638
Nuclear fusion reaction releases almost twice the energy put in
(www.newscientist.com)
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 06 Feb 2024
638 points (96.2% liked)
News
23310 readers
3724 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. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
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
We already got plenty of nuclear fusion output with no energy input on our part. But folks dont want solar panels
What is with peoples insistence that we only ever use one kind of power generation?
Wind, solar, fusion, fission, hydro, they all have their uses. Why limit yourself like some kind of console fanboy?
That's fair. Im big solar fanboy but if more people were fusion researchers the world wouldnt be a worse place.
Fusion is self sustained and highly scalable.
If it was practical we wouldn't need the other forms, except for places not serviced by electrical grids.
Fission takes a long time to build and finance. It hasn't been invested enough in. We need more green energy to replace fossil fuels faster than governments can get fusion plants up. That's why wind, solar and hydro are and should be the preference.
Hydro needs the right geography. Solar and wind need the right local weather. Solar great in a California desert, but terrible in Scotland where wind and hydro are very effective.
There some cases where a specific technology is the best and clearest option. But when fission becomes reliable, it will cover the vast majority of use cases in the highly Industrialised nations. Everything else will be niche.
Well as soon as I can get a fission reactor in my house I'll give up on energy independence then.
Propaganda by solar bros.
It's only the solar bros doing this because you can sell solar to the average idiot. Most people can't own other forms of clean energy generation directly.
I also have a suspicion that a lot of the renewables vs nuclear debate is stoked by fossil fuel interests
*minus the energy needed to make, maintain, and replace solar panels.
I support more solar installations, just calling out it isn't free power.
As more solar is installed, the less power input we need to provide. There will be a point where all solar power required to make a solar panel will be produced by solar panels
As more solar panels are installed, more material and maintenance are required. They deteriorate over time, and require large physical areas.
I guess at that point, each panel needs to be extremely efficient to limit the space, extremely durable, made of cheap materials, easily recyclable into another panel.
Right so
Is clearly false
I give the comment a pass because it's pretty obvious hyperbole
True, but that's not reliable source of energy though, specially during short and cloudy winter days when it's most needed. Look what happened in Germany and how they became on if the biggest European polluters. The key ingredient missing is energy storage. Once that's solved, solar panels would become much more useful.
We could massively subsidize home battery storage and this wouldn't be an issue at all. Microgrids are the future anyway. The only reason why storage is an issue now is because it needs to be centralized. Once we get away from that tons of new possibilities open up.
Home batteries are expensive and take a lot of place. Also they won't last more than a day. Imagine winter time with short cloudy days. Realistically you need at least a month worth of energy storage and even then you need sun to recharge it. They would distribute energy consumption better though by charging during night.
We have all the technology for energy storage we need, it just needs to be built. Theres gravity storage like pumped hydro, pressure storage, thermal storage, flywheels.
Well, no. Sadly we don't. At least not in the range needed. All of these require either specific geographic relief, something really huge, too expensive or combination. Perhaps the most promising is the green hydrogen, but then again, we have yet to see it at such scale. I'd love to be wrong, though.
yeah, we use a lot of energy, absolutely every form of energy production we have involves really huge things. Massive mines, dams, pipelines, oil rigs, nuclear cooling towers, fossil fuel power plants, oil tankers. They just have to be built. we can excavate dams, build solid weight lifting facilities, molten salt storage, make arrays of flywheels. There's a ton of answers to energy storage already, they dont involve resources with any kind of scarcity, they just have to be built.
Big construction involves environmental concerns, that's why we don't have many new dams nowadays
Boi i better see you raising a fuss over that infrastructure bill
Grrl I don't remember voicing my own opinion on anything
Or bombs. They have fusion versions of those with a great deal more output than input but they’re not really fond of those either.
Solartards don't realise that the problem with solar is storage and sun availability. It's a fantastic idea on paper but unless you're in an tropical country, good luck surviving winters.
WHAT? This is completely new information that nobody has filled journals with papers working out solutions.
we've had grid scale storage for a long time now. storing energy for things like cars needed new technology for weight concerns, but for electrical utilities? You lift a weight upwards with an electric motor during peak times, and let the weight down to spin a generator when you need it. It's been in application with pumped hydro storage for a while.
There are plausible technical designs to make huge batteries out of dirt / dirt cheap materials (e.g. liquid metal battery but there are others). I wonder how that compares to building other power plants. The problem is that humanity is just too stupid to live.
Yes, as evidenced by humans not living
Humanity as a global civilization, not individual humans. The latter you can have intelligent conversations with, the former has the rationality of a slime mold - only growing towards where there is energy / food / money.