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Z Machine Advances Fusion Race
Sandia Labs has announced a new milestone in Linear Transformer Driver technology that aims to solve one of the biggest obstacles to practical fusion reactors. Getting the current needed to "spark" a burst of fusion is doable; getting a constant series of sparks going to create a continuous chain of fusion bursts has never been achieved. The LTD, which allows the Sandia Z machine to fire once every 10.2 seconds, makes it look achievable. The press release (which has been picked up in a few places, but with no further analysis) says that practical fusion power could now be 20 years off.
Weren't we closer 30 years ago?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
And to think they said it would be forty years off twenty years ago!
Wasn't it 20 years off 20 years ago?
I think that I'll stand by my idea that even if/when we crack fusion enough to be able to build a fusion power plant it'll have to be so big to be worth it, that they won't be able to get the funding to do so.
Basically, Containment costs go up by the square, while energy release goes up by the cube. To make it worth it, we might be looking at a 100 gigawatt reactor*, of which half goes towards sustaining the reaction.
*1-2 gigawatts is a pretty big reactor today.
I don't read AC A human right
> says that practical fusion power could now be 20 years off.
Twenty years off what? And are they light years or dog years?
Isn't that the way it has been for the past 50 years?
Cold fuses you!
Practical fusion has been 20 years off for at least the last 40 years if not longer.
In fact, it might be just 20 years off if we would actually commit to making it work. Remember the Apollo program? Put a man on the moon and safely return him in a decade? If humans can do that, they can certainly develop working fusion power generation.
If they want to.
A stunted oak tree shades the inland road.
Badass Resumes
Bad choice of name. The Z-Machine is a type of virtual machine used mostly for running interactive fiction, interactive tutorials, and the like, and has been for the past few decades. Its specifications are freely available and anyone can implement their own:
Versions have been implemented in C, Java, XUL/JavaScript, and even NewtonScript.
When I first saw the headline I read "Saudi" and thought, well there goes all western dominance in the world for the next few centuries. Oh, and the now obligatory 20 years away! Egad!
Well, since every comment here is about that "20 years off" quote, I'll add mine.
That twenty years (here and decades ago) assumes that governments won't pull funding for fusion research. But they did, and will again. ITER could have been built years ago. It wasn't a lack technology holding it back, it was a lack of money. So don't blame the scientists who give those 20 year estimates, blame your governments.
For that matter, when is "now"?
Is it when the original article was written, when it was linked from slashdot, is it when I type this post, when I click the submit button, when the site stores it in it's database, when you're reading it. And is it "now" in our dimension or in some parallel dimension?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Wouldn't be more honest to say "We have no clue when fusion energy will be practical. Maybe some fundamental research breakthrough will make it doable next year, maybe we need to struggle with the current approach for another thirty years. Please fund research" ?
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Actually, measured in light years, practical fusion is only 1.58e-5 light years away.
Everyone, please be sure to tag this article "infocom". Thanks.
Fusion reactors could produce some short lived waste, but they are not prone to melt down and so don't need the heavy containment that fission reactors require in most countries. Table top fusion is also advancing so I'm not so sure things have to be big to be useful. For Tokomaks this probably is a requirement but not neccessarily for other methods.s -selling-solar.html
--
Mr. Fusion on your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Am I the only one that read the article title and thought they were referring to Infocom?
Fusion power has _always_ been 20 years off. This isn't some 1984 groupthink bullcrap: it really is just always 20 years out of our reach by general consensus.
It is worth noting (and it is also mentioned in TFA) that this development advances the field of Inertial Confinement Fusion, which is an area that has not traditionally been considered the most likely candidate for commercial fusion power generation. ITER and all other experimental tokamak reactors are of the other variety (magnetic confinement fusion), where a magnetic field is used to keep the plasma in place during the reaction. During ICF, each fusion reaction has a duration short enough that it isn't necessary to hold the plasma back against the forces of gravity. Hence the need to produce a "spark" quickly and efficiently, as many consecutive reactions are necessary to produce any significant amount of power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_ fusion
In case anyone wonders who Sandia Labs are, from the article:
Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies, and economic competitiveness.
I've got an old Cyrix PC to donate, if it will bring them any closer to achieving their goal. It should bring the bursts down to at LEAST 5 seconds per burst.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
do, then alternatives to conventional fusion have to be found. Because really this is a disgrace. As many have said they've been saying Fusion would be a reality in 20 years for the past 40 years.
So the two best options besides conventional fusion, which really is an illusion, would be:
The Plasma Focus Device
Low Temperature Nuclear Reactions
Because really at this point after wasting 50 years and billions of dollars we have to try something different.
The article lacked a photo of the Z Machine in operation. Amazing!
The linear transformer driver (LTD), that's central to this approach, was created at the Institute of High Current Electronics in Tomsk, Russia. Nice of them to sell them to Sandia....
I think the 30 years joke is a bit passe. In realilty, the funding for fusion has suffred some major hits in the last 30 years after the big spike in the 70's. To measure a field's achievment in years is somewhat nieve, as total funding dollars is more realistic. If 1970 funding dollars had continued for the next 40 years, I think we would be there now, but alas we will have to wait for the money to trickle in. Iter is a great step forward, but work in innovative concepts that are alternatives to the tokamak are also good in looking for economically viable fusion schemes.
That's a lot of reps with a lot of power. This is going to end up in missle defence for sure! I doubt funding is going to be an issue here.s -selling-solar.html
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Mr. Fusion on your roof: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Practical fusion power is always 20 years from the present. That was true 40 years ago, it is true today, and will be true 40 years from now. This is a little known consequence of general relativity.
But fired repeatedly, the machine could well be the fusion machine that could form the basis of an electrical generating plant only two decades away.
I understand this as "this machine could be the basis for a new power plant design within 20 years from now".
seems like a long wait just for a theoretical power-plant draft...
Sigs are for the weak.
Where's Simon Templar when we need him?
Bad choice of name. The Z-Machine, which is short for Z-Pinch Machine is a fusion confinement machine that has been around for five and a half decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Pinch Numerous experimental devices have been built around the world in government labs and universities.
It has pretty much the same color glow that every power generating thingy in Star Trek does. It looks like a pile of warp cores, doesn't it?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I still think there will be some kind of radiation or gas/plasma that will act to allow quantum tunnelling of some kind.. sort of a fusion catalyst.
meh
Contrary to the misconception people keep throwing arround, it wasn't 20 years of 20 years ago. The confusion arises because one was talking about different things. One estimate was when we would reach break-even. That eastimate was for year 2000, and at the time ( 1970) it was 30 years into the future. As it happens, the JET reactor has managed to heat a plasma to the temperatures needed for break-even, but that doesn't mean it is practical as a powerplant. I have a 30 year old book about electricity generation, which estimates the first powerplant for 2050. Furthermore, last time I heard "it was always X years ago", X was 30. Before that X was and had "always" been 50 years ( Tho my Swedish book still says 2050 and was written in the 70ies ). I bet in 2040 we will hear people saying how widescale worldwide deployment of fusion powerplants was "always" 10 more years. When in fact, the estimate of today is that the technology needed to build a practical powerplant ( not necessarily an economically competative one ) is 2027. These "that is what they said back then" quotes usually have no substance in reality. It is just like saying "well they said chernobyl was safe", which of course nobody ever claimed ( in contrast the department of energy stated that no water cooled graphite moderated reactor would be licensed in the US ). However, the claim sounds so damning that people want to believe it. It is the same thing with fusion. The scientists never claimed we would be using fusion plants today. They claimed that IF funding was continued, and IF projects were not cancelled, then we would be able to have a controlled fusion reaction by the year 2000. As it happens we have done better than that. We have managed to initiate fusion reactions that produce more energy than is needed to sustain them. This is however not the same thing as an economically competative powerplant, and it is not the same as ignition ( a fusion plasma that needs no external energy input once it is burning). If you keep changing the goal to be something more difficult, then yes, the goal will always be in the future, that doesn't mean the original estimate was wrong tho. It just mean you were talking about something else.
It's a joke, people
I've seen their PCs so I'm not sure how much faith I'd have in a reactor they built.
Actually, the article was referring to practical fusion being 20 [light] years away.....on the new planet that was discovered.
2 5/0024257
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/
Layne
I thought all it could do was play old Infocom text adventures!
Comment of the year
The original hydrogen bomb was known as the "Super" before it was called a hydrogen bomb, and the idea is what every wide-eyed geek in elementary school imagines the H-bomb to be -- put an A-bomb next to a vat of deuterium, and the A-bomb blasts the deuterium hot enough to make it fuse.
As the dudes as Los Alamos started building computers to do numerical models of fluids and radiation and everything, it became apparent that Teller's Super was a dud. The physics of radiation were such that simply sticking a fission bomb next to a pile of heavy hydrogen was simply not going to do anything. What if you sweetened the deuterium with tritium -- then what? As it turned out, you would need gobs of tritium, so the whole thing was a non-starter.
As it turns out, Stanislaw Ulam came up with the idea of a staged atom bomb -- a small atom bomb would provide the shock to compress a big freepin pile of plutonium to make a big honkin atom bomb, and Teller got ahold of that idea to make the staged H-bomb. The staged H-bomb used to be a very dark secret, but the combination of Richard Rhodes "Dark Sun" and that Progressive Magazine article kind of let out at least the general H-bomb concept. Teller's stamp on the staged bomb was that prompt x-rays from the atom bomb would be the way of getting compression instead of Ulam's original idea of the shock wave, but that the radiation would act first is obvious once anyone with physics knowledge starts working on a staged design, and Teller kind of took all the credit.
But the actual staged H-bomb not only focuses A-bomb radiation to compress a pile of deuterium, it also compresses a plutonium "spark plug" in the middle to make Ulam's staged A-bomb. The combination of heat and pressure from the radiation compression along with the flood of fast neutrons from the plutonium spark plug manage to fuse the deuterium, which produces its yield mainly in the form of yet more neutrons, which provides fission of a U-238 blanket to provide much of the explosive power of the bomb.
Fusion is really, really hard, even with the heat and pressure from an atom bomb, and the real H-bomb is a Rube Goldberg set of multiple effects which use fission-driven neutrons to produce fusion neutrons to produce gobs of explosive power from non-critical fission of U-238. Fusion is really, really hard, even for the Sun, because while the Sun is not using deuterium but straight hydrogen, for all of the intense heat and pressure in the interior of the Sun, the reaction rates are really, really low, which is a good thing, because otherwise the Sun wouldn't have lasted 5 billion years to allow us to be here.
So back to the fusion power reactor. All of the claims of imminent fusion power are based on using lots of tritium for D-T fusion for the same reason that Teller's Classical Super would have needed gobs of tritium and for the same reason that the actual H-bomb that burns D-D needs three stages of fission to get its explosive power. Just as the need for tons of T made Teller's Super a non-starter, the need for tritium means that the current frontier of fusion power is a non-starter. Yes, you breed tritium in the lithium blanket, but you have to compare the breeding doubling time with the half life of tritium and wonder how much seed tritium will you need to get a fusion power economy going and how many decades of breeding tritium will be required to switch the economy over the fusion power before the oil runs out.
baah I can make happen so that it makes the run in 11 parsecs.
blog plug -> The Darker Side of Light
hmmm, I was under the impression that fusion was meant to be self sustaining, ie once the lasers had fired and the nuclear fire had started to burn, no further external input would be needed. The impression I get from this article is that the z machine would be continuously zapping the fusion core????. Also, as far as i'm aware, this is just a glorified capcitator circuit, am I wrong?, have I drifted away from reality and crossed into the realm of wild and unsubstansiated claims? mooooo.
prepare the survey weasels.
I remember seeing a powerpoint lecture given by one of the researchers there, who calculated that to make the Z machine feasible for providing fusion power, they would need to fire one of these off every 0.1 second, so once every 10 seconds is not even close. Plus, the simple fact that there's an enormous explosion going off ten times a second, which destroys the chamber that holds the capsule, makes it seem like there's a definite engineering feat to overcome, otherwise the whole thing is liable to crumble to bits. Right now, they only fire off the Z machine a few hundred times a year... going from that to a few hundred times a minute is a big step.
I also wouldn't want to live anywhere near there; it feels like a moderately strong earthquake in the area everytime they fire that thing; it seems like the ground beneath and around a rapid-fire facility would quickly weaken and collapse.
So yes, the Z machine is an excellent source of x-rays, and those x-rays can definitely be used to collapse a fusion capsule, but how applicable is it for fusion power?
Very interesting post.
But I think that it kinda points out where we're at. Fusion is VERY HARD. It gets somewhat easier if you 'spike' the mix with tritium, and larger reactions, while taking more power to initiate, generally release more power as well.
My point is that I figure that we're going to figure out how to make it workable sooner or later. It's just that version 1 will have a practical plant pushing the size limits. Imagine a plant the size of your average military base. Large enough they build a rail system to shuttle workers from one end to another. Heck, picture a Black Mesa.
I don't read AC A human right
I thought 1 AU would be closer?
I drank what? -- Socrates
I take it you're speaking of the IFR? I still don't understand why, given the recent spike in interest in non-fossil energy, we're still not building or even talking about them. I mean, (a) fail-safe, (b) radioactive waste safe in under 200 years, (c) far, far more fuel efficient, (d) capable of reprocessing weapons-grade material... what went wrong?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But we'll look like wimps if we don't kill hundreds of thousands of 'em! They'll probably call us fags, too! How could we possibly live with ourselves? BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB 'em!
Fuck "in God we Trust," we should just print "don't rock the boat" on our money.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's the correct historical pronunciation of "gigawatts," but in 1985, people had already moved to pronouncing the "giga" prefix with the hard 'g' sound; I always thought that it was probably intended by some writer as a way of showing Doc's eccentricity, because he was using an effectively obsolete pronunciation, but that it got left in the script because it just sounds like a really, really big value.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Interesting, how that relates to Rober Bussard's Polywell fusor, which he claims can be made into a prototype 100 MW plant in 7 years, provided the needed 200M USD funding?
You can also listen to his lecture at Google Tech Talks in 2006 to get an idea of what he's up to.
BTW, you can donate to this fund via Paypal and sign the petition to renew his funding from the government.
Following the first Sandia test (z-machine), Jean-Pierre Petit explains that it could be used as in a automobile motor : successive fusion. With the temperature reached, it could allow many kind of fusion wich are absolutly not polluting. You can see his presentation at : "http://www.jp-petit.org/science/Z-machine/machine s_MHD/machines_MHD_bases.htm#course_armements".
He also talks about the possible military usage, wich would allow any country to get a nuclear weapon...
You can translate his page via google translate, french to english.
If they only knew that the Z Machine could do more than run their text adventure games they might still be in business.
Teller kind of took all the credit.
Which is why the design is called the Teller-Ulam design, right?
I'm just joking with you. Teller did get more credit than he probably deserved, and your post is truly excellent. I get really tired of all the slashbots around here proclaiming absurdities in subject areas they know nothing about, and your post is a breath of fresh air.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
OK, so let me see if I understand your post:
Fission is easy, but you've got a finite (and very short) amount of time to actually split atoms, because the whole reaction is busy exploding and you don't have fissionable material in contact with itself for very long. So the trick getting a bigger bang is to figure out ways to get a greater proportion of your fissile material to split.
If you build a bomb with a chunk of Plutonium inside a shell of deuterium inside the main bomb, you can get the deuterium to fuse and release a metric assload of neutrons plus an equally large number of xrays. The neutrons from the initiator explosion plus the neutrons from the fusing act to react a large number of the Plutonium core's atoms, and the pressure from the initiator explosion plus the pressure from the xrays from the fusion reaction serve to hold the core together long enough to get a lot of it to split - a lot more than you would otherise.
So you get yield from the initiator (at the usual amount for a fission reaction) plus yield from the fusion reaction, but the lion's share of the yield comes from getting a lot more of the Plutonium core to split than would normally happen for a core of that given mass.
Am I right?
I confess that I find the processes in modern nuclear weapons fascinating, and I'm flabbergasted at just how advanced the technology is - and I wonder if maybe we wouldn't be better off with those amazing brains working on fusion power instead of weapons miniaturization.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
One thing I don't think many people realize is that everything leading up to and including fusion are just heat sources for boilers that power steam turbines. ... all just big old steam engines.
Wood, Coal, Fission, Fusion
Has the efficiency of steam turbines progressed much in the last 50 years?
After fusion would it be better to focus on Steam turbines or the removal of the steam cycle from the power generating equation?
Thermocouple technology would probably be better in the long run than steam technology moving turbines around.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
.....Fusion is really, really hard, even with the heat and pressure from an atom bomb.........
Why spend billions re-creating something on earth which already exists 93 million miles away -- the sun.
It has been keeping us warm and feeding for millennia. The fossil fuels we now burn are nothing more than stored solar energy. This means that all that carbon we are now releasing must have been on the surface of the earth at one time in order to participate in photosynthesis. For that reason alone, all this global warming BS is just that BS and should be ignored. If living plants and animals flourished in such abundance, to create all these fuels, then why exactly would the return to a warmer, more life filled planet be such a terrible thing? Living things, especially people, are very much able to adapt to changing environments, if the changes are gradual. Would growing oranges in Alaska or Siberia be such a terrible thing?
There is this yet poorly understood, yet ubiquitous process called photosynthesis in nature for capturing the free energy this giant thermonuclear fusion device sends our way. It has ben working for untold amounts of time. We figured out already how to refine common sand to make devices to convert some of this energy for our needs. There is a band of wind called the jet stream circling the earth at high velocities. Utilizing only 1% to 2% of its energy would meet all human needs all by itself. Learn how to fly a windmill kite 7 miles up and get the power down to earth.
It seems to me that developing these partially working, known technologies should bear fruit much sooner than pie in the reactor fusion.
All theory is gray
1 AU = 1.58128588 × 10^-5 lightyears
So sayeth Google.Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I always thought that it was probably intended by some writer as a way of showing Doc's eccentricity, because he was using an effectively obsolete pronunciation, but that it got left in the script because it just sounds like a really, really big value.
Was it obsolete in 1955?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You mean reactors like ITER wont get the funding they've been promised already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
We will be able to get the funding to build fusion power plants (ITER is going to cost 10billion euros)...will they be commercially viable is another matter entirely.
You probably have a point about solar and wind power being more feasible in the next couple of decades, and people are already spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on those technologies. Of course, they're both still fairly uneconomical compared to fossil fuels. While I don't know the actual numbers, I also get the impression that efficiency in solar specifically hasn't gone up in a particularly heartening way over the last few decades. But it makes a lot of sense to keep investing in both of them.
However, researching seemingly-outlandish possibilities is often a good idea, too, even if just to improve our understanding of the problem. It is a big assumption that fusion power can be implemented economically, but if that assumption proves out, a few reactors could be far more efficient than square miles of solar panels or windmills. I have no idea how effective a kite would be, although it sounds interesting.
As for global warming, the changes that are being projected aren't all that gradual. Coastal flooding, even over the course of decades, would be a big pain in the ass. Even more important, what if current agricultural zones go down the crapper? Growing oranges in Alaska won't be that helpful if the US breadbasket goes away. By the time production moves to the arctic circle, there could be huge famines. Time frames, the magnitude of the effects, and even the causes of global warming are still somewhat debatable, but I think it's more than prudent to invest some resources in hopefully preventing or mitigating some of these changes.
You have to remember this is all information about the first fusion device which was used in the Ivy Mike shot. Richard Rhodes revealed it in Dark Sun, it is the so-called fission-fusion-fission reaction.
First, a relatively small fission bomb detonates and the X-rays from it heat a sheath of plastic foam that surrounds a cylindrical vat of cryogenic deuterium (D). The foam is heated to a very high pressure plasma which compresses and heats the D. The Pu239 rod at the center of the vat is compressed to supercritical density and undergoes fission which further heats and compresses the D. The D undergoes fusion.
The casing of the device is natural Uranium U238. This isotope has no critical mass because it does not fission when hit with the "fast" neutrons emitted when it undergoes fission itself. However, the fusion reaction emits very very energetic neutrons at about 14MeV which cause the U238 shell to fission. That final fission reaction produced most of Mike's energy of 10MT.
The Castle Bravo shot used solid lithium deuteride instead of the vat of cryogenic deuterium. Under bombardment of the fusion neutrons the lithium breeds into tritium which gives rise to the D-T reaction in addition to the D-D reaction. The solid form of the fusion fuel was more practical for a weapon fuel.
One thing I don't quite understand in the OP is why large amounts of T need be created to support the fusion economy. Doesn't each reactor create as much as it needs for itself as it operates? I can see difficulties associated with separating the D from the lithium, but thats a chemical process and not in principle difficult. D is radioactive and lithium is nasty stuff, so it wouldn't be exactly easy, but probably doable.
Also, it's quite likely that modern weapons work like Teller's Super. That would be much more practical that the staged reactions of the early devices. Those super-geniuses at Sandia had decades and more computing power than Teller did to figure it out. So I would bet that someone somewhere has a pretty good understanding of how those little pellets work, especially under X-ray bombardment which must have been studied to death as a weapon technology.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
If that happens without deserts forming in the US Midwest and other places where huge amounts of food are currently grown, and without an increase in devastating storms, and without a big species die-back, and without an increase in pandemics, and without sea levels rising all over the world, and without halting the Atlantic Conveyor, and so on and so forth ... well, in that case, no, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing.
And being paid to be a hit man wouldn't be a terrible thing as long as I don't have to, you know, kill anybody.
Tritium has a very short half life. Around 11 years if I remember so even as you are breeding it you are loosing some of it do decay. Also isn't radioactive it is very easy to deal with. Lithium is had a bad habit of bursting into flames but other than that it isn't too hard to deal with. Tritium is hard to deal with it is radioactive, has a short half life, and is the key to making big and nasty bombs. Even with a classic fission bomb you can multiply the yield by injecting a small amount of tritium gas into the core.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You're right that fossil fuels (and ethanol, heck, even wood-burning) are really just a drawn-out solar power source. It may even be possible to build solar collectors that are worth a damn on an industrial scale as our understanding of photosynthesis improves (recent /. story about quantum mechanics of photosynthesis comes to mind).
Hooray for conservation of energy.
But your understanding of global warming/climate change is way off. The warming that you seem to be saying will increase plant life is not from any sort of increase in solar energy hitting the earth. It's from greenhouse gasses (and a serious increase in solar energy would probably fry most plant life and give us all skin cancer).
Yes, the carbon we're releasing has always been here, but the problem is that we're putting it all up into the atmosphere at once. This is starting to/will cause shifts in weather patterns that are likely to kill off significant amounts of plant life because evolution quite simply does not happen as fast as you seem to think. Now, maaaaybe if we could replace all the forests that have been cut down since the industrial revolution we'd counteract some of the carbon emissions via photosynthesis, but growth would take too long and that still couldn't absorb all the carbon we've kicked up. Regrowing and then re-burning that significant of a chunk of the planet's plant life for energy is just totally impossible.
And the energy required to keep windmill kite in the air wouldn't be anywhere close to the energy collected (gravity is a harsh mistress). You're basically arguing for a perpetual motion device (collecting more energy from the passing air than is consumed in creating lift), which, if we could build, we probably wouldn't bother making it fly, too.
Then again, with free energy why wouldn't we make it fly?
YUP, a mindless idiot like yourself is probably right. Experts have done nothing in over 50 years but collect grant money to make cool looking labs that do nothing. No advancements, nothing! Everyone rush to praise the village idiot who can read some foolish pop sci article. Go back to your wretched existence and do some mindless monkey programming like your fellow /.ers
......
/. recently here:
/ 14/1416255
And the energy required to keep windmill kite in the air wouldn't be anywhere close to the energy collected.........
The idea about extracting energy from high altitude winds was on
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04
There are many places, even near city load centers where such generators would produce plenty of power. It is indirect extracting of solar energy from wind currents and has nothing to do with perpetual motion. A 25 MPH wind will easily keep a kite in the air. Any excess would make power, just as terrestrial windmills do.
(..... from greenhouse gasses......)
The sun's output is very stable. Exactly, in a "greenhouse" -- that's where plants grow especially fast and lush. Let's make the whole earth a great greenhouse, like it must have been before all the fossil fuels were sequestered under ground. A warmer earth will hold more moisture in the atmosphere. The heat capacity of water will tend to reduce the torrid heat of deserts and warm the arctic, making for a larger area for people to live and grow food. Canada and Siberia are two of the largest land masses, mostly uninhabitable because it is so miserably COLD there. Let's warm them up to say Northern California temperatures and millions of living things, including humans could enjoy their stay there. That would more than make up for a few almost under water already coastal areas possibly getting flooded.
That flooding might not even happen, because much of the now ice locked water would be in the atmosphere, where it would rain down on now dry regions. Since we don't really understand how climate, both regional and global works, it is impossible to say exactly what would happen where. We do KNOW that the earth was very warm and productive in many regions that are now icy and desert. The Sahara was a fruitful place, even during the early Egyptian Civilization. We find evidence of tropical things in what is now arctic. Continental drift is not a full explanation of why this is true.
A warmer over all climate would also reduce total energy needs, since most of our present utility costs come in the winter time to keep warm. Biological processes operate best at the temperature of your blood. If the average temperature of the whole planet were in the 90F rather than around 50F as now, life would literally explode all over the place. Even 75F average global temperature would make this planet much more livable. Global warming is GREAT. Bring it on slowly, say in the next 100 years or so, then we can adapt to it.
All theory is gray
.......If that happens without deserts forming in the US Midwest and other places where huge amounts of food are currently grown......
Extreme climates are cause by differences in temperatures. A warmer overall air and ocean temperature would tend to reduce the extremes because water has a great moderating effect on climate. The warm humid air would even out the climate more than the cooler dry air of today. In the US midwest, frost might become rare and things could grow there that cannot grow there now.
Moisture and warmth is more important to agriculture than almost anything else. A warmer over all planet would supply more of both to most areas. Even if climate gets 30 degF warmer on average over the next 50 years (not likely) we could certainly adapt in what amounts to about a human life time.
All theory is gray
I started hearing the hard g version when I joined a telecommunications company and used giga-Herz units. That was in 1984, when computers had 4.77 MHz clocks and 640 kb were enough for everybody.
The first time I heard a prefix pronounced "jiga" was in a movie in 1985.
Care to cite your sources on this? Because the IPCC report that was published recently suggests almost the opposite. Already warm climates will become warmer and drier, not more humid; in those climates, water tables will drop as soils are dried out (which also contributes to topsoil erosion due to wind).
As someone else said, who cares if you can grow oranges in Alaska if the bread basket can't continue producing enough for everyone?
In Arizona, we've been seeing abbreviated monsoon seasons and dropping water tables for over a decade. Granted, some of this is attributable to the burgeoning population... but somehow, I don't think the reduction of monsoon rains is completely attributable to population growth. We're also seeing fewer hard frosts in the winter, which means some pest populations (like ticks) are growing out of control.
Again, care to cite a source or provide an argument to support your claims? Because the IPCC report predicted that, for example, a 2 degree C temperature increase might benefit crop yields in North America overall, but any increase beyond that was almost certain to have a negative impact.
The effects in Africa and Central America are predicted to be the most profound, since agriculture in those areas is tied to rainfall, and rainfall patterns will most certainly be disrupted by higher temperatures. Combine that with drier soils that get blown away, a la the Great Dust Bowl, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Of course, this is starting to get WAAAAY off topic. Bringing it all back to the original article, and to your comments upon it: Yeah, practical fusion may be a long way off, but the technological benefits just from trying to achieve it are going to pay off big-time. I am particularly heartened by the fact that the approach taken by the researchers in TFA is substantially different from the magnetic confinement approach taken by the tokamak proponents (e.g., ITER). More teams trying various different ways of achieving fusion means an increased probability that one of the approaches will bear fruit.
In the meantime, there are other sustainable energy sources we can exploit, and still be carbon-neutral. Yeah, it's possible that humans could adapt to some dramatic climate shifts, but what would happen to most civilizations on our planet? What would happen to our cultures? These impacts need to be weighed too.
losing. losing. not loosing. losing.
Look it up in a dictionary some time.
-TFA says thet they need 35megabux over five to seven years to say "go or no" on this...
... CHUMP CHANGE!* (about what we, that is to say, US flushes down the crapper in Iraq every 16 or so hours (assuming 500% overrun vs estimated costs fo r the z-machine project and 400 Billion butcher-bill over 4 years of ...war
m _wrapper&Itemid=182,
./'ers who are not native English speakers, the idiom "chump change" means "a quantity of money that, in the context of the present discussion, is utterly trivial".
Assuming the standard 300% to 500% cost overrun, it STILL chump change in the greater scheme of BS...
(that is to say, Big Science, in case you were wondering)
Even if the technology doesn't directly lead to commercial fusion power, it is probable that enough physics and engineering will be learned that the amount in question is
http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=co
or you may instead prefer http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11880954/))
Engineering research vs. a war... which is likely to yield a superior Return On Investment?
*In the unlikely event that it fails to be completly obvious to some
Good news, everyone!
Fusion reactor only 20 years from now!
The sizes of the current systems are large so that effects can be observed. I happen to know for a fact that a reactor capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts can fit in the back of a Delorean.
http://www.johntitor.com/Pages/TimeTravel.html
Now you tell me! I didn't know about the plutonium "spark plug" need: the detailed instructions in the Tom Clancy novel didn't even mention it. That explains the flop of my last backyard test! Luckily I didn't throw away all that good plutonium...
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.