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Nuclear fuel is a non-trivial resource. There is no basis for thinking we will ever find anything better. Scientific progress is not a law of nature. It needs

by fsloth 7y ago

Nuclear fuel is a non-trivial resource. There is no basis for thinking we will ever find anything better. Scientific progress is not a law of nature. It needs very specific environment to thrive. Before scientific revolution kicked in the pharaohs would have easily adjusted to europe and elsewhere. No one can predict whether there is an infinite amount of scientific progress ahead of us or will we hit a wall.

vlovich123 7y ago
Fusion is powered off of hydrogen, the single most abundant element in the universe. Seems to me like the smart bet is that sometime within 3000-300k years humanity will have developed fusion.
- cyphar 7y ago
  Cold, net-positive fusion. Current fusion reactors either require more power than they output or would run far too hot to be sustainable. While I too am hopeful that humanity will be able to crack cold fusion in the next few hundred millennia, it should be noted that cold fusion is something which has simply not occurred in our universe before. Yes, fusion is the most commonly-occuring process in the universe, but all of it runs hot. It is possible that net-positive cold fusion might never come to pass and we'll have to go back to solar panels so we can exploit the output of already-existing hot fusion from the Sun.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Why would you need cold fusion? Simply net-positive energy output from a (hot) fusion reactor would do the trick. Of course, there is a risk there that we will hit some fundamental efficiency limitation that simply makes it not worth it. But st least it's not known to be a physical impossibility, like cold fusion is believed to be. In fact, more than cold fusion, I think there is a reason to hope for warm superconductors at some point in the future.
    - cyphar 7y ago
      That depends on how hot we're talking. I'm not up-to-date on the latest hot fusion work (so I might very well be completely wrong here) but I'd have naively assumed that containment would be a significant limitation of having stable hot fusion reactors. Most research fusion reactors I've seen online only run for minutes at most -- and that's with net-negative fusion.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        From what I’ve been told, the runtime limit is mainly because they have a stringent and tiny limit on the lifetime radiation production of their reactors. These limits are not technological, they are because the reactors are research projects. I believe the main losses are plasma instabilities, rather than the energy cost of the containment. This is somewhat secondhand knowledge though, I merely used to hang out in a pub with someone who worked in this field.
      - vlovich123 7y ago
        https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exotic-fusion-reactor-program-moves-forward-with-larger-more-powerful-design https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exot... Basically there's lot of research into how to do containment that's far more efficient than Tokamak reactors that suffer from the problem you mention. A 100 years is a really long time to bet against given how the pace of our innovation is constantly increasing, let alone 3000 years. Keep in mind that thorium has 3x the capacity & we don't even have reactors to process that so even "regular" has a very long shelf-life. Uranium scarcity isn't a thing when compared with global warming & meets our energy needs drastically better than solar/wind & even hydro while having a much more compact ecological foot-print.
godelski 7y ago
There are plenty of areas to look at for new energy generation just within particle physics alone. Not to mention that we're at the finish line with a net positive fusion reactor (I don't know a single fusion scientist that doesn't think iter will work). Scientific progress may not be law, but there isn't a thousand year period where humans haven't advanced.
- hermitdev 7y ago
  I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know when it works, until, well it does. And who knows how long it will to take commercialize once we do get it working. I mean, Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 were easy and would be solved in 2 years. 4 years later, Tesla'd are killing people by driving into highway barriers or broadsiding a semi trailer. Ambitious? Yes. Are we there yet? No. I think autonomous driving is a worthy goal and we should keep working at it. Same with fusion. But do I believe the projected timelines? No. Doubt that I'll see fusion as a power source in my timeline. Maybe never fully autonomous vehicles (I mean trully fully). And I'm still under 40. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think a lot of people underestimate the true difficulty of some of these projects.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    It's always 5 years out until it isn't! :)
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    > I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Fusion is an amount of money away more than an amount of time.
    - hyperbovine 7y ago
      Unless you believe markets are completely inefficient I just don’t buy this argument. Think about the reward awaiting the person or company that finally cracks fusion power: trillions of dollars in wealth; the gratitude of an entire planet; instant, everlasting fame, and so on. So, ample incentives already exist. No, the reason we haven’t solved fusion is that it’s a hard problem, and the right genius(es) have yet to come along.

by fsloth 7y ago

vlovich123 7y ago

Fusion is powered off of hydrogen, the single most abundant element in the universe. Seems to me like the smart bet is that sometime within 3000-300k years humanity will have developed fusion.

cyphar 7y ago
Cold, net-positive fusion. Current fusion reactors either require more power than they output or would run far too hot to be sustainable. While I too am hopeful that humanity will be able to crack cold fusion in the next few hundred millennia, it should be noted that cold fusion is something which has simply not occurred in our universe before. Yes, fusion is the most commonly-occuring process in the universe, but all of it runs hot. It is possible that net-positive cold fusion might never come to pass and we'll have to go back to solar panels so we can exploit the output of already-existing hot fusion from the Sun.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Why would you need cold fusion? Simply net-positive energy output from a (hot) fusion reactor would do the trick. Of course, there is a risk there that we will hit some fundamental efficiency limitation that simply makes it not worth it. But st least it's not known to be a physical impossibility, like cold fusion is believed to be. In fact, more than cold fusion, I think there is a reason to hope for warm superconductors at some point in the future.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    That depends on how hot we're talking. I'm not up-to-date on the latest hot fusion work (so I might very well be completely wrong here) but I'd have naively assumed that containment would be a significant limitation of having stable hot fusion reactors. Most research fusion reactors I've seen online only run for minutes at most -- and that's with net-negative fusion.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      From what I’ve been told, the runtime limit is mainly because they have a stringent and tiny limit on the lifetime radiation production of their reactors. These limits are not technological, they are because the reactors are research projects. I believe the main losses are plasma instabilities, rather than the energy cost of the containment. This is somewhat secondhand knowledge though, I merely used to hang out in a pub with someone who worked in this field.
    - vlovich123 7y ago
      https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exotic-fusion-reactor-program-moves-forward-with-larger-more-powerful-design https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exot... Basically there's lot of research into how to do containment that's far more efficient than Tokamak reactors that suffer from the problem you mention. A 100 years is a really long time to bet against given how the pace of our innovation is constantly increasing, let alone 3000 years. Keep in mind that thorium has 3x the capacity & we don't even have reactors to process that so even "regular" has a very long shelf-life. Uranium scarcity isn't a thing when compared with global warming & meets our energy needs drastically better than solar/wind & even hydro while having a much more compact ecological foot-print.

godelski 7y ago

There are plenty of areas to look at for new energy generation just within particle physics alone. Not to mention that we're at the finish line with a net positive fusion reactor (I don't know a single fusion scientist that doesn't think iter will work). Scientific progress may not be law, but there isn't a thousand year period where humans haven't advanced.

hermitdev 7y ago
I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know when it works, until, well it does. And who knows how long it will to take commercialize once we do get it working. I mean, Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 were easy and would be solved in 2 years. 4 years later, Tesla'd are killing people by driving into highway barriers or broadsiding a semi trailer. Ambitious? Yes. Are we there yet? No. I think autonomous driving is a worthy goal and we should keep working at it. Same with fusion. But do I believe the projected timelines? No. Doubt that I'll see fusion as a power source in my timeline. Maybe never fully autonomous vehicles (I mean trully fully). And I'm still under 40. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think a lot of people underestimate the true difficulty of some of these projects.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  It's always 5 years out until it isn't! :)
- DuskStar 7y ago
  > I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Fusion is an amount of money away more than an amount of time.
  - hyperbovine 7y ago
    Unless you believe markets are completely inefficient I just don’t buy this argument. Think about the reward awaiting the person or company that finally cracks fusion power: trillions of dollars in wealth; the gratitude of an entire planet; instant, everlasting fame, and so on. So, ample incentives already exist. No, the reason we haven’t solved fusion is that it’s a hard problem, and the right genius(es) have yet to come along.