force,
| however.
| mgfist wrote:
| It sounds like a problem at first glance but it isn't. For
| one, there's an easy solution: overbuild solar. With solar
| generation that is 2x-3x peak demand, you only need 4 hour
| storage to have a robust, clean grid with near 0 downtime.
| Add a bit of longer term storage and you've got a grid
| that's more reliable than the one today.
|
| That's the conceptually simple solution, but ofc there's
| more practical ones. Mix in wind, some nuclear, different
| storage solutions (Ev2grid, pumped hydro, rocks-in-a-box,
| etc..), demand-side solutions (VPPs), efficiency
| improvements (insulation, heatpumps), a few of the hundreds
| of advanced projects being researched (solar in space,
| enhanced geothermal, iron air batteries, SMRs, etc..).
| Combine the 1000s of solutions being proposed, researched
| and scaled out and you have a very solid plan of attack.
| Sinidir wrote:
| You don't you build solar and wind, which have different
| seasonal productions. Wind power is actually higher during
| winter. See: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-
| normalized-mon...
|
| And if you combine the graphs for solar and wind from this:
| https://aleasoft.com/european-solar-and-wind-energy-
| producti...
|
| You can nicely see that they are complementary in terms of
| energy production.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There's many reasons to believe that the future is going to
| be as unrecognizably (mostly) better to us as someone who was
| born in the 1940s to today.
|
| In the 1940s - cities smelled like sh!t, were so polluted you
| almost never wanted to go outside, healthcare was still
| largely snake oil, the average person was still working 10
| hours a day 6 days week, human rights outside of straight
| white christian men were questionable, AND we were in our
| second world war in 20 years - at the advent of the nuclear
| bomb.
|
| Look at where we are now.
|
| If you don't see progress, and if you can't see how people
| back then thought the world was surely coming to an end, and
| you think it's worse now, I'm honestly amazed.
|
| At no point in time, was progress a up and to the right with
| no impediments. Every advance we've had, people have worked
| HARD for. So thank your lucky stars so many people get up
| every day and keep working for it.
|
| Because it isn't easy. But it's what we do. Always have.
| Always will.
|
| Eventually, we will reach the physical limits of how good
| technology can get. But we are laughably far away from that
| point in so many major aspects of life, that we've got a long
| way to go before the 10 & 20 year future might not be
| _better_.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> Look at where we are now.
|
| In the middle of an environmental crisis? Are we not going
| to factor that outcome into our measure of progress?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| For at least the past 3500 years we've always been in the
| middle of an environmental crisis. Some of them have
| decimated populations. Climate change is forecasted to
| kill 0.1% of the population per year. In a population of
| 8 billion that's a massive number, but compared
| relatively to some previous environmental crises that's
| tiny.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 0.1% of the population on average, but concentrated in
| particular areas that percentage can go _much_ higher. It
| 's not as if those deaths will be spread out nicely
| across the world.
| geodel wrote:
| Most of it is true. But _Always have. Always will._ seems
| naive to me. This improvement from 40 's is very specific
| phenomenon in rich western countries. A lot of places I
| lived in my 3rd world country have become even more hellish
| shit-hole then they were like 30 years back.
|
| More and more technological solution I see nowadays are the
| solution to problems technology created in first place.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about? More people have
| been pulled out of poverty in the last thirty years than
| ever in the history of humanity!
|
| https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/06/01/towards-the-
| end...
| jchonphoenix wrote:
| SF still smells
| geodel wrote:
| You can't really compare past nasty smell with premium
| high tech NextGen(r) smelly shit of today.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Half the houses in the USA in 1940 didn't have indoor
| plumbing. They didn't ask in previous censuses, probably
| because it wasn't a relevant question which means 50% in
| 1940 was a climbing number and everything below that was
| less than 50.
|
| "Plumbing Facilities
|
| In 1990, only 1 percent of our homes lacked complete
| plumbing facilities. But, things were much different in
| 1940, when nearly half lacked complete plumbing. Then,
| about ten States had rates approaching or exceeding 70
| percent. In succeeding decades, the proportion of homes
| lacking complete plumbing dropped dramatically, falling to
| about one-third in 1950 and one- sixth in 1960. It is
| interesting to note the States with the lowest percent- age
| of such homes in 1940 were higher than Alaska, which topped
| the 1990 list."
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Arguments like "look how much progress we've made in other
| areas!" are just Survivor Bias.
|
| You have to prove the analogy, not just state it.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| That's all well and good, but even if progress continues as
| you say, you have to worry about powerful people directing
| that progress ineptly. As we get more advanced, room for
| mistakes shrinks and we get closer to a great filter
| situation.
| tarsinge wrote:
| The catch is it's not really progress if it's not
| sustainable. It's like living on debt, it ends up in
| bankruptcy. Are we really correctly investing the
| ecological debt for a sustainable better future, or are we
| just burning through it for short term "progress" and
| leaving a ruined earth after?
|
| > But it's what we do. Always have. Always will.
|
| You can't extrapolate from the past because never before in
| history we had the capacity to have impacts at that scale
| (e.g. atomic bomb). We are in uncharted territories.
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly right. Even that _verified improvement_ is
| limited to very small part of the world
| hcurtiss wrote:
| But depending on how you define it, our species has never
| been "sustainable." The very first house clobbered the
| meadow and mice beneath it, and that one meadow was
| forever "lost." Yet, we keep finding resources, and
| alternatives to those resources, and more efficient means
| of using both. We have been using nonrenewable resources
| for hundreds (tens of thousands?) of years, and yet we
| keep finding more. Ehrlich famously lost his bet, and
| dramatically so! On every objective measure, we live in
| the very best moment in the history of humanity, and
| while there will be ups and downs, there is every reason
| to believe that will be just as true ten years from now
| and a hundred years from now.
|
| I'm always amused by the doomsaying Malthusians. They're
| always so confidently wrong.
| mgfist wrote:
| Flip side of that catch is that we're the first
| generation that can create an emissions free society.
| It's never been needed before, and it's never been
| possible before.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Huh? all of pre-Medieval society was relatively emissions
| free and infinitely sustainable
| pfdietz wrote:
| To first order, the sustainability problem is the fossil
| fuel problem. And we're on the way to solving that.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| Sadly, it's the old 'if it bleeds, it leads' meme. People are
| attracted to extremes (good or bad) and if something is
| boring and middle-of-the-road, they ignore it. SLow,
| iterative, steady progress is boring to most people. They
| want dramatic breakthroughs.
|
| Most of the public can't grasp the mathematics of compounding
| change.
| oezi wrote:
| I think it is obvious to anyone following the technology
| trajectory that solar is the dominant energy source of the
| future. No other energy source is on a similar path to become
| cheaper so quickly.
|
| We won't even focus on storing much of it but just build more
| and more.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Solar + transport is good but still fragile, a cheap,
| durable and reliable means of storage would complete the
| picture.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| What transport? You tried permitting a major transmission
| line in the western US lately?
| jacquesm wrote:
| What societies do to make their energy problems worse has
| nothing to do with tech, that's entirely self inflicted.
| pydry wrote:
| I think a lot of the skepticism around solar/wind/storage
| rests on an incorrect understanding of how easily
| variability can be dealt with. Which is understandable,
| because it's quite a complex problem to model.
|
| The story on that is surprisingly positive, but it's quite
| easy to FUD by parties with a vested interest (carbon
| lobby, nuclear lobby) because some people will hear:
|
| * "well, the sun doesn't shine at night. the wind doesn't
| always blow! check mate!"
|
| E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37161473 (posted
| after I wrote this)
|
| or, if it's aimed at a slightly higher intellectual level,
| things like:
|
| * "pumped storage is a nice idea but realistically there
| just isn't enough space for all the pumped storage we
| need".
|
| E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37161790 (posted
| after I wrote this)
|
| * "we need 1-2 weeks worth of storage to deal with the
| inherent instability of wind/solar"
|
| And they'll believe it because it all _sounds_ plausible
| enough, even though it 's wrong.
|
| And then they'll repeat it all over hacker news lol...
| dahfizz wrote:
| Care to elaborate on what we do when the sun doesn't
| shine and the wind doesn't blow, then?
| pydry wrote:
| Demand shaping - Germany pioneered this by dialing
| aluminum smelter usage up and down in the early days.
| They didn't talk about it much, I think because it
| functioned as a kind of hidden subsidy and they didn't
| want to attract undue attention. There's LOTS of scope
| for stuff like heaters and vehicles batteries to use
| electricity when it's plentiful and cheap and turn it off
| when it's not. The UK has a special electricity tariff
| for this already which is very popular with electric car
| drivers. Demand shaping is, relative to storage, _really_
| cheap and usually gets forgotten about in skeptical
| renewable energy models.
|
| Pumped storage and batteries for short term energy
| storage - hours to weeks. Australia is already building
| one pumped storage battery which should provide them with
| roughly 350GWh - roughly half of the short term storage
| they'd need if they had a 100% solar and wind based grid.
| With one plant. You can't do this in, e.g. Florida but
| the geography to build this is more than plentiful enough
| in most of the world (this topic is pretty well settled:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14555-y but
| for some reason people keep disputing it).
|
| Hydrogen for seasonal storage - for weeks when the wind
| doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Roughly 2-3% of
| power will need to be stored this way on a 100%
| solar/wind grid. It's not efficient and expensive to
| generate hydrogen from electricity and then turn it back
| into electricity but still cheaper than generating and
| using nuclear power at the point of generation. It is
| cheap to store enormous amounts of power for long periods
| this way though.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| The Australian project is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
| nowy_2.0_Pumped_Storage_Power...
|
| But it seems hardly replicable say in central Europe.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Maybe not now. But prices are reducing at 80% per decade,
| so it's likely only a few years away from being
| achievable.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Even if solar would cost literally zero, then it does not
| solve problem that there is no place to fit such
| megasized pumped storage.
|
| (I am speaking about central Europe or more specifically
| Poland)
| oezi wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense. Just use fossils when there
| are no renewables available. Gas peakers for short term
| unavailability and others for medium unavailability.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| You don't need rivers or even much of a slope for pumped
| storage. Just water and a few hundred feet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Po
| wer...
| pydry wrote:
| See the study linked to in my comment above. The one
| where I said "weirdly people keep disputing this".
|
| In Europe there's some geography known as "the alps"
| which has been used for years this way by the countries
| surrounding it.
|
| Poland's environmental record is atrocious on almost
| every level. I guess the coal lobby must run the
| government or something because nobody else in Europe
| that reliant on fuel that dirty. They're a model of how
| not to do anything right.
| shakow wrote:
| Germany has still on average one of the dirtiest
| electricity of Western Europe, must import from its
| neighbors quite frequently, and is currently seeing the
| premises of an exodus of its industry due to energy cost;
| I'm not sure that using them as an example is pushing
| your argument.
| oezi wrote:
| The sources of the high energy cost are:
|
| - Ukraine conflict's impact on gas prices
|
| - Cost of renewables from over 10 years ago when Germany
| jumpstarted the solar industry using subsidies.
|
| - An ill-advised by highly popular switching off of
| nuclear plants. The Germans preferred higher energy
| prices now for less hassle and worries due to having
| Nuclear plants.
|
| None of these points have any impact on the argument that
| solar is the clear winner of becoming the dominant energy
| source until 2050.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Dam! 350GWh is massive. That's like 10x the current
| largest pumped hydro storage. Projects like that do make
| renewables much more compelling
| shakow wrote:
| > even though it's wrong.
|
| Well, empirically, we only observe that countries heavily
| relying on renewable (Denmark and Germany are the poster
| children) (i) have a much worse average CO2/kWh ratio,
| (ii) still need to import energy when, well, the wind
| does not blow and the Sun does not shine.
|
| But feel free to elaborate on where this is wrong.
| pydry wrote:
| https://en.energinet.dk/About-our-
| news/News/2021/06/22/Danis...
|
| 117 looks ok to me. They're probably one of the most
| improved countries in the world in the last 10 years,
| although overall France's is likely still lower thanks to
| all their 1970s nuclear power plants - decarbonizing
| decades before anybody gave a damn about global warming.
|
| For reference Poland is at like 650. They use an
| _ungodly_ amount of coal. Environmentally Poland are an
| absolute a disaster compared to every country in Europe
| (even poorer ones), but, they didn 't shut down a couple
| of aging nuclear power plants so they're on the good side
| of the American nuclear power lobby and get relatively
| little stick.
| shakow wrote:
| Poland is (i) a pretty poor country compared to Germany,
| (ii) does not present itself as the "obviously right way
| forward", (iii) didn't close perfectly working nuke
| plants to please the Grune, (iv) does not actively lobby
| with all its might against nuclear power in each and
| every single EU instance, (v) produces ~5x more
| electricity than Poland for ~2.7x the population, so they
| are obviously more impactful.
|
| > they're on the good side of the American nuclear power
| lobby and get relatively little stick.
|
| I'm French, I don't care about American nuke power lobby
| - and frankly, given the pitiful state of electricity
| CO2/kWh in the US and how much coal is burned, it seems
| that this lobby must not wield that much influence.
| ekianjo wrote:
| If its so wrong then why has no country or even a city
| ever achieved it?
|
| Surely california has tons of taxpayer money in excess
| what is preventing them to do all that?
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > even though it's wrong
|
| Which part is wrong? Except that we need more than 1-2
| weeks worth of storage to rely on solar/wind as anything
| more than occasional addition.
| pydry wrote:
| E.g.
|
| https://reneweconomy.com.au/much-storage-needed-solar-
| wind-p...
|
| "Graham says that the CSIRO modelling showed that at very
| high levels of wind and solar, a maximum of half a day's
| average demand was needed for storage. In some areas of
| the grid, only around three hours might be needed."
|
| Or:
|
| https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-
| stora...
|
| The amount of short term storage to get a grid between
| 80-95% running on solar/wind is measured in hours.
|
| Electrolyzing and storing hydrogen in an underground
| cavern can buffer the rest and be stored easily for years
| if necessary.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| It seems to be about Australia, right? While not really
| applicable to for example Poland where solar and wind are
| far less stable.
|
| Which one of reports at linked
| http://www.energynetworks.com.au/projects/electricity-
| networ... is one that you refer to here?
|
| For the second one - is "more responsive loads" code for
| "load shedding" which is code for brownouts and
| blackouts?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's the kind of just-in-time thinking that's one
| unfortunate dice roll from plunging people back to pre-
| industrial levels.
|
| So _what if_ we roll another Eyjafjallajokull in one part
| of the world, simultaneously with a war breaking out in
| another, and some large-scale maintenance ongoing in
| another part still, while everyone 's grid is designed to
| keep "oh half a day's tops" and not a watt more, because
| ain't anyone gonna pay for it? With globally reduced
| capacity for, say, a week, that "half a day's average
| demand" worth of storage may start running dangerously
| low, and what then? Will we somehow scramble to fire up
| long-closed fossil fuel plants in that time?
| oezi wrote:
| If you need to utilize 2 weeks of storage as a worst case
| once or twice per year then it doesn't seem an issue to
| just burn fossils for those instances.
|
| The goal is to reduce Co2 emissions and replace fossil
| usage.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| >It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to
| operate a coal plant.
|
| When you say this you need to also talk about how much it
| costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some
| given percentage of grid power. There is probably some %
| where it stops being cheaper than coal
| lolinder wrote:
| They have a paragraph addressing that point, if you read
| on:
|
| > It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and
| solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be
| quite straightforward to power the grid using 90%
| renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%.
| It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we
| celebrating that?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a
| platter and all that will happen is that people will run
| around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if _any_
| powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
| cratermoon wrote:
| U.S. nuclear power plants typically refuel every 18 to 24
| months. The average planned outage time is about a month.
| We never hear much about how nuclear power plants only
| have a ~95% planned uptime.
| concordDance wrote:
| The problem isn't the uptime, it's that the downtime
| strongly correlates across all instances of wind power
| and across all instances of solar power in a country:
| https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
| jacquesm wrote:
| So what? It's not as if those baseline powerplants that
| we have today will all suddenly disappear. They will just
| have a lower utilization factor. And that's perfectly
| fine.
|
| Solar, hydro and wind when you have them, nuclear when
| you don't, gas when you don't have nuclear and coal when
| you don't have gas. It is really quite simple. And the
| best bit is that you can have your solar and wind
| installations up and running before the ink is even dry
| on the kind of permit and investment required for a
| nuclear plant and it is much cheaper to boot, as well as
| decentralized so far more resilient and friendlier to the
| grid (assuming the grid is well designed in the first
| place, which isn't always true).
|
| And 'in a country' is the wrong level to be thinking at.
| You should look at much larger areas than that, and
| across both longitude _and_ latitude.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Also, 100% renewables isn't the only option. We can build
| more capacity than we need. Research shows that 300% mix of
| solar and wind will cover all but the worst days. It also
| gives lots of extra capacity on most days to produce fuel and
| capture carbon. The fuel provides long-term storage for bad
| days.
| concordDance wrote:
| > it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90%
| renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%.
|
| Sadly incorrect. You can see the variation of wind and solar
| we get here in the UK at: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
|
| As you can see, fossil fuels are about a 1/3rd of power and
| we expand renewables by maybe another 30% before we start
| getting excess power. After that point, you start to have
| excess power while no longer reducing CO2 by much as you
| still need the Nat gas for the cloudy and still days.
|
| In practice you might be able to get to 75% non-fossil fuels
| before you're firmly into the realm of diminishing returns
| without a big storage breakthrough or a doubling/tripling of
| electricity costs (its triple to go pure wind and current
| tech energy storage because you need up to weeks of storage
| to not have blackouts, but with a nuclear power expansion
| youd only need a doubling).
| laurencerowe wrote:
| While we do get into diminishing returns beyond about 75%
| non fossil fuels you can over provision renewables several
| times for the cost of new nuclear power or storage.
|
| New offshore wind projects in the UK contract to produce
| power at about 40% the cost of new nuclear, about the same
| as gas before the Ukraine war interruptions. And that's
| before the 45% construction cost overrun on Hinkley Point C
| that EDF is responsible for.
|
| Onshore wind would be half the price of offshore but we've
| stopped building it because Tories.
|
| Over provisioning a mix of renewables is likely the most
| cost effective route to greening the electricity supply.
|
| Modelling for Denmark shows over 90% of its electricity
| consumption could be provided through modestly over
| provisioning renewables 1.5-2x along with 4-12h of storage
| and 99% with 3-4x over provisioning renewables and 48h of
| storage.
|
| https://x.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 90% is easier in North America where I'm based due to our
| large grids. But you've already implemented part of the
| solution to get to 90% -- bidirectional HVDC grids with
| Norway. Sell cheap wind power when you can and buy hydro
| when you can't.
|
| But even if you can't easily get to 90% why not celebrate
| the fact that 75% is easy. Sure the last 25% is hard, but
| 75% good news and 25% bad news is not what I see in the
| news articles.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| Isn't nuclear nearly 20% of the USA power mix? I've never
| liked fission but it's there and lots of effort to design
| a next generation of it which would be able to use
| nuclear waste and maybe make that less hazardous.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem with breeder reactors isn't, and never has
| been, an engineering one. It's a relatively simple
| process, so far as nuclear physics is concerned. The
| problem is that the anti-nuclear cowards don't want to
| make plutonium easily available. Nevermind the fact that
| we already have one of the largest nuclear arsenals
| (maybe the biggest, given Russia's gross mismanagement as
| of late), and pose no real proliferation risk, since we
| already have all the plutonium our hearts desire.
| asynchronous wrote:
| An article about fusion and HN manages to bring up solar and
| wind somehow. Never fails.
| dale_glass wrote:
| It's an article about how fusion is still far away.
|
| It's technically cool, yes, but we need electricity now,
| and tomorrow, not next century.
|
| I'm excited for fusion as a human accomplishment, as high
| tech research, maybe as a power source for future
| spaceships.
|
| But I think it's likely the time may never come when it's
| used to generate power for the electric grid, and expecting
| that to come soon is just naive. We don't even have a
| single fusion plant that produces power yet, let alone the
| hundreds of them that would be needed for the tech to have
| a real-world impact.
| oezi wrote:
| It is an article that nicely illustrates that it is at
| least 50 years away. We shouldn't pin any hopes to it or
| (for me at least) fund research on it any more than 10%
| of the funding we provide for solar research.
| joak wrote:
| The title says 'fusion' but the talk is actually about
| NIF and their inflated PR.
|
| Fusion energy companies like CFS (tokamak) or Helion
| (colliding FRCs with direct energy capture) might start
| producing electricity to the grid in less than 10 years.
| oezi wrote:
| Once they have a working prototype it is going to be 10
| to 15 years for paperwork and building the first plant.
| HPsquared wrote:
| They are competing for the same market. Unless fusion can
| be much more economical than solar?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed. It's raining soup, all we need is more spoons. We are
| awash in energy but we're totally focused on making it in the
| most complicated, centralized and expensive way possible.
| It's fascinating in a way, how all of these tools are
| available and yet there are fairly powerful lobbies that keep
| pulling us away from the solution just so they can make a bit
| more money.
| concordDance wrote:
| No, the problem isn't some conspiracy it's the very real
| problem of "how do you store electricity when days are
| cloudy and still?".
|
| Look at these graphs: https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
|
| You need to either overbuild 10x or you need lots of
| storage.
|
| Even a 3x overbuild means you need weeks of storage if you
| want to avoid once a year brownouts.
|
| And electricity storage still costs 100-400$/kWh per 10
| years. An extra PS60 billion per year while ALSO building
| 3x more solar and wind than we will use during peak times
| is a lot of money for the government to spend.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is really old hat by now. Everybody is aware of the
| fact that when it is cloudy and there is no wind that you
| will need other sources. But on balance for the planet as
| a whole there _always_ is plenty of wind and there
| _always_ is plenty of sun. We are just not capturing it
| and we are not transporting it effectively across longer
| distances.
|
| People used to say that you can't make baseline power
| with solar and wind. Slowly - and often grudgingly -
| they've come around and now realize that it isn't about
| 100% availability, that will always be a mix. The
| question is simply how much of that mix can be offset by
| renewables and the answer is 'much more than you
| originally thought'.
|
| And as the price of solar and wind drops further and
| further that fraction only increases.
|
| Every KWh that is produced by solar and wind does not
| need to be generated by fossil.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| He posted about fusion, and you replied about solar. Not all
| technology follows the same cost curve.
| djha-skin wrote:
| Solar requires way more concrete and a bunch of mined rare
| earth minerals, nickel and cobalt, and is not green.
|
| Wind power requires an enormous amount of epoxy and the
| windmills wear out and then you have to throw an enormous
| amount of epoxy away and it is not green.
|
| Storing energy using batteries from the above sources
| requires an enormous amount of nickel and cobalt mind out of
| the Earth by third world countries and is not green.
|
| Fusion power requires mining lithium and is not green.
|
| Nuclear power requires changing people's minds and when it
| does fail it causes two-headed fish. While perhaps green, it
| is not politically feasible at this time.
|
| Here's an idea. Take public transit instead of using that
| Tesla that required a bunch of imported rare earth minerals
| from sweatshops in China and microchips from Taiwan -- which
| may or may not be available to us in the future in this
| geopolitical climate -- and lithium and cobalt from death
| trap mines down in Peru and Africa.
|
| Burn natural gas in your stove instead of electricity which
| is generally coal-fired, or if it isn't coal fired, it comes
| from so solar and wind and is therefore not green.
|
| My point is that the original paragraph stands. It's going to
| get worse before it gets better and no one wants to believe
| this.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Fusion power requires mining lithium and is not green.
|
| Where can I buy this machine?
| klysm wrote:
| I hate this term of 'green'. It's conflating so many
| different axes of environmental effects, which is sometimes
| what we care about but it removes any nuance immediately. I
| find usually it distracts from one of the primary issues:
| carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I feel like you're worried a little too much about having
| to tolerate some waste here and there and not worried
| enough about global changes to biosphere function.
|
| Yeah, having mine next to your house sucks, we need to get
| better at managing that kind of thing. But it's a local
| suck. It's in a totally different category than having the
| climate shift into a mode that no longer supports our food
| crops, for instance.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| > using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last
| hard 10%
|
| Solar and wind cannot be used in this role and at this scale
| due to their massive variability
| mordae wrote:
| So make the factory, AC, etc... vary the load!
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Brownouts and blackouts lasting for weeks during windless
| winter weeks are hardly solution.
| KSteffensen wrote:
| Can't we fill the Sahara with solar panels? If
| transmission lines are problematic hydrogen or methane
| could be used to transfer the energy to where it needs to
| be used.
|
| This of course has a lot of political implications, but
| if we wanted to do it we could.
| concordDance wrote:
| Shutting down factories in winter will make local
| industry uncompetitive, which will have awful effects.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| That argument ignores the fact that the variability goes
| both ways: during peak production times, electricity will
| be CHEAP. Hell, it's not hard to imagine a situation
| where capacity gets built up high enough to extend the
| viable high-consumption times that during peak hours the
| grid has to actively incentivize industry to use more
| power.
|
| IMO, the right move is for the government to subsidize
| power generation to the point of absurd excess, like we
| do for agriculture. It's a matter of national security,
| and it ends up acting as a subsidy for industry of all
| kind.
| indymike wrote:
| > The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the
| good news that we do have -- like solar and wind power.
|
| No one is ignoring it. We're rapidly deploying both
| technologies all over the place. It's exciting that real
| money is flowing into the industry. Fusion has speculator
| money, and Fusion gets extra attention because it's sold as
| basically, the cure to all energy problems, forever and ever.
| ekianjo wrote:
| There is no tangible reason for the future to be worse than the
| present. Until we really try hard to make it so. By all
| accounts levels of life have been rising worldwide for the past
| 50 years. Most of the stuff that remains expensive is mostly
| linked to over regulation which is a pure question of political
| will. As for energy we can still move to regular fission
| nuclear power and massively reduce CO2 emissions if we want to.
| jujube3 wrote:
| The fusion hype should be blamed squarely on journalists, not
| on "the public."
|
| The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very
| different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather
| than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream
| journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source
| as they were of LM99, people would be better informed.
|
| "fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not
| sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is
| actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does
| useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a
| different conversation than the one about whether fusion power
| can ever work.
| jujube3 wrote:
| sorry, meant to write LK99 not LM99.
| carabiner wrote:
| This was posted during the height of the LK-99 frenzy:
|
| "In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the
| internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to
| believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty,
| housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that
| even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their
| worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in
| Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive,
| apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your
| attention instead?"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665
|
| It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got
| it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for
| hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different
| hype.
| JackFr wrote:
| I disagree. It's a theory of others' state of mind, based
| solely on the author's impression, offered without evidence.
| It's pure projection and more a window into the author's
| mindset than anything else.
| lolinder wrote:
| It can be projection and also be true, if the author is more
| or less typical of people in the group they're projecting
| onto. It certainly resonates with me and a lot of us here on
| HN (which has been a hub for this kind of story).
| gostsamo wrote:
| People were excited by expected breakthroughs in the past when
| global warming or overpopulation or whatever weren't that
| popular. They had other world ending scenarios back then but
| though they wanted to turn dearth into gold or to find the
| fountain of eternal youth, those were unbundled from the
| expected second coming. No reason to connect them now.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Global warming is bad, but you have to see the positive
| aspects too.
|
| Case in point: my local news just published an article saying
| that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one,
| am pretty excited about that!
| gostsamo wrote:
| Spiders are cool. If not for them, you will have much more
| guests at home and the fact that you are calling them "just
| insects" won't make their numbers smaller.
|
| Looking for something to extinct mosquitoes though.
| SanderNL wrote:
| You know what happens if people that are not experts talk about
| something they are not experts in?
|
| Physicists are no exception.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| It really is, and it mirrors the hype cycle around LK-99.
|
| In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described
| is at least _real_ , but the press is happy to spin it in
| wildly optimistic ways.
| gene-h wrote:
| NIF was never made to generate power. NIF uses lasers which are
| less efficient, but were cheaper to build. We have better lasers.
| What is important about NIF's result is that they demonstrated
| 'burning' plasma. The yield might be increased by adding more
| fuel.
|
| The author claims that cryogenic targets will always be too
| expensive. Why should they be? Mass production has brought down
| the cost of precision devices like CD drives and hard drives. Why
| should it be so difficult to do this for fancy ice? They claim
| cryogenic targets won't stand up to the heat in a power plant
| like environment. They don't need to for very long. If the
| pellets are shot into the chamber, the time they spend exposed to
| residual heat from the walls can be very short.
|
| Their entire discussion of the economics of ICF power is
| superficial. There is a range of conditions in which ICF power
| may be profitable.[0] Repetition rates of kilohertz as claimed
| are unnecessary.
|
| [0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2020.005..
| .
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| The article mentions that the reaction had a 4% yield with lasers
| that are 0.5% efficient.
|
| The 100% yield scenario would yield 75MJ of energy.
|
| Modern lasers that are 20% efficient would require 10MJ instead
| of 400MJ for the reaction.
|
| In theory we only need a 13% yield with modern lasers to reach
| breakeven. 9% with 30%, 7% with 40%, etc
|
| Note that this is just for this particular pellet they tested -
| larger pellets likely have better yields due to scaling laws, but
| would require a more powerful laser array.
|
| I think the article is rather pessimistic, understandably so, but
| doesn't really paint an accurate picture of the progress made. If
| anything, we are closer than we think.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| This is what the article misses. NIF is doing theoretical
| testing using extremely inefficient lasers.
|
| Nowhere in this article does it mention the gains from using
| more efficient lasers, instead treating the 400MJ input as a
| constant. Bad reporting.
| alexwebb2 wrote:
| The conclusion here veers quite rapidly into scientific endism
| (we've more or less reached the pinnacle of human science, and no
| further significant advances are likely to be made) and
| malthusianism (we lack the resources to do so anyway and are
| headed for decline as a species).
|
| For me, that colors everything that was said before it, and
| causes me to reinterpret the objections on cost/efficiency as
| being rooted in "we're not there yet, and because we're at the
| end of scientific progress, we'll therefore never get there".
| ooterness wrote:
| It is the 21st century. For more than a hundred years, fusion
| has been twenty years away. To be a man in such times is to be
| one amongst billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most
| bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.
| Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has
| been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of
| progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there
| is only war.
| cstross wrote:
| The key point about NIF is buried _way_ down in the article:
|
| _But the NIF was never "about" societal energy. Its primary
| purpose is nuclear weapons research. This pesky thing called the
| nuclear test ban treaty means we can't just go around detonating
| nuclear bombs whenever we feel like it. Surely we did not run out
| of South Pacific island paradises to blow to smithereens. The NIF
| allows study of matter at extremely high energy density._
|
| NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a
| weapons research and development lab established during the
| Manhattan Project. Talk of laser fusion as a viable path to
| commercial fusion reactors is propaganda intended to further the
| budgetary aims of the nuclear weapons industry. The realistic
| path to fusion power lies through magnetic confinement reactors
| (eg. ITER, Wendelstein-7X, etc.)
| morkalork wrote:
| There's also the angle that it's just something for the
| researchers at that lab to do, gives them a purpose. And in
| exchange, the US has a perpetually well staffed nuclear weapons
| research lab.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't know why there is any doubt about that. Maybe it's only
| because I am older and was DoE-adjacent in the relevant
| timeframe, but I distinctly recall the pitch for funding NIF
| was 100% pure weapons. They even wrote it down:
|
| https://www.osti.gov/biblio/50733
|
| """ The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to
| produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap
| with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the
| total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of
| the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total
| energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to
| pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition
| experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding
| of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating
| various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for
| separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to
| radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In
| addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more
| such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport
| and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a
| considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in
| enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging
| stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training
| the next generation of scientists who will monitor the
| stockpile. """
| fanf2 wrote:
| I was looking around for news about the current state of
| operations at JET when I found this article
| https://physicsworld.com/a/ignition-pending/ which repeatedly
| muddles fusion power research and fusion weapons research.
| (Never mind the several paragraphs about the cold fusion
| idiocy.) And this is in a publication that is supposed to be
| for a technical and knowledgable audience. Sigh.
|
| Anyway, in recent years at JET they have been doing a new
| round of deuterium-tritium experiments. The interior of the
| reactor has been refurbished with tungsten and beryllium
| inner surfaces, like ITER will have, and they have been
| testing longer reaction pulses. Sounds promising
| https://physicsworld.com/a/fusion-energy-record-smashed-
| by-j...
| Stevvo wrote:
| I don't know if you've heard much about Tokamak Energy;
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_Energy
|
| I think they have a good shot at commercial fusion by
| 2030s. The REBCO magnets reduce the size and complexity of
| the machine massively. Oddly, Brexit is a benefit to them;
| JET employees can no longer go work for ITER if they want a
| pay and lifestyle upgrade, but they can go a few hundred
| meters down the road.
| jessriedel wrote:
| > NIF was built by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
| a weapons research and development lab established during the
| Manhattan Project.
|
| Isn't this wrong? LLNL was an 1952 off-shoot of Lawrence
| Berkeley National Lab, which in turn was founded in 1931. LLNL
| was not established during or by the Manhattan project, which
| ended in 1946.
|
| > [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] was originally
| established as the University of California Radiation
| Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response to the
| detonation of the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb during the
| Cold War. It later became autonomous in 1971 and was designated
| a national laboratory in 1981.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Livermore_National_La...
|
| > [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory] was founded on August
| 26, 1931, by Ernest Lawrence, as the Radiation Laboratory of
| the University of California, Berkeley, associated with the
| Physics Department.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Berkeley_National_Lab...
|
| > Although the Manhattan Project ceased to exist on 31 December
| 1946, the Manhattan District was not abolished until 15 August
| 1947
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#After_the_wa...
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| Maybe a dumb question, but what is the point of continuing
| nuclear weapons research?
|
| Isn't the research basically done, as in "we can build big
| enough bombs to annihilate whatever we want"?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Good question!
|
| Existing nukes degrade due to various factors such as the
| natural radioactive decay of the uranium and plutonium
| they're made of. Supercomputers are used to simulate this and
| make predictions about reliability, remaining lifetime,
| etc...
|
| When it comes time to refurbish old bombs, ideally they
| should have the cores reprocessed into new, modern designs
| with better safety, reliability, and less fallout when they
| go boom (better efficiency).
|
| All of this requires measurements, simulations, tests, etc...
|
| In the past it was done with experiments on complete bombs,
| now it's done with experiments on just small subsets that
| don't go boom in the desert.
| Stevvo wrote:
| I don't think ITER will ever be completed.
|
| They have delayed the announcement of the delay, but it's
| expected to be another 5+ years.
|
| It's the most complicated machine ever built, with each part
| built by a different firm in a different country for political
| reasons. The first vacuum vessel sector installed was corroded.
| Korea used steel that didn't meet the specifications. 8 more
| sectors from four different nations to go, each one could bring
| its own 5 year delay. Or maybe they don't find any issues on
| the inspections but only find a leak after the whole machine
| has been assembled.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| ... and the first _net gain_ result and headline just so
| happened to coincide with the renewal of their gov grant.
| cratermoon wrote:
| That "net gain" comes with a lot of a caveats. 400MJ to
| produce a 2.1MJ laser burst that resulted in 3.5MJ of fusion
| out is pretty far from a total net gain.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| What would be the advantage of a bomb built out of this
| technology as opposed to an H-bomb?
|
| How do you know it's not the other way around:
|
| That they're using the gigantic piggy bank of the military to
| fund actual fusion research?
|
| I agree that ICF doesn't seem like a winning strategy. But
| surely it's not complete waste, either, right?
| cstross wrote:
| You can't build a bomb using this technology. Period.
|
| But you can achieve plasmas of equivalent density and
| temperature to those you get in an H-bomb explosion, which is
| invaluable to weapons researchers if they're not allowed to
| actually detonate any bombs.
| weberer wrote:
| That makes me wonder whether it would be feasible to build a
| bomb type reactor. Detonate a hydrogen bomb in an underground
| lake 10km down, then extract the steam over the next few days.
| neaden wrote:
| If you've got a 10 KM tunnel bored into the earth you could
| just build a geothermal power plant and not need the nuclear
| aspect at all.
| cobbal wrote:
| They did consider using nukes as a fracking device to aid
| in geothermal power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P
| roject_Plowshare#Proposed_nuc... (near the bottom of the
| list)
| api wrote:
| This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-civilization
| tendencies. Everything he writes is going to go through that
| lens. Check the other posts.
|
| I knew I recognized the name so I checked and yup it was him.
| I've seen his stuff before. Summary: "Everything is futile so
| give up now." He would have been arguing for the impossibility of
| space flight in the 40s, or small computers in the 60s, etc. His
| approach is to "do the math" with the most pessimistic
| assumptions and then conclude it'll never work.
|
| Thing is: if you take that position you will be right more than
| half the time... probably more than 2/3 of the time. Being a
| permanent curmudgeon about anything new is a great zero-effort
| way to seem prescient.
|
| Fusion is obviously monumentally hard, but there is a steady
| march of gains toward higher and higher energy levels at lower
| cost. There is no known fundamental physical reason why fusion
| can't be done in a reactor, and given that it's a path to
| effectively infinite clean energy it'd be stupid to not keep
| working on it.
| chpatrick wrote:
| The point isn't that fusion isn't worth doing but that NIF
| isn't actually about power generation and it's disappointing
| that it always gets into the news as if it was.
| boxed wrote:
| Sure. But the NIF approach IS doomed. Even if they succeed by
| reducing fuel costs by 5 orders of magnitude AND manage to
| capture 100% of the energy AND manage to increase firing rate 6
| orders of magnitude it's STILL not even close to competitive
| with solar power.
|
| That's pretty bad. Fusion might be feasible, but this approach
| isn't. (And I would say the same about ITER, even though that's
| WAY more feasible.)
|
| We shouldn't pay too much attention to approaches that, when
| 100% successful, are still failures.
| api wrote:
| NIF is pretty universally panned as an approach to commercial
| fusion. It's more about doing basic science on plasmas and
| fusion and of course researching thermonuclear weapons
| without actually doing real (dirty) nuclear tests.
|
| That being said, sometimes technology can do surprising
| things. If some other line of research somewhere yields, say,
| lasers that are multiple orders of magnitude more efficient
| then suddenly things might change and ICF would become a
| viable path. The massive inefficiency of lasers is the
| largest single problem.
|
| The main reason magnetic containment is so much better than
| ICF is that huge electromagnets are more efficient than
| lasers plus inertia at confining the plasma.
| Veedrac wrote:
| Note that there are a bunch of ICF approaches that don't
| use lasers and potentially have much higher conversion
| efficiencies, though they are all pretty experimental and I
| wouldn't bet on any of them in particular.
| boxed wrote:
| From the article it doesn't seem like even a 100% efficient
| laser will do much to the economics...
| acqq wrote:
| > This guy is a pretty doctrinaire "doomer" with anti-
| civilization tendencies.
|
| Calling him that name is IMO an attempt of a "character
| assassination" and not a valid critique. His blog is " _Do the
| Math_ " and his arguments are based on the math. If you can
| contribute a single example where his _math_ is wrong, I 'd be
| more inclined to believe you. Otherwise, I'll do my best to
| ignore your future comments.
|
| > Summary: "Everything is futile so give up now."
|
| I'm quite sure you can't cite an actual text where he wrote
| anything like that.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Ha ha I read his earlier article about whether we could survive
| going back to foraging etc. and I think he is too optimistic! I
| think we have created enough pollution and wrecked ecosystems
| that 8bn people cannot go walkabout and survive simultaneously.
| Let alone people's skill. Food will be the last concern: human
| predators and acess to water would be! But that is my take.
|
| That said I am more optimistic we wont need to go back to
| hunter gatherer en mass.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > This guy is a ... "doomer" ...
|
| Whatever your feelings about his pessimistic tone, regularly
| debunking the latest popular media baloney is a reasonable
| pastime, which society could certainly use more of.
|
| > Fusion is obviously monumentally hard ... steady march of
| gains toward higher ... There is no known fundamental physical
| reason why ...
|
| True. And limestone can be mined by hand, on top of Mount
| Everest. The cost per kilogram would be enormously higher than
| any normal commercial limestone quarry, but if we just invested
| _enough_...
|
| Meanwhile, "aim your solar cells roughly toward the sun" fusion
| energy is available at scale, now, and is orders of magnitude
| cheaper than there's any reason to believe possible for a
| commercial fusion reactor. And human society does not have
| infinite resources, to invest in sounds-cool stuff with
| massively negative ROI's.
| cubefox wrote:
| Solar power is highly volatile and can't be stored in large
| quantities. It's not cheap when it is infinitely expensive at
| night. A better alternative to fusion would be fission. It
| works, is stable, and will likely remain far cheaper than
| fusion even when fusion becomes technically possible.
| api wrote:
| > can't be stored in large quantities.
|
| "We don't have an energy problem. We have an energy storage
| problem."
| cubefox wrote:
| We don't even have much of a storage problem, fission
| works and doesn't need energy storage. Our problem is
| rather that coal power is cheaper than fission. Coal
| plants are responsible for the majority of anthropogenic
| CO2.
| api wrote:
| Coal and fissile fuels are stored energy. My point is
| that if we can store energy at scale we can just grab the
| free energy that falls from the sky.
| cubefox wrote:
| We can't store the energy in coal. Only in batteries at
| high cost and low capacity.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| > I view myself as intrinsically optimistic, so I am unsettled
| by my growing concerns about the viability of our future--such
| worrying is not consistent with who I am.
|
| From his about page. Not exactly what I'd call doctrinaire.
| sustn wrote:
| I find the tone of your comment quite harsh in its choice of
| words. Just as you call the author a "doctrinaire doomer" for
| not showing huge optimism about the future of our way of life
| and civilization, you could be labeled an "infantile dreamer"
| and "deluded denialist" of the very real and concerning
| findings about the climate change and planetary limits we will
| be faced with, and already are. But is such pointed labeling
| really justified? And more importantly, what good does that
| kind of barbed language do in a conversation.
|
| The blog post author seems to be concerned about the time and
| attention spent on something that is not likely (i.e. as his
| post states is off by several orders of magnitude at least) to
| realistically help with alleviating the urgent problems of
| planetary climate change and resource exhaustion. I agree with
| that concern.
|
| Faced with finite resources and a time limit, prioritization is
| essential to ensure the best chance of success. Technologies
| like fusion detract from finding and implementing more
| realistic approaches that could help with long-term
| civilizational sustainability.
| api wrote:
| Might have been too harsh, but I've come to see doom and
| gloom or even just lots of pessimism as the other side of the
| climate change denial coin. It discourages us from actually
| trying to do anything, since it promotes the idea that the
| whole thing is just impossible and we should just live it up
| before we hit the Malthusian die-off. This point of view is
| extremely common in scientific and technical circles and it
| doesn't need to be promoted any more.
|
| I also really dislike back-to-hunter-gatherer primitivism.
| It's an ideology of extremely privileged people who have
| never actually lived "close to nature" a.k.a. poor. It's a
| reactionary fantasy of a lost golden age that never existed
| and belongs in the same category as American right-wingers
| glorifying the 1950s or neo-medievalists glorifying the
| 1500s.
|
| It's a brutally tough problem and it's likely that we already
| have dialed in a certain amount of climate change we will
| have to deal with, but it's not futile unless of course we
| just give up.
| acqq wrote:
| > since it promotes the idea that the whole thing is just
| impossible and we should just live it up before we hit the
| Malthusian die-off.
|
| I haven't seen the author you criticize ever promoted
| either that or that he suggests that humanity as the whole
| _should_ revert to "hunter-gatherer primitivism."
|
| I see now you are summarizing his writing just as "just
| lots of pessimism". But the numbers don't lie. Unless you
| directly depend some specific miracle (and you should state
| which that is supposed to be) the numbers, if extrapolated
| assuming continuous growth, result in resource exhaustion.
| Continuous growth is provably impossible without some
| miracle involved.
|
| And I guess the above observation you translate to "the
| whole thing is just impossible"? Would you define your
| "whole thing" as the "infinite growth and scientists will
| give us a miracle allowing that"? If not, what are you
| talking about then?
|
| In the words of Tom Murphy, from the article:
|
| "The physical reality is that we are living in an
| ecologically, evolutionarily untested paradigm that is very
| recent (on relevant timescales) and powered by patently
| unsustainable practices and resource use. The cost is rapid
| ecological degradation and global disruption to the
| biosphere. It seems quite clear that the track we are on
| does not lead to the stars, but to ignominious self-
| termination of this whacky mode called modernity."
| walleeee wrote:
| The guy is by no means a "doomer" and nowhere does he say
| everything is futile, give up now. That is the opposite of his
| point: he wants us all to reflect on our trajectory, subject it
| to serious critique, and try to turn it into something more
| likely to carry us through civilizational adolescence[0].
|
| He does have qualms about whether "effectively infinite clean
| energy" would do us any good right now. Look at what we've done
| with a temporary surfeit of very cheap (but not clean) energy.
| We are kicking out the legs of the stool we're sitting on.
| Human beings perch precariously at the apex of a massive
| biological edifice, the foundation of which is fundamental to
| human life, but we have the unfortunate habit of thinking all
| we need is technology and ingenuity. Far more than new
| technology, we need the wisdom to apply our tools for the long
| term flourishing of earth-borne life, of which humanity is a
| part.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/6-1oUMNX64Y
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm skeptical if commercial fusion power generation will ever be
| economic. We get tricked by existence of stars but stars actually
| produce a really low amount of energy per unit mass: 0.2mW/kg
| [1]. It just so happens that stars are really massive (~333,000
| times the mass of Earth). Stars can thus solve the neutron
| problem with gravity.
|
| Even if you solve magnetic confinement of a superheated turbulent
| fluid in a fusion reactor (and that's a big "if"), you still lose
| energy and destroy your container through the loss of neutrons.
|
| I'm skeptical of any energy "breakthrough" now, be that with
| fusion, batteries and superconductors. With LK-99 I refused to
| care until it was reproduced (particularly given the factor that
| at least one of the paper's authors had previously had to
| restract papers). So many "breakthroughs" are just about building
| reputation for the individuals and seeking grants and funding for
| their research. That's all.
|
| Solar, in particular, is our future.
|
| And while we're worrying about far-future tech like fusion, we're
| ignoring the very real problems of today. Like it or not, we have
| and will continue to have a dependence on fossil fuels for some
| time to come. So much so that the US hasn't built a significant
| refinery in 30-40 years. I get the naive opposition to this but a
| new refinery produces WAY less pollution than the old refineries
| we have.
|
| This is set to change with a new refinery in Oklahmoa that will
| be 100% powered by renewable energy and produce 95% less
| greenhouse gas (per unit of fuel) than existing refineries [2].
|
| [1]:
| https://lifeng.lamost.org/courses/astrotoday/CHAISSON/AT316/...
|
| [2]: https://journalrecord.com/2023/05/25/planned-cushing-
| refiner...
| gpjanik wrote:
| Everyone mildly interested in the topic knows about what's
| written in the article. There are popular scientists making
| youtube videos about what is Q, etc.
|
| It's the gain factor of the fuel itself, not the entire system
| that achieved positive value. The point is that until 2022, noone
| was able to achieve any gain at all. So this was a breakthrough
| (alas many more needed to make it commercially usable) and just
| because some stupid people misinterpreted it, it doesn't mean
| it's not important.
| tootie wrote:
| I was aware of this but reading this article makes it seem like
| we're just completely barking up the wrong tree and this entire
| approach is never going to be practical.
| gpjanik wrote:
| On what premise? It just says we can't make it economical
| anytime soon, but you have to start somewhere - or should we
| all agree that unlimited clean energy is not worth trying
| because it's a long shot?
| willis936 wrote:
| I think "this approach" is short for "ICF" rather than
| "fusion energy".
| tootie wrote:
| My impression from previous news was we had passed a
| barrier, but still had a short way to get net positive on
| the total system and that we were on the right trajectory.
| This article makes it sound like we're essentially nowhere.
| That we've made a nice experiment, but the tech involved is
| so wildly inefficient we will be back to the drawing board
| when it comes to building a real generator. I had no idea
| the lasers were consuming such a massive amount of energy
| or that they were so expensive to operate.
| catapart wrote:
| Agreed. This is a weirdly negative and short-sighted article.
| It's like... yeah, maybe lasers aren't the way to go, guy. But
| the fact that we proved it in a practical, empirical test -
| regardless of the method we used - means that all of our
| theories are strengthened. All of our research into the topic
| is either on the right track, or can now be measured against a
| practical result. It's... huge. It's a huge deal that was
| rightly praised.
|
| And, like you said, nobody who was interested that I talked to
| failed to understand the pretty simple setup: overall cost is
| the asterisk, but gain factor is great! The best I can assume
| is that this guy deals a lot with students and maybe students
| didn't grok the whole situation (as all idealistic and naive -
| wonderful traits in students - are likely to do).
|
| In any case, it just seems really pessimistic to say "really
| don't expect anything to come of this laser process", because
| of the obvious practical reality: other fusion researchers
| aren't all using lasers to create fusion, yet all of them can
| use the results from the laser fusion to make efficiencies in
| their own designs.
| progrus wrote:
| [flagged]
| myrmidon wrote:
| Could you explain what this "infowar" is about, who "they" are
| and who is supposedly crazy and dumb?
|
| Your post makes zero sense without context.
| progrus wrote:
| You're not the target audience, but OK:
|
| "They" are a bunch of corrupted intelligence officials and
| powerful/influential people who got corrupted somewhere along
| the way, but started morphing into a totalitarian cabal
| around when the Soviet Union collapsed.
|
| The unipolar "team America" world was always an illusion, the
| Cold War just shifted underground and distributed.
|
| This has intensified recently, as you can tell with
| Argentinians picking an ancap maniac, and the deep state in
| the US throwing the whole freakin library at Trump.
|
| Add to that all sorts of other schemes and plots that you can
| probably guess at, if you're honest with yourself.
|
| The conflict is almost over, they have lost. The Chinese
| economy is teetering over the abyss. Trump starts his
| counterattack on the US establishment 8/21. Enjoy the show.
| quenix wrote:
| Just out of interest, why do you say 8/21? Sounds like a
| pretty random date, and you seem quite sure of yourself.
|
| What makes you think he'll "begin his counterattack" then?
| progrus wrote:
| https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/1108937128051502
| 44
| dave333 wrote:
| Anyone interested in clean energy should know about this device
| that produces 100s of kW in a novel chemical process.
|
| https://brilliantlightpower.com/suncell/
|
| Note that the wikipedia article about this company is policed by
| skeptics and has been in dispute for more than a decade.
| TomMasz wrote:
| I live near the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser
| Energetics (aka The Laser Lab) and took a tour one day. They have
| an enormous bank of huge capacitors (think refrigerator-sized)
| that they charge off the power grid since there's no way in hell
| they can get sufficient energy directly. Laser fusion is one of
| those things that's _possible_ but seems unlikely to ever be
| _practical_ , though something may useful still come from it.
| Bajeezus wrote:
| I used to work at the Rochester LLE! I never worked on
| capacitor logistics, but I heard that it was a PITA to work
| with local utilities to get those on the grid (but nowhere near
| as much as the PITA to get that building zoned for Brighton in
| the first place)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's been actualized recently, but there's a sort of vaporware
| bermuda triangle within physics of revolutionary holy grail
| advancements that repeatedly garner an enormous amount of hype
| and press, but almost always fails to materialize into anything
| useful.
|
| It consists of * Room temperature semiconductors
| * Useful fusion power * Quantum computers something
| anything useful outside of a simulation
|
| It's a bit of a meme at this point. These things have been twenty
| years away for forty years. I wouldn't go as far as saying any of
| these things are impossible, but I would suggest physicists roll
| their eyes at these announcements for a good reason.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Is this more a property of these breakthroughs being very hard
| or very desirable? What would be achievements of similar impact
| that might be more achievable?
|
| I'm asking this in part because I was thinking way too much
| about applications of superconductors during peak LK-99 hype
| and now think room-temp superconductors would be the greatest
| possible discovery (we wouldn't even need fusion about because
| solar cells in deserts and a global superconductors grid). I
| wonder if I got to that conclusion because I obsessed over
| superconductors for weeks and if I'm missing other equally
| amazing, possible, future technologies.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Probably mostly a consequence of how desirable these things
| would be. Both room temperature semiconductors and fusion
| would completely reshape society and re-draw the geopolitical
| map to a degree we haven't seen since the industrial
| revolution. We'd find ourselves in an age where oil was
| nearly worthless.
|
| So there's a lot of money and glory at stake if you can
| demonstrate you're making headway toward any of these goals.
|
| There's a parallel to alchemy in all this. Before we knew it
| wasn't impossible to create gold through chemical processes,
| it seemed like a very appealing quest indeed. You have
| figures like Newton spending an inordinate amount of time and
| effort trying to figure it out.
| cubefox wrote:
| > What would be achievements of similar impact that might be
| more achievable?
|
| Artificial intelligence. By a gigantic margin. Fusion would
| be very expensive and likely not competitive with fission,
| due to vastly more complex and expensive reactors. So
| effectively useless. Quantum computers: Nobody knows what
| they would be practically useful for, not even experts like
| Scott Aaronson. (No, cracking RSA is not useful.) Room
| temperature superconductors: The most realistic example I
| have heard about them is ... smaller MRI machines. Great.
| bell-cot wrote:
| To judge by how many Hollywood blockbusters have featured ever-
| larger-and-flashier Sci-Fi ray guns and robots and space ships
| and such...I'm thinking that most humans are quite naturally
| drawn to "Big! New!! Shiny!!!" things.
|
| And politely pointing out that common human bias might be a
| better approach than pinning "blame" (for people kinda being
| suckers for the idea of fusion power reactors) on ideology /
| mythology. The latter often get more emotional and adversarial.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yeah, lots of people have been saying the same thing as of late.
| There's a bunch of fusion designs that promise bigger outputs
| than inputs, but so far that only holds so long you look at the
| most convenient parameter: the energy going into the plasma, and
| the energy being produced as a result.
|
| Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy heating
| up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for energy
| production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary costs like
| magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.
|
| I support research into fusion energy, but IMO it's very likely
| it'll never be used for commercial energy production. It might
| eventually make it into spacecraft and submarines, but I think
| before it becomes practical to build a powerplant, renewables
| will eat its lunch.
| willis936 wrote:
| >Once you take into account that you waste a lot of energy
| heating up the plasma, and that you capture less than 100% for
| energy production, and that there are all sorts of auxiliary
| costs like magnets, the picture is a whole lot less rosy.
|
| The startup costs of heating the plasma are only significant in
| the high density/high confinement time/low temperature regime
| of pulsed ICF devices, which use no magnets.
|
| The notion that laypeople have an accurate idea of rosiness
| based off of Qplasma progress is not one I can treat seriously.
| The jump from Qplasma 0.1 to Qplasma 1 is similar to the jump
| from Qplasma 1 to Qplasma infinity. We burn the plasmas to find
| the minimally viable machine and we do the science and
| engineering to continually push it down (obviously the world
| can not run on NIFs and ITERs).
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I think there is an important missed point: research funding is
| rivalrous, and not infinite. NIF is such a dead end that there is
| a huge risk that the positive result sucks the air out of a
| crowded room and _de facto_ takes away resources from "societal"
| fusion energy projects that have a shot at actually being useful.
| Veedrac wrote:
| ...how? Commercial fusion does not compete with NIF. Nobody
| invests in NIF expecting to make a return, the government
| spends money on it hoping for science. NIF is not to my
| knowledge part of government programs that aim to accelerate
| commercial fusion.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The government could drop funding of fusion that can't be
| commercialized and give grants to other fusion projects?
| Funding between government research agendas is rivalrous too.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This isn't a zero sum game.
|
| We have enough money that we can do both.
|
| It should only be a question of whether this NIF research
| is useful.
|
| Surely, they are actually producing some value. There
| research _is_ beneficial to fusion in general.
|
| Is it useful enough? I don't know.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| You're kidding right? Political handouts are exactly a
| zero sum game. To fund something new, you must pick one
| of either:
|
| - decrease spending elsewhere
|
| - tax people more
|
| - borrow on credit
|
| - print money
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