News From The Void

General Discussion
1430

So I guess moving away from nuclear energy just went out the window on a global level. Oh well. I wasn’t too fond of that particular idea, but couldn’t see an alternative in the face of a rather untrustworthy and dishonest industry (no, nuclear power doesn’t get any cheaper if you strip away all the regulations. You just don’t have to pay the true cost anymore. Someone still has to, though).

Thought they might learn a bit, invest some money into new designs that don’t run off the dirtiest fissile material imaginable, and maybe we could get back to nuclear energy in 3 decades or so and do it well instead of doing it cheap and with the condition that the infrastructure also needs to support the proliferation of nuclear weapons as a side hustle.

Looks like what we’ll get instead is a revival of nuclear energy with an industry even less inclined to give a damn. Greeeeeeat… :person_shrugging:

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1431

There’s still a lot of work going into fusion - and they are making progress, albeit slowly. It’s proving a hard nut to crack, but it think it will be achieved eventually.

Trouble is, workable fusion would provide effectively unlimited, clean, free energy. That sounds like a greaat idea, until you consider the wider implications. You would remove most of the barriers to industrial expansion - and energy is not the only resource industry consumes. You would remove one of the major limitations to population growth - but those people would still need feeding and housing. They would (perhaps most pressing) still need water.

Whilst fusion would allow us to stop using fossil fuels, all that power would nevertheless create a lot of heat, which would have to go somewhere.

Tickets for Mars colony available here.

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1432

Considering the challenges the development of the technology is facing, I do not believe that “free” is going to apply. Not even “cheap”. Even if we can make it work, there is still the possible scenario that fusion energy will turn out the new supersonic passenger transport: Yes it works, yes it would be great, but it’s so ridiculously expensive to operate that it’s not worth the advantages.

Even if it becomes a viable technology with commercial success, it might still not be anywhere near “cheap”…

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1433

The reason supersonic passenger transport failed is not because it’s expensive - it’s because it can’t be operated over populated areas - which are, unfortunately, the places most passengers want to go. Concorde did manage to turn a profit running the transatlantic route, but when the original planes wore out, it wasn’t financially viable to make more, just for a single service.

As for fusion power being free - I tend to agree that it won’t be free for the customer - because the people who own the generating plant will still seek to profit, even if it costs them nothing.

By far the greatest cost in any technology is the energy required for its production. A conventional gas or coal fired power plant is expensive because of the enrgy required to make the concrete and steel; because of the energy required to machine the turbines, cast the housings, refine the copper, and draw the wires. Then there’s the energy cost of producing the fuel for the thing - mining the coal, mining and refining uranium for nuclear reactors.

If fusion can be made to work, the only fuel it requires is tiny quantities of hydrogen. Both hugely abundant, and so cheap it might as well be free. Apart from the hydrogen fuel, a fusion reactor produces more enerrgy than it uses - so the enrgy is, in that respect, free. A system that provides more energy than it uses can then be used to power the production of similar facilities - at zero energy cost.

OK, there will still be construction costs associated with raw materials and labour - but compared to current production methods, they’re pretty minimal.

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1434

Nuclear power was an excellent choice, just not the way the US did it. The “American spirit of innovation” where every plant built had to be designed from the ground up, and face examination from the ground up pending approval, was a disaster. France followed the principles of Henry Ford: they approved a safe and effective design and started building with mass produced parts and uniform operating procedures. Their only problem was being ahead of their time…they actually built too many and produced more power than they could use, or even export, at the time.

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1435

The same could be said for any kind of powerplant, but that’s not quite how it works.

First off, if your fusion reactor uses hydrogen, it will generate certain types of radiation. Not nearly as much as fission, but at some point you will have irradiated parts to dispose. Second, nobody’s using using common hydrogen as a fusion fuel yet. We’re using specific isotopes, like Deuterium (somewhere about 13,000 bucks a kg right now, apparently). That’ll probably come down quite a bit if it’s required in larger quantities, but it is in fact not abundant, so it might also go up. If you want less radiation, you have to fall back on Helium3, and now you need a mining base on the moon… Doesn’t sound cheap either!

Next up is maintenance cost - if we’re looking at tokamak, the reactor is going to be two hells of expensive to build, being a rather complicated affair, and we don’t know yet about maintenance requirements under continuous load, or how the thing will scale. The relation between these two will be the major deciding factors for actual operational costs, and then there’s ROI, which also depends on scalability. A reactor that produces energy “almost for free” once it’s running, but needs a hundred years to return its investment costs because it’s just not producing that much of it at a time, is still a problem.

And after all those unknown factors, there’s the known ones. We still need to turn heat into electricity, meaning we’ll have a good old steam engine running behind the reactor, because we still haven’t found a better way to do this at scale. Most of that work of “machining the turbines, cast the housings etc” is still required. We’ll still need all that stuff at the back of the reactor to get actual electricity, and we know pretty exactly how expensive that stuff is to operate and maintain. In the absolute best case, fusion power won’t be much more expensive than that. Which would be great, but would surprise me quite a bit.

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1436

My whole thesis is based on the premise “IF fusion can be made to work” - as I clearly stated.

The experimental results are, so far, promising - but they are experimental, and progress has been slow.

You are correct that the current experimental designs use deuterium and tritum (hydrogen isotopes) rather than normal hydrogen. However, the goal is for commercial fusion reactors to run on hydrogen alone. Deuterium and tritium are currently used because it is easier to achieve fusion ignition temperatures with this combination - but we’ve been able to achieve fusion igniton in hydrogen for more than 50 years - it’s what happens in hydrogen bombs. It’s not achieving fusion that is proving a problem at the moment - it’s containing, controlling, maintaining, and directing the fusion products that is proving difficult.

To the best of my knowledge, the three front runners in the competing technologies (Tokamak, Stellator, and ICF), have all achieved breakeven point somewhere in the World. I have my doubts about ICF, as there seems to be no obvious way to contain and harness the reaction, and therefore no way to maintain it beyond a brief, but intense, energy burst. It’s also worrying that much of the research into ICF seems to be directed towards use of the technology as an initiator for nuclear weapons.

Fusion reactors are inherently orders of magnitude safer than the fission variety. If you pull the plug, they just shut down. If they develop faults, they can’t go into runaway, and they can’t go into meltdown - the instant the magnetic containment is lost, they just stop working - and immediately they stop working, they stop producing radiation.

Once we achieve a viable, working design, I think we can confidently expect subsequent models to become cheaper, more reliable, and smaller. That’s been the case with just about every other form of technology I can think of.

But all the above is bye the bye. The purpose of my original post was to point out that everyone thinks an endless supply of clean, free energy (OK, cleaner, cheap energy) is a good thing - and I don’t necessarily agree. The problem facing the World is not carbon dioxide emissions, it’s not over-use of fossil fuels, it’s not motor vehicles, industrial pollution, agricultural monoculture, pesticides, or dwindling water resources. These things are just by-products of the real problem - the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about. The problem is us. There are too many damned people, and we keep making more.

If we could stabilise the World’s population around 1950s levels, the problems I noted above would just disappear.

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1437

Yippee….

Perfect location though

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1438
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1439

No rain for a month and now I am in the basement…tornadoes, hail, pouring rain.

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1440

Stay safe.

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1441

I started this thread because I couldn’t think where else to post the news that rioters had set fire to the library where I grew up.

Now a local TV producer has made a documentary about the place. He makes the point that it’s not all bad, and that people still support each other - which is true, but honestly - Walton is still rough as a bear’s ass.

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1443

The plot twist no-one saw coming: After decades of fighting tooth and nail to contain nuclear technology to a manageable spread, neglecting dozens of viable and potentially beneficial development paths along the way, the world has finally given up and lets things run their course.

The one thing they wouldn’t be without, the killer feature that could make them stop worrying and embrace the bomb, was… auto-complete!

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1444

I just can’t believe I’m living to see the beginnings of the Zuckland-Amazoni future that all those 70’s and 80’s sci fi movies warned us about. Corporations are king :frowning:

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1445

I think you may be correct. This relates to my earlier mention of conflicts of interest with media as well. They are owned by the same global mega corporations that own most means of production, distribution and sales (this includes military interests). They show you what they want you to see, they sell you only what they want you to buy, and if they can’t control it, they will try to bury it.

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1446

I see some crown jewels have been lifted from the Louvre. Seems they dropped a tiara or two on the way out.

It’s kinda hilarious after decades of museum heist movies etc…and elaborate plans to bypass security etc…that these guys just drove up with a ladder in a truck and climbed in.

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1447
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1448
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1449

This is pretty close to me

As in, right next to my mother’s grave, close to me. There’s exits into the hotels greenery via the graveyard, I really hope none of these gobshites and gouriers made a mess of the cemetery :man_shrugging:

As close to doxing myself as I’ll ever get :joy:

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