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I don't know enough to say what their odds are, other than very long. But one day, probably in my lifetime, we'll master fusion power, and it will begin a revol
by eloff 9y ago
I don't know enough to say what their odds are, other than very long. But one day, probably in my lifetime, we'll master fusion power, and it will begin a revolution that will make the industrial revolution look like a minor event. I don't think people realize that really cheap, clean energy solves pretty much every problem of scarcity. We'll enter an age of plenty like the world has never known. Limitless energy means limitless water, food, and materials. Of course it's not really limitless, but if it's even an order of magnitude cheaper than what we have now, the possibilities would be mind blowing.
- qntl 9y agoWe could pretty much save the world with fission today, but we don’t because politics. I’m not confident that we’ll actually adopt fusion even when the tech is ready.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoI can imagine the first reactors would be prohibitively expensive.
- mark-r 9y agoNaturally. You don't pump money into something like this for years without expecting to get a huge payback. That patent had a lot of military applications in it.
- danmaz74 9y agoHow could fission save the world today? It's not that cheap.
- ben_w 9y agoPart of the cost is relatively excessive safety margins. “Relatively excessive“ because despite the reputation fission is the safest power supply we have now, including solar because installing things on rooftops is not without risk. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
- Majestic121 9y agoThe risk is much higher because it is not only about human deaths, but also about unusable land for decades and decades. It will be impossible to re-populate land up to six miles from the Chernobyl for the next 10,000 years, and it will probably be the same for Fukushima Along with that, zones that can be repopulated are suffering much higher risk of cancer and misc health issues. The safety margins are big because the risks are tremendous, not because people love to waste money.
- srslack 9y ago>It will be impossible to re-populate land up to six miles from the Chernobyl There are still humans living within the exclusion zone, still humans working at Chernobyl where three reactors continued to operate after the accident, the vast majority of gamma from the site is from an isotope with a half-life of 30 years, and the background radiation within the exclusion zone is provably less than the background radiation you find when living in high altitudes. Chernobyl was the absolute worst case in that it had no containment whatsoever, and Fukushima was an absolute worst case for a western reactor in that it couldn't SCRAM and cool properly with multiple backup systems failing, but the implication that large tracts of land are uninhabitable for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of years is patently false. In addition, there are no attributable deaths to either accident among the general population. Radiation doses in both cases were very low in the context of the general population surrounding these plants. The fact is that more people died from the sudden evacuations and stress of relocating than died, or will die, from the radiation levels.
- Majestic121 9y agoHmm, I got the 10000 years number from this source : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/12189175/Chernobyl-and-Fukushima-contamination-a-risk-for-decades-or-even-centuries-to-come-warns-Greenpeace.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/12... But I can't seem to be able to find the original, even on Greenpeace You might be right on this
- eloff 9y agoWe don't adopt fission because it's disastrous when things go wrong, so it scares people. Plus it produces a waste problem that lasts for an incredibly long time. Fusion doesn't suffer from those problems.
- ExcelSaga 9y agoD-T fusion suffers from all of those problems.
- eloff 9y agoTo the same extent as fission? You're being disingenuous here with that comparison.
- ExcelSaga 9y agoFission is required for D-T fusion at this point, otherwise you don’t have any tritium. It’s the people who ignore that, and our failure to breed tritium within a fusion reactor who are disingenuous. If you don’t know even that much about the science, I’d strongly recommmemd refraining from accusing people of being less tham forthright.
- eloff 9y agoIt is today, but my understanding is that fission is just our best source of neutrons to breed tritium from lithium 6. Fusion should also be an excellent source of neutrons, so I don't see that as being a hard requirement. I'm not a physicist, so I may be dead wrong.
- yellowapple 9y agoPer the article, it sounds like the fusion reactor itself could indeed be the thing producing the tritium by way of a lithium blanket. Of course, that means it'd need to have some way of generating the neutrons (the design seems to include two spots for "neutral beams", but I missed any mention of what's supplying those beams).
- carry_bit 9y agoNot just today, we could've decades ago.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoWe could save the world with solar right now and it can be started immediately and is indefinitely scalable. The problems of energy supply are political not technical.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 9y agoFusion power will probably not be particularly cheap unless we really do figure out how to build very small reactors. If big Tokamaks like ITER are the way forward we need to build these very big, very expensive power plants whose costs need to be amortized over the electricity produced.
- wiz21c 9y agoSince energy is such an important factor to the life of humans, I'd say the dollar/euro price is a measure that is too narrow. The question is : is fusion necessary ? how many will die if we don't have it ? how many will be born if we have it ? Have we got a future without it ? what will be the quality of life without it ?
- DKnoll 9y agoIncreased birth rate is not necessarily a good thing for human development at this stage. Our planet cannot support an infinite number of people. Since we are already facing unprecedented growth that won't be stopped except by famine, world war or some other calamity, it's important we find a way to stretch our limited resources further and develop technologies that will help us expand beyond earth like nuclear fusion.
- wiz21c 9y agoYup. But I was pointing more at the fact that the notion of "price" is not very useful here. If we're talking about mankind's future, money should be brought back to the level of "minor technical detail".
- adrianN 9y agoMoney is what we currently have as a means of getting a consensus about what is important for mankind's future and how to allocate resources based on importance and expected payoff. It's not the best system, but it's hard to introduce alternatives.
- 9y ago
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> I don't think people realize that really cheap, clean energy solves pretty much every problem of scarcity. Except the one people care about, scarcity of mates.
- eloff 9y agoLess scarcity of sex robots? Only half joking.
- twic 9y agoNuclear powered sex robots!
- skjerns 9y agohow's there a scarcity of mates? for each male there is a female (approx.)?
- thaumasiotes 9y agoEver wanted to mate with someone who wasn't interested?
- ben_w 9y agoNo. Rather the opposite.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoI find that unlikely, but note that other people wanting to mate with you when you aren't interested also illustrates a scarcity of mates. There's nothing special about you in particular.
- Density 9y agoNot in China.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
- gonvaled 9y agoSorry to be pessimistic, but although I agree that technological progress has the potential of dramatically improve our lives, I fear that instead we will get more capital concentration. Put another way: social forces will balance out any positive effects of technological progress, so that in whole, humanity's well-being remain more or less constant.
- twic 9y ago> really cheap, clean energy solves pretty much every problem of scarcity How does it make rent in San Francisco affordable? How does it make enough grass-fed premium beef for everyone in the world to eat steak every night affordable?
- your-nanny 9y agoFlying apartment buildings. Lolz
- Turing_Machine 9y agoWell, if energy were cheap enough you could just dig huge, multi-level tunnels, fill them full of grow lights, and raise all the grass-fed beef you wanted. It's the same with water -- there's plenty of water in the ocean. If energy were cheap enough, you could just distill seawater and get all the freshwater you wanted.
- fastball 9y ago"Limitless" energy would mean the ability to grow crops and meat and everything with very little worry about efficiency.
- ourmandave 9y agoWhich makes me sad reading an article prioritizing all the military applications, because Lockheed Martin. It's like a real life Iron Man movie script. I prefer the Superman version of limitless energy. https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
- mmirate 9y agoIf this technology becomes practical and we don't have the military applications figured out, other nations will. Sorry Citizen, you must speak German now, Changeover Day was yesterday.
- maxerickson 9y agoEnergy is already incredibly cheap. In developed countries it's something like 10-20% of household spending, which is a really nice bonus if you get most of that to spend on something else, but it's also not going to dramatically change the lifestyles of those people (who basically enjoy access to limitless food and water, with quite abundant access to other materials). It's also set to get dramatically cheaper as solar really takes off in the coming years.
- bryondowd 9y agoBeing able to use the same amount of energy cheaper is only half the equation. I'd be more interested in what we can do with 10x as much energy at the same price, or 100x. Could open up entirely new industries or make things that are currently infeasibly expensive novelties into commonplace materials. One obvious win would be desalination plants to allow mass scale water production in areas with little or no fresh water but access to ocean water. Right now that's only economically feasible in limited cases, to my understanding.
- spacehome 9y agoMassive scale hydroponics at all latitudes, too. Why be limited to what the sun can grow, when we can grow our own sun right here on Earth?
- eloff 9y agoYou may be lucky enough to enjoy limitless food and water, but a substantial part of the world does not and it's going to get worse before it gets better as our population approaches 10 billion in the next 30 years. A lot of that water is going to need to come from desalinization, which is basically an energy problem. Vertical farming may help us when it comes to agricultural water demand, but it's also very energy intensive. Both problems reduce to energy problems.
- maxerickson 9y agoHunger and access to water are largely already political problems, and like I said, energy is going to get cheaper fast in the coming years (shifting them further into the political realm). Vertical farming is going to provide perishable produce to rich people, so it's kind of weird to end on that point given where you started.