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Experts Urge US To Continue Support For Nuclear Fusion Research (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A panel of 19 scientists drawn from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended yesterday that the Department of Energy should continue an international experiment on nuclear fusion energy and then develop its own plan for a "compact power plant." A panel of 19 scientists drawn from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended yesterday that the Department of Energy should continue an international experiment on nuclear fusion energy and then develop its own plan for a "compact power plant."
But as the National Academies' report noted, major challenges must be overcome to reach these goals, beginning with how to contain and control a burning "plasma" of extremely hot gas, ranging from 100 million to 200 million degrees Celsius, that can produce more heat than it consumes. The report calls the resulting plasma "a miniature sun confined inside a vessel." The world's biggest experiment intended to create and draw energy from burning plasma is under construction at Cadarache, France. It's called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, and its centerpiece is a large, doughnut-shaped, Russian-inspired reactor called a tokamak. Several member nations have already developed their own national programs, and the assembled National Academies experts concluded that the United States should eventually follow, once the ITER experiment shows there are ways to contain and manipulate a sustained fusion reaction. "It is the next critical step in the development of fusion energy," says the report.
But as the National Academies' report noted, major challenges must be overcome to reach these goals, beginning with how to contain and control a burning "plasma" of extremely hot gas, ranging from 100 million to 200 million degrees Celsius, that can produce more heat than it consumes. The report calls the resulting plasma "a miniature sun confined inside a vessel." The world's biggest experiment intended to create and draw energy from burning plasma is under construction at Cadarache, France. It's called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, and its centerpiece is a large, doughnut-shaped, Russian-inspired reactor called a tokamak. Several member nations have already developed their own national programs, and the assembled National Academies experts concluded that the United States should eventually follow, once the ITER experiment shows there are ways to contain and manipulate a sustained fusion reaction. "It is the next critical step in the development of fusion energy," says the report.
The thing about reports that try and forecast how much CO2 we are omitting, is all of them are based on current technology.
They don't take into account technological breakthroughs, especially on the order of magnitude of getting a working fusion reactor...
Overnight the entire world's energy makeup would change, as such reactors became widespread.
No we don't know this exact thing will pan out, but when people are talking about problems even 80 years from now - that is a LONG time for lots of amazing technology to come along. It's certainly been the case that even just over the last 20 years a lot of things are around now that were not dreamed of, nor thought possible back then.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not FISSION FAIL research, not "radiation is harmless we should all wear Cesium clothing" or any of your bullshit tropes, FUSION research! #Not the same thing!
A panel of experts drawn from the Slashdot user community have recommended Slashdot editors not consume alchol before proofreading submissions. A panel of experts drawn from the Slashdot user community have recommended Slashdot editors consume alchol before proofreading submissions.
It's over an hour long, if you want to skip to the cost/planning information, skip to 55:13 http://www.psfc.mit.edu/news/m...
What things 20 years ago were never dreamed of or thought possible?
Who thought we would be landing rockets vertically with reusable boosters?
Rovers going for years on end on Mars?
But really you could just google countless examples if you actually cared, like this one
And that's from 2011.... here's a (newer?) one...
I can't think of a single one.
If you really can't think of any examples, I feel very very sorry for you. :-(. The world is amazing! Wake up!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...1882: the first power grid.
130 years.
Sometimes great advances take time.
Nobody has hit ignition yet. This includes the massive complex at Lawrence Livermore. Know how long they have been trying? The "laser bay" set in Tron was filmed in the prototype for the Livermore system. It was built in the 90's, at four times the original cost, and still isn't up to "full power," apparently because they don't know how to get it there.
So, yeah, fusion research in the US has been a total debacle. Hopefully the Europeans can get it to work, but they're already spending the money, so why does the US have to? I think we have the sunken cost fallacy going on with the National Ignition Center.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Global Warming!
BORING PEDANTIC INCEL NAZI FAGGOT KEN DOLL THERE WILL ALWAYS BE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUR LIES AND NAZI PROPAGANDA
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
But, but, but, think of the scientists!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The big mistake was made back in the 1950, fast energy rather than slow energy. How to get as much energy out of the radioactivity as fast as possible because of the focus of engineers and dick brains (military et al). The focus should have been slow energy. Not how quickly you can get energy out of radioactivity but how you can trickle it out over a very long period ie many nuclear reactors with a single fuel load, small, much more stable and that fuel load, lasts the life of the reactor, probably re blended out again for use in the next reactor. So two hundred reactor power stations rather than two or three requiring continual fuel replacement.
Fusion simply reflects a too high risk of catastrophic failure. Want to design fusion reactors, the very first thing you do with each, what happens when the containment field fails. Well, if the answer is instant nuclear detonation, well, go fuck yourself and your fusion reactor design. Fusion fine as long as it don't go boom in failure mode.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There is a consistent level of research funding that simply pays for transferring and maintaining what we know so far about fusion from one generation to the next without actually gaining much ground.
It's been around that level of funding for as long as the "in 20 years" joke has been around, crawling along and occasionally something new and useful is figured out.
If a Kennedy-space-race-esque decision were made to say "fuck it, we're putting 50 billion dollars a year into getting this done," you'd have it within a generation as the skill and knowledge base expanded exponentially with specialized graduate degree programs and parallel research projects for everything remotely worth exploring.
Nobody that can afford to feels the need to take that gamble.
Worldwide funding for fusion research has already exceeded $50 billion with no meaningful result. Time to move on.
"It's called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, and its centerpiece is a large, doughnut-shaped, Russian-inspired reactor called a tokamak"
Robert Bussard didn't have a lot of positive things to say about tokamaks when he gave a Google tech talk on fusion back in 2006
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Worldwide funding for fusion research has already exceeded $50 billion with no meaningful result. Time to move on.
That's a tiny sliver of capital compared to other human endeavours, many of far more questionable merit.
Fusion research is important, but not urgent. Let its development continue. In the meantime, embrace other viable renewable and low-CO2 alternatives.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Better yet...
Every other title is as follows.
[weasel words] insists on continuing support for [bottomless money pit] or we are are all doomed.
SO! Yeah, RIP Slashdot.
It will work fine, you just have to make it larger - say, 186,000 miles in diameter. We have documented evidence of functionality.
I'm speaking for just over 7 billion people when I say, the sooner the better.
As other nations invest in R&D, remaining top-dog becomes more difficult. Add-in a political 'science is too expensive' mentality and the USA loses ground quickly.
"Experts Urge US To Continue Support For Nuclear Fusion Research"
s/Experts/Recipients of government grants/
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Um... a fusion reactor canâ(TM)t explode. If you lose containment of the plasma it dissipates and you need to restart your reactor.
Fusion is hard. Fission is trivially (and therefore dangerously) easy.
One we have quantum computers in 5 years we can use VR and a Linux desktop to figure out fusion!
Ahh, this old canard.
Here, this handy little chart should help you understand what is actually meant with that.
In his apparent mad rush to drag the U.S. back to the 1940's technologically, socialogically, and politically, the gods-be-damned Trump administration will likely defund, kill off, and bury any and all research into practical fusion reactor technology, and instead insist on building more coal-fired power plants. Give 'em enough rope, and he'll probably try to outlaw solar power and wind power, too. Never mind what that'll do even in the short term to nationwide air quality and people's respiratory health, his science adviser assures him there's no connection between asthma, and other respiratory diseases, and air pollution.
Meanwhile countries like China will forge ahead and likely master fusion technology ahead of the U.S., and rub our faces in it in front of the rest of the world, making the U.S. look like even a bigger laughingstock than it already has been made to look like in the last 2 years, if you can believe that's even possible. If Trump, somehow, against all odds and against all common sense, manages to get re-elected in 2020, all I can tell you is: better start learning to speak Mandarin and Russian.
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Short-sightedness never accomplished anything.
There are some pretty well established scalings that have been determined, basically saying if you have a given magnetic field, tokomak radius and shape, you will get a specific Q. The basics of containing plasma in a tokamak have been worked out some decades ago, and some of the final details have been worked out in the last 20 years, like disruption prevention and mitigation schemes.
We know a fusion reactor will work if built big enough (and I'm not talking about the joke about making it the size of the sun). The question is what is the least amount of increase in size we can get away with, because costs scales very roughly with volume of the reactor. How much stronger magnets can we develop and how much heat flux can the first wall takes (gets worse for smaller machines)?
This is getting into the realm of engineering, where the question is not, "Is it possible?," but instead, "Is it possible on a economical budget?"
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Fusion simply reflects a too high risk of catastrophic failure.
A machine the size of ITER (which is expected to be larger than an actual commercial reactor), would have about 10^22 nuclei in it. If you could magically make all of the fuel in the reactor react, it would be the equivalent of about 2-3 tons of TNT, smaller than typical nuclear weapons. That is skipping over the fact it is pretty much impossible to get everything to react, as a large fraction of the volume of the reactor is not near high enough temperature as the very center of it is. The reaction process is quite fragile, which is why it is so hard to keep going in the first place.
To put things in perspective, the superconducting magnets on ITER represent a huge storage of energy due to the current circulating in them. This actually works out to about 12 tons of tnt equivalent, larger than the energy contained by the fuel in the reactor. A quenching of the magnets would be one of the worst failure modes possible. This is something MRI machines already have to deal with, and they contain about 10-30 MJ in close proximity to humans vs the 50 GJ in all of the magnets of a fusion reactor with considerable amount of neutron shielding.
The danger to people working around a fusion reactor is comparable any other industry setting, and there is no danger that extends out to people near by but not in the reactor building. Have you ever seen what an industrial boiler explosion can do? That is far worse and there are many of those around in urban locations.
...no meaningful result
Uhh, the Lawson triple product, the prime yardstick to measure fusion reactors and how close they are for producing fusion reactions, has been doubling every 2 years 70s, and is now within a factor of ~20 of a commercial plant.
Global warming check.... look how much progress compared to computer chips we made... check.... seems to be a sales pitch. As I recall from JET, the inside or the torus is radioactive from all the neutrons and other strays from the plasma, yet here apparently fushion is clean.
E~MC^2, at C = 1W per spin, i.e. E~ W*W or E ~ area
In other words the energy of matter relates to the area they cover, a proton as the surface of a sphere, an electron as a point, or disc, or surface of a sphere.... for any given F universe (with W wavelength), this mass is used as a proxy for energy in 2 dimensions of a universe.
It's does not even correctly describe the energy *above* the resonant field, even if that mass measurement is a correct proxy for dipole energy.
It doesn't correctly account for monopole energy. If you think of the peasoup simulation at start, it only has monopoles, there is no 'C' because there is no resonance, no F, and monopoles can move infinitely fast when pushed/pulled by other monopoles. All the energy that will ever be in this universe started in that monopole field.
Monopoles pushing other monopoles are not oscillating, and cannot be resonating with the field, have no C limit, and so C does not apply to them. So no equation based on C could correctly describe that energy correctly. Even if you're viewing the world in 2 dimensions.
Yeh, I'm saying stuff again. How dare I. Your confidence in your equations is as ill founded as your confidence in your wibbly wobbly particle model.
I don't see how this fits into our plan to destroy every living thing on Earth within the next 100 years?
Thermal spectrum liquid salt thorium breeder are less complicated, and proven, and will get us there faster, for less money and safer than any water cooled reactor. Cheap plentiful thorium is a mining waste byproduct. The Liquid Thorium Molten Salt reactor is low cost, proven, not a scientific pie in the sky.
Make this a priority.
Fast spectrum burners are also worth pursuing, to burn up stockpiles of old reactor waste and plutonium.
Old proven tech.
Very sub-optimal for making fuel for weapons.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.59
What in god's name are you talking about? To quote Luke - "Everything you just said was wrong." Is there a mod -1 for impossible ignorance?
Worldwide funding for fusion research has already exceeded $50 billion with no meaningful result. Time to move on.
That's a tiny sliver of capital compared to other human endeavours, many of far more questionable merit.
Fusion research is important, but not urgent. Let its development continue. In the meantime, embrace other viable renewable and low-CO2 alternatives.
A quick google shows that the entire Apollo program was just over $100 billion in today's money.
Seems like we could probably spend a little more time and money of the fusion thing.
Gentlemen, we must protect our phoney baloney jobs! Harrumph harrumph!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To be fair, Bussard's Polywell failed entirely. One thing about tokamaks is that we're already sure that they work, we know the scaling laws and can extrapolate the behavior.
I am astounded that a group of people who probably have only one thing in common, they "do" research for a living, have come together and concluded that more research should be undertaken (and paid for). I'm sure all of them will invest their life-savings in it. No bias or conflicts of interest, I'm sure.
Fission reactors can't suffer nuclear detonation either (that's right, the climax of Pacific Rim wouldn't work in real life). You need specific isotopes of uranium or plutonium to make a bomb; isotopes which actually impede the functionality of the reactor as an energy source.
Chernobyl suffered a thermal explosion. So much energy built up so quickly the reactor fuel vaporized and blew apart the building. It was not a nuclear explosion. And it should be noted that Western nuclear reactors cannot blow up as Chernobyl did because they're designed with a negative void coefficient. They're designed so if the cooling water starts to boil, it slows down the nuclear reaction. Chernobyl's design used a positive void coefficient - boiling water sped up the nuclear reaction. The moment its coolant started to boil, the reactor was doomed. Positive void coefficient reactor designs were never used in the West because of this inherent instability. The Soviets were more interested in building something cheap, rather than safe.
Even the right isotope of uranium or plutonium, building a bomb is very hard to do. The materials will not blow up in a nuclear explosion by themselves.. There were two supercriticality accidents with a plutonium core during the Manhattan Project. The two halves were accidentally put together close enough where the nuclear reaction became self-sustaining. All that happened was it gave off a bunch of radiation killing the nearest scientist. It did not blow up.
To make it blow up in a nuclear explosion, you have to crush the uranium or plutonium far beyond its normal state. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a gun. A uranium bullet was fired at another uranium mass, briefly increasing the density beyond that needed for the supercriticality to cause a nuclear explosion. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki used explosives to implode a shell of plutonium (this is the method used in modern nuclear weapons). When the shell pieces collided in the center, their density briefly exceeded what was needed for a nuclear explosion. if they don't all meet in the center at the exact same time, then either there's no nuclear explosion, or you get a small nuclear explosion (this is why the yields in North Korea's nuclear tests were so small as to almost not register on monitoring equipment)..Getting all those explosives to go off at the exact same time with the right force in the right direction is really, really hard.
Incidentally, fusion is so much harder to achieve that a fission nuclear bomb is used to create the pressures and temperatures needed to get hydrogen to begin to fuse, causing a fusion explosion. That's where the term "thermonuclear" comes from.
Wait for someone else to develop it, then steal the plans.
But seriously, there's something to be said for waiting if the existing technology doesn't seem to be up to the task. Japan spent several decades working on and pouring billions of dollars into HDTV, determined to be the first country to have HDTV broadcasts and be in control of all the standards. The U.S. didn't do anything. But Japan built their HDTV standard on analog transmission because that was the only technology capable of doing TV broadcasts at the time. Then in the 1990s, the price/performance of digital signal processors (needed to compress/decompress a digital video stream) dropped so quickly that the U.S. was able to develop a digital HDTV standard in just a few years and at far less cost than Japan's effort.
None of the existing fusion reactor designs really instill me with confidence. They don't seem to instill the designers with confidence either as they're always talking about it being decades away. Maybe what we need is to wait for some breakthrough in superconductivity or materials science or quantum mechanics which suddenly makes fusion easy.
Of more concern would be the extremely large magnetic containment fields or the very high power systems needed to generate them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Embrace? You mean fuck-in-azzwhole solar/tidal/wind/fat-bitches-bikepedeling .... none good for better than 5% of civilized energy wants.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I had or did most (though not all) of those things 20 years ago. Not only did we think it was possible, we had them in a typical home.
Goijg in order, starting from the top:
Lots of music in a pocket-sized device (iPod)
This one is kinda new, the first consumer mp3 players came out 20 years ago. As I kid I got unlimited wireless streaming music on my Walkman. We called it radio.
VoIP / audio over the net
20 years ago I was setting up an early installation of live internet video with sound
64 bit processors
Nintendo 64 came out more than 20 years ago, so kids owned 64 bit processors. The surprise is that although we went from 8 bit to 64 bit in 25 years, after another 25 years we're still on 64 bit.
Hybrid cars
Been around since the 1970s
Burning a CD
You're kidding, right? While setting up the live internet video software, I burned a CD
Lots of internet video stored by one company (YouTube)
30 years ago, most of the video was on Prodigy, then AOL took over
Wireless internet / wifi
The actual wifi standard was over 20 years ago. In my storage room I probably still have Proxim wireless cards, which predate the wifi standard. So I had wireless internet in my home 25 years ago.
Editing video on your computer
How do you think we slices up those movies to make cool gifs to put on our Geocities pages?
DVR
We called it a VCR. I also probably still have a PCI video capture card in my storage room. Maybe even an ISA one. Cards like those were popular with Windows Media Center, a DVR that with Windows 15 years ago. 20 years ago, the DVR was a separate application that didn't come with Windows. *Renting* a DVR instead of owning it is new.
Video chat
Refer back above. We used it for naked girls, what we now call "cam girls".
Is to persuade governments to fund research. BNFL burned renewable funding. The US repeatedly blocks fusion and is currently anti-science.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Coal was supplanted over a century ago. It is still used.
Safe forms of fission exist, and have done for 40+ years, but none are in use in the US. The US also bans any form of nuclear reprocessing, resulting in far more dangeroys waste being created.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Care to explain why multuple sites niw have multi-minute fusion reactions? No? Oh, that IS a surprise.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nopw, the latest news from Germany puts it at 5 years. Skepticism is for real minds. Cynicism is for fools.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hey, I remember spirographs!!! You could twiddle knobs to draw all sorts of curves, based on nothing but the twidding of your fingers. I actually once managed to draw a pretty cool sailboat with one of those.
The fanciful lines on that chart have about as much to do with actually accomplishing fission as Theranos had to do with actually testing blood reliably.
That's an interesting chart, but do we have any way of knowing how true those predictions are? It's hard not to believe from an emotional perspective that if funding was significantly raised, fusion reactors would be achievable.
My problem has always been that even with solid funding, significant grid contributions from fusion reactors are 50+ years away. Generously, 20 years of well-funded research just to get a small-scale test plant built, and then another 10 years to build and get something grid-scale built and tested. In another 20 years, you have maybe 5-10 more plants built, assuming everything is a runaway success.
I think it should be seriously researched, but the timeline to actually gain anything civilization-impacting out of it seems something like a century away, and may be too late unless there is a miracle breakthrough.
Just tell Trump that it will help make better nukes, and he'll sign anything you put in front of him on the subject.
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How many coal men will be put back to work in the coal mines if they make fusion energy work?
'nuff said...
#MAGA
Panel of experts selected by Scientific American? I cancelled subscription to this political tube a year ago.
Pouring cash on the problem may be great fun for the folks spending it, but has not resulted in much progress.
It also nudges the problem from one of science to one of politics.
Which is part of the problem with the fission power industry.
I wonder if these big science machines are speeding or slowing the progress.
For fusion, we only need to get 2 atoms to get friendly at a time.
Herding cats is hard, herding many seems near impossible, but 2 might be approachable analytically.
Why is a big machine with a bunch of atoms in a plasma the only approach?
If the answer is it takes scale to make an energy producer instead of consumer, then perhaps that is the part of the problem to fund.
Yes, if you build a tokamak bigger, you get closer to net power, and the assumption is that they will work if large enough. That was known long ago, and more reasonable people recognized that the tokamak was a dead end because of the poor scaling. They can't be built at reasonable sizes; the physics dictates that a net power machine will be enormous, making tokamaks impractical.
Pursuing a dead end is not progress; it has made fusion a laughing stock, and prevented funding of more promising approaches, which do exist.
I am now firmly in the camp of the greens who want to cover the planet in PV. I understand that nuclear energy is statistically the safest form of energy production, and i used to be the firmest supporter of such. However now that experts have stepped in i a firmly against it. It is not nuclear power per say im against. It is experts. An expert is someone who gets on the internet makes some bold claim and says you have to beleive me because im an expert. You are not allowed to do uour own thinking, you need experts to do your thinking for you.
Experts in finance all said to buy stocks in 2008. Experts said whites were superior to black in 1930. Experts said steroids do not support musclular developement in the 50s. Generally i am agaisnt whatever experts say. The world is flat, and nuclear power is evil incarnate. Fuck science. Fuck experts.
When will we get articles that do not defer to some expert authority figure all the time. You should not have blind faith in anything whether it be the gobermint, the church, or scientific experts
The silly part of all this: once we perfect the science and engineering of fusion power we’re still only going to use it as a heat source to boil water and power a steam turbine.
Is there any research into finding a way to extract electrical energy DIRECTLY from nuclear reactions? i.e. What are the theoretical and practical possibilities of a nuclear fuel cell?
Uh, the first vertical landing rocket was demonstrated in 1961.
Not one that had boosted a payload into orbit, no.
But, the space shuttle was flying 20 years ago, which boosted payloads into orbit and then flew again. It's only the "vertical landing" part that's new, not the reusable part. And, mostly people weren't envisioning "vertical landings" because it had never seemed like a particularly important thing whether a landing was vertical or not.
...and as for "never dreamed or thought possible"-- no, science fiction landed rockets vertically all the time. It was certainly "dreamed" and even "though possible."
The Soviets landed a Rover on Mars in 1971.
Which never deployed.
The original comment you're replying to was "rovers going for years on end", which didn't happen until 2006 (two years after the Opportunity rover landed, assuming "years" means "at least two years".)
But "never dreamed or thought possible"-- no, nobody ever thought that it wasn't possible.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Worldwide funding for fusion research has already exceeded $50 billion with no meaningful result. Time to move on.
You’re a retard.
Yes, if you build a tokamak bigger, you get closer to net power, and the assumption is that they will work if large enough. That was known long ago, and more reasonable people recognized that the tokamak was a dead end because of the poor scaling. They can't be built at reasonable sizes; the physics dictates that a net power machine will be enormous, making tokamaks impractical.
Pursuing a dead end is not progress; it has made fusion a laughing stock, and prevented funding of more promising approaches, which do exist.
No the physics dictates that in order to have high performance in a compact device you need high field. Nb3Sn super conductor loses its superconductivity at high field that’s why we had to go to large machine sizes. REBCO does not suffer this problem. So we can go to high field in a compact device. Now the challenge is engineering. The forces on the center stack become enormous that we don’t have a material that can withstand the stresses without deforming.
> Why is that surprising? That corresponds to 16 exibytes (well 8 if you have signed pointers). There's no machine on the planet which could make use of pointers of that size.
It's not just about pointers. The CPU processes *everything* n-bits at a time, with n-bit precision. I mentioned Nintendo 64. It had 4MB of RDRAM. The 64 bit processor wasn't because it needed large pointers to address a huge amount of memory. :)
Along with all internal operations being n-bits at a time, 16-bit computers normally used the 16-bit ISA bus, 32-bit computers used the 32-bit PCI bus. Bus bandwidth was a problem and a 128-bit bus seemed likely in the future.
One thing that happened is we moved computation to the GPU, which does millions of bits at a time. Bus bandwidth certainly increased with PCI-e, but because it's too hard to keep 64 bits in sync, PCI-E switched from parallel (PCI) to serial at a much faster clock.
Similarly for external ports. Rather than making a wider (and therefore higher bandwidth) parallel port, we dropped parallel ports and switched to universal Serial bus, USB.
So, a group of scientists ban together to desperately plea that their should be funding for an already funded avenue of research? Furthermore, since there are no current plans to eliminate this research, it is import to panic each and every person that you know, that we should ban together and work very hard to stop the government from canceling this vital research, that they had no intention of canceling.
The sad thing is, so many people on this forum are so blinded by irrational hate that they accept the darkest parts of their imagination as unquestioned fact.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
My sense is that current CO2 output isn't something worth worrying about. Do the math and you get 4 CO2 molecules per 10,000 air molecules. Water overwhelms that number by a factor of 100 and has a much wider greenhouse absorption spectra. Freeman Dyson, the first man to understand Feynman's diagrams and prove they were legitimate, pointed out that atmospheric sensitivity to CO2 models presume the absence of water which yields nonsense results. My professional experience working with modeling software is that trying to predict the effect of a change from 3/10000 to 4/10000 in a chaotic model is a fool's errand.
A bigger concern is the plankton population numbers which have crashed by 60% since the 1950's. As John Martin at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Institute predicted, restore the plankton and you can absorb the excess CO2. Chop the plankton numbers as drastically as they have been and it's little surprise that CO2 numbers are climbing. Thing is, we can fix that but nobody talks about it much.
When thinking long-term about an area of science or technology, it is important to think about sustaining the development and retention of people across multiple professional generations. The government should be planning in terms of how many people it is going to sustain in developing fusion power for multiple decades and then do it. You have to pay the people, and you have to pay for the machines that the people are going to build to learn more. Otherwise you end up losing the people who know what they are doing, and paying extra to develop the talent again.Sure, it may take 100 years, but you have to fund consistently over that period or it will take 150.
Wow, a whole multi-minute after decades of research and billions of dollars? It isn't going to work. Time to move on.
If we do NOT solve fusion soon, we are fucked as a species.
If we solve fusion, we solve oil and other fossil fuels.
If we solve fusion, we solve further atmospheric pollution and can begin to put energy into atmospheric carbon removal.
If we solve fusion, we solve water (energy for desalinizations) shortages.
Whoever solves fusion will be remembered along with DaVinci and Cochrane. Maybe Musk is up to the challenge?
a fusion reactor can't explode
I'll bet you a six-pack that the intellectual descendants of the geniuses who built the Chernobyl reactor can blow a fusion reactor up. But I'll give you that the explosion probably won't be all that big and the radioactive debris will probably be a lot less long lived and noxious than those from a damaged fission reactor.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
and then develop its own plan for a "compact power plant.
Might it not be a good idea to wait until a self sustaining fusion reaction has been achieved before setting out to design fusion power plants?
My guess is that once it becomes clear that a fusion power plant is doable and the economics are viable, getting funding -- private and/or public -- is unlikely to be all that big a problem.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Sure it did. It got us the electoral collage, which in turn got us Trump. It got us a constitution with zero penalties for violating it, which in turn got us continuous violations of the "highest law in the land." It also got us a supreme court that does whatever it likes WRT the constitution instead of requiring actual adherence to what article five says is required for changes to the document. It got us the drug war, into all manner of hot wars, brought us slavery and repression of women and a trickle-up financial environment and so, so much more.
Short-sightedness is clearly a powerful engine for change.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Humanity's been around watching birds fly for tens of thousands of years.
But we've only had significant flight capability for about a century.
Seems to me it might be a little premature to be saying "This isn't the technology you're looking for. Move along. Move along."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Speaking of genuises: please don't play with manure and cause an even bigger explosion. Ignorance can be weaponized.
That was Etch A Sketch. Spirograph was a set of molded plastic gears with holes for a drawing pen, that could be assembled in various ways to draw epicyclic figures.
Yep, fusion has been just around the corner for pretty much my entire adult life. But I think we forget that major technologies take time to work out. Think about how long people have been fiddling with fire, for example. Or making steam a usable power source. Or internal combustion engines... What did JFK say about going to the Moon.. it is hard. And look at what we learned along the way. There has been a lot learned about the process itself -- even more to learn about how to transform this basic reaction into useful power. Be nice if I saw it happen, but think that is not likely.
In that case, aren't you ignoring SSE and AVX instruction sets?
Ezekiel 23:20
What a stellar idea!
Ezekiel 23:20
Fission reactors can't suffer nuclear detonation either ... Chernobyl suffered a thermal explosion.
Scientists might disagree
Ezekiel 23:20
First of all, how dare you communist bastards suggest we invest money in development of science a technology using Celsius as our scale of measurement. If you really want money, you'll switch to Farenheit ASAP.
Also, investments in free and clean energy are anti-American. We have goals of reducing emissions standard requirements to promote the free market and allow people to right to choose to drive cars that consume more fuel. If you were to interfere by decreasing the value of energy, this would interfere with the free market and before you know it Xi will be in charge!
Let's focus on important things
1) No more of this healthcare for everyone bullshit. If you're poor, either commit a crime so we can lock you up to produce prison jobs for hard working former coal workers. Or at least join the military so we can either kick your ass into shape, get you killed or make sure your PTSD is bad enough that you'll commit a crime and make prison jobs. If you're worthless as a prisoner, dead person or a "hero" (we love that one... nothing gets poor people to do stupid shit like selling that one), then your health is a problem... eat more boxed shit and die... we don't want your problems.
2) Coal! It makes no difference whether we decide to use more coal, the entire coal industry is automated now. It takes an absolute frigging moron that probably believes wearing some camouflage pajamas and carrying a weapon makes them a hero to believe there will ever be coal jobs again. That ship has sailed... but if we can sell a shitload of coal, we can either afford to build a supermax in their back yard to give them jobs or we can pay their welfare and foodstamps from it.
3) Fracking! Ooooooo baby... I love this thing.... and any liberal pussy that whines about water supplies and earthquakes is a commi bastard. There's simply no proof that causing massive amounts of underground vibrations and instability has anything to do with pollution from things like settled sediment being disrupted in water supplies and there sure as shit is no proof that causing massive underground explosions has anything to due with the stability of the land above it. That's just nature. Look... even the dumb ass Brits are doing it everywhere now too. And we all know they're commi bastards.
No... none of this fusion shit. Let the commi Europeans destroy their own economies with that crap. In the free market USA (where everything and everyone is clearly better) we will stick to shit we can blow up out of the ground.
The total spent on fusion since 1954 is $24 billion. Wonder how much that is per facility per year. After all, the Manhattan Project only cost $22 billion and fusion can't be any more difficult than banging two rocks together really hard.
The total spent on fossil fuel is $21 trillion a year. Obviously that can't work, either.
They'd been trying to build computers since 100 BC, obviously those are impossible.
They'd been trying to find a Higgs boson since the 1960s. Obviously they don't exist.
They'd been trying to discover how to make fire since 5 million BC. Obviously can't be done.
Wake me up when... no, don't bother waking me up. This level of stupidity is too great to stomach.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's not just about pointers. The CPU processes *everything* n-bits at a time, with n-bit precision.
No, it's only about pointers. Desktop CPUs go up to 512 bit wide instructions with the latest AVX. And they're super scalar so they are 256 bits or more wide, but they use that width to do several operations not just one really big one. There's not much utility in 128 bit arithmetic so they don't waste the silicon on it.
Bus bandwidth was a problem and a 128-bit bus seemed likely in the future.
We went flying past that.
The internal memory busses are based on cache lines which are also 512 bits wide in big CPUs: that's how much memory it fetches in one go.
DDR 4 gives a 64 bit width, but processors now support quad channel DDR4, which gives an effective width of 256 bits to main memory.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm talking about what we expected 20 years ago.
We had gone from 8-bit to 16-bit, then 16-bit to 32-bits, then from 32 to 64-bit. It seemed entirely logical that we'd go from 64 to 128.
> with the latest AVX
Yes, with the latest AVX. AVX didn't exist 20 years ago. I'm talking about what we expected 20 years ago.
We had gone from 8-bit to 16-bit, then 16-bit to 32-bits, then from 32 to 64-bit. It seemed entirely logical that we'd go from 64 to 128. Instead, things went in different directions.
Just wait for China to develop it then pull a play out of their own playbook and just steal everything you need.
Why dump so much money into Research and Development when you can just pull a China ?
As a specific example, in 1998 we saw that CPU "bits" had been doubling every few years, so we didn't expect that 20 years later SQL Server and all the other popular software still wouldn't be able to handle 128-bit values. We thought we could use 128-bit addressing and computers in general would be able to use these 128-bit values after a few years.
If we're had used 64-bit addresses, that would give us 18 quadrillion IP addresses. That's this many:
18,446,744,073,709,551,616
If we knew then what we know now, we may well have used 64-bit addresses in IPv6. 18 quadrillion is plenty of IPs. We figured that by 2018 computers would be able to handle 128-bit numbers. We were wrong - most software can't. By "we" I mean *I* made that argument. I was wrong.
It sounds like you're saying we don't need to worry about our current CO2 outputs because technology will just come along that solves the problem effortlessly.
I find it amusing you think developing a fission reactor is "effortless"
Or developing much more efficient solar cells. Or any one of the countless other things that WILL improve over the next 20-30 years in ways you cannot image.
It's not that these things are effortless - it's that over the span of all progress, they are INEVITABLE. The massive switch to electric cars is inevitable because it makes so much more sense. The massive switch to solar power is the same; inevitable it will be cheaper.
Your problem is that you can only see what is, not what will be - so you seek to destroy the world to correct some wrong that was never going to be a problem to begin with if you hadn't meddled.
Your way of thinking is the way of despots and tyrants through history, that left hundreds of millions to suffer or die because you lacked vision and any faith in progress.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fission reactors can't suffer nuclear detonation either ... Chernobyl suffered a thermal explosion.
Scientists might disagree
That's not what that paper says. The paper says the scientists agree with the GP. I know that paper is dense physics and statistics but nowhere in that paper did it say there was a nuclear detonation. Not a single word. Is this what passes for thought in society now? Just posting a paper and making false claims about what it says? On behalf of the worlds scientists, GFY.
It literally says there was a fizzle involved. The isotopic evidence is there. If you're too obtuse to see it, then I can't help you. The authors don't "agree with GP". And they may not be alone.
Ezekiel 23:20
Some fusion proponents here were claiming that ITER was going to "be the one". This time, really, for sure, ITER establishes the practicality of fusion! And if not ITER, then the NIF.
Nope. This funding call is for another huge tokamak (or other experimental reactor). There will be another after this one, and another one again after that. Fusion research is slow, expensive, and the route to success is entirely uncertain.
This is why we don't want to create any Manhattan Project style fusion research programs. You'd waste too much money, have to make big technological bets long before the technology was ready to support that.
Meanwhile fission is viable today. Solar, wind and geothermal is viable today. Natural gas and even (gulp!) coal is viable today. You'd have to be an idiot to fund a crash fusion development program under these circumstances.
Whether or not Trump (lol, really the (former?) Republican majority in Congress) cut funding on fusion research, the funding cuts would come whichever side had majority, unless somebody offered them a metaphoric handjob for it.
Go read up on Bussard reactors, or that German one that is 3d printed one of those geometric knots.
Gee thanks I am sure without you telling me what was meant I wouldn't of known
Anyway seeing as I was actually around for the time frame in question and you weren't
It means exactly what was said. IE if you fund fusion it's 20 years away. Well it's been nearly 70 years
We have vastly better control systems, vastly better ways to model the magnetic fields, superconductors, far improved high temperature materials, and far superior power control and management systems.
You know there was no amount of funding that was going to make all that happen by 1970 or 1990 or 2000 and you know what else we are still far away from breakeven.
So you know what your chart tells people ? It tells people just how much you like it when people feed you shit.
That's kind of amazing seeing as the cost of Iter alone is 20 billion +
https://www.sciencemag.org/new...
and the NIF was nearly 4 Billion
https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/...
Pretty sure there's been more than 2 projects.
Oh so we should defund ITER now seeing as the German project is a stellarator not a tokomak
ITER and Tokamak in general cannot confine neutrons, which are not sensible to electromagnetic fields. And high energy neutrons damaging the machine is a problem
An idea is to target fusion reactions that do not produce neutrons, but that required insanely high temperatures. We have another machine for doing that: the Z-Machine
so you seek to destroy the world to correct some wrong that was never going to be a problem to begin with if you hadn't meddled.
It's retarded deniers like you who will destroy the world by letting it bake.
Unless we can convince rational people to ignore you.
What we should've done which is a moot point, is say to hell with iter, never put in a single cent and developed our own tech on us soil whoch probably would've received real funding because we would've wasted enough cash to get to the "too big to fail" point and followed through with the project regardless of cost.
It's retarded science-ignorant alarmists like you who will destroy the world trying to "fix" it.
"we don't know who struck first, but we know it was us that scorched the sky". Yep, sounds like alarmist MO.
I am dead serious about you being the one who will literally destroy all life on Earth, if you have your way. Trying to screw with natural cycles is the height of idiocy.
I'll let you have the last response so you can keep peddling your hoary old load of fear, but know that every day the scales fall from more people's eyes, who truly embrace debate, logic and most importantly - SCIENCE over FEAR. I pity you living in the mental jail you have constructed for yourself...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As opposed to the doofus who posts 20 year old data?
not a nuke scientist here but i mostly agree what you say. ..uhm.. say 20.
however, the "bomb" is difficult because we mostly look at it thru "history book" lenses.
the point is, that there was only little plutonium available at the time, thus the least amount of plutonium was sought to explode spectacularly.
the trick was to keep the atoms close enough together that they would meet "geometrically" multiplying neutrons long enough and not fly away "from the source of neutron production" (thus not being able to contribute to furthering even more neutrons).
now take this ~7 kg plutonium sphere that needs a shitton of shaped charge engineering to xplode and multiply it by
now you got the core of a nuclear reactor with MOX fuel.
what you get is a half-assed NUCLEAR explosion a-la fukushima reactor 3. it might not have been as efficient as a shaped charged assisted 7 kg of refined plutonium bomb but with that much fissionable material (including plutonium) piled onto
one spot (~200kg) there can hardly be a doubt that a commercial ~800 MW reactor can explode nuclearly!
I'm a little skeptical of this number, but to put it into perspective, completing the 2nd Avenue Subway in NYC would cost about $6 billion. Anyone whose ridden the nearby but fatally overcrowded Lexington Ave. line knows it is badly needed, and would probably pay for itself quickly just in terms of person-hours lost through delays. However, in the bigger picture, there is just no comparison between the need for a subway line on one hand, and orders-of-magnitude-cheaper-and-safer energy on the other. We should be investing WAY more than we do, and I'm guessing that if government got the hell out of its way, the private sector alone would likely be doing so all by itself.
Nonaggression works!