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Comment on Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times
luthis@lemmy.nz 10 months ago
“Near limitless energy”. …
OK what are the limits? Preferably absurd answers please…
uphillbothways@kbin.social 10 months ago
krellor@kbin.social 10 months ago
Since everyone else gave a joke answer I'll take a stab in the dark and say the upper limits would be the availability of hydrogen and physical limitations in transforming heat output into electricity. The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels. After that, it would be how well you can scale up turbines to efficiently convert heat to electricity.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels.
I’m not expert either, but I don’t think most of that 96% of hydrogen is a candidate for the fusion we’re doing today. NIF (like the OP article) uses Deuterium (Hydrogen with 1 neutron) and Tritium (Hydrogen with 2 neutrons) is what is squashed together to produce energy. The more neutrons make the fusion “easier” to produce energy.
Naturally occurring Deuterium isn’t crazy hard to find. Its in sea water, but you have to go through A LOT of sea water to pull out the rare atoms of Deuterium. Naturally occurring Tritium is much more rare with having to find very small amounts in ground water.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
For reference and because I was curious enough to look for it, Deuterium is 0.0156% of the hydrogen in ocean water.
Promethiel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In a perfect world, NASA was always funded like Humanity depended on it since after WW2, and by 2010 a unified global space organization supplanted the need for any militaries because we’re too busy building fission plants on the moon to bind with that sweet HE3 to power the Space Mobile Homes affordable for all because of course we researched fusion without profit motive until it worked.
Kinda my preferred alt-world, now someone please fire up all of the world’s particle accelerators on high at once, that’ll get us there right?
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you have fusion energy, creating H2 from water via electrolysis is a joke. You can do it at home. It only requires a lot of energy. But with energy from fusion it will become super easy, barely an inconvenient
BehindTheBarrier@programming.dev 10 months ago
Well. Assuming the cost of splitting water is lower than the energy produced from the same amount of hydrogen.
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is muuuuuuuuuuch lower
Sphks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
In the news, 5.000 years later : “Scientists warned that our mass extraction of hydrogen may produce global salinization, but no one wants to reduce its energy consumption.”
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 10 months ago
Electrolysis has up to 70% efficiency and needs sulfuric acid. The superheated thing has about 90% efficiency.
atocci@kbin.social 10 months ago
2 energies and no more
LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 10 months ago
willis936@lemmy.world 10 months ago
There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.
D-D fusion converts about 2% of mass to energy. E=mc^2. So we have 8.4E31 Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 9.8 trillion years of fuel.
Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.
luthis@lemmy.nz 10 months ago
This is the answer we all needed.
Big_Boss_77@kbin.social 10 months ago
The flamingo population must remain constant for ignition to function.
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s nearly limitless because they used nearly 200 lasers. If they built a new one with the full 200 lasers, who knows what could happen.
luthis@lemmy.nz 10 months ago
Like, they used 198 lasers, or they used 98% of each of the 200 lasers?
dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 10 months ago
You know how the sun radiates an incredible amount of power through millions and millions of tonnes of material undergoing nuclear fusion every minute, and the sun is expected to last for millions of years?
Well, not that much. But it’s still a lot!
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You would have enough power to play a game of Civ II to completion.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 10 months ago
One limit less.
rem26_art@kbin.social 10 months ago
Only on Tuesdays between the times of 04:04 and 04:27 UTC
Sabata11792@kbin.social 10 months ago
Ah, my childhood ISP is still luring around.
MxM111@kbin.social 10 months ago
UTC? Absurd!
blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 10 months ago
It’s near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. … But to be honest, the ‘unlimited energy’ thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That’s even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn’t the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it’s a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.
That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It’s not complete garbage green-washing (unlike “carbon capture and storage”, which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it’s some holy-grail of unlimited power is … well … basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.
SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
The limits are only your imagination.
meco03211@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You have to sign up for a two year initial contract. After that there’s tons of limits.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
They boiled 10 kettles of water with this energy.
Ultimately, if everything is optimized, its probably only limited by the number of kettles available.
0110010001100010@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Could we somehow capture the steam from all the kettles to turn a turbine? I see zero problems with this plan.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Coal or nuclear, it’s all steam baby
ThePancake@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I know this is probably tongue in cheek, but I genuinely thought the same until recently. There’s a company called Helion which is developing a really cool fusion process that doesn’t use steam as an energy transfer mechanism. Obviously it has its own set of drawbacks and roadblocks, but still really cool tech in the making.
Here’s the video I saw going into detail on it if anyone’s interested:
youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38?si=iBpHfDxhRgHHRtN2
atocci@kbin.social 10 months ago
We're gonna spin those turbines so good
doofy77@aussie.zone 10 months ago
The UK will become an energy powerhouse.