37
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
37 points (87.8% liked)
News
22855 readers
4232 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
fusion won't give us infinite power. It requires tritium last I knew.
What's the bottleneck there? Is there a reason why we couldn't scale up production? Genuinely asking.
It costs energy to make. Im not sure really if its net positive overall but its enough that the moon is talked about for its tritium deposits which makes me think its not very easy to make. wikipedia has some stuff on it but its hard to get overall. Anyway though its not some magical unlimited energy. it has inputs and outputs like anything else.
Of course, yeah. I think we would see nearly unlimited, free energy, but there's obviously still bounds and constraints. I think it could very well be enough energy to be considered limitless for everyday activities and industry, and only run into issues with things like space travel. But we'll have to see. It's such a new field in terms of actually having things to show for, there's a lot we don't know.
Im very skeptical it would get anywhere near that. Besides tritium I know the reactors need certain shielding that gets worn out and becomes radioactive. tritium can be made from fission plants and fusion makes radioactive elements but given everything else we have seen with technology I am doubting these are going to play off each other in a net positive way that can just be kept on going. Its in some ways a lot like wind/solar/water. The sunlight/wind/maybetidal is unlimited but the materials for the collectors are not and have to be replaced. We are really good at using up energy sources and there are like 8 billion of us.
From what I understand tritium is the easiest but there are other ways to acheive fusion. Once we figure out deuterium-tritium fusion we should be able to work towards something like deuterium-deuterium fusion. You also have methods that can be used to manufacture tritium. One of the later stages of the ITER project is to attempt to use the reactor to breed tritium. If they can pull that off then there would be no need for external sources of tritium.
I mean even given that there are other resources that go into it. Fusion will give us more time but its not going to allow super inefficient things like sucking the carbon back out. I don't have great hope because given we squandered the last 50 years I doubt more time will help us. All the same though its better to have it than not have it.