Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Just a reminder that even if you have a fusion generator that reaches over unity, untill you can fit that in the space and weight of a car or truck engine, you still need a lot of oil, and you still need a lot of rare earth minerals for batteries.
Not saying that it would not be great to be able to retire coal oil and gas power plants from the grid as a theoretical over unity fusion power source someday becomes a thing…
But I am saying its not a cure-all.
Seems obvious to pick a new transit paradigm for personal cars, obviously trucks can stay.
Also in the current era, coal plants already have a good replacement: nuclear. At least for bigger countries, but most are shutting down rather than improving. This might be (hopefully) starting to change though in recent times.
Also I don’t know what fusion power is, I shall be on wikipedia now. Good day sir.
Assuming you mean commericial grade hauler trucks and such, I absolutely agree with all your points.
… Are we running commercial trucks on biodiesel yet?
But yeah, for personal transit… a huge amount of the world gets around on bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles. Cars are basically a luxury, like, any car.
Of course that works because public transit over long distances tends to work, and the whole country tends to not be laid out as just a cancerous mass of utterly useless suburubs, strewn out around urban cores that are half parking lot.
I dunno, if we just say, banned pickup trucks and SUVs for private use, well, that’d cut down on road maintenance a good deal, would make being a moped or bicycle or motorcycle commuter a bit more feasible.
Assuming you mean commericial grade hauler trucks and such, I absolutely agree with all your points.
Oh yes, I mean commercial hauler trucks, etc. The ones that do their job well of course. Of course theres other types of trucks for maintenece, last mile deliveries, etc.
(Side note, europe has nice delivery vans)
Definitely not the things the average american has started calling a “truck”, which has 5mpg and is used solely for one person to go to and from an office job, etc, never hauling anything.
And plus 1 for bikes, idk about motorbikes though, sadly they seem like death traps because of how fast you can go, one mistake by you or someone else on the road and you could see black.
Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.
Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.
Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.
Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.
With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.
But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts if the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap.
Motorcycles… have more effective range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.
Theyre a bit more popular in south america.
Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.
The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.
And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?
I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has 30% the top speed, maybe 20% the overall range.
Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a US city.
And bicycles are not street legal in the US, practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.
Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, in a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, being cautious, than I would on a bicycle, where…
… you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just bike lane at all, buts illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk.
Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.
Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.
Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.
Motorcycles can do that.
So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.
I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.
We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.
We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.
I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.
No no no. You just use the fusion to heat the water to make the steam to turn a turbine and then distribute that energy. Boom electric cars are a thing. While it’s technically possible to make a car with 0 petroleum products, it’s not financially viable in the current market.
Oil is remarkably cheap. I always find it funny that a gallon of gas and a gallon of water stay about the same price when one literally falls from the sky for free.
There are topologies which don’t require steam heating for electricity generation…
Its not ‘funny’, its the result of enormous structural subsidies for the oil and gas industry for … what like 125, 150 years now?
Brought to you by all the people who preach the merits of the perfectly competitive free market for everyone else.
… Its a multi generational, ongoing crime.
I wonder what Smedley Butler would have to say about the Trump-ezuela operation.
I mean, if we’re in the sci fi timeline where fusion is a developed technology to the point where energy is effectively free with no env impact, then we can still do a lot to avoid that. Cars don’t need huge batteries when your roads are powered, etc.
Your… roads are powered?
Via what, a third rail, that can electrocute anyone who touches, does ‘funny stuff’ in snow or rain or ice?
Every road segment has a… gigantic cellphone style wireless charger?
That sure wont be a nightmare to maintain.
… Car somehow become maglev trains?
What are you talking about?
You know, the fictional concept of cars being powered by the road, via whatever technobabble the author writes
Sorry I don’t read sci fi with garbage worldbuilding.
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
If the power is free, you can synthesize hydrogen or even hydrocarbons from captured CO2.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Cool and hows all that coming along?
Hydrogen vehicles?
The whole initial pitch from Tesla, that basicslly got EVs conceptually over the hump into being potentially practical…
… was Elon saying he was gonna build a whole network of infrastructure for that, charging networks.
… and then 90% of that never happened.
Remember when we were gonna have basically a carwash type thing but it would just do a battery swap on your car?
Remember when he was all giddy about the SOLID METAL SNAKE that was gonna basicslly just be a robot tentacle that would automagically plug in to your charging port?
Yeah, basically of that shit happened.
So my point is, you run into the same fundamental problem with hydrogen, now you need to build a whole new set of infrastructure.
… Who is going to pay for that?
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Ok, so use the hydrogen to make heavier fuels, you just need heat and CO2
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
… so you’re saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to … do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?
… Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?
I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved…
…for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense…
Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.
And … synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.
And and, for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.
If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately ‘refined air’… you’re going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.
It is a little more complicated than just ‘heat up CO2’.
Unless you can point me to … somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from… ambient CO2… that you’re scrubbing from the air… demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept… and described the total amount of energy required to power this process…
Yeah I’m calling bullshit.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
what if we abolish capitalism?