12 ms·

This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning an

by hliyan 3y ago

This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others: "In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."

gostsamo 3y ago
People were excited by expected breakthroughs in the past when global warming or overpopulation or whatever weren't that popular. They had other world ending scenarios back then but though they wanted to turn dearth into gold or to find the fountain of eternal youth, those were unbundled from the expected second coming. No reason to connect them now.
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  Global warming is bad, but you have to see the positive aspects too. Case in point: my local news just published an article saying that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one, am pretty excited about that!
  - gostsamo 3y ago
    Spiders are cool. If not for them, you will have much more guests at home and the fact that you are calling them "just insects" won't make their numbers smaller. Looking for something to extinct mosquitoes though.
megaman821 3y ago
You can't just group all those things together and say they are alike. Fusion in particular is a bit more physics experiment than the future of energy. Even in a world where we master than engineering and physics around fusion it won't be an economical source of power generation. It will only be used in areas where fusion's power generation to physical footprint ratio is highly valued.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  What if room-temperature superconductors were real and led to improved efficiency in tokamak reactors?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The only difference between existing superconductors used for tokamaks and a RT version would be the energy cost of cooling the magnets to keep them below the critical temperature. Cooling does take a significant amount of energy, but I don't think that just getting rid of that would mean fusion produces enough energy compared to the cost of building the plant to compensate. And of course, a room temperature superconductor can have better or worse qualities than existing conductors in other ways. If it were much heavier, or required more expensive raw materials, or had lower critical current, it could in favt be worse than the existing solutions (the extra construction costs could offset the extra energy output).
  - megaman821 3y ago
    The economic "problem" is that ultimately fusion is a heat source that turns water into steam which turns a steam turbine. Solar and wind are approaching the cost of just the steam turbine alone. There is hardly any room for fuel and operational costs. Even today steam turbine plants produce higher cost electricity that natural gas combined cycle plants.
- dTal 3y ago
  This is a weird comment. There is no reason to expect that a hypothetical economically viable fusion power plant would have an unusually good "power generation to physical footprint ratio". At the same time - you really don't consider "uses water as fuel" an advantage?
bryanlarsen 3y ago
The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the good news that we do have -- like solar and wind power. Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper. It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges. It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%. And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually. There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  >It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.
JackFr 3y ago
I disagree. It's a theory of others' state of mind, based solely on the author's impression, offered without evidence. It's pure projection and more a window into the author's mindset than anything else.
- lolinder 3y ago
  It can be projection and also be true, if the author is more or less typical of people in the group they're projecting onto. It certainly resonates with me and a lot of us here on HN (which has been a hub for this kind of story).
SanderNL 3y ago
You know what happens if people that are not experts talk about something they are not experts in? Physicists are no exception.
permo-w 3y ago
come now, strip back the layer of bullshit verbosity and what does this really say?: ~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited about potential good news~ as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over scientific breakthroughs this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats and re-explains it 5 or 6 times the useful information in this article could be imparted in one, maybe two paragraphs
ekianjo 3y ago
There is no tangible reason for the future to be worse than the present. Until we really try hard to make it so. By all accounts levels of life have been rising worldwide for the past 50 years. Most of the stuff that remains expensive is mostly linked to over regulation which is a pure question of political will. As for energy we can still move to regular fission nuclear power and massively reduce CO2 emissions if we want to.
JeremyNT 3y ago
It really is, and it mirrors the hype cycle around LK-99. In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described is at least real, but the press is happy to spin it in wildly optimistic ways.
fallingknife 3y ago
It's important to recognize that the bad news side of the ledger is overcrowded because that's what the ledger keepers want. There's a reason that the reaction counts for more engagement than thumbs in the FB algorithm.
jujube3 3y ago
The fusion hype should be blamed squarely on journalists, not on "the public." The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source as they were of LM99, people would be better informed. "fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a different conversation than the one about whether fusion power can ever work.
- jujube3 3y ago
  sorry, meant to write LK99 not LM99.
carabiner 3y ago
This was posted during the height of the LK-99 frenzy: "In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different hype.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
Eh to me it reads like an old fart who doesn't find science fun any longer and is just waiting for retirement.
LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
That whole thing is about the NIF, which isn't the only possible path to fusion. It's also ignoring all the private fusion start-ups, which is understandable, because they havn't delivered so far. But that may change, or not. Remains to be seen, but not discarded as 'foolery' outright.

by hliyan 3y ago

gostsamo 3y ago

People were excited by expected breakthroughs in the past when global warming or overpopulation or whatever weren't that popular. They had other world ending scenarios back then but though they wanted to turn dearth into gold or to find the fountain of eternal youth, those were unbundled from the expected second coming. No reason to connect them now.

someplaceguy 3y ago
Global warming is bad, but you have to see the positive aspects too. Case in point: my local news just published an article saying that global warming is disrupting spider romance. I, for one, am pretty excited about that!
- gostsamo 3y ago
  Spiders are cool. If not for them, you will have much more guests at home and the fact that you are calling them "just insects" won't make their numbers smaller. Looking for something to extinct mosquitoes though.

megaman821 3y ago

You can't just group all those things together and say they are alike. Fusion in particular is a bit more physics experiment than the future of energy. Even in a world where we master than engineering and physics around fusion it won't be an economical source of power generation. It will only be used in areas where fusion's power generation to physical footprint ratio is highly valued.

Apocryphon 3y ago
What if room-temperature superconductors were real and led to improved efficiency in tokamak reactors?
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The only difference between existing superconductors used for tokamaks and a RT version would be the energy cost of cooling the magnets to keep them below the critical temperature. Cooling does take a significant amount of energy, but I don't think that just getting rid of that would mean fusion produces enough energy compared to the cost of building the plant to compensate. And of course, a room temperature superconductor can have better or worse qualities than existing conductors in other ways. If it were much heavier, or required more expensive raw materials, or had lower critical current, it could in favt be worse than the existing solutions (the extra construction costs could offset the extra energy output).
- megaman821 3y ago
  The economic "problem" is that ultimately fusion is a heat source that turns water into steam which turns a steam turbine. Solar and wind are approaching the cost of just the steam turbine alone. There is hardly any room for fuel and operational costs. Even today steam turbine plants produce higher cost electricity that natural gas combined cycle plants.
dTal 3y ago
This is a weird comment. There is no reason to expect that a hypothetical economically viable fusion power plant would have an unusually good "power generation to physical footprint ratio". At the same time - you really don't consider "uses water as fuel" an advantage?

bryanlarsen 3y ago

The flipside is the refusal of people to acknowledge the good news that we do have -- like solar and wind power. Perhaps because it's boring. Solar is basically the same tech as it was in the 70s. The only major difference is that it is literally more than a million times cheaper. It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. Sure there are challenges with wind and solar, but that's all they are: challenges, not showstoppers. When something has such a compelling cost advantage, there is lots of margin to throw at the challenges. It'll be difficult to power a grid with 100% wind and solar so that's all you hear. But on the flip side, it'd be quite straightforward to power the grid using 90% renewables using the existing plants for the last hard 10%. It'd be both cheaper & cleaner! Why the heck aren't we celebrating that? Add short term storage and it'll be 99%. And this isn't theoretical or anything. We are doing it. We're currently installing solar & wind at about 5% a year, and that 5% is increasing by about 50% annually. There is way more good news than bad news about solar. But good news is boring and bad news gets clicks, so you only see the bad news.

jackmott42 3y ago
>It's cheaper to install and operate solar than it is just to operate a coal plant. When you say this you need to also talk about how much it costs to build enough energy storage for solar to become some given percentage of grid power. There is probably some % where it stops being cheaper than coal
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    It's interesting how you could hand a solution out on a platter and all that will happen is that people will run around yelling 'it isn't perfect'. As if any powersource has a 100% uptime guarantee.

JackFr 3y ago

I disagree. It's a theory of others' state of mind, based solely on the author's impression, offered without evidence. It's pure projection and more a window into the author's mindset than anything else.

lolinder 3y ago
It can be projection and also be true, if the author is more or less typical of people in the group they're projecting onto. It certainly resonates with me and a lot of us here on HN (which has been a hub for this kind of story).

SanderNL 3y ago

You know what happens if people that are not experts talk about something they are not experts in? Physicists are no exception.

permo-w 3y ago

come now, strip back the layer of bullshit verbosity and what does this really say?: ~there's a lot of a bad news around, so people are excited about potential good news~ as if before climate change there'd never been media hype over scientific breakthroughs this whole article makes exactly one interesting point: the media hype around fusion fails to properly illustrate the actual energy being put in to the experiment. it explains this well once, then wraps it up in snark and verbosity and repeats and re-explains it 5 or 6 times the useful information in this article could be imparted in one, maybe two paragraphs

ekianjo 3y ago

There is no tangible reason for the future to be worse than the present. Until we really try hard to make it so. By all accounts levels of life have been rising worldwide for the past 50 years. Most of the stuff that remains expensive is mostly linked to over regulation which is a pure question of political will. As for energy we can still move to regular fission nuclear power and massively reduce CO2 emissions if we want to.

JeremyNT 3y ago

It really is, and it mirrors the hype cycle around LK-99. In the case of these laser fusion stories, the effect described is at least real, but the press is happy to spin it in wildly optimistic ways.

fallingknife 3y ago

It's important to recognize that the bad news side of the ledger is overcrowded because that's what the ledger keepers want. There's a reason that the reaction counts for more engagement than thumbs in the FB algorithm.

jujube3 3y ago

The fusion hype should be blamed squarely on journalists, not on "the public." The LM99 room temperature semiconductor circus was a very different phenomenon, mostly driven by internet people rather than journalists. And very short-lived. If mainstream journalists were as skeptical of fusion as a net power source as they were of LM99, people would be better informed. "fast-charging, high-range" EVs are already here, so I'm not sure what you're on about. "non-degrading," no, but nobody is actually claiming that. machine learning also exists and does useful work. We can argue that it's overhyped. That's a different conversation than the one about whether fusion power can ever work.

jujube3 3y ago
sorry, meant to write LK99 not LM99.

carabiner 3y ago

This was posted during the height of the LK-99 frenzy: "In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire ... I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36895665 It was downvoted and flagged. Mainstream press like NYTimes got it right by ignoring this until replication. HNers fall for hype as much as the rest of the world, it's just different hype.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

Eh to me it reads like an old fart who doesn't find science fun any longer and is just waiting for retirement.

LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago

That whole thing is about the NIF, which isn't the only possible path to fusion. It's also ignoring all the private fusion start-ups, which is understandable, because they havn't delivered so far. But that may change, or not. Remains to be seen, but not discarded as 'foolery' outright.