Heh. damn my eyes.
first para should have ended:
How dare people not act according to your own notions of the national ideal? They should be forced into national service so that they can be taught! blech.
I was just curious about whether you were bonded or a free agent, since your earlier post was pretty revolting. How dare people
I'd say Kerry is as full of crap as any other politician. You mistake my opposition to Bush for an endorsement of Kerry. At the time, I thought that Kerry was an asshole just like Bush for voting to give Bush the power to go to war, when it was obvious that he would use it directly.
As for the funding vote, I can't believe that you can look at me with a straight face and say that you've never heard of funding bills with all kinds of nasty riders on them.
Want to have a rational debate? Or are you just going to rely on the talking points from the RNC?
Interestingly, Team Bush seems to have taken a breather. Maybe they're having fun watching the debate? No updates for over 5 minutes. Maybe they're busy astroturfing? Don't have any ammo for the past few questions?
Well, it appears that team Bush is a lot faster off the mark than team Kerry. They have 'responses' up on their site about as fast as they can type in Kerry's statements. It looks like they have a bunch of canned statements that they grab to toss up to the top of the page based on the category of the response, since they've had some repeats.
Team Kerry doesn't respond nearly so fast. The timing suggests to me that they're doing more of the work by hand.
As far as I know, no actual researchers bother to make any concrete claims as to the timeframe for viable fusion energy, since they know they're never going to get fully funded. I have a hard time blaming the physicsists and nuclear engineers for their optimism, since if they weren't incurable optimists, they wouldn't be in this field anymore.;-)
If administrations have been given overly optimistic estimates, it's likely because somebody asks them something like, "If we wanted to (if we actually funded it) how soon could we have fusion?" You know, just in the off chance that it could actually be done sometime during their tenure, so they can get the glory.
Regarding price increases making coal-based synthetic gas a economically viable alternative, you should keep in mind that the mere fact that it is economical to tap it doesn't mean that it doesn't still cost us more effort to obtain it. Efforts that could be directed elsewhere, were cheaper (ie easier) alternatives available.
And the physics for a working reactor actually has been pretty much nailed down. That's what ITER is. ITER is actually miniaturized (!) version of what we think a working reactor prototype can be. After ITER, they plan to scale it up a few times, using lessons learned on their scale model, as it were, to build a demonstration reactor.
There are of course alternative lines of research, such as LDX, which use 'advanced fuels' (jargon for D-D fusion, a much higher-energy output @ lower temperature reaction than D-T), which would be desireable as a next generation fusion reactor. The physics of the 2nd generation reactors is what hasn't been nailed down.:-)
My bad. The figure is supposed to be 'deuterium in 1 inch of seawater' = 'energy needs for 100 years'. So that makes things a little easier. Unfortunately I can't find a nice online citation backing this figure up.
Quick back of the envelope: (+ irresponsible google searches)
Their
guess is that 150kg of Deuterium would run a 1000 MW reactor for a year. (google cache, unfortunatly. Searched for "kg deuterium world energy")
Ratio of deuterium to hydrogen: 0.015% = 1.5 10^-4
Mass ratio of hydrogen in water molecule: ~1/9
So:
(9 kg water/kg hydrogen)*(14e12 Watts)*(150 kg D/reactor) / ((1.5e-4 D/H)*(1e9 W/reactor)*(1000 kg water/m^3)) =
1.2 10^8 cubic meters of water processed per year.
Which translates to a mere.1 cubic kilometers of water needed to be processed per year. Of course, it's late at night, and *my* math might be wrong..:-)
From the only blurb I could find freely available on the Economist's website, it appears that the editors are intent on comparing apples to oranges, in their comparison of a fusion plant to a fission plant. The final output of a fission plant is something with a long half-life that you have to deal with for a long time. The waste from a fusion reactor is non-radioactive helium, which if you don't like it, can be released to simply float away into space. (but that'd be silly, since we can use all the extra helium we can get) Sure, the containment vessel will eventually get a little warm, and will have to go sit in a cave somewhere for a long time, but that's nothing compared to some of the really nasty compounds which come out of fission plants.
And the reason money gets wasted on fusion is that the program is on continual life-support due to being cronically underfunded. Sure, if you pay the absolute minimum you can get away with over a long time, you can spend an impressive sum without getting very far. The vast numbers of americans who struggle with credit-card debt could tell you as much. It says nothing about the value of the program.
At the end of the day, we need fusion if our civilization is going to survive. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out in a relatively short timescale. Fission is nice, but there isn't really all that much in the way of fuels sitting around on Earth, so we'd just run into the same problem. Alternative energy sources like wind and ground-based solar are stopgaps at best, and are ultimately limited in the amount of power obtainable from them. even if you could create a closed system which supplies our needs for today, the 2nd Law says there will always be losses and wastage, and the end is that we all live in little thatch huts. If we haven't nuked each other out of existence earlier than that.
Bottom line, if we don't get fusion working in 50 years or so (and we probably will, at the rate we're going), you're going to see the nastiest wars over diminishing oil supplies you've ever seen, followed by population collapse, and if we're not lucky, the collapse of whatever passes for civilization these days.
If we fall now, there won't be any second chance for our descendants in a few hundred years --they won't have the easy access to oil that we enjoyed. We'll be back to pre-industrial days, with whatever tiny bits of tech we can hang onto and keep running with 'renewable' energy sources until it all breaks and can't be replaced because the assembly plant doesn't run.
Although it is true that most fusion schemes require tritium to operate, it is also true that tritium can be bred from deuterium as a 'side-effect' of running a fusion (or fission, for that matter) reactor.
In the case of LDX, however, tritium is completely unnecessary for operation, as it makes use of the Deuterium-Deuterium reaction.
And there's a lot of Deuterium in the oceans. I believe the estimate is that we could run our entire civilization off of the Deuterium present in just the first centimeter of the oceans for one or more years. And we'd put most of that water back, so you don't even have to worry about the oceans being taken away from all the little fishies.:-)
He simply needs to get behind the wheel of his car
That is, of course, if he happens to have permission from the U.S. Government in the form of a drivers' license.
The point is not that airlines or private individuals don't have the right to choose how they wish to restrict access to their property. The point is that the government doesn't have the right to force airlines or private individuals, as proxies, to restrict access to their property.
Although the kidnapping example is technically in the same category of movement restriction, perhaps a better example would be if police set up checkpoints at every major intersection, and required the identification of anyone who wished to pass. This would differ from the current system only in degree, and has been thus far prevented from taking place by both popular opinion and by the logistical nightmare that would ensue, although with the advent of cheap RFIDs, I wouldn't place too much faith in the latter, and I've little in the lasting ability of the former, given the example that you provided with your own comment.
That quip about the massive fusion plant is no joke. For all the money we've blown on fusion development efforts, we could have had a thriving solar industry by now
Care to explain that last statement? Exactly how much money do you think we have 'blown' on fusion research, compared to the money spent on photocells?
And comparing fusion to the superconducting supercollider is stupid. The former is engineering for energy production, and the latter is engineering for physical understanding. Your statements show that you have no understanding of the value or functioning of R&D.
Would you have considered large particle collider experiments a waste of money if they led to the discovery and construction of FTL or inertialess propulsion systems? Sure, we now know such things are unlikely to be possible to construct, but we wouldn't have that knowledge if we didn't have a deeper understanding of the structure of the universe.
I believed what would happen was we would give
money to an international organization which
would fund research in other countries, which
our scientists would not participate in,
or benefit from.
I see, and if this were the case, then it'd be a little silly, yes. But fortunately, U.S. researchers are likely to be involved if there is U.S. funding. Lots of big projects are done with international collaboration these days, and researchers are typically a pretty mobile bunch.
> > my S.O. happens to be a grad student in the fairly small field > > of fusion research.
>My girlfriend in college was a nuclear engineer. >That doesn't qualify me as an expert in nuclear >engineering or politics. It might make you a >bit more well informed, but I don't believe >we can use second hand exposure as an indication >of wisdom.
As a physicist, I'm probably about as close to an expert in the subject as one can get without actually being a nuclear engineer, but that's irrelevant to talking about whether or not something is getting funding.
And if you want to treat information coming from the people who are getting paid to do fusion, about how much they are being paid to do fusion this year, as opposed to years past, as 'second hand exposure', then I don't believe you'll be convinced by anything which can be presented on slashdot, and you're just a troll.
>The budget contains thousands of items. I believe >that few of our lawmakers are cognizant of the >details of even a reasonable percentage of them. >I don't believe Bush saw this as anything more >than a power point screen that got an increase >because it looked good politically.
Hell, I don't care if he consulted chicken bones and the witch-doctor. (although I think that's a bit extreme). *All* politicians look for things to make them look good politically. Most of them choose defense contractors (Bush included). And hell, it *does* make him look good politically simply because it *is* good. I don't mean to give Bush full personal credit if that's what's bugging you, but I do give credit to his Sec. of Energy, and his willingness to be led to fund fusion. That's not to say Bush is my favorite guy, or that I'll vote for him in Nov., but it doesn't mean you should ignore reality.
>Fusion reasearch was funded long before >Bush came into office.
Agreed. I never argued otherwise. I merely stated that fusion has seen increased levels of funding under Bush.
>I believe the article says we spent 2.5 million on >our research, internationally there was 5 billion. >So our research budget was 0.05% of the total? >In a field that requires expensive machines to >validate theories? To claim 'credit' for that >miserable lack of foresight seems foolish to me.
Part of the problem is that there isn't very much to spend a huge amount of money on at the moment. The field of fusion research is limited to a very few universities (and national labs, if you want to count NIF, which I don't). This is because, historically, fusion has never been fully funded, and what funding there is can only support a limited number of researchers and research groups.
And it's not like it's just Bush's lack of foresight. It was under Clinton that we pulled out of ITER in the first place. It's just the usual inability to consistently fund expensive research programs over the long term that we've also seen with NASA. Politicians want to fund activities which will show results by the next election cycle, and tend to cut the budgets of anything which takes longer. Other countries (China especially) have a better focus on the need for fusion, since their need is greater (they see that their economies will be just getting up to steam when the oil runs out..)
>Now they're going to cancel the program entirely? >Let others do all the research and gather all >the wisdom?
Hello? We're still in ITER?
>I think you listened to the spin >doctors and didn't think this through for >yourself.
And I don't think you read the article, or have been paying attention. Let me recap for you:
First, there was ITER, the grand planned collaboration to make a big stomping test fusion reactor. It was going to be very expensive.
The U.S., looking at the huge pricetag, and not wanting to build it somewhere other than the U.S., pulled out of
Exsqueeze me, but my S.O. happens to be a grad student in the fairly small field of fusion research. As a fusion researcher, she is keely aware of the overall funding situation (seeing as how it impacts her *directly*).
While fusion may be a 'back page line item', in a budget somewhere, it is in reality something that the administration is interested in funding, (as evidenced in the many visits by top DOE officials to her lab) and as a result has not only avoided having its budget cut (in real dollars, like most research has in recent years), but has actually increased the amount of funding available to researchers. The US has also gotten back on board with ITER by promising to pay a huge part of the cost of construction, after it had previously backed out, saying it was too expensive. The real availability of money for research is the only thing that counts.
And yeah, they're interested in an educational campaign about fusion. How the hell else are these big corporate interests going to maintain, in the long term, public will to fund fusion research programs? Even if he wins re-election, Bush won't be in office long enough to ensure the program reaches fruition.
It doesn't matter if Bush came up with the idea himself. The point is that he has supported their recommendation. People have been recommending that fusion be funded for years, and are usually completely ignored.
Indeed, but it appears that Bush and co. are interested in punishing the EU (and France in particular) for opposition to the war in Iraq. Prior to the US getting back into the ITER collaboration, Caderache was the favored spot to build it, and even Japan had said that it wasn't going to push for its location on its northern coast.
As soon as we jumped in, however, we swiftly pushed Japan into opposing the French location, and convinced South Korea soon afterward (which itself is impressive, given the traditional animosity going on there).
Excuse me, but Bush *has* funded fusion research during his term in office. Sure, he represents big oil companies, but those companies aren't too stupid to realize that all the oil's going to be gone in 50 years or so.
These guys are in the business of selling energy. You don't think they want to be on top of the next big thing? Fusion is pretty much the only way out, if we want to maintain a high-energy civilization.
While it's true that fusion has been "15 years away" for over 30 years, one must keep in mind that the 15 year estimate assumed that fusion would receive full funding.
Unfortunately, politics being what it is, the fusion research (more engineering, really) program has never been fully funded. If you were to look at the original projections for fusion development, and compare the amount of money estimated as needing to be spent to the amount that has actually been spent, you'll see that the state of the art in fusion is just about the same fraction of the way towards a reactor as the fraction of money which has been spent on it.
Entertainingly enough, the one single, solitary thing I like about the Bush administration is that it has really pushed to fund fusion research during its term in office. Makes me wish Kerry would publicly promise to do the same, so I could at least think about that when I vote for the lesser of two evils...
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. damn my eyes. first para should have ended: How dare people not act according to your own notions of the national ideal? They should be forced into national service so that they can be taught! blech.
I'd say Kerry is as full of crap as any other politician. You mistake my opposition to Bush for an endorsement of Kerry. At the time, I thought that Kerry was an asshole just like Bush for voting to give Bush the power to go to war, when it was obvious that he would use it directly.
As for the funding vote, I can't believe that you can look at me with a straight face and say that you've never heard of funding bills with all kinds of nasty riders on them.
Want to have a rational debate? Or are you just going to rely on the talking points from the RNC?
Do the Bushies pay you, or are you a freelance fascist?
No, he's just saying the same old lines.
And Team Bush is back! New header, but some old blocks. I wonder what database and interface they're using to pull their updates off with?
Interestingly, Team Bush seems to have taken a breather. Maybe they're having fun watching the debate? No updates for over 5 minutes. Maybe they're busy astroturfing? Don't have any ammo for the past few questions?
Team Kerry's website seems to be asleep.
Well, it appears that team Bush is a lot faster off the mark than team Kerry. They have 'responses' up on their site about as fast as they can type in Kerry's statements. It looks like they have a bunch of canned statements that they grab to toss up to the top of the page based on the category of the response, since they've had some repeats. Team Kerry doesn't respond nearly so fast. The timing suggests to me that they're doing more of the work by hand.
If administrations have been given overly optimistic estimates, it's likely because somebody asks them something like, "If we wanted to (if we actually funded it) how soon could we have fusion?" You know, just in the off chance that it could actually be done sometime during their tenure, so they can get the glory.
Regarding price increases making coal-based synthetic gas a economically viable alternative, you should keep in mind that the mere fact that it is economical to tap it doesn't mean that it doesn't still cost us more effort to obtain it. Efforts that could be directed elsewhere, were cheaper (ie easier) alternatives available.
And the physics for a working reactor actually has been pretty much nailed down. That's what ITER is. ITER is actually miniaturized (!) version of what we think a working reactor prototype can be. After ITER, they plan to scale it up a few times, using lessons learned on their scale model, as it were, to build a demonstration reactor.
There are of course alternative lines of research, such as LDX, which use 'advanced fuels' (jargon for D-D fusion, a much higher-energy output @ lower temperature reaction than D-T), which would be desireable as a next generation fusion reactor. The physics of the 2nd generation reactors is what hasn't been nailed down. :-)
Quick back of the envelope: (+ irresponsible google searches)
(9 kg water/kg hydrogen)*(14e12 Watts)*(150 kg D/reactor) / ((1.5e-4 D/H)*(1e9 W/reactor)*(1000 kg water/m^3)) =
1.2 10^8 cubic meters of water processed per year.
Which translates to a mere .1 cubic kilometers of water needed to be processed per year. Of course, it's late at night, and *my* math might be wrong.. :-)
And the reason money gets wasted on fusion is that the program is on continual life-support due to being cronically underfunded. Sure, if you pay the absolute minimum you can get away with over a long time, you can spend an impressive sum without getting very far. The vast numbers of americans who struggle with credit-card debt could tell you as much. It says nothing about the value of the program.
At the end of the day, we need fusion if our civilization is going to survive. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out in a relatively short timescale. Fission is nice, but there isn't really all that much in the way of fuels sitting around on Earth, so we'd just run into the same problem. Alternative energy sources like wind and ground-based solar are stopgaps at best, and are ultimately limited in the amount of power obtainable from them. even if you could create a closed system which supplies our needs for today, the 2nd Law says there will always be losses and wastage, and the end is that we all live in little thatch huts. If we haven't nuked each other out of existence earlier than that.
Bottom line, if we don't get fusion working in 50 years or so (and we probably will, at the rate we're going), you're going to see the nastiest wars over diminishing oil supplies you've ever seen, followed by population collapse, and if we're not lucky, the collapse of whatever passes for civilization these days.
If we fall now, there won't be any second chance for our descendants in a few hundred years --they won't have the easy access to oil that we enjoyed. We'll be back to pre-industrial days, with whatever tiny bits of tech we can hang onto and keep running with 'renewable' energy sources until it all breaks and can't be replaced because the assembly plant doesn't run.
So yeah, I think fusion is important.
In the case of LDX, however, tritium is completely unnecessary for operation, as it makes use of the Deuterium-Deuterium reaction.
And there's a lot of Deuterium in the oceans. I believe the estimate is that we could run our entire civilization off of the Deuterium present in just the first centimeter of the oceans for one or more years. And we'd put most of that water back, so you don't even have to worry about the oceans being taken away from all the little fishies. :-)
That is, of course, if he happens to have permission from the U.S. Government in the form of a drivers' license.
The point is not that airlines or private individuals don't have the right to choose how they wish to restrict access to their property. The point is that the government doesn't have the right to force airlines or private individuals, as proxies, to restrict access to their property.
Although the kidnapping example is technically in the same category of movement restriction, perhaps a better example would be if police set up checkpoints at every major intersection, and required the identification of anyone who wished to pass. This would differ from the current system only in degree, and has been thus far prevented from taking place by both popular opinion and by the logistical nightmare that would ensue, although with the advent of cheap RFIDs, I wouldn't place too much faith in the latter, and I've little in the lasting ability of the former, given the example that you provided with your own comment.
Care to explain that last statement? Exactly how much money do you think we have 'blown' on fusion research, compared to the money spent on photocells?
And comparing fusion to the superconducting supercollider is stupid. The former is engineering for energy production, and the latter is engineering for physical understanding. Your statements show that you have no understanding of the value or functioning of R&D.
Would you have considered large particle collider experiments a waste of money if they led to the discovery and construction of FTL or inertialess propulsion systems? Sure, we now know such things are unlikely to be possible to construct, but we wouldn't have that knowledge if we didn't have a deeper understanding of the structure of the universe.
I see, and if this were the case, then it'd be a little silly, yes. But fortunately, U.S. researchers are likely to be involved if there is U.S. funding. Lots of big projects are done with international collaboration these days, and researchers are typically a pretty mobile bunch.
> > my S.O. happens to be a grad student in the fairly small field
> > of fusion research.
>My girlfriend in college was a nuclear engineer.
>That doesn't qualify me as an expert in nuclear
>engineering or politics. It might make you a
>bit more well informed, but I don't believe
>we can use second hand exposure as an indication
>of wisdom.
As a physicist, I'm probably about as close to an expert in the subject as one can get without actually being a nuclear engineer, but that's irrelevant to talking about whether or not something is getting funding.
And if you want to treat information coming from the people who are getting paid to do fusion, about how much they are being paid to do fusion this year, as opposed to years past, as 'second hand exposure', then I don't believe you'll be convinced by anything which can be presented on slashdot, and you're just a troll.
>The budget contains thousands of items. I believe
>that few of our lawmakers are cognizant of the
>details of even a reasonable percentage of them.
>I don't believe Bush saw this as anything more
>than a power point screen that got an increase
>because it looked good politically.
Hell, I don't care if he consulted chicken bones and the witch-doctor. (although I think that's a bit extreme). *All* politicians look for things to make them look good politically. Most of them choose defense contractors (Bush included). And hell, it *does* make him look good politically simply because it *is* good. I don't mean to give Bush full personal credit if that's what's bugging you, but I do give credit to his Sec. of Energy, and his willingness to be led to fund fusion. That's not to say Bush is my favorite guy, or that I'll vote for him in Nov., but it doesn't mean you should ignore reality.
>Fusion reasearch was funded long before
>Bush came into office.
Agreed. I never argued otherwise. I merely stated that fusion has seen increased levels of funding under Bush.
>I believe the article says we spent 2.5 million on
>our research, internationally there was 5 billion.
>So our research budget was 0.05% of the total?
>In a field that requires expensive machines to
>validate theories? To claim 'credit' for that
>miserable lack of foresight seems foolish to me.
Part of the problem is that there isn't very much to spend a huge amount of money on at the moment. The field of fusion research is limited to a very few universities (and national labs, if you want to count NIF, which I don't). This is because, historically, fusion has never been fully funded, and what funding there is can only support a limited number of researchers and research groups.
And it's not like it's just Bush's lack of foresight. It was under Clinton that we pulled out of ITER in the first place. It's just the usual inability to consistently fund expensive research programs over the long term that we've also seen with NASA. Politicians want to fund activities which will show results by the next election cycle, and tend to cut the budgets of anything which takes longer. Other countries (China especially) have a better focus on the need for fusion, since their need is greater (they see that their economies will be just getting up to steam when the oil runs out..)
>Now they're going to cancel the program entirely?
>Let others do all the research and gather all
>the wisdom?
Hello? We're still in ITER?
>I think you listened to the spin
>doctors and didn't think this through for
>yourself.
And I don't think you read the article, or have been paying attention. Let me recap for you:
First, there was ITER, the grand planned collaboration to make a big stomping test fusion reactor. It was going to be very expensive.
The U.S., looking at the huge pricetag, and not wanting to build it somewhere other than the U.S., pulled out of
While fusion may be a 'back page line item', in a budget somewhere, it is in reality something that the administration is interested in funding, (as evidenced in the many visits by top DOE officials to her lab) and as a result has not only avoided having its budget cut (in real dollars, like most research has in recent years), but has actually increased the amount of funding available to researchers. The US has also gotten back on board with ITER by promising to pay a huge part of the cost of construction, after it had previously backed out, saying it was too expensive. The real availability of money for research is the only thing that counts.
And yeah, they're interested in an educational campaign about fusion. How the hell else are these big corporate interests going to maintain, in the long term, public will to fund fusion research programs? Even if he wins re-election, Bush won't be in office long enough to ensure the program reaches fruition.
It doesn't matter if Bush came up with the idea himself. The point is that he has supported their recommendation. People have been recommending that fusion be funded for years, and are usually completely ignored.
As soon as we jumped in, however, we swiftly pushed Japan into opposing the French location, and convinced South Korea soon afterward (which itself is impressive, given the traditional animosity going on there).
These guys are in the business of selling energy. You don't think they want to be on top of the next big thing? Fusion is pretty much the only way out, if we want to maintain a high-energy civilization.
Unfortunately, politics being what it is, the fusion research (more engineering, really) program has never been fully funded. If you were to look at the original projections for fusion development, and compare the amount of money estimated as needing to be spent to the amount that has actually been spent, you'll see that the state of the art in fusion is just about the same fraction of the way towards a reactor as the fraction of money which has been spent on it.
Entertainingly enough, the one single, solitary thing I like about the Bush administration is that it has really pushed to fund fusion research during its term in office. Makes me wish Kerry would publicly promise to do the same, so I could at least think about that when I vote for the lesser of two evils...