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Author Topic:   Fusion: Hope For The Future?
Taq
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Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


(1)
Message 6 of 9 (904638)
01-03-2023 6:30 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Phat
01-02-2023 8:01 AM


Re: Who Pays The Bill?
Phat writes:
An eventual breakthrough leading to cheap and abundant energy could be a game-changer.
As the old saying goes, fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be.
The experiment in question had ~2 megajoules of laser light in and ~3 megajoules of fusion energy out. That's a yield of about 300 watts, or enough to run your computer for an hour or 2.
Of course, there is a huge BUT . . .
While they got more fusion energy out than laser light in, what they didn't say as loudly is that it took 300 megajoules of electricity to make the 2 megajoules of laser light. So their actual total yield was just 1%. Not as exciting.
The other less major BUTS are that they used tritium, which is really expensive and hard to come by, and the fuel pellet takes a lot of work to get to the right shape (almost perfectly spherical). As it sits right now, this is not a process that can be repeated 10's or even 100's times a second, more like twice a day.
Even if they arrived at a high enough energy output, it is highly doubtful that it will be affordable for decades after that. Of course, if they don't try then we will never have affordable fusion power, so I commend them for slogging away at it.
In the short to medium-long term, fission is the fuel source we should be pursuing, IMHO.

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 Message 1 by Phat, posted 01-02-2023 8:01 AM Phat has not replied

  
Taq
Member
Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 7 of 9 (904639)
01-03-2023 6:48 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by Phat
01-02-2023 8:10 AM


Re: Who Pays The Bill?
Phat writes:
As Ray Dalio reminds us, the United States is on a slow decline and China is on a slow accent. Our only advantage is our freedom, but our political squabbling complicates and hinders our progress. Of course, the CCP(Chinese Communist Party) complicates and hinders theirs as well.
quote:
As signatories to the ITER Agreement, the ITER Members China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States will share in the cost of project construction, operation and decommissioning, and also share in the experimental results and any intellectual property generated by the project.
ITER Members
ITER is the biggest fusion project going right now. China has some of their own fusion projects that have had some good results, but I don't expect them to leapfrog ahead of everyone else, and even if they do I don't expect them to hoard the technology. China would absolutely love to be the center of the fusion world if that happens.
Personally, I would love to see the Western Capitalists get ahold of the technology first and leave the governments out of it.
It's highly doubtful if any capitalist would have the capital to get fusion power off the ground. Even if they did have the capital, I doubt they would want to spend 100's of billions in initial investment without any guarantee of return for decades. This type of infrastructure is what governments were made for, for better or worse.
Besides, we have already seen what it looks like when capitalists are in control of the electrical grid in a free market. It's pretty bad. They jack up prices whenever they want. California tried it and it was horrible. Texas has a hybrid system if I understand it correctly, and you say people with $10,000 electrical bills during the Texas freeze last winter. Free markets don't work when there isn't a healthy balance between supply and demand. When the producer has a product people can literally not live without then free capitalism doesn't work.

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 Message 2 by Phat, posted 01-02-2023 8:10 AM Phat has not replied

  
Taq
Member
Posts: 9970
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 9 of 9 (904647)
01-04-2023 10:57 AM
Reply to: Message 8 by AZPaul3
01-03-2023 8:38 PM


Re: Who Pays The Bill?
AZPaul3 writes:
To be commercially viable, so the fusion buzz goes on the internet, Qt of any fusion device (tokamak, stellarator, etc) needs to be at 1000++ and sustainable for years.
It's that controlled and sustained part that are the kickers. We already did the 1000++ Qt (Qp might be a better measure) in the 1950's and 60's with hydrogen bomb testing.

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 Message 8 by AZPaul3, posted 01-03-2023 8:38 PM AZPaul3 has not replied

  
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