US DOE - Fusion Ignition
- Thread starter BanjoCy
- Start date
I need Neil DeGrasse Tyson to break it down for a dummie like me
Reminds me of the building the DMV is located in Chicago. Lots of great times waiting there.
In the past few months CF has made us all Attorney's, Doctor's, Offensive Coordinators, Basketball coaches, Talent scouts, War experts, among other things so now we can not add Nuclear Physicists to our areas of expertise.
Don't listen to the haters. There is a lot of concern that the method used to create the reaction will not be scalable to actually use it for energy production. That said, it's still something humans had never been able to achieve until now, so it's still a pretty big frigging deal for the science.
If a plane was powered by fusion, could it take off from a treadmill?
In the reaction they got more energy then they put in.
But the lasers they were using operate at 1% efficiency, so they used 100 times more power getting enough energy into the reaction in the first place.
Not to mention the reaction net gain was not converted back into electricity at whatever efficiency loss it has.
Basically if I'm calculating it correctly, the gain they needed off the reaction just to make it energy neutral needed to be 187 times more then they got, assuming 100% of the extra gain was converted directly back into electricity.
They claim it may be a decade away, I am guessing more like multiple, multiple decades.
I know a scientist at Livermore extremely well and have asked about this and other research going on at the lab. They've basically answered nothing for classified reasons. From the small amounts I have gathered. This has FAR more implications for our military and national defense than it does moving us towards a greener grid system.
I haven't gotten my CF fusion degree yet, but I assume we're still just using a steam turbine to generate electricity?
Those two things go hand in hand.
Our national defense is weakened both by being dependent on ****** countries in the middle east for oil as well as by the effects of climate change that are likely to increase conflicts around the globe as time goes on.
But yes, if we could develop compact fusion reactors they could power all sorts of things, from ships to larger aircraft.
Yes, even if someday we are able to harness the powers of the sun itself, we'll still be using it to boil water to generate our energy.
Didn't know they had any scientific stuff in Livermore. Town of 400 some by Fort Dodge must be rockin'
So....we get to see Real Genius finally play out?
