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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: 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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