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posted by cmn32480 on Monday November 02 2015, @09:26PM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:02AM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:02AM (#257807) Homepage

    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

    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&

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @03:30PM (#257969)

    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

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:12AM (#258272)

      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.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:06AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:06AM (#258270)

    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.

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