I haven’t been paying attention, but suddenly this is all over the news, and elsewhere, so it must be important, LOL (No seriously, it IS important)
BREAKING NEWS: This is an announcement that has been decades in the making.
On December 5, 2022 a team from DOE's @Livermore_Lab made history by achieving fusion ignition.
This breakthrough will change the future of clean power and America’s national defense forever. pic.twitter.com/hFHWbmCNQJ— U.S. Department of Energy (@ENERGY) December 13, 2022
SECY. GRANHOLM begins her remarks: “This is a BFD.” https://t.co/7LW0jHokdZ pic.twitter.com/e7LSUaDkjd
— Gary Grumbach (@GaryGrumbach) December 13, 2022
Here’s the live stream, you can rewind to the beginning:
So far above my pay grade, but I’m enjoying learning new things this morning.
And now for something completely different, but here is another fun discovery”
More info on this cute little bird here
This is an open thread
Ken
The one caveat I’ve seen is that the calculation is based on energy delivered to the fuel, not on total input energy. It’s a bit like calculating furnace efficiency while excluding the heat lost up the chimney and the power used for the fans.
But even the spoilsports making that point are agreeing this is a significant step forward. Instead of being perpetually fifty years in the future, fusion is now perpetually thirty years in the future.
Brent
Josh over at TPM has written a couple pieces on this and I have read a few things about it on other places as well. As I understand it, it is a big deal for a lot of different reasons. But with respect to the specific case of a clean and free energy future, its, at best, incremental.
IOW, lots of reasons to be excited about the science, but the future is not quite here yet.
E.
If this leads to free or nearly-free energy, we are all doomed. The only constraint on our use of the Earth’s resources right now is the cost of the energy to extract them. Do the thought experiment: make energy free. Does it really lead to a utopia we all share?
Old School
Do we get flying cars now?
p.a.
Anything that gets us even incrementally closer to telling the Saudis and Petro-Americans to fuck off is ok by me, even if I’m not around to actually see it.
Hilbertsubspace
@E.: Welp, there it is, the dumbest thing I’m going to read today. Congratulations.
PAM Dirac
@Brent: Cheryl Rofer says she would probably have a post up after the news release, but she did point out that this while this is likely a scientific breakthrough, it is unlikely to be an energy production breakthrough. I’d also point out that as the science gets better sometimes it tells you what you want is farther away rather than closer. It is research after all.
Ken
@E.: Infinite power worked out well for the Krell.
Frederic Pohl’s “Midas World” also explored the consequences — by the end of the series of stories, Earth is nearly uninhabitable due to the accumulated heat from the fusion reactors.
TaMara
Some days I wonder why I even bother to get excited and share things with you guys. 🤦🏻♀️
DaBunny
@E.: I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s just possible there might be some middle ground between “we’re all doomed” and “a utopia we all share.”
So no, I don’t think cheap energy = utopia. I have faith in humanity’s ability to fuck things up. But it might make recovery from a climate disaster possible.
oatler
Did we finally get the Overbalancing Wheel to work? “Young lady, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!”
Brent
@E.:
I would say the answer to that question depends on A LOT of unknowns. Much of the resource extraction we are engaged in, for instance, is specifically for the purpose of energy AND the plundering of those resources occurs because it is profitable. A free energy source could change all of the many complicated equations of human need at multiple levels. Or not.
I would say, at this point, its nearly impossible to know what will happen. But its not at all difficult for me to imagine a world where abundant and nearly free energy (nearly free when including all the externalities) is a hugely positive step for society.
cain
@TaMara: lol .. leave it to us techies to put cold water on hot fusion! 🤭
mrmoshpotato
@TaMara:
🎶Tuesday Morning’s
Saturday Night’sAlright for Fighting🎶TaMara
Sasha
The question we need to ask ourselves now is this: How will late-stage capitalism fuck this up?
Old School
@TaMara: You are appreciated for your efforts.
Exciting news about the Black-naped Pheasant Pigeon! It hadn’t been scientifically documented for 140 years!
CaseyL
What I’m hearing in various corners is, this experiment proves creating energy from fusion is possible, but we’re a very long way from using fusion as an energy source even on a small scale.
When/if that happens, fusion energy will change the world in so many ways it’s hard to wrap my head around. Mostly to the good – but, like DaBunny says, I know if there is a way to fuck this up, humans will find it.
mrmoshpotato
@Old School:
I assume it was recently documented.
Curtis
Well, I think this is exciting news. It’s not a pipe dream after all!
Omnes Omnibus
@DaBunny:
I am not sure that is Doctrine. It’s one or the other. It’s heaven or hell. Purgatory was invented by a squish.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@TaMara: Oh, I’m totally excited about it!
E.
@Brent: I am only asking people to do the thought experiment. Just think about what we mostly use energy for, and what it would mean if that came without cost. Heating, cooling, travelling, construction, extraction of resources, shipping plastic stuff to your door — all that can be done for the cost of the labor alone. And yes, sure, with the right political framework we could turn this into a huge win for society. What would that political framework look like? How possible would it be to achieve? Is anybody working on it? When I look around at the fairly untempered greed and sadism that seem to drive our markets and behavior, I am not optimistic that this will be an improvement of life on earth for people or animals or most all living things.
Old School
@mrmoshpotato: Yes, it was caught on video on Fergusson Island, just off the eastern coast of the island of New Guinea. The video is at the bottom of the post.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
No matter what happens, there is ALWAYS someone who pops up in a B-J thread to tell us we are all doomed. That may be as much of a constant as death and taxes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: As ever….
Another Scott
There’s a very readable article at Science that talks about the news, how it’s a BFD, and how much more work is needed. A great and important step forward.
Cheers,
Scott.
Emma from Miami
@TaMara: Indeed. As much as I love this bunch, I sometimes wonder why I do. Eeyores, the bunch of them.
Brent
@E.:
I understand. And what I am saying is that that thought experiment is going to be heavily complicated by a lot of variables which we just can’t know at this stage. Just to give an example, right now, we work to mine a great deal of lithium because we need batteries for all sorts of purposes. But will battery technology and thus the need for lithium look the same in a post-fusion world? I don’t think we really have any idea about the answer to that question.
Mike in NC
This item should surprise approximately nobody:
Fat Bastard was (still is) planning to stock the entire federal workforce with hundreds of loyal Oath Keepers once he installed himself as our fascist dictator-for-life.
Omnes Omnibus
@Emma from Miami: #NotAllJackals
schrodingers_cat
This is a scientific breakthrough. To make practical applications out of it will take time. I am hoping that those initiatives get funded by the NSA, DoD and such
Science like most other fields of endeavor is long grinding work, with little glory. Where Rs are always threatening to take away your funding.
Another Scott
@E.: It’s always good to think about the implications of new technologies. But…
This is just one step forward. Actual practical power from these things is still decades away, and still might not be possible even in that time frame.
Even if it works, it won’t be “free”. These are gigantic, complicated machines. They need lots of hardware that costs money to make. They need lots of utilities. They need lots of land. They need people to run them. And eventually they have to be taken off-line for maintenance, so there will have to be redundancies, which will also increase the costs.
If it works, being able to run modern societies without burning million year old carbon is a good thing. Whether that is from fusion, or solar, or wind, or geothermal, or whatever, it’s a good thing but will not be free. Economics will still work, and there will still be the need for government regulations to guide and constrain the economics. Just as we made the transition away from wood and whale oil, we’ll make the transition away from fossil fuels.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Emma from Miami: I am a realist neither an optimist or a pessimist.
Two rabbits
Sorry if my formatting is bad. I didn’t really quote E, all my words.
geg6
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Yes, so much true there. Being a natural pessimist, one would think I would also be casting doom and gloom on this news.
But Jesus. Even I don’t really see why or how one would want to piss on this massive achievement that I’ve been told all my life would never happen. There is nothing that a dedicated Eeyore can’t find depressing, I guess.
Emma from Miami
@schrodingers_cat:That’s a hard row to hoe Still, many a good thing came out of left field from someone who was a bloody-minded optimist.
rikyrah
(No seriously, it IS important)
BWA HA HA AH AHH AHA
But…is it important?
LOL
rikyrah
@cain:
BWA AH HA HA HA HA AHH A
John Cole
FFS readers all basic and applied research is by nature incremental ya fucking eeyores.
rikyrah
This takes me to one of my favorite episodes of Archer.
Lana’s father, who is a genius, has made a breakthrough like this. I mean, he’s made the breakthrough that would immediately free us from dependence on Fossil Fuels.
Well, of course, TPTB find out and try to kill him.
In the end, the CIA buy his research for an enormous fortune….
Their logic?
” Do you see how much trouble the Middle East causes us…WITH Fossil Fuels? Can you imagine if we don’t have that to keep them remotely in line?”
Sad to say, I understood their logic.
cmorenc
Two things this fusion discovery won’t lead to:
nuclear fusion-powered cars
people giving up personal cars for transport
The discovery is still a BFD, but let’s not celebrate the upcoming freedom from Saudi oil just yet, although true, it would make the transition to universal use of electric vehicles that much more practically feasible.
piratedan
@E.: who’s to say we have to do it here? We have a perfectly lovely asteroid belt just over there to play with :-) sure, sure, we “might” kick something inward bound to kill all life on the planet, but hey, we had to get into space sometime in the next billion years or so, best to get started.
different-church-lady
Still holding out hope for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.
Eolirin
@cmorenc: Electric cars are going to replace internal combustion engine ones entirely before fusion power becomes viable.
Poptartacus
Cold fusion will save us all and throw in room temperature superconductivity and we’ll all be rich, rich I tells ya.
Brachiator
@PAM Dirac:
Very good and important distinction. I look forward to more discussion on this.
And of course, some of the most important commercial applications are the result of breakthroughs in basic research.
Carlo Graziani
This is a step forward, but whether it counts as a “breakthrough” depends on what they actually learned from the process of achieving this configuration.
I’m a little skeptical, because it seems to me that the current accomplishment, while real, is the result of a lot of engineering-style tweaking of geometric configuration and materials choice, guided more by intuition than by any theoretical reasoning, and not necessarily leading to any generalizable design principles that could lead to any even more efficient designs.
I could certainly be wrong about this. If I am wrong, then I would expect that “breakthrough” means that we are in a new stage of inertial fusion research, in which every few months another design of capsule is placed in the chamber and another increase in energy yield results from it. That would be the case if the physicists in the project have figured out some new design principles.
However, I think it is rather more likely that they are still stumbling around trying things without knowing why things work, why they succeed in getting the amount of burning that they get before the package flies apart, and how to assemble the next-larger package. We’ll see.
Mike in NC
The latest about the “Trump of the Tropics”:
So they wear yellow soccer jerseys instead of red MAGA hats.
CaseyL
Sorry, didn’t mean to be an Eeyore, and didn’t intend my comment to be taken as such. The breakthrough is amazing; it’s just gonna be a while before we see any practical applications.
The Moar You Know
Progress. But I’ve been seeing progress all my life:
Me, child, 1970s: Scientists say working fusion reactors by 1980
Me, teen, 1980s: Scientists say working fusion reactors by 2000
Me, adult, 2000: Scientists say working fusion reactors by 2030
Me, middle aged, now: Scientists say working fusion reactors in 30 years.
Not in my lifetime, at that rate.
Science explaining fusion to kids and the media (the kids are smarter): you smack two hydrogen molecules together to make a helium, energy from seawater forever.
The explanation that is not used but closer to truth: working fusion is putting a miniature hydrogen bomb inside a magnetic bottle that can stand and contain multiple hydrogen bomb detonations per second for decades. This is obviously not in the cards for anyone anytime soon.
Barbara
@Mike in NC: Sort of ironic considering the fate of Brazil in the World Cup, but also somehow on point considering that the star, Neymar, seemed to believe that any defensive maneuver intended to get between him and a goal should be considered a foul. “Entitled to win by any means even if not strictly within the rules.”
Carlo Graziani
@The Moar You Know: If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure we’ll have working fusion energy before we have working quantum computers that do anything useful.
Nettoyeur
I’ve worked on fusion energy development for over 40 years. The Livermore development is important to physicists in terms of their ability to build things and predict performance, but it is a long long way to power plants. NIF was built primarily to test the physics capsules for fusion weapons (aka H bombs) using 192 laser beams instead of the X rays from a fission bomb to fill the mirrored capsule (called a Hohlraum) with high intensity light sugficient to compress and heat the deuterium-tritium pellet to high enough density and temperature to ignite fusion reactions. The energy released in the subsequent nano second explosion is greater than the laser energy injected….but note that the conversion of electric grid power to laser power is less than 1% efficient. Doing this pulsed laser stuff fast enough (10x per sec) or efficiently enough to produce commercial electricity is not going to happen. There are other ways to sustain fusion plasmas in toroidal (doughnut shaped) magnetic fusion devices that are more attractive for power generation, but a lot of work is needed on things like high heat flux, neutron resistant materials. The Dept of Energy spent something like $1B on NIF, and needs to show that it has done what it promised to do for credibility, but it is important to read past the breathless headlines to understand the true significance.
Brachiator
@E.:
This could be of tremendous benefit to less developed countries and potentially spark a new industrial revolution.
I also wonder how fusion might be used for space exploration, space stations and lunar bases.
Barbara
@The Moar You Know: Right, I mean, we can make power in amounts that can blow up anything that ever existed. It’s harnessing that power so that it does not, in fact, blow a lot of things up that is proving so much harder to grasp.
Hungry Joe
I remember reading an interview with a physicist during the ‘73-‘74 oil crisis. He was asked about fusion — could that be a solution? He waved the question away: “No. We’re working on it, but that’s technology for the 1990s.”
(Moar said it better.)
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Brent: Incremental is probably the way we’ll do it. There’s no one weird trick, despite what the internet tells us
E.
Just put me in the camp that thinks it’s good to think through our ideologies from time to time. Is it always a good thing when something we like becomes cheaper? It’s okay to answer “yes” instead of heaping abuse on the person doing the questioning.
Jeffro
“FUSION ENERGY POSSIBLE IN NEAR FUTURE: HUMANITY MUST KEEP BURNING THAT SWEET, SWEET CARBON UP UNTIL LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT, THOUGH” – FauxNews headline coming in 3, 2, 1…
JPL
This is good news and although I might not live to see it, my grand imps will. Lucky boys!
JPL
@Jeffro: ha You did forget how many people will lose their jobs.
PAM Dirac
@Hungry Joe: Another data point from Wikipedia:
So this is 10 years late by the estimates of the facility’s director. I don’t think it is being an Eeyore to celebrate the hard work and perseverance of the science team while at the same time being realistic about the implications for useful energy production.
Another Scott
@Nettoyeur: Good points.
From the FAQ:
I haven’t checked recently, but I don’t think that any of the magnetic confinement donuts (tokamaks / stellarators / etc.) have come close to ignition yet. While they are more suitable for actual power generation, they still have to show that they will actually work.
Basic research is fun, but frustrating. The great thing is, once someone figures out how to do it, then the development and production gals take over and make it workable and real.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@John Cole: Basic scientific research has been underfunded since the Reagan revolution. The entire model right now is based on the labor of underfunded post-docs and graduate students whose funding can be cut off at the whim of the likes of Gosars and MTGs
The across the board cuts that happened in 2013 (sequestration) killed many a career and nascent discoveries/technologies.
Carlo Graziani
@The Moar You Know:
Actually (little-known fact) it turns out that most of the energy output of a “hydrogen bomb” is from fission of the U-238 of the tamper casing surrounding the burning D-T core. U-238 fissions just fine in the presence of a flood of neutrons supplied by the fusion reactions, it just isn’t capable of supporting a chain reaction.
So the notion that hydrogen bombs exploit “fusion energy” is actually misleading. They only exploit the high density of neutrons emitted by non-self-sustaining burning in the hydrogen core to fission U-238. And the only true self-sustaining H burning in the solar system that we know of is still the Sun.
Brachiator
@JPL:
Or how many new jobs might be created.
UncleEbeneezer
@TaMara: If only we could harness the energy of crushing everyone’s hope/enthusiasm. All our energy problems would be solved, and then return, and be solved, then return…
Ken
I have a hazy memory of a proposal in the style of Project Plowshare (“use nuclear blasts to dig big holes”) or Project Orion (“use nuclear blasts to launch things into space”) of using nuclear blasts to generate power.
The containment would be some deep hole in the ground, and after the blast it would be nice and hot, and you could run turbines off that heat. Sort of like making your own geothermal source.
Jeffro
@JPL: FUSION ENERGY SOON TO BE MANDATED BY DEMS: ALL JOBS* DESTROYED, ECONOMIC COLLAPSE IMMINENT
*except fusion reactor monitor, so, still one job available worldwide ;)
Here’s one for Sept/Oct of election years:
DRAG QUEEN CARAVAN!!1! SPOTTED APPROACHING SOUTHERN BORDER WITH FUSION REACTOR-POWERED GUN-CONFISCATING MAGNET, CRT CANNON, AND LGBTQ BOOKMOBILE IN TOW
Stuart Frasier
Unless we come up with a better way to turn the energy from fusion into electricity, it’s just going to be a fancy way to boil water. Even if the fusion reactor and fuel were free (they won’t be), it still will necessarily be more expensive than renewables due to the steam turbine side of the plant. So this is a step forward and fusion is certainly more desirable than fission, but we’re not going to be getting “energy too cheap to meter”.
dmsilev
I’m not sure inertial confinement fusion (the “use a bunch of really big lasers to generate a shockwave that compresses the fuel until it ignites” approach used here) really has much potential for power generation. The “really big lasers” part kills your efficiency, so even if the fusion part is past breakeven (the announcement today), it’s a long long way away from system breakeven. Magnetic confinement, where superconducting magnets are used to similarly confine and compress the plasma, seems a lot better positioned for actual power generation. The two efforts on that front to watch IMO are a (multi)-government funded one called ITER (a big facility being built in France) and a private company in Massachusetts called Commonwealth Fusion.
cmorenc
@Eolirin:
Since:
– electric cars still rely on the power grid to charge
– the power grid is still in substantial portion reliant on fossil fuels
– the practicalities involved in transitioning to electric cars as a way to free us from dependence on fossil fuels isn’t entirely worked out practically, not yet until the power grid itself is in significantly higher % clean – even though the ongoing transition to electric vehicles is an essential component to a finding a sustainable path forward
– Also, there will be some residual resistance to transitioning to electric vehicles in colder climactic regions, due to the lesser efficiency and range of batteries in cold weather.
frosty
@schrodingers_cat:
So for you, then, “That glass is the wrong size!”
Matt McIrvin
Cheryl Rofer has it right: the definition of “energy gain” here excludes a lot of things and this is very, very far from a practical energy source.
In fact, I would argue that even if they did get nuclear fusion to a point where you could build a practical plant, it’d be less significant than you might expect and certainly no reason to stop pursuing other energy sources. Nuclear fusion seems to be even worse than nuclear fission in the area of scale: the plants, if they ever even exist, are going to have to be truly enormous and colossally expensive, so they will have to run for many decades to justify that expense. That has the effect of slowing technical progress–that “experience curve” that made solar and wind energy far cheaper than we would have dreamed decades ago. It doesn’t help us so much for a technology like this.
Stuart Frasier
@cmorenc: Electric cars are less carbon emitting than gasoline cars on an entirely coal powered grid. In reality, the electric grid is far cleaner than that in most of the country and is getting cleaner all the time. An electric car you buy now will get cleaner over time as the grid charging it gets better.
PAM Dirac
@Another Scott:
In a career as a scientist I guess I kind of internalized the frustrating path without really thinking about how horribly wrong the media picture of geniuses at work making brilliant discoveries left and right is. Research is about discovering reality and sometimes reality sucks hard. You learn celebrate the incremental triumphs you have without getting too full of yourself thinking you have it all solved now. I think it was Feynman who said the scientific method is a way to minimize your chances of getting fooled and the most likely person to fool you is yourself.
Nettoyeur
@schrodingers_cat: The funding for fusion power and other energy started to drop when Reagan came in 1981 (just after I got my doctorate) and when corrected for inflation, has still not recovered. The laser fusion facility at Livermore was mainly funded by the weapons program to develop the physics packages used in modern two stage nuclear weapons.
The Moar You Know
@Carlo Graziani: I gotta co-worker freaking out about quantum computers and AI. Maybe his grandkids have to worry about that, but neither him or I.
@Barbara: not even close. We can fuck up the climate good. We might be able to kill a lot of the biosphere. But we can’t even blow up our own planet.
You need antimatter for that. Which we (from a practical perspective) do not have.
JPL
@Brachiator: Fox only cares about job creation when a repub is in office. That won’t be mentioned today.
Barbara
@The Moar You Know: Well I for one am heartened to find out that we cannot blow up the planet. I am pretty sure we can scorch all living things on it, however, if we really, really try.
The Moar You Know
@Carlo Graziani: I didn’t want to make it too complicated for the audience.
Martin
I’m sorry, but this is not a BFD. At least not for climate. It is a BFD for science.
So, the equipment that produced this result is not the kind of equipment that would generate electricity. We are building such a test machine (ITER), in France, for $20B, and it’ll be done in 2025, 18 years after it was started. It won’t actually produce power though – it’s just a test site. And for $20B it’ll produce less power than some US solar plants that cost a few hundred million dollars to build.
Even if ITER proves to be incredibly successful, and achieves not just 120% of output, but the 600% of output its projected to do, The soonest you’d see a production power plant is 2045, and that plant would be wildly unprofitable. I’m theoretically pro-nuclear. It’s not that hard to make it safe, but it’s impossible to make it fast, and that’s why I’m opposed to investing money in it right now – we need solutions quickly. Not in a decade, but tomorrow. If you want to put solar on your house, you can have that up and running in a month. Go do that.
There’s no fully automated luxury communism coming to save us. We know how to address climate change. It’s pretty cheap, too. Stop driving your car. Take the bus, a bike, the train. Don’t fly so much. Eat less meat. Don’t waste fossil fuel electricity on hot tubs and things you can live without. All of these solutions also save you money, so it’s a solution that costs nothing. It does change your life a bit, but probably not as much as you think.
When I graduated college I had all my accumulated stuff. My parents had moved away from me, and I had no real way to take my stuff with me. So, when I graduated, I got rid of everything that didn’t fit in a duffle bag, and that’s all I could take into my adult life. It was hard. For a few weeks I missed stuff. And then I didn’t any longer. I cut the mass I carried with me by at least 95%, and what it revealed to me was that all the stuff I was afraid to get rid of wasn’t actually important, and I didn’t replace any of it.
That’s what apocalypse means – to reveal. Disaster reveals what matters. Dealing with climate change is a test to see if we can reveal what matters before the disasters, rather than waiting until after.
schrodingers_cat
@Nettoyeur: Pointing out facts makes you Eyeore, whoever that is.
*Yeah I know he is some character from Winnie the Pooh which I haven’t read because not everyone was born in the US or was an English major in college.
Ken
@Stuart Frasier: That has always bothered me in regard to fission power. You’ve got this magic metal that gives off energy, and you use that to boil water and spin a turbine.
You’d think there would be some way to go directly to electricity, maybe some clever lamination of uranium metal and semiconductors. There’s radiothermal generators, of course, but work there seems to concentrate on low-power, long-duration applications.
Matt McIrvin
@Two rabbits: The waste-heat crisis is one that Arthur C. Clarke liked to talk about back in the day. If there were an actual reason to move industry into space, it’s that (though of course indefinitely continued exponential growth will swamp any mitigation measure–we soon end up with a matryoshka of Dyson spheres or some such thing).
But we’re very far from having to worry about it right now–global warming is about greenhouse gases from fossil fuel emissions, not about direct heat emission, and that’ll kill us first.
I personally think we do need to get off the treadmill of exponentially increasing resource consumption somehow but I don’t think that we should consequently regard new energy sources as bad. “Electricity for free”, if we really had it, actually would open up a lot of ways to NOT ravage the environment–it’s a matter of making the choices, which is the hard problem, but that’s the hard problem regardless.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
Never read the books, but did see some of the Disney animated cartoons.
jonas
@Mike in NC: I think the whole premise of the Oath Keepers is that they were current and ex-military/gov/LEOs who vowed to defend (their version of) the Constitution against liberal subversionists who wanted to use it to do things like guarantee people’s civil rights and limit access to assault weapons. You know, real tyranny. So seeing a bunch of US government agents on a membership list is really not surprising. That’s who they intentionally recruit.
catclub
@rikyrah:
I remember my grandfather telling us ( in say 1972) about the ‘Pogue Carburator’ that would give cars over 50mpg, and that the carmakers and the oil companies stomped on it. I now has my doubts.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: Eeyore was one character where Disney actually stuck pretty close to the source material, even visually. He’s chronically depressed and pessimistic, though one aspect that doesn’t come through in the animated version is that he’s also kind of resentful and paranoid, occasionally going on about an unnamed “Some People” who are responsible for his problems.
What Americans don’t really get at all is the pun in his name: if you have an English accent, “Eeyore” sounds like “hee-haw”.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Works for me.
It’s a good start.
schrodingers_cat
That was my initial takeaway too having only read the news reports.
Ken
“Fusion plants are enormous great things that don’t go anywhere, which is good, because it means that you can run away from them. They’re expensive, cantankerous, and the only good reason for putting up with them is that they produce lots and lots of heat, without which we would freeze to death. Most of the [Kuiper belt colonies] rely on fusion power, as do the various interstellar projects. They come with certain maintenance issues. When your city relies for its power on a machine that takes gigawatts of juice just to keep running and is sitting on top of an ice cap and pumps out enough waste heat to trigger moonquakes and boil the atmosphere, you have certain structural-engineering issues to deal with.”
— Charles Stross, Saturn’s Children
Paul in KY
@TaMara: I like it when you share new things, TaMara. Fine with me!
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Not seen the cartoons either. Just seen Pooh branded merchandise.
hells littlest angel
Here’s hoping this isn’t some Fleishmann and Pons type hype.
PAM Dirac
Cheryl Rofer’s take on this is up at LGM
C Stars
Ha! I told Mr. Stars he should take a job at LLL! “All they make is weapons” he said…
ETA Oh, nevermind, I was confused. The job was at Lawrence BERKELEY Ntl. Lab.
Aka weapon factory.
Paul in KY
@Sasha: The energy company that produces the fusion energy will bill all of us for the bazillions in developmental cost. That will be 99.7% of your fuel bill.
Paul in KY
@E.: Probably Karl Marx style Communism would work the best…
Matt McIrvin
@hells littlest angel: It’s not that–the Livermore people know what they’re doing–but the claim of “energy gain” here comes with an asterisk so large it can be seen from space.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@cmorenc: Um, actually… this WILL lead to nuclear fusion powered cars (in a decade plus, once fusion is set up to generate lots of electricity). Fusion will power EVs, heat pumps, the internet, manufacturing aluminum… all the stuff we use electricity for!
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: Nobody cared about the kingdoms in the Middle East before 1800.
C Stars
@TaMara: Well I’M excited. I came here looking for some good news and hoping to get a break from our latest obsession with Ugly Rich People…and this is it. Technology can move fast. My kids will likely benefit.
Thanks!
Paul in KY
@Hungry Joe: If only that guy had said ‘the 2090s’ and he’d have been much more correcter.
Matt McIrvin
@C Stars: In the late 1980s I had a summer job at NCAR writing scientific visualization software for thunderstorm/tornado experts, to turn the simulation output from their supercomputers into pretty pictures. The code I wrote got shipped around on magtapes and shared with researchers elsewhere.
One of the machines I used for the actual visual display was a specialized graphics computer called a Raster Technologies Model One, which had what was then an incredibly amazing 1280×1024 display with 24-bit color.
One day I got a call from a guy at Lawrence Livermore, an acquaintance of my boss who had been using my code. But it wasn’t about that at all; it was a strange request: he wanted me to open up our Model One and read off the part number of some part on a board inside. He said that a “power surge” had melted theirs.
We never did figure out what the hell they were doing over there that brought that on.
Paul in KY
@Ken: and the radiation would make giant vegetables!
sdhays
I like how legitimately excited Secretary Granholm is about this breakthrough. Such a change from her predecessor who was so clueless as to what the department actually does that he not only was mistaken that it handled oil extraction, he even wanted to abolish the department altogether when he was running for President.
PAM Dirac
from Cheryl’s description is seems the DOE and LL really downplayed the energy production implications.
jonas
It’s important to remember that the reason they’re doing this research to begin with isn’t to solve the energy/climate crisis — it’s so they can study and maintain the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. If somewhere down the line this helps get us closer to sustainable fusion energy production, that’s great. But, as folks have been saying, that’s still quite a ways off.
Brent
@Paul in KY: Energy companies can extract high prices now precisely because there are few entities that have the resources to produce enormous amounts of energy at wholesale. The whole point of fusion energy is that it could, potentially, significantly change that circumstance. Once it is possible to extract enormous amounts of power from what are essentially infinite and readily available resources (and of course I realize we are a very long way away from that being a reality) than the sort of monopoly on energy production you are referencing is no longer part of the equation.
Paul in KY
@Ken: I think the problem is the radiation given off. Radiation is not good for fragile living things.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
AFAIAC, the biggest cost of power is the carbon we’re dumping into the atmosphere, even if it doesn’t take a dollar from my wallet. Whether the world my 15 year old son will spend most of his life in is a hospitable place for human life will depend on how great that cost is.
So sure, it may cost a lot of money, but if there’s no cost in terms of carbon, we’ll be coming out way ahead.
Roger Moore
@E.:
Two points:
Tom Levenson
Charles Seife, who is very good on this stuff, has a piece up at the Atlantic that goes into the history of the National Ignition experiment, and the implications of this result.
TL:DR Seife writes what folks above have been saying. This is a fascinating result that does not, in fact, move fusion as a socially valuable energy source forward much, if at all. It is, he says, a symbolic advance more than a practical one. (TBF: he wrote a book some while back that was a brutal history of fusion efforts. Brutal, but not wrong.)
If we are going to deal with climate change in a way that leaves a tolerable planet for my kid and/or grandkids, we need an all of the above right not strategy. Fusion won’t be a meaningful part of the puzzle for a long time.
C Stars
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, I kind of wanted him to work there just to hear about some of their projects. Our neighbor for a while worked the LBNL, researching something to do with predicting movements in neural pathways (don’t ask me, I am very much not a neurophysicist). He quit after a couple of years because he couldn’t stand to think how the government might use his research. They always seem to have a lot of job openings.
Also, wow! 1280×1024 😎
MisterDancer
Ah. Look, I love ya, but this is not the take they think it is.
I have a firm hate-on for the hard-line elements of the Saudi royalty/religious elements, and their fellow travelers, and have since before 9/11. Yet: proposing to further manipulate cultures that the West has been putting colonizer collars on for centuries? That ain’t ever gonna work out well, oil or not.
In fact, with situations like MBS and Trump’s ties to the Saudi regime, it’s arguable it’s they who use oil money to manipulate us.
ian
@Paul in KY: Well the people who lived there probably did, I wouldn’t call them nobody.
Gvg
Saving the planet from climate change requires energy efficiency even more than new sources. Heat is energy we are wasting, that we throw away without using it. Heat is active molecules, energy. Inefficient burning machines and homes allow heat to escape without using it. If we use all or almost all the energy, what is allowed to escape is cooler and doesn’t contribute heat to the climate as much. More efficient power plants should waste less heat and burn more completely all of the fuel they are fed, without letting heat radiate out into the climate. Better homes should be insulated so your heater only needs to run a little or your air conditioner too. LED lights and before that fluorescents were more efficient, took less wattage and were cooler running because they were more efficient. Electric cars to be worth it, need to be using less fuel to power their batteries than they would to run on gas and the power plant needs to radiate less heat total than all the electric cars it fuels. Car brakes these days are designed to collect the power/heat back from the car when they slow it down.
reversing climate change is not actually the same problem as getting off the oil/ other large mined fuel sources problem. Fission still would involve some mining I think but not on the same scale. We do a lot of damage getting our current fuel, we need a lot and it’s on going, we are vulnerable to some pretty nasty regimes, source may run out, transporting it has its own problems.
My first question is always going to be about the waste product and storage. I gather it’s too soon to get into that for this research though.
Paul in KY
@Brent: The thing used to ‘extract enormous amounts of power’ is going to be monstrously expensive. Whomever builds/pays for it will want to get their money back somehow.
Paul in KY
@MisterDancer: Certainly if those regimes are no longer floating on an ocean of money, they are going to be diminished in power.
Paul in KY
@ian: In the grand, geopolitical way of looking at things, we’re all nobodies, Ian.
My comment meant that before oil was discovered to be very, very useful for modern civilization and before anybody realized they floated on an ocean of it, they were piddly little backwater places that no state actor thought or particularly cared about.
Theoretically, mass fusion power could return them to something approximating that state.
Tom Levenson
Meanwhile the clock is ticking for an MIT spin-off company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems to achieve breakeven by 2025. They’re building a test tokamak at Fort Devens, with backing from Bill Gates and others. Their secret sauce is a containment achieved with high temperature superconducting magnets, which gives their machine an edge, they claim over the ITER facility in France.
I appreciate the optimism of those involved, but I note that fusion scientists are perhaps the most optimistic of physicists and engineers because they have to be if they’re going to make it out of bed in the morning.
schrodingers_cat
People with a STEM background
Guys calling this a climate solution is premature
Arm chair scientists who probably took Physics for Poets in college and watch NOVA regularly.
Shut up, Eyeore.
Roger Moore
@Carlo Graziani:
This isn’t quite true; it turns out that most weapons deployed today use enriched, frequently highly enriched, uranium for the casing because it yields more energy per weight of bomb. A depleted uranium case still works and is cheaper, but it delivers less explosive power per weight, which is critical for real-world weapons.
Also, the fissionable jacket is nice and boosts yield, but it is not strictly necessary. They made (and IIRC still make) bombs using non-fissionable cases (e.g. tungsten) when the goal is to get some effect other than maximum explosive yield. The “neutron bomb” everyone was so scared of back in the 1970s was that kind of design. The goal was to use the neutrons generated by the fission core for their direct effect rather than to generate a bigger boom by fissioning uranium.
ian
@Paul in KY: Napoleon and Nelson may disagree.
The outside world was interested in the Middle East before the invention of oil. The people who lived there, the people who lived in regions near it, pilgrims, and people who wanted trade goods from the region (spice, incense, silk, rare stones) all had an interest in the Middle East.
The crusades would be a good example of something happening in that region pre-oil that the broader world took a great deal of interest.
The end of oil will not mean that the Middle East disappears from news reels.
trollhattan
Verifying the Higgs boson has yet to enrich my life, but I’m happy for the particle physics folks who can now pursue next steps, etc. This seems a little like that: proof of concept and TBF this is only one path to achieving fusion: the Dr. Evil Frickin’ Laser Way. The Webb telescope will push our knowledge of the universe’s origins; again, not going to impact where my organic chicken comes from but very cool stuff.
My “claim to fame” is working on the NIF project at my then employer, who installed the beampath–imagine a clean room the size of three indoor football stadiums; imagine it being a confined-space work environment into which you install 192 of the largest lasers ever built. Those were the worksite conditions.
I was too unimportant to go into the NIF building itself but did get to hang at our LLNL jobsite office, which was pretty cool. You think the Lab site is all secure and then observe buildings on site that are double super-secret secure, including concertina wire festooned around their roofs, which TBH was kind of a head-scratcher. My presumption is they’re the weapons research buildings but who can guess what else they’re up to.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Tbf, the person who got the big negative reaction was the one who said “Actually, free clean energy would be bad”.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan:
That result hasn’t been great for the particle physics folks because what they got was the most boring possible expected outcome, one that doesn’t really point the way to next steps. It’s intensely frustrating, the field seems stuck in a rut, and I’m glad I got out of there.
Frankensteinbeck
@E.:
Energy generation is not the limit on extraction and other destructive technological uses. Their limit is demand, which will only slightly change as downstream effects make users able to afford more. Energy generation demand is a side effect, and one of the most destructive specifically because of the fuels we use. Fusion power, which we’re nowhere near, would remove that giant ecosystem damage cost, the biggest we have except maybe agriculture.
One example of the flaw in your argument: You talk about ‘shipping plastic’. The shipping might get easier. The amount of plastic made won’t go up much, because both we’re already using it close to as much as we desire to, and because it won’t become anywhere near free. Energy just isn’t the limiter for ecologically damaging industry.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: That field has been a hot mess for a long time. The pages listing the number of contributors >= the pages in the paper
* I am exaggerating, but only a bit.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Its never really going to be “free” either wrt to thermodynamics or $$ so we are good I think!
MisterDancer
Yes! Good lord, who seriously thinks all Europe cared about was oil?
Seriously — late-1500s England craved Ottoman attention (and feared their military might) so based that Queen Elizabeth the First not only had an entire self-playing clock-organ built for Sultan Mohammed III (and paid for by London merchants!), but had the damned thing disassembled so it could be put on a ship to get to Istanbul!
Indeed, the guy who built (and re-built) said organ is the source of our first English-language information on the realities of the harem. (And no, it’s not a running orgy…)
That act cost a fortune — and it was in service of not only gaining a greater fortune, but also in avoiding military entanglements (…for a time). Europe, as a whole, feared Ottoman military might in the 15th/16th centuries, and acted accordingly. Indeed, it was the slow loss of that might that led to European forces pushing into Ottoman territory, building them as colonies just as crucial as what was happening in South Asia and (Southern) Africa, among many other places around the world.
Napoleon’s takeover of France was, after all, partly to spoil further English interests in the region, and beyond. He didn’t just wake up one day and decide to go play around the pyramids, y’all!
Ruckus
@Brent:
I’d say likely not, as there are other materials that can be used that are not anywhere near as rare as lithium and progress is moving forward rapidly. Some of the materials/designs can also make more effective batteries, and cheaper.
Aziz, light!
As a young science reporter in 1979, I wrote a couple of articles about fusion power. The nuclear physicists I interviewed told me it was 30 years away. That’s a stock answer that still works today. As great as commercial fusion power would be, we shouldn’t base our energy planning on it. It seems unlikely to be scaled up successfully.
Paul in KY
@ian: Good points, Ian.
Paul in KY
@MisterDancer: I was only considering those kingdoms/principalities that currently float on a sea of oil. The Ottoman Empire/Turkey and Egypt were not being considered in my comments.
ARoomWithAMoose
@Matt McIrvin: “We never did figure out what the hell they were doing over there that brought that on.”
that era? Someone probably wheeled the cart with the monitor over to a rack in the DC to display hi-resolution things directly from a new spiffy machine, plugged into the PDU in the rack, and discovered 220VAC is problematic for stuff rated for 110VAC.
WaterGirl
@Emma from Miami: Please to not be tarring all of us with that brush.
WaterGirl
@Mike in NC: Surprise? No. Horrify? Yes.
Ken
This is because they keep returning my submissions on Twill Theory™ (“taking string theory to the next level!”) un-read.
Steve
While I think this is cool, and may have some interesting specialized applications, I would be astounded if we say a single KWH of fusion power to the grid in the next 50 years. As others have noted, application remains very far away.
In the meantime, though, solar and batteries keep getting more cost effective (the price of solar is down 99% since the 1980s!). So my guess is that well before we have the technology to create fusion power on any scale, we will no longer have the need for it.
MisterDancer
Going back to your first comment:
The “Middle East” is a lot of countries, with a lot of history and connections to oil. I mean, most scholars would not consider Iran to be Middle Eastern in a lot of key ways, from cultural to governmental, but it certainly is treated as such, even to this day.
that said — the Saudi region was basically under Ottoman control for centuries. Much of that control was because of the importance of Mecca — but also because of European incursions in the Red Sea. mostly from the Portuguese across the 1500s. Indeed, this is likely a contributor to the fall of the Egyptian-centered Mamluks who lost to the Ottomans, who took responsibility for protecting both Egypt and the Arabian peninsula from European assholic behavior…for a price.
By 1600, Arabia was pretty much Ottoman territory, and they were The Empire that Europe did not want to deal with — yet, as I’ve already noted, they had to. But yeah, it is in fact true that Europe had interests in the Arabian peninsula area well before 1800. If nothing else, I’d be shocked if Europe didn’t have anti-Ottoman agents involved in the fight for that region that would eventually lead to the rise of the House of Saud; they certainly did similar elsewhere, eagerly.
I hope this helps clarify, for everyone, the situation and why some of us are reacting…badly to these assertions about the Middle East, oil-laden or otherwise.
Paul in KY
@Ken: I think they’ve been very interested in Crochet Theory ™, considered the next advancement from String Theory.
Supposedly ties it all together…
Paul in KY
@MisterDancer: You got me, MisterDancer. Curses, foiled again!
scav
@Paul in KY: Ehhh, some say Crochet’s fundamentally loopy. There are still some interesting threads in Nålebinding Theory though to pull on: they don’t seem to fall apart as easily as the Crochet and Knitting leads.
The Moar You Know
@schrodingers_cat: you sure bought back a memory with that one. My brother and I were in college at the same time. We both had a good high-school level science education, and we had always been interested in it. Now, he went in as a philosophy major, wanting to be a professor (amazingly, that worked) and I went in as a music major determined to be a rock star (amazingly, that did not work). He rooked me into taking “Physics and Philosophy”, and while the professor’s knowledge of philosophy was on point, his knowledge of physics was non-existent, as frankly was his knowledge of science. We both lasted a week and then transferred out. The prof was so hopelessly over his head he was embarrassing himself every class, and I’m one of those people who just finds it agonizing – I’m grinding my teeth right now just thinking about this poor bastard – to watch someone humiliate themselves in public.
The Moar You Know
@MisterDancer: nor would any Persian, and they’re Persians, not Iranians nor Arabs and they will lay down the law to you if you fuck that one up. I got educated on that the summer in high school that I worked at McDonalds. Came in handy when we hired our Persian accounting guy last year.
Another Scott
@catclub: My understanding is, the fancy carburetor, and water injection, and all those other “things that the government doesn’t want you to know about” actually did work.
But only in very limited operating conditions.
If you tried to actually use one of those fancy carbs on a real car in the real world you’d never be able to start it, or it would quit if the air temperature was above 70F, or the emissions were through the roof, or …
It is not impossible that some tinkerer will come up with some wonderful new gadget that works better than anything 100+ years of R&D by multiple $100B corporations have come up with. But it’s very, very rare.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@MisterDancer: I’ve wondered (probably not uniquely) whether Moses’s “burning bush” was a persistent fire caused by a natural oil/gas seep…
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@scav: Interesting. I must subscribe to your newsletter.
Suzanne
Okay, I know it is not the point of the post……but that LLNL James Forrestal Building has the MOST BEAUTIFUL WAFFLE SLAB!!!
GOD I LOVE BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURE!!!
TriassicSands
For anyone willing to do a little reading, the late Professor Lawrence Lidsky’s 1983 paper, “The Trouble with Fusion” is a good place to begin to get a look at the difficulties of making fusion work as a viable commercial power source. Needless to say, Lidsky’s skepticism earned him a lot of criticism. Obviously, much research had been done since then, but, as always, a workable fusion reactor is still decades in the future — assuming that ever proves possible on both a scientific and engineering (economical) level.
The reason human beings, especially Americans, want fusion power is because they don’t want to either alter their current lifestyles or give up the possibility of a better future lifestyle. Of course, none of this takes into account the countless other species that share the planet with us and that we are currently driving toward extinction. Climate change is one of the threats, but habitat loss is equally threatening. And inexhaustible affordable energy is unlikely to decrease population or habitat loss.
I believe that the main problems facing humanity aren’t scientific or technological, but rather philosophical, moral, and ethical.
ian
@The Moar You Know: I think it is worth pointing out that “Persian” refers to the nationality/cultural group that is the majority in Iran. Iranian is a modern way to say a member of the citizenry of Iran. There exist people who live in Iran but are not Persian, such as the Azeris, Kurds, or Baluchis, who would be Iranians. Iran moved away from the title Persia for this reason (even though Iran is a Farsi word for Persia).
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: I think that with modern hybrids, petroleum-powered cars have been basically optimized to the physical limit of what we can expect for efficiency given the other product requirements. You can make a car get more than ~50-60 mpg, but to do it, you have to make it really small and light and underpowered and start taking features away. It’s not going to be the family cruisemobile.
Making it a pure electric gives you a big step up in total efficiency, but, again, you’re already pretty much maxed out for that.
The next big step is to figure out how to not use a car.
(That said, most of the vehicles you see on the road today are monstro SUVs that aren’t even trying to be all that efficient–there’s a lot of upside just in moving away from them.)
Ivan X
@E.: I don’t think abuse is warranted, but I also don’t think declaring “we are all doomed” is exactly “thinking through our ideology,” and doesn’t merit serious response. The “thought experiment” you invite is invalidated because you’ve already declared a zero-sum, absolutist conclusion to the experiment. And, when, to my surprise, people seriously engaged with you and tried to get you to consider a counterpoint, you moved the goalposts to the “fairly untempered greed and sadism that seem to drive our markets and behavior” which could be used throw cold water on any kind of human advance, scientific or otherwise. If your pessimism is so total, you may not be deserving of abuse (no one is), but you certainly open yourself up to criticism, and I don’t find your invitations to be in good faith, because all you’re really inviting is that you be joined in your hopelessness.
VOR
I agree. Solar keeps getting better. Photovoltaic efficiency keeps rising. Cost of new solar installations keeps going down. Wind turbines have turned out to have lower maintenance costs than originally thought. We need better power transmission, which is a problem because people do not like high voltage power lines through their neighborhood. Hopefully room-temperature superconductor technology continues to improve and becomes commercialized so they can help in that regard.
There is a lot of innovation happening in fission too. Thorium powered plants. Different cycles where production of plutonium is not a design goal. Fission still has the problem of waste disposal, something Fusion hopefully would not.
C Stars
@Suzanne: I noticed that too. There’s something about those big muscular institutional buildings.
Bill Arnold
@VOR:
So does fossil carbon – we just spew the waste into the atmosphere, where it will stick around for a long human-scale time, doing damage (inc mass killing of humans), some of the damage permanent, e.g. mass extinctions. Compared to that damage, the potential damage caused by nuclear fission waste is noise.
WhatsMyNym
@schrodingers_cat: Since the book is English (author, illustrator, and publisher), I don’t suppose many in this country have read it. I’m English and my parents didn’t buy it for us.
Matt McIrvin
@VOR: Fusion generally does produce nuclear waste over the long run, because the reactions they mostly consider using produce neutrons which make things radioactive. It might produce less than fission does.
EthylEster
I heard a good chat on the Quirks and Quarks podcast reacting to this. Their take: improvements in solar cell efficiency make fusion research a waste. Focus funds on solar cell research and battery tech. The complexity of the fusion approach is mind-boogling.
Suzanne
@C Stars:
I like when you can see how the building works. Contemporary architecture does a lot to cover everything up in order to make everything look smooooooth and minimal.
Brutalist architecture is honest and doesn’t feel like it’s made of plastic.
rekoob
@C Stars: @Suzanne: The James V. Forrestal Building in DC is the headquarters of the Department of Energy. It faces Independence Ave SW and forms part of L’Enfant Plaza. It’s across the street from the Smithsonian Castle. (I once heard a Metro conductor announce, “Next Stop: Elephant Plaza”!)
E.
@Ivan X: Sorry thought everyone knew there is a continuum between utopia and apocalypse and would recognize I am using a figure of speech, shorthand to announce the poles. These arguments surfaced originally in the “nuclear fusion in a bottle” discovery/hoax back in the early 2000’s. There was a day or so there when the world thought it was real. Basically there is an association between energy costs and consumption of raw materials. Duh. Should energy costs become negligible, labor will fall dramatically as well, and the only brake is the physical amount of material available, which, granted, doesn’t have to stop at Earth. But some argue there is a better way to achieve fulfilling and happy lives in the long run.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@The Moar You Know: As I understand it, since the sun runs on fusion, it’s like creating (and controlling) a sun-type thing. BFD!
Ivan X
@E.: And that I think could indeed make for an interesting argument, whether or not it’s one I agree with.
RevRick
Count me among the skeptics. I think this is overhyped vaporware that will only prove to be unworkable at the commercial scale. Like long hyped thorium reactors. The only ones who would really benefit are electric utilities and their wealthy shareholders.
Given how fast renewable costs are plummeting, we all might be better off slapping solar panels on our roofs and simple windmills in our backyards. After all there are several hundred million alternators lying around in auto junk yards that could provide a baseline of electric power to our homes. And cooking? Why a simple wooden box, a pane of glass, and aluminum foil, and you have your own solar cooker.
One of the greatest obstacles we have is that we cling to the hubristic fantasy of an ever-growing middle class paradise, as if that’s the key to happiness. But it’s an ecological dead end. Even 1% annual growth leads to a doubling of resource usage, which is ultimately unsustainable. There’s only so much Earth.
Right now, I’m using the Internet to post my foolish opinions, but those opinions are made possible by a lot of other human foolishness: porn, video games, Facebook and crypto demand enough server power to make it cheap enough to support banking, online shopping and this website. But if Amazon Prime went away, would my life cease to be worth living?
What I am asking here is that we question the presumption that this scientific advancement is an unalloyed good or even if good, really worth it?
C Stars
@Suzanne: Hmm. I never thought of that. All the new buildings going up in SF seem to be made of mirrored panels. Boring and headache-inducing.
Miss Bianca
@WhatsMyNym: Surely I can’t be the *only* one here who has actually read Winnie the Pooh and related stories?
Layer8Problem
@Miss Bianca: Nope, and I can’t be the only one who kept getting misty-eyed and sniffly every time I read the end of the last story of The House at Pooh Corner to a little kid who was wondering why I was doing that.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Good Lord. I waded back this thread only to discover MOAR DOOOOOM!
I think this is why we can’t get consensus on any way forward to address climate change. There will always be a very loud subset of people who feel the ONLY way forward is to completely get rid of every modern convenience. That will never happen. In fact, the surest way to get the public to say, ‘Screw it! ROLL COAL until the world DROWNS, BURNS, or BOTH!’ is to cast doom and gloom over every solution that doesn’t involve regressing to a more primative existence. People will not give up their comforts until they have to. Yes. I know the threat is existential. Yes, it will lead to war, social disruptions, death, extinctions, and massive human migrations. Human beings are adaptable, and they will wait to adapt until they have no other choice. That is who we are and who we have ALWAYS been. It is a fundamental part of human nature.
Fusion is many, many years away, if ever. I think this advancement is great, though! Science is awesome!
EthylEster
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: *sigh* This is an engineering project. No science involved in these accomplishments.
E.
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: “People will only give up their conveniences when they have to” is the kind of thing that is actually false but made just a wee bit more true every time somebody declares it to be so.