Nuclear Fusion

[cosmicfolklore]

Just yesterday, I was listening to an interview with one of the original scientists that was on the research team for using the lasers to ignite the fusion bond, and it sounds like they may have a few more decades to go. Each bond requires a separate single blast with a laser, so the whole process seems dependent on a precision laser system that won't quickly wear out from millions of blasts strategically aimed timed and applied. It's not quite the "get it started and let it go" type of fusion that scifi has made it out to be. It's more like a fancy direct fuel injection system, using much hotter fuel, but still requires an operating system to keep it going.

 

[Egg Shen]

All fine and well but I’m too cynical to believe there will ever be free energy. The won’t unroll it as a freebie to benefit mankind. They will find a way to monetize it.

 

[Briar Lee]

Until the first practical steam engine, all the nations of the earth were pretty well on an equal footing as far as energy went.

You can raise a horse to pull a cart and a tree to burn just about anywhere.

Today, there is one place left on earth you can sink an oil well and oil gushes out. It’s not America and it’s not Europe. It’s in the sands of the Arabian deserts.

The oil sheiks in the Middle East have held monopoly pricing power over cheap, easy oil for a half a century.

In decades to come, every nation that is part of what Winston Churchill named Christian Civilization will have a limitless source of baseline nuclear fusion power generation.

My grandfather was right, he was just right about fifty years too early about nuclear fusion.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

All fine and well but I’m too cynical to believe there will ever be free energy. The won’t unroll it as a freebie to benefit mankind. They will find a way to monetize it.

I think that the idea of free fusion for all of mankind is scifi based... like most of the stuff attributed to Nikola Tesla is just folklore. What I heard and have read, it still requires an operating system and maintenance, so it will just be somewhat like clean nuclear energy, from my understanding. It will still be astronomically expensive to run. Scifi has propelled most inventions, but none of it has been as altruistic as scifi writers have made it out to be.

 

[ashdigger]

The only way this will benefit mankind is if the right bribes are paid to the right people.

So, in short, this will never be viable.

Thanks for coming to my TimTalk.

 

[trouttimes]

All great adventures start with a single small step.

 

[mawnansmiff]

All fine and well but I’m too cynical to believe there will ever be free energy. The won’t unroll it as a freebie to benefit mankind. They will find a way to monetize it.

Quite so. I remember not too long ago when we (at least here in the UK) were encouraged to go along with wind & solar farms everywhere, we were told of virtually free electricity.

Yet now we have them everywhere you look, the electricity generated by them is sold to us mugs at the same price as electricity from coal fired power stations!

Regards,

Jay.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Quite so. I remember not too long ago when we (at least here in the UK) were encouraged to go along with wind & solar farms everywhere, we were told of virtually free electricity.

Yet now we have them everywhere you look, the electricity generated by them is sold to us mugs at the same price as electricity from coal fired power stations!

Regards,

Jay.

Someone has to buy, install, and maintain those windmills. Overhead means it ain't free. It just means that you are all one step closer to no longer funding terrorists for your energy. Maybe.

 

[AJL67]

Quite so. I remember not too long ago when we (at least here in the UK) were encouraged to go along with wind & solar farms everywhere, we were told of virtually free electricity.

Yet now we have them everywhere you look, the electricity generated by them is sold to us mugs at the same price as electricity from coal fired power stations!

Regards,

Jay.

Just read an article they are starting to prime the old coal plants for the winter as the other options aren’t going to produce near enough energy.

 

[tbradsim1]

There ain’t no free ever, somebody is gonna pay, Hi I’m from the Government I’m here to help you.

 

[verporchting]

I thought this was a thread about keeping SG flakes lit.

Moving along, nothing to see here, lol.

 

[Briar Lee]

We are just exactly the same man, that woke up one morning beside Eve in that garden, and knew there really was a God.

Then poor Adam went off to smoke his pipe or something to come back and find one of them there deesasters in progress.

It was a long time before men lassoed and tamed a horse. Then the man devised a bridle.

Some other guy rigged up a sail on a boat.

Another man forged the first axe.

Much much later, a Scotsman perfected the steam engine.

Now men mount metal ships that fly six miles high at 550 miles an hour, and hardly ever kill anybody. Other steel carts run 80 miles an hour over millions of miles of paved highways.

Sooner or later we’ll have fusion power plants that water goes in and a big turbine makes electricity. It will cost labor, to build and maintain. But so do all our other miracles of our own creation.

Fusion is a good way for us to spend our labor.

 

[mso489]

Pretty spectacular as a feat of physics. As for applications for practical generation of electricity for public use, that's decades away, at least, and we have to keep the planet habitable in the meantime, so a definite maybe on its usefulness.

Let me see, fission is blowing the atoms apart, and fusion is smashing them together.

Supposedly, there would be far less radioactive waste with fusion, generally just the reactor units themselves, not spent fuel accumulating in underground bunkers and mines into perpetuity, which is what we are generating now with "clean" nuclear power plants. We will always have this to contend with, at the mercy of history's fluctuations, ala the reactors in Ukraine.

 

[didimauw]

I usually don't correct it, but I do have a quota to meet. They didn't make me Commissar of Christmas because of my good looks.

....yes they did.

 

[Winnipeger]

...so far out of reach that people did not think it would happen in our lifetime.

It's hard to believe it actually happened. I half expect them to come out next week with a statement there was a miscalculation. It's happened before.

 

[mikethompson]

....yes they did.

Go on, you

 

[kcghost]

I'll tell you the one incontrovertible truth about nuclear energy. It's always 50 years away.

 

[Winnipeger]

There are two different ways of potentially creating a fusion reaction. One with lasers, the other with magnets. The one in California uses lasers. The big reactor (ITER), which uses magnets, is not scheduled to start operating until 2025. This giant international project is the largest and most expensive scientific experiment of all time, and it won't generate any power, because it's only an attempt to prove the viability of future reactors. The energy it creates, if it achieves breakeven, will just be vented away. We probably are decades away from a commercial reactor, but if it's even a possibility, which this week's announcement seems to show, then maybe humanity won't destroy itself this century, and my daughter's life will be less fraught than I've expected it to be. There's been a lot of bad news this century. It's nice to hear that scientific progress might pay some dividends in the end, apart from more pollution and environmental destruction. This is more important than going to Mars or billionaires flying to space or colonizing the moon; but with viable fusion reactors, all those things would be much easier to achieve.

 

[condorlover1]

Here is the sort of fusion energy you really don't want pointed at your nut sack...

 

[Yadkin1765]

This is an evolutionary step more akin to the first harnessing fire or first utterance or first purpose made tools than say a steam engine or the printing press. Fire is to nuclear fusion what a crude scrawling of a line or circle in the dirt is to the Principia Mathematica.

And, I suspect this is not the complete news. Some months ago, I heard from a trustworthy little bird who has a lobbyist for their textile business in the Carolinas that just so happens to also lobby Washington for these folks out of California: they don't dare divulge the truth of their ability to generate Kwhs of electricity because it would upend global markets in a dramatic way and cause inestimable economic chaos. That being said, the little tidbit I was dropped some six or eight months ago was as follows:

A small nuclear fusion reactor went online in a test run in spring of 2022 in NC and powered 20,000 homes for some hours before being shut down. The Pentagon and major energy corporations are aware of the technology, and are trying to figure out how to integrate it without excess disruption or starting some sort of conflict.

This the gist paraphrased from that little bird's chirp I was privy to. All of this, I realize, should be taken with a grain of salt, as no one here knows me from Joseph. I too remain a skeptic, but am not at all surprised and look forward to speaking to that little bird again to confirm it to be the very same Cal. Laboratories that we discussed this past spring. I suppose I share it for novelty sake. If true, it surely is an exciting time to be alive.