8 ms·

I was with you on the first part. If this proves room-temperature/ambient-pressure is possible at all, that is huge. Not so sure about the "won't be long until

by pohl 3y ago

I was with you on the first part. If this proves room-temperature/ambient-pressure is possible at all, that is huge. Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.

jacquesm 3y ago
Compared to fusion it should be a lot simpler and if there is one material that exhbits these properties there might be more. I'm really hoping this isn't a scam and that there isn't some kind of critical error. Regardless of how much more work needs to be done to get this to commercially viable at scale if true I would imagine that massive investment will start chasing that goal. Just thinking about the possible applications for storage makes me dizzy. Fingers crossed.
serf 3y ago
>There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism. most of the common examples are in-the-works or exist in some form, they just don't satisfy the 'every-person' checkbox yet. AI? sure. Flying cars? sure. Robots? sure. Fusion is in the works, too. Tens of billions of dollars being thrown into the ring by private capital -- and recently -- which is a pretty good indicator of 'perceived realistic' historically. Also, it's kind of apples/oranges. We had equivalent mechanisms before the transistor, transistors just lead to extreme miniaturization of logic gates that we now enjoy. Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. similarly : room temperature atmospheric pressure superconductors are a new thing if proven possible.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > it's the miniaturization that's the hard part We don't have a working fusion system to miniaturize. Stellar fusion happens at much lower temperatures than what we're trying to do on Earth.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      The sun's core is actually very hot, it is the outer layers of the sun that are much cooler. We're trying to do this at roughly twice the temperature than the core of the sun, and I realize the difference is millions of degrees but on a relative scale this doesn't add much complexity, it would be almost as difficult if the plasma would be only half the temperature that they are shooting for. And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it. So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath. Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun My understanding is we are not. (Not an expert!) The Sun's core runs around 15 MK [1]. A tokamak, 150 MK [2]. Orders of magnitude rarely come for free in physics. We need those higher energies because we can't, like the Sun, swaddle with the mass of a hundred thousand worlds a low-temperature, low-frequency weak-force mediated proton-proton reaction [3]. The Sun relies on quantum tunneling to overcome the Coulomb barrier. We humans have to increase the reaction energy so it doesn't all bleed off before anything happens [4], which means using the strong force [5]. [1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/ [2] https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generated-in-a-tokamak/ https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generate... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung [5] https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-fusion-38b4be10328f https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-f...
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  My favorite example is the hydrogen fuel cell. It was invented before the lead acid battery back in the 1800s. PEM gave it a boost around the Apollo era, but that wasn't enough to make it widespread either. Lead-Acid went through its whole 100+ year character arc and hydrogen fuel cells still haven't found product market fit. Sometimes that's how it is.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    There are plenty of commercial applications of hydrogen fuel cells though. The biggest issue has been pretty much a constant over the time since it has been invented: keeping the membranes free from impurities is hard. But there are all kinds of transportation devices using hydrogen in production today.
    - Turskarama 3y ago
      Sure, but the point is that they hardly caused a revolution in energy storage. If fuel cells didn't exist, for the average person life would be exactly the same. Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out. I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Fuel cells are just another transformer like the dynamo, or any kind of motor. They turn one kind of energy into another and in the context of hydrogen (which you could produce out of water using electricity as a means of storing energy) it serves to reverse the storage step. This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have, it is at best a quantitative change (and hopefully an improvement). Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.
harry8 3y ago
"I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism." --Pohl Longsine Nice phrase, useful many places and I might well do that. (Unless objections are raised).
PaulHoule 3y ago
To be specific look at how long it has taken cuprate superconductors to find practical applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprate_superconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprate_superconductor This was something that people said would change the world when I was in high school and it really hasn't. (For that matter, the fundamental physics is still not very well understood)
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Going from 23K to 35K is useful but not a game-changer. Going to 127C will be, if it works.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    They rapidly got up to liquid nitrogen temperatures so when I was in high school we would go to the welding supply shop, bring back liquid nitrogen to the lab, and do the Meissner effect demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLvVkkq5GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLvVkkq5GE Liquid nitrogen is very easy to handle (ordinary thermos), liquid helium is much more expensive and harder. WHen I was in grad school the one required class was the Physics 510 lab and for that I did an experiment that involved second sound in superfluid helium and that involved cooling stuff down with liquid nitrogen first, then rolling up a huge dewar full of liquid helium, attaching a vacuum pump to get the temperature down to 2K, etc. For all that trouble you get to see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpKCYZFfDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpKCYZFfDU That said, it was a long time before really good superconducting tape for fusion reactor magnets and stuff like that became available.
  - thehappypm 3y ago
    133K is the record for them
fnordpiglet 3y ago
Fusions problem isn’t feasibility. It’s funding.
mark_feelthree 3y ago
It has 4 fairly common ingredients and only needs a couple of days to create. You can be sure that China will make a spreadsheet with all possible combinations of synthesis and farm them out to their Universities for rapid development... and then they start hunting for the 'ideal' version... flexible, fast to synthesize etc. The Manhattan project and moon landings happened because the US spent a significant % of it's GDP on the project. We might have Fusion already if they repeated it... LK-99 is just chemistry... not nearly as complicated.

by pohl 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

Compared to fusion it should be a lot simpler and if there is one material that exhbits these properties there might be more. I'm really hoping this isn't a scam and that there isn't some kind of critical error. Regardless of how much more work needs to be done to get this to commercially viable at scale if true I would imagine that massive investment will start chasing that goal. Just thinking about the possible applications for storage makes me dizzy. Fingers crossed.

serf 3y ago

>There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism. most of the common examples are in-the-works or exist in some form, they just don't satisfy the 'every-person' checkbox yet. AI? sure. Flying cars? sure. Robots? sure. Fusion is in the works, too. Tens of billions of dollars being thrown into the ring by private capital -- and recently -- which is a pretty good indicator of 'perceived realistic' historically. Also, it's kind of apples/oranges. We had equivalent mechanisms before the transistor, transistors just lead to extreme miniaturization of logic gates that we now enjoy. Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. similarly : room temperature atmospheric pressure superconductors are a new thing if proven possible.

jacquesm 3y ago
> Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent. It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > it's the miniaturization that's the hard part We don't have a working fusion system to miniaturize. Stellar fusion happens at much lower temperatures than what we're trying to do on Earth.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    The sun's core is actually very hot, it is the outer layers of the sun that are much cooler. We're trying to do this at roughly twice the temperature than the core of the sun, and I realize the difference is millions of degrees but on a relative scale this doesn't add much complexity, it would be almost as difficult if the plasma would be only half the temperature that they are shooting for. And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it. So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath. Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun My understanding is we are not. (Not an expert!) The Sun's core runs around 15 MK [1]. A tokamak, 150 MK [2]. Orders of magnitude rarely come for free in physics. We need those higher energies because we can't, like the Sun, swaddle with the mass of a hundred thousand worlds a low-temperature, low-frequency weak-force mediated proton-proton reaction [3]. The Sun relies on quantum tunneling to overcome the Coulomb barrier. We humans have to increase the reaction energy so it doesn't all bleed off before anything happens [4], which means using the strong force [5]. [1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/ [2] https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generated-in-a-tokamak/ https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generate... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung [5] https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-fusion-38b4be10328f https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-f...
jjoonathan 3y ago
My favorite example is the hydrogen fuel cell. It was invented before the lead acid battery back in the 1800s. PEM gave it a boost around the Apollo era, but that wasn't enough to make it widespread either. Lead-Acid went through its whole 100+ year character arc and hydrogen fuel cells still haven't found product market fit. Sometimes that's how it is.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  There are plenty of commercial applications of hydrogen fuel cells though. The biggest issue has been pretty much a constant over the time since it has been invented: keeping the membranes free from impurities is hard. But there are all kinds of transportation devices using hydrogen in production today.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    Sure, but the point is that they hardly caused a revolution in energy storage. If fuel cells didn't exist, for the average person life would be exactly the same. Revolutionary tech does change normal peoples lives, and sometimes very rapidly, but a lot of stuff that looks revolutionary just kind of never works out. I'd say nuclear power is probably the prime example of this. It was supposed to bring us electricity too cheap to meter, but it's actually the most expensive form of generation that anyone bothers to build.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Fuel cells are just another transformer like the dynamo, or any kind of motor. They turn one kind of energy into another and in the context of hydrogen (which you could produce out of water using electricity as a means of storing energy) it serves to reverse the storage step. This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have, it is at best a quantitative change (and hopefully an improvement). Room temperature / ambient pressure super conductivity is something we do not currently have. The difference between having that and not having that is a qualitative difference and hence it will enable a whole raft of applications for which we currently do not have a solution.

harry8 3y ago

"I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism." --Pohl Longsine Nice phrase, useful many places and I might well do that. (Unless objections are raised).

PaulHoule 3y ago

To be specific look at how long it has taken cuprate superconductors to find practical applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprate_superconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuprate_superconductor This was something that people said would change the world when I was in high school and it really hasn't. (For that matter, the fundamental physics is still not very well understood)

CamperBob2 3y ago
Going from 23K to 35K is useful but not a game-changer. Going to 127C will be, if it works.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  They rapidly got up to liquid nitrogen temperatures so when I was in high school we would go to the welding supply shop, bring back liquid nitrogen to the lab, and do the Meissner effect demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLvVkkq5GE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLvVkkq5GE Liquid nitrogen is very easy to handle (ordinary thermos), liquid helium is much more expensive and harder. WHen I was in grad school the one required class was the Physics 510 lab and for that I did an experiment that involved second sound in superfluid helium and that involved cooling stuff down with liquid nitrogen first, then rolling up a huge dewar full of liquid helium, attaching a vacuum pump to get the temperature down to 2K, etc. For all that trouble you get to see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpKCYZFfDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpKCYZFfDU That said, it was a long time before really good superconducting tape for fusion reactor magnets and stuff like that became available.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  133K is the record for them

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Fusions problem isn’t feasibility. It’s funding.

mark_feelthree 3y ago

It has 4 fairly common ingredients and only needs a couple of days to create. You can be sure that China will make a spreadsheet with all possible combinations of synthesis and farm them out to their Universities for rapid development... and then they start hunting for the 'ideal' version... flexible, fast to synthesize etc. The Manhattan project and moon landings happened because the US spent a significant % of it's GDP on the project. We might have Fusion already if they repeated it... LK-99 is just chemistry... not nearly as complicated.