If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@rhywden In this case, that's $14 billion over two years. For one of the many such projects. Total yearly spending is much greater (in constant dollars) than on the "big" projects of the past. There are also multiple competing such projects.
Maybe you could then provide some sources? Also, considering the potential impact and what other stuff we're spending money on, that's actually hardly worth mentioning.
Hell, over here we have a stupid train station and an even stupider airport where the costs are in the same ballpark.
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@rhywden so what? That is still a hell of a lot of money to spend on something that most likely will never produce electricity at any scale or net gain.
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France Spent $20 Billion on Trains That Don't Fit Its Stations
France's national railway operator, SNCF, recently ordered 2,000 new trains at a cost of more than $20 billion. Now, it's found out that they're too big for many of the stations they're supposed to pass through. And this isn't the kind of order you can return.
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@sockpuppet7 yeah, let's not waste anymore money on trains that don't work or power generation that is only economical on a solar scale.
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@polygeekery Fusion power is easy. We just need to make a reactor that can contain a one-million-mile-diameter ball of hydrogen.
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@mott555 like a Dyson sphere?
Seems more probable than current fusion proposals.
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@rhywden In this case, that's $14 billion over two years. For one of the many such projects. Total yearly spending is much greater (in constant dollars) than on the "big" projects of the past. There are also multiple competing such projects.
Maybe you could then provide some sources? Also, considering the potential impact and what other stuff we're spending money on, that's actually hardly worth mentioning.
Hell, over here we have a stupid train station and an even stupider airport where the costs are in the same ballpark.
All data from Wikipedia, on about a 30 second search. And there's no guarantee that more money will actually make things better. Often there's a threshold where the limiting factor is something else entirely (trained personnel, needed breakthroughs, paradigm shifts, etc). In fact, using the Manhattan project (one where we knew what to do, just didn't have the tooling to do it and had to build that) as a model is just the wrong thing to do in many cases. Big centralized programs only work for a few things--most of the actual development is done by the small labs working independently.
But sure, more money is good for those poor starving scientists.
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@rhywden In this case, that's $14 billion over two years. For one of the many such projects. Total yearly spending is much greater (in constant dollars) than on the "big" projects of the past. There are also multiple competing such projects.
Maybe you could then provide some sources? Also, considering the potential impact and what other stuff we're spending money on, that's actually hardly worth mentioning.
Hell, over here we have a stupid train station and an even stupider airport where the costs are in the same ballpark.
Now don't you feel dumb for not spending as much as a train station or an airport and winning WWII?
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@polygeekery said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@mott555 like a Dyson sphere?
Seems more probable than current fusion proposals.
I think he was suggesting just letting most of the energy shoot away into space and capturing a tiny little silver of the energy that's heading our way.
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@anotherusername I wasn't really suggesting anything. I don't know if fusion reactors are viable or not, but here's a mind-blowing fact: The sun's core, where fusion happens, only produces about 275 watts per cubic meter. And containing it requires the gravitational binding energy of an entire star. Maybe there's a way and I'm all for finding it, but a large part of me thinks it's not possible to get megawatts from a fusion device small enough to fit inside a building.
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@mott555 said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
The sun's core, where fusion happens, only produces about 275 watts per cubic meter.
Well, thermonuclear bombs do a lot better than that, so I think it's more complicated than this.
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@polygeekery said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@mott555 like a Dyson sphere?
Seems more probable than current fusion proposals.
Or a Dyson swarm, which is about the same thing but with billions of small satellites instead of a solid sphere.
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@mott555 I remember reading that fusion reactors would hypothetically be much more efficient than stars, so advanced civilizations would extract the hydrogen from stars and fuse it themselves to avoid wasting energy. Pretty cool thought.
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@jaloopa said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Yeah, but they didn't predict a speaker that can turn your lights on if you bought the right lights and have your lights available to hackers on the Internet, so we're ahead if you like that sort of thing
That’s somewhat debatable … IIRC (it’s been some years since I saw BTTF2) nobody turns the lights on by telling them to, but future Lorraine hydrates a pizza by voice command to the oven. If they have that, they probably also have voice-commanded lights — or at least the tech to make them.
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@gurth said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Lorraine hydrates a pizza
Yuck. I look forward to the organic pizza plants in WALL-E.
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@boomzilla It’s a “raw” pizza, of course.
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@anonymous234 said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@mott555 I remember reading that fusion reactors would hypothetically be much more efficient than stars, so advanced civilizations would extract the hydrogen from stars and fuse it themselves to avoid wasting energy. Pretty cool thought.
But then it wouldn't be raw, organic energy.
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@gurth said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
IIRC (it’s been some years since I saw BTTF2) nobody turns the lights on by telling them to
They absolutely do.
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@mott555 said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
But I haven't heard anything about it in 3 years now, so who knows?
Apparently they presented a few of their "findings" early on, but from what I've heard, people were not too impressed with those (as in "we could have told you that" or possibly "we could have told you that 20+ years ago").
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FTR, our previous thread was here:
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@mott555 Yeah. Funnily enough this is one of the things that the fusion community likes to throw around to impress others -- ITER is expected to contain a plasma that's >10x hotter than the core of the sun. Or something like that.
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@cvi said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
ITER is expected to contain a plasma that's >10x hotter than the core of the sun.
But is even that warm enough to melt Boomzilla's heart?
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@mott555 said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@anotherusername I wasn't really suggesting anything. I don't know if fusion reactors are viable or not, but here's a mind-blowing fact: The sun's core, where fusion happens, only produces about 275 watts per cubic meter. And containing it requires the gravitational binding energy of an entire star. Maybe there's a way and I'm all for finding it, but a large part of me thinks it's not possible to get megawatts from a fusion device small enough to fit inside a building.
You've got that backwards: The gravitational pressure is what causes fusion. And without fusion any star would collapse under its own weight.
And there are otherways to contain plasma. Guess what they're using?
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
And there are otherways to contain plasma. Guess what they're using?
Magnetism. So what? It might as well be gravity but it is gravity we have to pay for.
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@blakeyrat said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
But is even that warm enough to melt Boomzilla's heart?
If not we can use Boomzilla's heart as extra shielding in future fusion reactors. It's a win-win.
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@mott555 said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@anotherusername I wasn't really suggesting anything. I don't know if fusion reactors are viable or not, but here's a mind-blowing fact: The sun's core, where fusion happens, only produces about 275 watts per cubic meter. And containing it requires the gravitational binding energy of an entire star. Maybe there's a way and I'm all for finding it, but a large part of me thinks it's not possible to get megawatts from a fusion device small enough to fit inside a building.
The reason for the low power density is the weakness of gravity. Gravity is by far the weakest force in the universe. A small magnet can lift several thousand pounds of steel, overcoming the gravitational field of the entire Earth. If gravity were stronger, it would compress the core of the star more, causing more power output from fusion. Down here on earth, we have much stronger containment fields (magnetic ones), so we can squeeze (literally) more power out of fusion reactions in much smaller spaces.
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@mzh said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@mott555 said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@anotherusername I wasn't really suggesting anything. I don't know if fusion reactors are viable or not, but here's a mind-blowing fact: The sun's core, where fusion happens, only produces about 275 watts per cubic meter. And containing it requires the gravitational binding energy of an entire star. Maybe there's a way and I'm all for finding it, but a large part of me thinks it's not possible to get megawatts from a fusion device small enough to fit inside a building.
The reason for the low power density is the weakness of gravity. Gravity is by far the weakest force in the universe. A small magnet can lift several thousand pounds of steel, overcoming the gravitational field of the entire Earth. If gravity were stronger, it would compress the core of the star more, causing more power output from fusion. Down here on earth, we have much stronger containment fields (magnetic ones), so we can squeeze (literally) more power out of fusion reactions in much smaller spaces.
But at a significant cost--magnetic fields (alone) do no work. Thus, you need really cockamamie field geometries (and other magic) to actually get both confinement (keeping it away from the walls) and adequate density (to make the reaction happen). Simulating plasmas is really stinking hard. Like...super hard. And doing so in funky toroidal (except not really) geometries is even worse. And then actually building that in the real world is a nightmare. Oh, and dealing with the high energy neutrons pouring off and the "ash" (helium mostly) that poisons the reaction if left there (or makes the walls brittle), and harnessing the energy given off (mainly in the form of those neutrons or the ash) without damaging the sensitive magnetics (or the cooling needed to keep the magnets going)...
Fusion is hard. Really hard. And not in a way that more money will magically solve. Basically, there's been one dead end after another and no appreciable progress (outside of grand pronouncements that don't go anywhere). For decades. It'd be nice if it worked, but so far it's not looking so good.
Compare this to fission. There, the hard part is keeping it from melting or leaking. And that's basically (with Gen IV+ reactors) a solved problem. And the output is nice hot water you can use to heat other water to make steam. Yeah, clean-up's a bear, but overall it's a nice, well-understood, simple process that lends itself well to large-scale baseline load handling. Much of the installation cost is in the permitting and uncertainty phases (as well as the fact that we outsourced all our reactor vessel manufacturing capabilities, but...)
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Thus, you need really cockamamie field geometries (and other magic) to actually get both confinement (keeping it away from the walls) and adequate density (to make the reaction happen).
Yep. Here are the superconducting coils generating the magnetic field for the Wendelstein 7-X reactor.
It looks somewhat biological, doesn't it? There are other devices where these coils are actually evolved instead of designed.
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Basically, there's been one dead end after another and no appreciable progress (outside of grand pronouncements that don't go anywhere).
Not so sure about the latter. There's been quite a bit of progress in the theoretical part (e.g. transport processes in the plasma). I think one of the problems is that the research community overhyped some results ~20 years ago, and it's biting them in the ass now (rightfully, maybe). I'm hearing that there's some worry that the results from an upcoming campaign won't quite live up to the earlier ones on paper (incidentally, and IIRC, it's the first actual fusion experiment in a decade or two, at least in Europe).
And that's basically (with Gen IV+ reactors) a solved problem.
Has anybody actually committed to building a Gen IV reactor? I have a few friends who did their Ph.D.s in related topics, but I don't ever remember any of them sounding overly optimistic at the prospects of such a reactor existing. Not because it wouldn't work, but mostly because of politics (sadly, nuclear is not very sexy ATM, so instead of building better and less wasteful plants, we're stuck with the old shitty ones).
Edit:
It looks somewhat biological, doesn't it? There are other devices where these coils are actually evolved instead of designed.
I wonder if this would look different today. The simulations that produced the current design were run in the early 2000s (I think), and I'm guessing were quite a bit constrained w.r.t. computational power (compared to today's levels).
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@cvi Indeed. The pessimistic view some here are exposing is basically the same bad thing they're accusing the people who are hyping this technology of: "Oh, but it's hard! Won't ever amount to anything."
Yeah.
The quote from JFK comes to mind.
@cvi said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
I wonder if this would look different today. The simulations that produced the current design were run in the early 2000s (I think), and I'm guessing were quite a bit constrained w.r.t. computational power (compared to today's levels).
But I'm sure that more money wouldn't have helped the simulations compute faster...
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Simulating plasmas is really stinking hard. Like...super hard.
QFT. It makes simulating quantum mechanics and general relativity look easy. Magnetohydrodynamics (i.e., plasma physics) is bastard hard. The problem is that it is both nastily non-linear and non-local, making almost all the usual tricks for simplification of the simulation non-applicable.
It's also not scale invariant IIRC. Which is the shit icing on the excrement cake.
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@dkf said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Simulating plasmas is really stinking hard. Like...super hard.
QFT. It makes simulating quantum mechanics and general relativity look easy. Magnetohydrodynamics (i.e., plasma physics) is bastard hard. The problem is that it is both nastily non-linear and non-local, making almost all the usual tricks for simplification of the simulation non-applicable.
It's also not scale invariant IIRC. Which is the shit icing on the excrement cake.
Those first two are straight-forward computationally. Ugly, but it's clear what to do. MHD is the kind of thing that's hard enough even in "nice" field geometries. You're lucky to get within an order of magnitude, let alone 100% of experiment. And it's super unintuitive, so you can't even weed out odd results on analytic grounds.
It's also impractical for trivial parallelizing. This means you can't as easily farm it out to large clusters and have to use more traditional supercomputers.
This all leads to progress in fits and starts, with lots of false leads.
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
MHD is the kind of thing that's hard enough even in "nice" field geometries.
There are some geometries which are simple enough, but they don't include anything remotely like a bounded reaction vessel. The “simple” situations include things like the solar wind, where you can get if not steady state, a pretty good first static estimate for a lot of the solar system. Provided you pretend there aren't any solar flares or coronal mass ejections. The interactions with planetary magnetic fields get rather more complex though.
http://center.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/web1/simulation/mhd3d01/mov484a8g.gif
That lab at Nagoya seems to have some awesome simulation movies on their website.
http://center.stelab.nagoya-u.ac.jp/web1/sramp/cdrom/sm0007/movie/zf073139.gif
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Indeed. The pessimistic view some here are exposing is basically the same bad thing they're accusing the people who are hyping this technology of: "Oh, but it's hard! Won't ever amount to anything."
It's a cynical view well earned by paying attention to all of the hype over the years. It may amount to something someday, but until there's actual evidence, I'm not getting excited.
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
The pessimistic view some here are exposing is basically the same bad thing they're accusing the people who are hyping this technology of: "Oh, but it's hard! Won't ever amount to anything."
So pessimistic views and optimistic views are basically the same thing to you?
No wonder you think commercial fusion power is right around the corner.
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@polygeekery said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
No wonder you think commercial fusion power is right around the corner.
If only someone would put some real money into it.
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@boomzilla said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@polygeekery said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
No wonder you think commercial fusion power is right around the corner.
If only someone would put some real money into it.
Why not put bitcoins in instead?
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@boomzilla said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Indeed. The pessimistic view some here are exposing is basically the same bad thing they're accusing the people who are hyping this technology of: "Oh, but it's hard! Won't ever amount to anything."
It's a cynical view well earned by paying attention to all of the hype over the years. It may amount to something someday, but until there's actual evidence, I'm not getting excited.
Yes, we know your credentials when it comes to science and your general outlook on it. Please don't expect me to take anything you say on those matters in any way seriously.
And "hype"? Who exactly hyped that technology? Shoulder aliens?
If it was science reporting: Good job. By that standard you'll pretty much forgo any and all advances in technology. We'd probably never have built the LHC either.
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Yes, we know your credentials when it comes to science and your general outlook on it
Well, your posts sure don't reflect that.
@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
Please don't expect me to take anything you say on those matters in any way seriously.
It's funnier (for me) when you don't because then you look kind of dumb.
@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
And "hype"? Who exactly hyped that technology? Shoulder aliens?
Like this!
You're re-
-ing on all of the "Fusion is X Years Away" stories we've seen over the years.@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
If it was science reporting: Good job. By that standard you'll pretty much forgo any and all advances in technology.
I don't know why anyone would listen to you since you're absolutely clueless on the history of it all. Well, except for the lulz.
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@rhywden said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
If it was science reporting: Good job. By that standard you'll pretty much forgo any and all advances in technology. We'd probably never have built the LHC either.
Seriously, though, fusion reporting is on par with flying cars and only surpassed by Year of the Linux Desktop.
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@rhywden In this case, that's $14 billion over two years. For one of the many such projects. Total yearly spending is much greater (in constant dollars) than on the "big" projects of the past. There are also multiple competing such projects.
At least get your facts straight.
It's around $14 billion spent for the whole project so far, with actual building being spread out since 2008, so not just the last two years. And it's not "one of many", it's the single biggest of such projects, with an international backing of many member countries.The yearly spending on this is basically peanuts, economically speaking. Much of the individual contributions of member countries also are in the form of delivering certain parts they produce, directly feeding back into the respective economies, which again softens the economic cost.
We don't really know if fusion will ever be economically feasible. The current timelines still say something like 2060 for optimistic scenarios. But the money spend on it really isn't that much.
It would be scientifically stupid not to try and pursue this. Heck, even if in thirty years they find out that it just can't be done, itmightlikely will still have paid off for just the scientific advances made along the way, in computation science, material science, etc.$14 billion + change for fusion is orders of magnitude more than $70 billion for the Manhattan project.
Say again?
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@topspin the article I got that from said construction started in 2013, and had cost 14 billion through 2015. And we've (the US) been spending hundreds of millions per year for decades. Yes, ITER is a big project. But that's just construction cost. Not planning, paying the salaries of the scientists for decades, building the dozens of other such projects that failed, etc. I was reading about fusion tokomaks in my 1980 encyclopedia for goodness sake. We've been doing serious fusion research since the 70s, if not earlier. And made basically no progress. The cold fusion hoax was back in the 90s--by then everyone knew fusion was a real beast to work with. So yes, the total spending on fusion research (with basically no progress) had been orders of magnitude more than the Manhattan Project.
For that matter, $70 billion is what, 3 big aircraft carriers? (WAG). Which was my point. Using the Manhattan Project as a benchmark for "lots of effort" is pretty stupid.
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As someone who's actually done real science and has several published papers, I'm of the opinion that the only result for spending lots of money on a big centralized project that requires breaking new ground is that you've wasted lots of money and made a bunch of scientists lazy. They'll find new ways to keep sucking on that teat until it's totally dried up. Allocating science funding by impressing the funding agencies (who aren't spending their own money anyway) is a horrible way of doing things that generates lots of papers no one reads and trains lots of graduate students who won't be able to find jobs in the field.
It's like trying to build a website by hiring the big names and giving them cost+ contracts. Throwing more money and people at a design challenge rarely works out well--it just multiplies the delays and increases the cost. Great for empire building, but crappy for getting anything done.
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@benjamin-hall Well, the current planned cost overall are in the ballpark of $25-ish billion or so. We all know it'll overrun that, but that's including everything in a project running for decades. Not every year or anything like that.
Orders of magnitude more than $70 billion would be something like $7000 billion
. It is not anywhere fucking close to that. At best, it's on the same order of magnitude.For that matter, $70 billion is what, 3 big aircraft carriers?
Yes, exactly. So spending that (collectively by several countries) on one of the largest scientific ventures of human history over the course of a few decades, is fucking peanuts. Chump change. Even if it fails.
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Note: I was wrong. We haven't been doing tokomaks since the 70s. It's been since the 1958. With nothing to show. That's 60 years. Of trying the same blasted thing, just bigger each time.
I'd love if fusion worked. But I don't think I will see it in my lifetime.
From NPR in 2010(!):
ITER is a collaboration between the U.S., Europe, Japan, South Korea, Russia, China and India. It plans a fusion project larger than anything the world has ever seen.
At $17 billion for construction alone, the experiment is also eye-wateringly expensive. The design is already facing huge cost overruns and delays, and it is barely even a hole in the ground.So tell me again. $25 billion? Yeah? really? No. Not even close. Probably double or triple that, minimum. Double again for screwy government accounting. And then increase by an order of magnitude for all the other research (both federal and by other governments and private organizations).
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
With nothing to show.
That's just not true. There's been lots of progress in several areas, for example in material science searching for materials to withstand the insane conditions.
There's not been that one single breakthrough that gets you all the way to workable fusion reactors, because there's just so many things to overcome, but there's still been progress.So tell me again. $25 billion? Yeah? really? No. Not even close. Probably double or triple that, minimum
So what, that's still not much for the whole world to finance, considering the importance of it and the time-frame of the spending.
I'd love if fusion worked. But I don't think I will see it in my lifetime.
I hope you're wrong, since I'd love to see it work, but I'm also not sure I'll live to see it. We won't know if we won't try, though.
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@benjamin-hall said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
It's like trying to build a website by hiring the big names and giving them cost+ contracts.
Yeah, but to be fair that would be the only way to bid a project that is as guaranteed to be a clusterfuck as that one was. I doubt anyone would have touched it unless it was either a T&M bid or just bid it at eleventy billion dollars so you are damned sure you cover your costs.
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@topspin I don't actually care about the funding. Yeah, in the grand scheme of things the amount we're spending is a pittance. But adding more won't significantly change things. That was the point I was responding to. And mocking those futurists who perpetually claim "We'll have X in Y years!", not caring that X is really really hard and we've been working for a long time on it and haven't come close. It's always around the next corner. The next breakthrough will be enough.
The problem with that kind of thinking is that it pumps up hope among the people, and then when it's inevitably wrong people give up. That hype and crash cycle does damage to the research effort--you train up a crop of new PhDs when things are hot, only for them not to find jobs and go into other things (having wasted all that time). By the time the next hype cycle is coming around, their skills are outmoded and a new crop gets trained...only for the cycle to repeat. That's brutal to the students who got shafted and horribly wasteful. Instead, we should accept that it's hard and slow and let it be that way. Give enough resources to make steady progress, without the boom/crash cycle.
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@benjamin-hall Well, I don't disagree with any of this. It's hard, takes time and resources. And the outcome is unsure, as my professor used to say "that's science".
It sounded like what you're saying is "this costs ${SUM_THAT_SOUNDS_INSANELY_LARGE_BUT_REALLY_ISNT} with nothing to show, stop this madness".
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@topspin said in If cold-pressed juice isn't for you, try some "raw" water:
@benjamin-hall Well, I don't disagree with any of this. It's hard, takes time and resources. And the outcome is unsure, as my professor used to say "that's science".
It sounded like what you're saying is "this costs ${SUM_THAT_SOUNDS_INSANELY_LARGE_BUT_REALLY_ISNT} with nothing to show, stop this madness".
Sorry. I was saying that comparing it to the Manhattan Project (saying that "well, if we only spent as much as we did on the Manhattan Project...") was foolish--we've already spent that and more, with little success. It's a completely different project, so the comparison between one where the fundamental science is an issue (MHD is icky hard) and one that was basically a tooling issue (building the tools/materials to build the bombs, the basic design is dead simple). One can be rushed by throwing money at it, the other can't.
Experts Fuss Over Cost Of Nuclear Fusion Research
