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takyon (881)
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10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org] Jango Raid [soylentnews.org]
Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?
“To be honest, I was feeling pretty despondent,” Dennis Whyte, the fifty-seven-year-old director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, at M.I.T., said. “And I was seeing that despondency in the faces of my students, too.” It was 2013, and M.I.T.’s experimental fusion device had lost its Department of Energy funding, for no clearly stated reason. The field of nuclear fusion, as a whole, was still moving forward, but agonizingly slowly. ITER, an enormous fusion device being built in southern France, in an international collaboration, was progressing—the schedule is for iter to demonstrate net fusion energy in 2035, and the majority of plasma physicists have high confidence that it will work—but Whyte knew that it wasn’t going to deliver affordable energy to the public in his lifetime, and maybe not in his students’ lifetimes, either. “ITER is scientifically interesting. But it’s not economically interesting,” Whyte said. “I almost retired.”
Nuclear fusion researchers open another bottle.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 24 2021, @03:48AM (3 children)
That boils down to "fission". They use 9 syllables to pronounce a two syllable word. The rest of the article is much the same. It's not simply an article, it's an almost Shakespearean tale. Nothing wrong with that, of course, some people like dudes dancing in tights. I'd rather they got to the point, and saved a few paragraphs.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @08:39AM (1 child)
Ignorant moron, what glows in the Arkansaws Darkness.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 24 2021, @09:00AM
Well, hi ari. You haven't posted a whiny journal lately. Are you feeling well?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 27 2021, @05:06PM
Lotta words just to say you're a curmudgeon. Do you do parties? We've got our own stockade and vegetables.
(Score: 3, Redundant) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday October 24 2021, @09:04AM (3 children)
Fusion energy industry is advancing so fast it's always located somewhere about 30 years in future.
Probably a best design of money sink in human history. It works perfectly as subsistence for lifetimes of several generations of scientists.
Yes, I am pretty sure it was designed as that and it's passed to next generations of privy researchers as an occult secret, doomed to never succeed.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday October 24 2021, @11:25AM (1 child)
I'll settle for this thing [wikipedia.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @01:14PM
Seaborg: Reactance is Fissile!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 25 2021, @09:06PM
I think you would get strong disagreement from the SLS contractors!
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @05:01PM (3 children)
NO! It always has changed. It always will change.
Sometimes it's downright nasty. When you get right down to it, it's never been a pastoral Eden. And it never will be. Just hope you get born in the right eon.
At least the place isn't all toxic and covered by active volcanoes, right now.
Natural events of Biblical proportions always override good intentions.
So, live simply, don't waste, be thankful for what you have, be nice to your neighbor, and quit cranking out so many hungry mouths.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25 2021, @03:54PM
Or you could simply continue to hobble prosperity, destroy our quality of life, squash meaningful advancement, and bankrupt yourselves... meanwhile other countries shovel coal into the atmosphere, trash into the water, and throw away the planet's precious natural resources for disposable junk.
I guess you've made your choice. Down-mod that post even farther if you hate individual rights and responsibilities!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 26 2021, @04:46PM
It was the gun's fault.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 26 2021, @04:56PM
I guess it is redundant... many people do realize — when they allow themselves some time for individual thought — that it's true, the climate has always changed, and always will. It's only when their minds are clouded by the hopes and fears from gaslighting that they forget. But it isn't redundant, because they don't think.
Gaslight causes global warming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @06:32PM (2 children)
And unlike controlled fusion, there's no shortage of viable triggers: China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan, USA/Russia, …
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @08:52PM
Fry: This snow is beautiful. I'm glad global warming never happened.
Leela: Actually it did. But thank God nuclear winter cancelled it out.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 25 2021, @09:10PM
No need for the fusion bombs.
Just find a nice comfortable shade tree someplace. Camp out under it and patiently watch global warming happen all around you. It won't affect you. You can wait it out until everything returns to normal.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24 2021, @10:38PM (8 children)
Betteridge aside, let's say we get all fusion-y up in the planet's business. What happens then?
Well, we use it, right? I mean, what else would be the point?
OK, so now we put it through all sorts of things. Lights. Transformers. Wires. Motors. Batteries.
You know what all these things do? They end up putting out heat. Motion ends up dissipating in heat, whether it's rubber on asphalt or transmission losses in a powerline. Sure, it doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere but that mostly relates to the effects of insolation. If we generate lots of heat down here, the fact that it isn't trapped at the same rate from the sky doesn't help us a whole lot. Then of course, if we're doing things with the energy that end up releasing carbon in other ways (such as increasing the rate of the carbon cycle owing to agricultural activities) then it's all moot anyway.
Let's put this in different terms: quite aside from carbon, a high-energy economy heats up the biosphere, because of entropy.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 24 2021, @11:03PM (7 children)
Just launch mirrors into space or do stratospheric aerosol injection to compensate.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 25 2021, @01:46AM
Those work irrespective of how much fusion is happening on earth.
In fact, they work better (relatively speaking) the more carbon's in the atmosphere.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday October 25 2021, @02:31AM (5 children)
:-) You need to "do the math" [ucsd.edu]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 25 2021, @03:51AM (4 children)
(Score: 2, Funny) by nostyle on Monday October 25 2021, @03:32PM (3 children)
You mean... like every stock-holder ever.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 25 2021, @04:28PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 29 2021, @10:15PM (1 child)
some people do: https://www.400years.dk/about [400years.dk]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 30 2021, @01:02PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday October 31 2021, @01:05AM
I get that planning on ITER was started during a time when HTS wasn't viable. Well, technology changed, but the project didn't. This is classic fusion research in a nutshell - doing projects nobody needs and investigating technologies so expensive nobody will use them commercially.
I think this demonstrates a pathology of publicly funded research, namely, that it's both primarily status signaling and second, that there are no alternatives when it's done this way. Projects like ITER aren't merely dead ends. They also take resources away from projects that would work.