As practicing researchers, can you tell us about the health of the pipeline of young researchers coming into the field? Is there a glut of trained physicists at this stage, or is there still a need for trained specialists to enter the field, especially with ITER and follow-on machines coming online in the next couple of decades?
OTOH, if they succeed, they'll get 500 MW thermal back out over a 30 second shot (Q ~= 10); later, advanced mode studies in quasi steady-state or steady-state at (Q ~= 5). That seems entirely reasonable for a machine which is designed to be an experiment, as opposed to a full-blown power plant.
I personally wouldn't gloss over the complexity of symmetrically imploding those little tritium targets.
Bear in mind too, that the scalings used to come up with the baseline performance predictions for ITER are quite conservative.
I remember seeing something recently, that Steve Cowley said in a recent speech that JET is likely to exceed breakeven in the next D-T campaign. Not bad for a 30 year old machine.
The NHS delivers far superior healthcare outcomes to everybody and costing us half as much as a percentage of GDP as the US spends. The US model is utterly, utterly broken, because policy is made by ideologically-blind libertarian halfwits.
But please, continue deluding yourself. It's funny to watch.
Hard-gamma? I thought that the issue with most of the likely fusion reactions was enormous amounts of fast neutrons and activation of materials by said neutrons, not hard gamma rays.
$4b is chump change, considering that the energy market is a multi-trillian dollar sector. Hell, the €25b that the anti-ITER folks are whining about so pathetically, is chump change -- it's ambitious, yes -- but worth every penny.
Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
My money's on ITER. Machines that produce actual fusion power (Joint European Torus) already exist.
We need adequate energy sources, and fairness in distributing those resources, to get most of the developing world past the 'demographic transition'. It's a big ask, but could be done if we were truly determined.
Fusion is _hard_. We had no idea how hard it would be until we tried doing it -- mostly because of unknown unknowns. It's took only a few short years (maybe 10?) to turn Fermi's first nuclear pile into a working power plant. Fusion is one to two/orders of magnitude/ more complex to pull off. So obviously, we're going to have to wait longer for a working power plant. If ITER works (and we're now confident it will), the first prototype power plants (the DEMO machines) won't be far behind.
Can't say I did notice. The only think I noticed is that you are shooting your mouth off as an AC and behaving like a complete wanker. Like a religious conservative, I'd say.
That IS THE ENTIRE POINT of science. Science is not a religion or belief system, as some uninformed religious people you have you believe. Science is only ever an approximation of reality, tested through experiment, and kept honest through peer review.
No such scrutiny, or verification exists in religion. We're just told to believe such-and-such, because of revelation or tradition, and that's it.
To be blunt, the "science has been wrong before" is a very old, very dumb, and heavily shopworn argument trotted out by ignorant, home-schooled religious people. It's a sad reminder of the massive, yawning gulf between the educated and the ignorant in our society.
Can't say I'm sympathetic. If his critical thinking skills, not to mention his social skills are so bad, then he has no business working for NASA, and show go and work for Ken Ham or something, where his abilities and skills will be better appreciated.
Citizen-initiated referenda are a recipe for disaster. The e-petitions that get sent to Downing Street, egged on by our halfwit tabloids are proof of that.
The simple truth, is that the vast majority of people are idiots, and a minority -- worse yet -- are wilfully ignorant. They cannot be trusted to formulate good policy.
Which, as a side note, is why fossil fuel companies' efforts to sabotage action on climate change by vilifying scientific experts, and expertise in general as "unelected liberal elites", "elitists", "antidemocratic", and what-have-you, is such a master stroke. The vast majority of people are dumb, ill-informed, emotional, easily-led beasts, who are lead around by the nose by slick corporate-commissioned PR -- mass opinion is very easily bought. We would be wise to keep mass opinion-as-a-weapon out of the reach of vested interests, if at all possible.
...because getting bad leaders is inevitable. It's an iron law of nature that the exact people you want kept away from power gravitate towards it. And it's an iron law of nature, that if or when people get fed up with bad leaders, they get rid of them, either with huge amounts of upheaval and bloodshed (e.g. the French and Bolshevik revolutions), or peacefully (representative democracy).
Simply put, the killer feature of representative democracy, is that it's easy and painless to kick a bad leader out of power without bloodshed and violence. Our corporate overlords insist upon it -- violent revolution is bad for business.
Project much? The anti-human, anti-Earth, traitorous Right want to destroy the world for the short-term profits of the rich, and will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Even the most depraved corruption and lies. Some days, I wish the Soviets won the Cold War, and put all the right wing nut jobs in the Gulag.
These are the same people who are paying professional shills and con artists to lie about global warming for their own private profit. Their actions speak for themselves.
Repeating a lie over and over doesn't make it true. Granted, it may do in the minds of rightwing true believers (and repeating a lie ad infinitum is a well known propaganda technique).
Most normal people aren't gullible American right wing loonies, and aren't so easily lied to.
Science is not a religion. Only stupid religious people think science is a religion. Only stupid religious people ascribe that flaw to other people.
Science is not religion. Religion is accepting stupid fairytales without proof, reason, logic or questioning in any way. Science is a system of gathering and systemising knowledge, which demands proof every step of the way. If I want, I CAN get a physics degree (which, by the way, I'm in the process of doing right now), learn quantum field theory, devise experiments and test them. Or I could ask somebody who has. There is no faith here, no stupid fairytales, no credulity, no superstition or lies.
Misrepresenting science as faith is extremely low, stupid and easy to debunk.
Climiate science is SCIENCE. In science, belief is irrelevant. Only evidence matters.
The denialists don't have evidence. They have good PR, online polls, debates, and other slick propaganda tools, but they will never win the scientific debate, because the evidence for AGW is overwhelming.
This is a political and ideological issue, not a scientific one.
I could call social-engineering/stealing those documents to be unethical and possibly illegal (IANAL).
But I salute somebody willing to knowingly destroy their own life to out a bunch of paid liars.
The whole thing is morally ambiguous, and whether or not he actually did the right thing (especially if he has a family to support), is open to debate.
And of course, you have evidence for this, right? There are analytics you could run over the text to prove/disprove the connection, but it's easy to just lie on Slashdot.
You blew your credibility the millisecond you quoted WUWT as a reliable source. Anthony Watt is just another right wing corporate whore with no credentials, no scientific training, no mainstream credibility, and a big mouth (very common in the wingnut alternative reality).
Slashdot Mirror
As practicing researchers, can you tell us about the health of the pipeline of young researchers coming into the field? Is there a glut of trained physicists at this stage, or is there still a need for trained specialists to enter the field, especially with ITER and follow-on machines coming online in the next couple of decades?
50 million watts of heating, but yeah, a lot.
OTOH, if they succeed, they'll get 500 MW thermal back out over a 30 second shot (Q ~= 10); later, advanced mode studies in quasi steady-state or steady-state at (Q ~= 5). That seems entirely reasonable for a machine which is designed to be an experiment, as opposed to a full-blown power plant.
I personally wouldn't gloss over the complexity of symmetrically imploding those little tritium targets.
Bear in mind too, that the scalings used to come up with the baseline performance predictions for ITER are quite conservative.
I remember seeing something recently, that Steve Cowley said in a recent speech that JET is likely to exceed breakeven in the next D-T campaign. Not bad for a 30 year old machine.
You don't get out much, do you?
The NHS delivers far superior healthcare outcomes to everybody and costing us half as much as a percentage of GDP as the US spends. The US model is utterly, utterly broken, because policy is made by ideologically-blind libertarian halfwits.
But please, continue deluding yourself. It's funny to watch.
Hard-gamma? I thought that the issue with most of the likely fusion reactions was enormous amounts of fast neutrons and activation of materials by said neutrons, not hard gamma rays.
I'd have polywell funded, even if just to shut up the myriad internet cranks constantly banging on about it.
No offence folks -- but citations from reputable peer-reviewed literature or STFU.
$4b is chump change, considering that the energy market is a multi-trillian dollar sector. Hell, the €25b that the anti-ITER folks are whining about so pathetically, is chump change -- it's ambitious, yes -- but worth every penny.
Mod parent up.
If anarchy's what you want, move to Somalia. The folks depriving you of your money by violence won't be from the Government, because there IS none ;-)
Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
My money's on ITER. Machines that produce actual fusion power (Joint European Torus) already exist.
We need adequate energy sources, and fairness in distributing those resources, to get most of the developing world past the 'demographic transition'. It's a big ask, but could be done if we were truly determined.
Fusion is _hard_. We had no idea how hard it would be until we tried doing it -- mostly because of unknown unknowns. It's took only a few short years (maybe 10?) to turn Fermi's first nuclear pile into a working power plant. Fusion is one to two /orders of magnitude/ more complex to pull off. So obviously, we're going to have to wait longer for a working power plant. If ITER works (and we're now confident it will), the first prototype power plants (the DEMO machines) won't be far behind.
Can't say I did notice. The only think I noticed is that you are shooting your mouth off as an AC and behaving like a complete wanker. Like a religious conservative, I'd say.
"Science has been wrong before"...
That IS THE ENTIRE POINT of science. Science is not a religion or belief system, as some uninformed religious people you have you believe. Science is only ever an approximation of reality, tested through experiment, and kept honest through peer review.
No such scrutiny, or verification exists in religion. We're just told to believe such-and-such, because of revelation or tradition, and that's it.
To be blunt, the "science has been wrong before" is a very old, very dumb, and heavily shopworn argument trotted out by ignorant, home-schooled religious people. It's a sad reminder of the massive, yawning gulf between the educated and the ignorant in our society.
Can't say I'm sympathetic. If his critical thinking skills, not to mention his social skills are so bad, then he has no business working for NASA, and show go and work for Ken Ham or something, where his abilities and skills will be better appreciated.
Citizen-initiated referenda are a recipe for disaster. The e-petitions that get sent to Downing Street, egged on by our halfwit tabloids are proof of that.
The simple truth, is that the vast majority of people are idiots, and a minority -- worse yet -- are wilfully ignorant. They cannot be trusted to formulate good policy.
Which, as a side note, is why fossil fuel companies' efforts to sabotage action on climate change by vilifying scientific experts, and expertise in general as "unelected liberal elites", "elitists", "antidemocratic", and what-have-you, is such a master stroke. The vast majority of people are dumb, ill-informed, emotional, easily-led beasts, who are lead around by the nose by slick corporate-commissioned PR -- mass opinion is very easily bought. We would be wise to keep mass opinion-as-a-weapon out of the reach of vested interests, if at all possible.
...because getting bad leaders is inevitable. It's an iron law of nature that the exact people you want kept away from power gravitate towards it. And it's an iron law of nature, that if or when people get fed up with bad leaders, they get rid of them, either with huge amounts of upheaval and bloodshed (e.g. the French and Bolshevik revolutions), or peacefully (representative democracy).
Simply put, the killer feature of representative democracy, is that it's easy and painless to kick a bad leader out of power without bloodshed and violence. Our corporate overlords insist upon it -- violent revolution is bad for business.
Project much? The anti-human, anti-Earth, traitorous Right want to destroy the world for the short-term profits of the rich, and will stop at absolutely nothing to do it. Even the most depraved corruption and lies. Some days, I wish the Soviets won the Cold War, and put all the right wing nut jobs in the Gulag.
Discuss.
More right-wing anti-science.
These are the same people who are paying professional shills and con artists to lie about global warming for their own private profit. Their actions speak for themselves.
Repeating a lie over and over doesn't make it true. Granted, it may do in the minds of rightwing true believers (and repeating a lie ad infinitum is a well known propaganda technique).
Most normal people aren't gullible American right wing loonies, and aren't so easily lied to.
Science is not a religion. Only stupid religious people think science is a religion. Only stupid religious people ascribe that flaw to other people.
Science is not religion. Religion is accepting stupid fairytales without proof, reason, logic or questioning in any way. Science is a system of gathering and systemising knowledge, which demands proof every step of the way. If I want, I CAN get a physics degree (which, by the way, I'm in the process of doing right now), learn quantum field theory, devise experiments and test them. Or I could ask somebody who has. There is no faith here, no stupid fairytales, no credulity, no superstition or lies.
Misrepresenting science as faith is extremely low, stupid and easy to debunk.
Climiate science is SCIENCE. In science, belief is irrelevant. Only evidence matters.
The denialists don't have evidence. They have good PR, online polls, debates, and other slick propaganda tools, but they will never win the scientific debate, because the evidence for AGW is overwhelming.
This is a political and ideological issue, not a scientific one.
I could call social-engineering/stealing those documents to be unethical and possibly illegal (IANAL).
But I salute somebody willing to knowingly destroy their own life to out a bunch of paid liars.
The whole thing is morally ambiguous, and whether or not he actually did the right thing (especially if he has a family to support), is open to debate.
I hope Heartland go completely apeshit and try and sue him. Then they'll get destroyed in discovery.
And of course, you have evidence for this, right? There are analytics you could run over the text to prove/disprove the connection, but it's easy to just lie on Slashdot.
Evidence, or STFU.
You blew your credibility the millisecond you quoted WUWT as a reliable source. Anthony Watt is just another right wing corporate whore with no credentials, no scientific training, no mainstream credibility, and a big mouth (very common in the wingnut alternative reality).