this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Science Memes

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For real this time, NSF, I swear it's the last time. (mander.xyz)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Wait, but fusion is working. They're seeing net positive output. It's still quite small at the moment, but moderate gains continue to be made in the field.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (3 children)

We already have a perfectly good nuclear fusion reactor about 93,000,000 miles from our planet. We just need to make better use of its output.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I mean yeah, we should absolutely be replacing as much fossil fuel use as we can with existing renewable energy tech. But there's no reason we shouldn't also be investing in fusion research, at least as far as I'm aware

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Because bad actors like fossil fuel and car companies will say "look, the government is funding fusion. Don't make us go renewable now, just wait five years until fusion is here." You have to consider the political impacts pursuing research will have on society's perceptions. Even if you know your project is just a wild experiment that probably won't work, journalists won't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

You mean like exactly what they did to Nuclear power when Solar and wind were those experimental and untested at scale technologies?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Archimedes agrees

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They already do this fyi. Solar plants tend to use mirrors that concentrate light to heat water and turn a turbine instead of actual solar panels. Amazingly, iirc converting light into heat, the heat into steam, and then the steam into kinetic energy, is still more efficient than a normal photovoltaic cells.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

And if you wanna go big you use liquid salt instead of boring old water.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The concept is viable. Just needs moar mirrors

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Mythbusters used a lot of mirrors, and could not get it to work.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

The concept is viable. Just needs moar mirrors

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Sadly I believe they found adding more mirrors did not appreciably raise the temperature of the focal point. Diminishing returns and all. So unfortunately more mirrors is not the answer, more Lasers is!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Well seeing how you almost need the output of a Dyson swarm to make a Dyson swarm, cool glowy rock power and explodey gas power can and will work just as good. Especially for places that are far away from the ideal conditions to exploit solar energy terrestrially. Where I'm at we have to use literal piles of garbage to be able to get high enough above the trees to achieve sustainable output.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This isn’t properly calculated though. They only count the actual laser energy inside the reacttvs output. They don’t account for the huge amount of energy thatch’s needed to run the lasers in the first place or the rest of the facility. It’s nowhere near putting out more energy than it consumes and it’s also a reactor for nuclear weapons testing so they don’t really try to produce energy anyway.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

You're not wrong. It's still an important step for the field though. Having a net positive within the reaction itself could theoretically mean eventually the energy from the reaction can help sustain the reaction after the initial higher activation energy. But with the poor state of science journalism the result was reported with extreme hyperbole.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Exactly. And that's with the little reactors. If I remember correctly ITER is less than 5 years from first plasma. After that monster gets online, fusion research gets much easier.