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SvennoJ on 12 March 2022
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Zarkho said:

Im a little surprised by the techno-optimism shown by some people here (just a little, since it always shows up in this kind of debates).

Thinking/saying that technology will save us, but failing to show any succesful examples occuring today is just plain faith. Nuclear is not making progress. In fact, its the contrary: all the new, more recent nuclear plants have ended being way more expensive to build than initially predicted, and its construction has also taken way more time than initially predicted. Fusion, torio and many other experimental reactors haven't been able to move from the experimental phase to the commercial/general use market for years. Green energy can substitute part of the energy provided by fossil fuels, but electricity (it's main outcome) is just a small part of the energy we consume today (and there are many sectors where green energy simply doesn't have the power to make them work, mainly heavy industries but also transport, where it's impossible to have enough materials and batteries to sustitute the current number of fossil powered cars, buses, trucks, etc. Not counting on how expensive electric cars are, and how expensive would be to pay for the electricity needed to charge them on a day to day use, specially given the actual Kw/h prices. Neither counting how many rare materials/earths are needed to make these cars batteries and chips: there's simply not enough for a full substitution of all cars currently used). BTW, we all know that, in order to make the devices that produce green, renewable energy, we still need fossil fuels to power the machines that produce them, right? And the era of cheap oil is rapidly leaving. Coal? You know that coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels, right? Even if, as is happening, we start burning coal again, that will only worsen the environamental and climate crisis and move our civilization collapse early. Hydrogen? It's already proven to be too expensive to produce, since it's not an energy source you can find in nature, like oil or wind: in order to produce Hydrigen you need to break H2O through electrolisis, a process that already needs energy to success. in other words: you spend more energy produccing Hidrogen than what you get from burning it, so its not efficient nor cheap. Simple thermodynamics!

No one has yet explained why if as long as there's demand there will be supply, PS5, XBSX and NSOLED are still strugglin' (A LOT) to get to shelves, with the bosses of their companies saying that production constrains will persist, at least, until 2023 (And they said that even before the Russia/Ukraine war started!).

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60312633

European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion - the energy process that powers the stars.

The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen. If nuclear fusion can be successfully recreated on Earth it holds out the potential of virtually unlimited supplies of low-carbon, low-radiation energy.

The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power). This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997. It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.


These things take time, but could go faster if we would put more resources into it.

There's huge uncertainty about when fusion power will be ready for commercialisation. One estimate suggests maybe 20 years. Then fusion would need to scale up, which would mean a delay of perhaps another few decades.

And here's the problem: the need for carbon-free energy is urgent - and the government has pledged that all electricity in the UK must be zero emissions by 2035. That means nuclear, renewables and energy storage.

In the words of my colleague Jon Amos: "Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century."

ITER hasn't even begun experimenting yet

JET is likely to be decommissioned after 2023 with ITER beginning plasma experiments in 2025, or soon after.
It's coming, and when it eventually scales up, you can make all the hydrogen you want from water. It will take a lot of work to switch to a hydrogen economy and our capitalist world isn't suited to such a huge change in behavior. Oil is still cheaper and will be for a while with all the existing infrastructure in place. The question is, do we leave it too late or plan for the future.

The shortages in transistors are not because of shortage of raw materials. It's the same as what brought all these lock downs on us. Maximizing efficiency, removing any redundancies, maximizing profits. Hospitals have been downsizing for decades and now got caught with their pants down when desperately needed. The pandemic also drove up electronics demands next to crypto currencies demanding more and more processing power. There simply wasn't enough overhead to catch an increase in demand while plants had to shut down for months due to lock downs. And like fusion reactors, it takes a long time to build these complicated plants, and now a long time to catch up to the increased demand. Same in healthcare, we're over a million elective surgeries behind just in Ontario due to downsizing and the pandemic.