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posted by
cmn32480
on Monday November 02 2015, @09:26PM
from the fusion-is-still-only-10-years-away dept.
from the fusion-is-still-only-10-years-away dept.
From Yahoo Finance:
Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy.
For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.And they're still dreaming.
But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.
Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.
The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the W7-X.
[...]
Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of W7-X on Youtube.
Additional information can be found at this referenced article from Science .
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:44AM
What you'd get for your billion Euros would be an hundred thousand homes that would have a net zero energy consumption for basically forever. Not too shabby.
While I'm all for basic research and applaud the efforts of this project...it's insulting to sell it as a financially viable path to energy production. Do it for the same reason we run the LHC: to learn more about what makes the Universe tick. Isn't that enough?
Even the wildest most optimistic schemes for both fusion and fission power production are ludicrously more expensive than what we already have today in off-the-shelf solar power. Sure, so the fuels for the power plants are as cheap as water or dirt. So what? Solar doesn't even have that expense, and it has zero maintenance and operations costs, and the equipment is orders of magnitude cheaper, and it's literally no more hazardous than a plate glass window. Nor can you weaponize it, nor is it a target for terrorists, nor do you have the NIMBY problem, nor is there any government regulation. And, oh-by-the-way, it also doesn't rely on theoretical physics that hasn't ever actually been demonstrated to work as hoped for, or multi-billion-dollar government research projects just to figure out if theory actually represents reality at all.
In stark contrast...solar is simply a matter of calling a contractor and saying, "Make it so!" -- or, if you've got adequate DIY home improvement roofing and DC electrician skills, going to your local home improvement store, coming home with the kit, and spending a week or so on your roof and in your attic. And that's all today, not some vague hope of commercializing it at utility scales before the end of the century...but today, right now.
So, yeah. Do the research for the sake of doing research.
But if your goal is limitless power too cheap to meter...well, if that's your goal and you don't already have it for yourself, either it's because you don't have the financial wherewithal for home ownership, or because you're an idiot holding out for a pew-pew laaaaazer sparkle unicorn fart fantasy.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:47AM
So, you're saying that 10K Euros makes "free energy forever" for a house?
Check the actual lifespan of a solar panel, or storage battery, or wind turbine gearbox. These things require manufacture, maintenance, and recycling of the used up parts, and all of that requires energy too. Solar and wind are weak tea compared to fission, cover the entire roof of a suburban home at 20 watts per square foot (peak) and solar still can't satisfy sunbelt demands for cooling, nor northern demands for heating, especially in winter when there's little solar radiation to capture. Wind can be good power when it's blowing, unfortunately most of us don't live in Western Nebraska.
Fission can be done about an order of magnitude SAFER than we are currently doing it, if we had the political will to build new plants instead of rehabilitating old ones. Fusion promises to take the ick out of fission, and that should get past our current political problems with nuclear energy. Spending a few tens of billions on convincing people that nuclear energy is better than fossil fuels? I'd call that a very good investment, much better than the 60 billion we recently spent to "politically stabilize" some oil fields.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:02AM
Bullshit.
Pure, unadulterated, weapons-grade bullshit.
I live in a modest suburban home with more than a third but well less than half of the roof covered in run-of-the-mill Kyocera solar panels, and I generate half again as much electricity as I use -- enough to power an electric vehicle for free when I finally get one.
Including cooling.
Including summer cooling.
Including summer cooling with daytime highs well over 110°F and overnight lows over 90°F.
Including summer cooling for weeks at a time with daytime highs well over 110°F and overnight lows over 90°F.
Oh -- and this is an home built during the Carter administration, with very little in the way of energy efficiency improvements. I've put in double-pane windows and had a lot of insulation blown in the attic, but it's a far cry from anything LEED would certify today.
Whatever the Koch Brothers are paying you to spew such FUD...they sure as hell ain't getting their money's worth.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:30PM
I don't think it's paid FUD. Lots of people sincerely believe that. I had solar panels put up recently, not even enough to fully cover my south-facing roof, and I'm generating more energy than I use in a year. One of my neighbors - same size house, built at the same time - talked to me about it. I found out their electricity bill was more than _double_ what mine had been before the solar panels. I haven't been able to figure out how they managed to get it that high (without grow-lamps, anyway). But it seems fairly common for people to have huge electricity bills, even in fairly modern houses, so the GP might be one of them.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:12AM
When I lived alone in Miami, during non AC months the power company charged me less for usage than their "customer charge" and other fixed fees - my total bill was running under $20 per month. Add a wife and two kids, double the size of the house, and now we're lucky to see the bill under $200 per month. More hot water, more people in and out of the refrigerator, and more months with the AC on 24/7.
AC is the big one, if you're trying to keep a house at 72 degrees in Florida, you're going to have some pretty impressive bills in the summer. We shoot for 76, and still see over $350 some months.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:06AM
I live in a 2000 square foot house in Florida, I've lived 4 similar Florida houses over the past couple of decades. Our power bills run about $0.10 per square foot per month most of the year, up to $0.20 psf during the hottest summer months. The power company (and my "smart" thermostat) says our consumption is "average for our neighborhood." Our cost of electricity is about $0.11/kWh, give or take. So, we need a little less than 2 kilowatt hours per square foot of conditioned space per month during peak loads, call it 2kwh to account for storage losses. If your panels are delivering 20 watts per square foot and they cover the same area as the house, then you only need 100 hours of pure noon equivalent sun per month to make it work, 3.3 hours a day, plus enough storage capacity to pull through nights and cloudy (but still hot enough to require AC) days.
Most panels don't deliver a full 20 watts per square foot as installed, and most systems aren't equipped with enough storage capacity to carry across 2 or 3 cloudy 90 degree days.
If you're getting all the cooling you need from 30% roof coverage, you live in a lower cooling demand location than Florida, or you have your panels on tracking mounts to get more than 9 hours a day of sunlight on average.
We have trees, which lowers our cooling bills, but also reduces our solar collection potential to less than 6 hours a day in most locations on our roof and in our yard.
As for northern latitudes, their heat energy demands are even higher than Florida's cooling demands, plus they get much less sun in the winter, when they need the energy the most.
Solar is getting better, if it were free I would definitely have it on my roof, but it's not _the_ answer.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:54AM
Oh, separately, as to why I don't have my own solar power farm: trees.
We like our trees, our trees provide shade and some semblance of an ecosystem around our home (birds, squirrels, etc.)
Trees screw up solar power ROI something fierce, all they have to do is shade the roof for 30% of the day and all those carefully calculated subsidies turn from profit to loss.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday November 03 2015, @10:15AM
No, what you'd get for a billion Euros is a failed project that produced dubious research and a request for 10 billion Euros for more research.