This is good. very good. Fusion can produce much more energy than fission and leaves no radioactive waste behind. If we could have fusion plans we could have cheap electricity for all.
Omar Hurricane, the experiment's lead physicist
I swear the physicists all have weird names just to troll us.
martyrdrebel27 said:
I saw a special one time that said we were fairly close to this already. He problem they said, was a lack of abundant helium-3 which they have found is more available on the moon. Proof that we need a moon base for the future of humanity.
we can dig it with shovels on the moon. Well not really but its that abundant on the surface of the moon.
Jeroenr said:
martyrdrebel27 said:
I saw a special one time that said we were fairly close to this already. He problem they said, was a lack of abundant helium-3 which they have found is more available on the moon. Proof that we need a moon base for the future of humanity.
This reaction used two hydrogen isotopes not helium.
Most likely deuterium (hydrogen-2), this can be fount in sea water as D2O (heavy water).
If i'm not mistaking this will produce helium-3.
Both deuterium and helium-3 is needed for helium-3 reactions though, which granted arent Fusion but something more powerful.
vallorn said:
This has always been the power source of the future, renewables have nothing on working fusion technology for clean energy and the fuels used are far cheaper than the rare elements used in solar panels.
This. renewables are not pwoerful enough to meet our needs and with ever increasing needs they wont be. Thermal energy from earth might be in some locations but thats expensive to set up. nuclear power was always the future and people running to shut down the plans are simply suiciding.
immortalfrieza said:
It seems to me like we are always "quite a way off" on just about everything. For all the advancements in medicine, robotics, nuclear fusion, or whatever reported all over the news and net, it seems like there's no real effort made to make any of it actually be completed. It's always "a few years away" and a decade or so later there's no noticeable progress being made.
Oh, were making progress. just look at what medicine had acess to, say, 10 years ago compared to now. we made a lot of progress, its just that such progress rarely gets splat out all over the news (because people would rather read at what dress some star wears) and largely goes unnoticed until you actually end up on the receiving end.
amaranth_dru said:
Mattel better pull through on that one. Otherwise there'll be a riot from B2F2 fans en masse. No doubt there will be blood... carnage... all sorts of apocalyptic behavior, all because they didn't deliver on a fictional promise.
But, being injustice league, we should be endorsing such behaviuor!
Exterminas said:
Practically over night huge parts of the world economy are going to crash since the price for fossil fuels will drop drastically. Maybe most of the big oil companies will go belly-up in the process! If enough of them do, then the price for drugs and plastic will sky-rocket, since those things need oil too, but without enough companies around to supply the demand, it might turn out nasty. Even so you will have thousands of persons from the gasoline, oil and motor industry that will need re-education or will simply be out of work once we can produce an abundance of energy through fusion.
Maybe I am exaggerating, but I don't see a potential paradigm-shift like nuclear fusion as entirely positive.
It wont. As it is now, only small part of oil is used for actual electricity making, and we are not putting those things in our cars any time soon. nor can we make plastics out of it. hard fuel (coal for example) and gases (maybe this will make fracking stop finally) are the majority share in our energy manufacturing, also nuclear fission. renewables are also good in a few countries that have plenty of them (norway for example have plenty of winds in the mountains and use it to power their aluminium factories).
The main use for oil - transport fuel and plastics - will not drop soon. after all electric car didnt revolutionize the market yet despite being around for a decade. With time, we will change that gradually. as far as plastics go, we already got solutinos like liquid wood, and for massi usage like plstic bags in shops - those are ALREADY made out of organic material and not oil as part of enviromental programme here in EU. the thing is - they degrade over time so you have around 1 year or so usage of a "one-time-use" plastic bag. wont make much problem for majority of users though. they are as cheap as plastic ones.
It not entirely possitive for everyone - for example somone cant make billions of profit off energy prices. However it is a net positive as a whole. also do note the fact that oil IS running out, and it will have to be changed no matter what, its only a question of "with what".
Angelous Wang said:
As great the the potential is of Nuclear Fusion is, I don't see that we will ever be able to use it until we ether create viable containment substance that is preposterously energy/heat immune or energy shielding/force fields that cost less energy than the reaction they keep contained.
we already do that with fission reactors though. even in worst casse scenario of reactor meltdown the "Shielding" dome we built as a
mandatory regulation makes sure that radiation will not leak for hundreds of years. they had to manually override security system to open a walve in Japan and that was a 60 years old reactor, one of the "old ones with poor security" types. you know, the ones that no longer exist in US or europe due to being regualted out (my country had the last one and we were forced to shut it down when joining EU).
So we already are capable.
Plus there is the blinding issue no one ever thinks about/mentions, a blinding issue in that the brightness of light a real Fusion core puts out if even 1% of the brightness of the sun would burn out people retinas who looked at it directly without some kind of super light filter.
And if you looked directly into nuclear fission reactor your retinas would also be burned out by radiation. but we dont.
