The press release I saw said prototype in five years, which is still shockingly close for a fusion power project.
Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why, it doesn't even slow them up!
That would be great, but on the other hand, being in a state of not yet having a prototype doesn't really make me feel like they can say with certainty that they will in fact have one.
Huh, the link in 2 USED to go somewhere.
Ah they corrected the typo in the url. This one should work:
I haven't yet figured out why a press release would be plausible.
I'm deeply skeptical, but this is way too practical for me to have any relevant expertise. Probably togolosh knows better than anyone else here.
Since you're bat-signalling physicists, I'll throw in a comment from my father that I'd love some fact-checking on. He mentioned having a mentor in grad school who'd been a student of Fermi, then said something like, "of course, back then, everyone cared who you'd worked for. It's not like that anymore. Nobody cares who you worked for." The boyfriend and I couldn't figure out whether it was so different from our field (where the term "pedigree" is used without irony) or whether he was simply wrong.
7: Yeah, that. On the other hand, it's a real company -- that is, it's not a press release from someone who says they made a time machine in their garage. And I don't quite see the benefit to Lockheed from grabbing headlines with something they're going to have to back off from.
But I really don't have a sense of plausibility at all.
Hmm.
They say that they need to do five complete design iterations until they have a working prototype, which sounds plausible if optimistic. It is of course possible that the third cycle will reveal a fundamental flaw that they can't work around.
They also say that the small size of their proposed reactor means they can do their iterations in one year instead of five or ten. Which would be pretty helpful.
But this reads an awful lot like someone trying to drum up funding for their experimental project by talking about how awesome it's going to be.
Which is why it's better to be Lockheed Martin than a Nigerian spammer.
They have a proven ability to make fancy YouTube videos, at least.
Right now the bank is offering .0032115% interest. Your (where you have money) choices are getting nothing, loaning money to poor people at usurious rates, or trying a long shot.
That's okay, gloomsters; if we get free, or even really cheap, energy, we'll just cook the planet with waste heat instead of GHG. Noooooo hoooooope. Doooooooomed.
DEAR SIR OR MADAM
THE LATE GENERAL SANNI ABACHA LEFT THE SECRET OF ABUNDANT, LOW EMISSIONS ENERGY LOCKED IN A SECRET ACCOUNT WHEN HE DIED. I WRITE TO YOU FOR YOUR GREATEST ASSISTANCE BY SENDING SOME SMALL NEUTRONS TO MY COUNTRY THAT WE MAY TOGETHER FREE NEUTRONS AND BREAK-EVEN WITH GREAT ENERGY TOGETHER
BLESSED,
AMBASSADOR LEONARD MALTIN
I know more money is better, but I can't imagine this release would get them much more money from DoD than they already get. I guess stock prices might go up.
Tom McGuire, who heads the project, told Reuters that his team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed's Skunk Works program for the past four years, but decided to go public with the news now to recruit additional partners in industry and government to support their work.OK, jake and Sifu win.
Lockheed Martin has a ton of cash to invest in R&D, and has some incentive to do publicity stunts like this. Even if the project doesn't pan out, it's not like anyone else has a working fusion reactor either, and it's good marketing... it reinforces the whole Skunk Works mythology about achieving the impossible.
Feh. You people are no fun at all. I was all "too cheap to meter", and now I'm back assuming that the world is going to continue to come to an end.
The too cheap to meter disaster is *much* slower and more interesting.
Coal didn't become an industry without government handouts and bankruptable early investors, so; first tragedy then farce.
I think this and the Elon Musk thing--what did he want to do? Catapult commuters between SF and LA? Build a great big commuter water slide?--are just more illustrations of the fact that if you are powerful enough, a bold claim and a back of the envelope calculation can get you serious newspaper coverage.
I wondered about the thermal risk clew mentioned when reading about this today. The idea of cheap fusion has been coming up periodically all my life, and the fact that so much energy, "too cheap to meter," would not be a good thing is often present. Probably saw the thermal concern first raised in the Tokamak era.
Nonetheless, I'd take slower and more interesting.
Said the actress to the archbishop.
Part of the problem with this, as with anything related to nuclear power, is that even if there was a blog post written by a sensible expert that told us what we should think about the claim, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell the difference between that and a blog post written by a crazy person pretending to be an expert. The nuclear-power blogosphere seems to be full of people calling other people idiots, and it might take some effort to disentangle who's right.
9, maybe nowadays people care what hundred-person project you worked on, but not who your direct mentor was?
Speaking of aerospace, you know when they talk about the F-35 costing 870 trillion dollars or whatever, where does that money go? Isn't the bulk of it going to get spent on salaries of people in California and Alabama and wherever? I mean, I assume some of the materials are expensive, but mostly because they're also highly processed by a lot of people who have a lot of managers, and the managers have to consult with HR, etc, etc. I mean, eventually some of it ends up in numbered accounts in Switzerland, or bunkers in Lebanon or wherever, but all the big defense contractors employ lots of people at quite good annual salaries, don't they? So, back to the OP, if somebody does invest because of this press release ("Buffet? Buffet? Anyone? Buffet?") aren't they basically just paying the salaries of people who would otherwise be being paid by the USG or some other govt they had a contract with for fighter planes or missiles or whatever? I dunno, at some point it all seems to boil down to earning a precarious living by taking in one another's washing.
So, back to the OP, if somebody does invest because of this press release ("Buffet? Buffet? Anyone? Buffet?") aren't they basically just paying the salaries of people who would otherwise be being paid by the USG or some other govt they had a contract with for fighter planes or missiles or whatever?
Yes, and as the first link the OP says there's a reason Lockheed is interested in this right now:
In recent years, Lockheed, the Pentagon's top supplier, has been increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.
This is on the periphery of the sort of thing I supposedly understand for a living. Fusion power has a long history of things that look great in simulation but are unstable in reality. Every plasma-fusion-power machine of the past 40 years started with some vague idea that the *configuration* was obviously ignition-capable, and the prototyping process would reveal some minor bugs.
In the past, though, the minor bugs were things like "all the plasma escapes due to pretty basic thermo" (magnetic mirrors), or "all the plasma escapes due to instabilities" (tokamaks) or "haha, here is the price quote on special twisty magnets" (stellerators), or "wait, that doesn't even work on paper" (polywell, Farnsworth, etc.) Given the long history of naive optimism on this point, one isn't going too far out on a limb by speculating that Lockheed's optimism is likewise naive.
On the other hand: I think that their approach is some sort of magnetic-mirror, which hasn't had so much attention over the past 30 years, so maybe new technologies have gotten a handle on its old flaws.
There has been a lot of oral sex in this opera so far.
as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.
Okay, but yeah, that's what I'm calling into question. Sure, projects get defunded, or refunded, or whatever, but overall military spending hasn't really gone down in the US, has it? I'm confused about exactly how the automatic cut off thingies worked for DoD. At any rate, it all seems like turf wars among the constant grouping of big masters of war, all of whom serve on each other's boards, anyway.
Sure, projects get defunded, or refunded, or whatever, but overall military spending hasn't really gone down in the US, has it?
Yes, it has. It's still very high, of course.
I'm confused about exactly how the automatic cut off thingies worked for DoD.
What's confusing? The automatic cuts went into effect and DoD had to reduce its budget. Just like every federal agency, except that the defense cuts were deeper.
17: one of the sons of Olesegun Obasanjo (former president of Nigeria) works/worked at Microsoft and had a blog I used top read back in the day. He mentioned that sending email was a particularly unreliable form of communication for him.
36 is amazing and I hope someone gets a great short story out of it.
I'm pretty sure Josh has told that story before. It sounds very familiar, anyway.
33: for a while when it looked like the "peace dividend" was going to be a thing people were looking seriously at manned missions to Mars, in what was in retrospect obviously a way to continue funneling money to defense contractors.
The fusion reactor bit is great if it works, although frankly if it looks like burning fossil fuels is going to raise the sea level twenty meters in a hundred years even nuclear fission starts looking good. there's a difference between "the land is uninhabitable because you have a 10% higher chance of getting cancer by the time you turn 60" and "the land is uninhabitable because it's under fifty feet of water".
39.2: The amount of land affected by nuclear fission is tiny compared to the amount affected by sea level rise, too.
Not that I see much chance of nuclear fission being our saving grace from climate change.
That's okay, gloomsters; if we get free, or even really cheap, energy, we'll just cook the planet with waste heat instead of GHG.
On the offchance that anyone accidentally takes this seriously: no, we won't. The current energy demand for the whole of the human race is about 15 terawatts. The amount of heat seeping up to the surface from the interior of the planet is 47 terawatts. The amount of energy delivered by solar radiation is 173 thousand terawatts.
Or, to put it another way: doubling or tripling human energy consumption would have a negligible effect on global temperatures. To crank up global temperatures by three degrees, we'd have to raise our collective energy consumption from 15 terawatts to 4,800 terawatts (Chaisson, 2008).
That is quite a lot. Basically that means a population of over nine billion, each of them running a small to medium-sized ship.
I mean, it's a problem if you're a Pierson's puppeteer but not really for the rest of us.
Thanks for that clarification, ajay. I know very little about fusion, but it didn't seem like the waste heat could be that big a problem. In my world, which revolves mainly around diesel generators, waste heat is primarily considered a valuable resource to be captured and used, and we make every effort to do that.
It's not just the waste heat at the generator stage. The vast majority of the energy we use ends up as heat eventually.
Three billion with three ships apiece! And a pony!
Exponential growth is out. Two ships. Communal ponies.
Actually, given the state of the F-35 project at the moment, if I were Lockmart I'd push out a press release saying *anything*. The fucking aeroplane bends, bends I say, when it manoeuvres and makes the engine compressor blades spinning at 20,000rpm kiss the casing (a problem this engine manufacturer has had with several other projects). This causes wear, heat, and failure. Fortunately, congress saved money by cutting the alternative engine project at Rolls-Royce out of the budget, so it's this engine or bust. The alternative is to make the airframe stiffer, i.e. heavier, but the plane's already been through multiple rounds of weight crisis already...
Fortunately, congress saved money by cutting the alternative engine project at Rolls-Royce out of the budget, so it's this engine or bust.
IIRC this was the engine that the USAF had wanted to cut for years and Congress kept insisting on funding? I missed that they'd finally cut it.
Yes. They kept re-funding for ages, then flipflopped and cut it, and now it looks like a buy cheap, buy two situation.
Cut in 2009 budget, reinstated, eventually killed in 2011. Apparently the remaining budget to flight test was $2.9bn. That said, they had 800 hours of test running on it at up to 100% so I wonder how hard it would be to reactivate the project.
Thanks for that clarification, ajay. I know very little about fusion, but it didn't seem like the waste heat could be that big a problem. In my world, which revolves mainly around diesel generators, waste heat is primarily considered a valuable resource to be captured and used, and we make every effort to do that.
Waste heat is a problem, just not in a (direct) global warming sense. It's a major problem for water pollution and causing algal blooms.
as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.
The what now? Didn't we just buy them a brand new war?
clew, are your sentence fragments pointing at an argument? I agree that it's interesting that, on something like a thousand-year timescale, our current growth rate has to break down because waste heat would become a problem. But it's not clear how it's relevant for questions of energy use in our lifetime.
31: Do you know a readable introduction to the different technologies and their issues?
51: yes, it's a sometimes-serious local problem but not a global one.
41. Not that I see much chance of nuclear fission being our saving grace from climate change.
I agree, even though if you really take mitigating climate change seriously, fission is the only currently available zero-CO2 power source that could replace coal, oil and natural gas.
Just too much bad publicity from Chernobyl (obsolete reactor run by idiots) and Fukushima (site selection by idiots).
47. Obviously you just lack patience: The F22, the previous fighter boondoggle, was used in combat for the first time this week! ... as a bomber, but you can't have everything.
56.last: my long-standing prediction that the F-22, in its entire lifespan, will kill more US fighter pilots in flight than it will foreign fighter pilots remains undisturbed.
Fukushima (site selection by idiots).
A bit unfair. You sort of have to put nuclear power stations on the coast or, at least, by the side of a large river or lake. The problem with Fukushima Daiichi was not putting the emergency generators somewhere waterproof. Fukushima Daini, next door, did this, and was fine.
If they're gonna make so much electricity, why can't they just use lots of air conditioners to cool things down, HUH?
58. Okay then, "Plant design by idiots."
Drum quibbled politely yesterday about "progressive" doom-and-gloom on display in this conversation.
Mark Kleiman hits a lot harder this morning.
OK, so we have nothing to fear from nuclear power as long as management is always competent and no idiots are ever allowed anywhere near a power plant. Got it.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the technocratic logic that it's better than fossil fuels, but it's worth pointing out that there are in fact drawbacks.
Fusion and dark matter on the same day??
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/16/dark-matter-detected-sun-axions
OK, so we have nothing to fear from nuclear power as long as management is always competent and no idiots are ever allowed anywhere near a power plant. Got it.
Yeah, basically it's pretty much like every other sort of technology ever invented in that respect.
This is my scientific illiteracy asking a question, but I don't understand why a fusion reactor is considered so much safer than a fission reactor. Doesn't a fusion reactor have a risk of having a self-sustaining reaction spiral out of control and, like, turn the earth into a star or something? I'm sure there's some reason why this isn't even a theoretical risk, since no one seems worried about it, but I don't understand why. Assume of course that management is incompetent and idiots are staffing the power plant. (Assuming otherwise is unrealistic.)
Yeah, basically it's pretty much like every other sort of technology ever invented in that respect.
Except the consequences of "oops, I guess I fucked that up" are a lot worse than pretty much any other sort of technology ever invented.
64: The fuel for a fusion reactor isn't dangerous by itself the say it is for a fission reactor.
I don't understand why a fusion reactor is considered so much safer than a fission reactor. Doesn't a fusion reactor have a risk of having a self-sustaining reaction spiral out of control and, like, turn the earth into a star or something?
No. You can get a self-sustaining fission reaction by just having a big enough pile of uranium in one place. It can be at room temperature and pressure, just stacked up there in a squash court, and it'll heat up and go on heating up until it melts down.
Fusion reactions can only happen at really high temperatures and pressures, like those in a star (created by the gravitational compression and resulting heating of a big cloud of gas) or a hydrogen bomb (created by a fission bomb going off right next to it). Fusion reactors use something like, eg, big magnets to contain the fuel while it's fusing. If you turn those off, then it'll dissipate, which will make a bit of a mess of your reactor but that's it. The smallest a fusion reactor can be and still be self-sustaining without external containment is roughly star-sized.
The fuel for a fusion reactor isn't dangerous by itself the say it is for a fission reactor.
Granted, but on the other hand, there's an ass-ton of the "fuel" just floating around in the atmosphere, which makes me worry that if the combustion chamber were ever insufficiently "sealed off" due to a malfunction of some kind, it could "ignite" all of it. So to speak.
The smallest a fusion reactor can be and still be self-sustaining without external containment is roughly star-sized.
Ah... okay. That's helpful.
Also, I think the fuel is relatively rare isotopes of hydrogen.
70: if it reassures you at all, we have set off a load of uncontained fusion reactions in the atmosphere over the last 50 years (H-bomb tests) and none of them spiralled out of control and set fire to the earth. If it were going to happen it would have done so by now.
72: yeah, the easiest sort of fusion to do depends on two rare isotopes of hydrogen fusing with each other. (Deuterium and tritium). You can get fusion between two normal hydrogen atoms, it's what powers the sun, but you need much higher temperatures IIRC.
Someone with a few more physics qualifications should probably take this one from here.
"No worse than an H-bomb explosion" isn't actually very reassuring. It's better than setting fire to the earth, I guess.
63.1: The fact that I'm first hearing of this from your comment doesn't seem encouraging.
54: Sadly no. I have a sort of patched-together understanding gleaned from colloquia and grad school friends' thesis defenses and such. And, um, Wikipedia. I once had an office next to that of an respected but very curmudgeonly emeritus plasma physicist; I pieced together an opinion on ITER by listening to this guy talk and applying a huge grain of salt.
It's better than setting fire to the earth, I guess.
New rollover text.
"No worse than an H-bomb explosion" isn't actually very reassuring.
No, the point I was making is that an H-bomb explosion is a really big, uncontained fusion reaction - much bigger than you would have inside a fusion reactor (obviously!) - and even that didn't set the air on fire, so you shouldn't worry about a problem at a fusion reactor doing it.
To use an analogy, it's like you said "wait, pollen's flammable and there's lots of it in the air - does that mean that if I light this candle, I might set the entire atmosphere on fire?" and my reply is "well, no, because there have been lots of huge forest fires and they didn't set the atmosphere on fire, so you shouldn't worry that your candle will do it."
New rollover text.
Not until someone acknowledges the present text!!!
The smallest a fusion reactor can be and still be self-sustaining without external containment is roughly star-sized.
Just above brown dwarf size, in fact.
80: I was getting sick of the "Jolt" one.
I spent an embarrassingly large amount of time yesterday trying to figure out WTF these guys were proposing. I think I know what they are doing, and it'd not crazy, just ambitious. The best source I found was AvLeak, which has some technical details and some pictures.
31 is good, but the configuration isn't a simple mirror machine, it's a hybrid of mirror and polywell. The idea is this: Take a mirror configuration (parallel field lines in the middle, pinched down at the ends), and inside it put a set of Helmholtz coils with opposite polarity. This means that the field at the center (where the plasma goes) is small and it gets stronger in any direction. This is good for confinement (though it will leak a little out the ends, which can't be avoided).
I think the idea is credible once you hose off the hype. Five years seems like an awfully fast development timeline, but if they have money it's not insane.
Ooh, exciting! (God, I love this place. How else would I have someone who actually had an informed opinion to ask about something like this?)
83: Interesting. I'll ask you the same thing I asked Scomber mix: can you point toward any reasonably readable introduction where I could learn a little more?
||
Can one of the physicists here tell me if this is plausible?
|>
86: Above, essear was being doubtful because the first he'd heard of it was in the Guardian rather than professionally.
As an ignorant layperson, "we have a seasonal signal therefore it must be dark matter interacting electromagnetically" doesn't seem parsimonious. But then again I'd never heard of axions until now.
The paper seems to have been posted to arxiv in March, which makes it even weirder that I haven't heard of it. Also seems to have been written in Microsoft Word, which strengthens my skepticism. But I'll try to read it tonight and form a more considered opinion.
85: I don't know of anything between Wikipedia level and textbook level. The texbook I'd recommend if you want to get into details (at the undergrad level) is F. F. Chen.
That seems a bit dated, but if it tells me what I need to get at Home Depot, seems good.
There has been a lot of oral sex in this opera so far.
I thought there was just the one blojobus interruptus.
I didn't even know operas had blowjobs.
Well now I really regret missing Partenope.
I'm just learning about this now, but I think the axion paper is already ruled out by (or within a hair's breadth of being ruled out by) CAST, an experiment that looks at a similar interaction (axions emitted by the Sun and interacting with a magnetic field) but does so in a nice controlled lab environment.
The news of Powder Her Face never reached Moby's bar, I guess.
(I couldn't remember the name of the opera so googled "blowjob aria". It turns out that there's a star of pornographic film clips who goes by "Aria", so that didn't work very well.)
At my bar, we only discuss operas that require a full orchestra.
96: That's one of the things I wanted to check later. It seems like the least you can do, when proposing an axion candidate, is plot a blob in the (m_a, g_{a gamma gamma}) plane that's consistent with your claimed observation, along with all the existing constraints. I can't imagine why they didn't do that unless it's either laziness or that their signal is already ruled out.
You most definitely have not missed Partenope! Last night was opening night. And it's one of those rare opera productions that succeeds as theater. It's really awfully good.
Yeah but I mean I'm probably not going to make it.
I guess I should investigate prices at least. Does it seem likely to have rush seats available, do you think?
Big surprise, it's super expensive unless you want to sit behind a column.
OR unless you can prevail upon your grad-student girl to get rush tickets but that is dicy.
It is absurd and beyond reason how much more expensive opera is than ballet. Pisses me off.
I hear that the St. Louis opera is quite affordable.
Can't send the kid there on the bus on a school night, tho.
I bet he could just sneak in to the SF Opera, though. He should give it a try, anyway.
I would think Handel would be an ok bet for rush tickets but I am not really basing this on anything. Reviews so far (including mine hooray) are extremely positive but I doubt that has much effect.
63. Yeah, basically it's pretty much like every other sort of technology ever invented in that respect.
Worse than that; the fossil fuel technologies screw us over even if they are designed and run by really smart non-idiotic people. They are inherently unsafe at all times and for all uses.
What kind of age do we live in where nosflow just drops in a mention that he has a girl and nobody even comments?
I counted a near-cunnilingus in the first act, blowjob and cunnilingus in the second. Neither to completion, although the cunnilingus appeared to almost get there. The third act had no sex, but there were giant erect nipples and some tap dancing.
Not sending the kid to that, at least not unaccompanied.
Nobody has to learn about tap dancing.
If DQ is going to go on about how dressing her son properly appeals to les filles, and I believe also something in a similar vein about learning French, then it seems churlish not to expose him to tap as well.
He had tap class this afternoon, in fact!
Well, he's spoiled already then isn't he, so what's the issue with the opera?
How about you take him, neb, and just let me know how those conversations in the interval go.
I totally will if you pay for the tickets.
You can get balcony seats for 77 each on Thursday night, that's not bad at actually. I may take him myself!
Thank you! I know you are and I sincerely appreciate it, will discuss with the guys tonight.
for an extra consideration I can be persuaded not to ask for a ticket for the aforementioned girl as well, so as not to expose him to constant handsiness in the seats.
Sincerity levels of 124 may be found to be unstable.
so as not to expose him to constant handsiness in the seats.
You don't think it's a bit rude for your girlfriend to be feeling up dq's kid at the opera?
It is kind of odd to experience the age of girls/young women checking out the kid when we are walking down the street creep up from 14-16 to mid-twenties.
What is "near-cunnilingus"? Licking a thigh?
90: The book you link says it's "Volume One" and its table of contents doesn't appear to contain anything about fusion, just plasma physics. Is there a "Volume Two" that Amazon doesn't know about?
131: That would be kind of burying the lede, wouldn't it?
The thread about changing tires was yesterday.
131: That would be kind of burying the lede, wouldn't it?
No, I think that's something else again.
Burying the lede is still usually last.
What kind of age do we live in where nosflow just drops in a mention that he has a girl and nobody even comments?
I was more focused on the fact that he's fully employed in a non-academic setting and is still thinking of taking advantage of tickets available only to students, seniors, and active-duty military. Pony up, gentrifier.
131, 134: I set 'em up, you knock 'em down.
Someone on my FB feed posted this link which links to this arxiv paper which claims that waste heat will be a problem on the 100 to 200 year time scale rather than the 500 to 1000 year time scale suggested by the arguments in clew's link in 46.2. So there's another thing I should try to check for myself. Seems disturbing.
I mean, not super disturbing, unless maybe you're an economist.
Pony up, gentrifier.
Pretty sure the damage has been done in my neighborhood.
I hear that the St. Louis opera is quite affordable.
Sadly, they sing everything in English.
141: That doesn't change your moral obligation.
Looks like the author of the textbook togolosh recommends also wrote a book called An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet that's aimed at a broader readership. Might be interesting.
That does not fit with my information.
If this is the opera in question Blume's information seems up-to-date.
Then perhaps I am misremembering something, because that does seem to be the case.
Oh, this convo reminds me , is Thorn about? Ashley Bouder Project in Cleveland October 25, sure to be a great show.
139: lot of handwaving in that paper. I used to be a huge fan of OTEC power but the more we learn about the importance of quasi-stable ocean currents on current climate patterns the more it scares me.
139: the paper isn't about general waste heat, like what happens if everyone turns on an extra toaster and the planet heats up. It's mostly about the large sun-absorbing areas of future solar farms. Can't we offset that by painting all the rooftops and parking lots white? Or will that crazy kickstarter put solar panels under all the parking lots?
Solar panels under the parking lots?
153: Well, they also have their "nuclear" curve which isn't explained in detail but seems to be about the waste heat from the power plants themselves from the low efficiency of converting all the energy to electricity.
The albedo effect of solar panels is the thing the Freakonomics guys claimed made solar panels useless for dealing with climate change, for which Ray Pierrehumbert raked them over the coals. The estimates there show that this solar panel albedo effect is tiny at current energy consumption. But if it increased by a factor of 100, it would be significant (about a Watt per square meter). At a 1% growth in energy consumption per year, that would take (back-of-the-envelope) 460 years. Doesn't seem quite consistent with the estimates in the Cowern and Ahn paper, which shows that forcing being reached in something more like 200 years.
It seems like the upshot of all of this is that percent-level growth in energy use per year, with most of the energy technologies we talk about, will eventually cause a new global warming problem independent of greenhouse gases. But it makes a big difference if that problem arises in 100 years or in 1000 years.
Piketty's guess was that growth rates will drop below 1%, right? I wonder if he would be okay with zero.
And anyway, yeah, these problems seem more manageable than the greenhouse gas problem. For one thing, they're not cumulative, in the sense that the temperature increase is a function of the instantaneous energy production rather than the integrated emissions over centuries.
Percent-level annual growth in total energy use in the long-term seems like a pretty questionable assumption to me. For one thing, at some point global population is going to peak and start declining. It definitely does seem to be a key assumption for the paper in 139, though.
Does the future even have parking lots?
We'll need somewhere to put all the self-driving cars.
"They paved paradise to put up an albedo-adjustment zone."
158: Sure. But on the 100-year timescale they're talking about, it seems more reasonable than if the timescale is several times longer. I wonder what sort of assumptions go into economic models in the Stern report or whatever-- is it commonly assumed that there will be at least 1% growth over the next century?
I think higher is usually assumed, but I don't see how one could have any confidence in the number. 1%±10%.
It looks like the model the Stern Review used was based on one of the IPCC scenarios that average annual GDP growth of 1.9% and average annual population growth of 0.6%, which they then used to do 1000 runs simulating GDP per capita over 100 years (2001 to 2200) to get a probability distribution, with 1.3% annual GDP growth assumed thereafter. Explained here (page 19 of the pdf).
The paper seems to be assuming that CO2 emissions will be largely eliminated during the first half of this century. That's a large enough change from our current trajectory that assuming 1% constant growth for the 75 years after that seems like a bit of a stretch.
Self-heating, self-driving cars in perpetual motion.
It's a pretty odd paper. The main point seems to be that we should be prioritizing wind, hydrokinetic, and (given suitable efforts to address the albedo issue) solar projects over geothermal and nuclear projects when investing in infrastructure to replace fossil-fuel generation to avoid this heat issue in the post-carbon future. Which, sure, sounds fine given their assumptions, but is this really an active issue anywhere?
Also they don't appear to discuss conventional hydro at all, which seems like an odd omission given that it would presumably fall into their "good" category that uses dissipative energy rather than producing additional heat. (Maybe it's mentioned in there somewhere; I only skimmed the paper quickly.)
In their categorization, what's wrong with geothermal?
It doesn't use all the heat it extracts from the earth, so some goes into the atmosphere and contributes to warming. They don't seem to discuss this in any detail, but I assume that's the problem.
Piketty actually talks about the Stern Review in the cornucopia of topics that is chapter 16. I suppose I could have done a better job with my summary, but it's only a couple pages and as I remember it, it doesn't amount to much more than "climate change is a problem, some people have made projections, we don't really know what's going to happen but it's going to be harder to deal with it than it would be to raise taxes."
Geothermal is adding energy to the Earth's surface by increasing the rate at which it's released from the interior. It's also much more like mining than it is renewable energy; rock is sort of a crappy conductor of heat. Not to mention all the induced earthquakes...
Geothermal is adding energy to the Earth's surface by increasing the rate at which it's released from the interior. It's also much more like mining than it is renewable energy; rock is sort of a crappy conductor of heat. Not to mention all the induced earthquakes...
174: How does that work when you use it for cooling? I know of a church which used it to heat in winter and cool in summer.
Indeed, the techniques involved in geothermal are more or less exactly the same as those involved in oil and gas extraction (and they're just as expensive). The only difference is that they're extracting heat instead.
175: That sounds more like a ground-source heat pump, which is a different technology from the sort of geothermal electrical generation jake and I are talking about, although they're often lumped together.
175: that's different; it's using the earth to smooth out temperature swings. Your basement is always more or less the same temperature; the thing your church has is just thermally connecting itself to the ground rather than physically going into the basement.
Geothermal power is digging down around hot spring and using the energy to generate electricity on an ongoing basis.
"They paved paradise to put up an albedo-adjustment zone."
Might be an idea to introduce tax advantages for high-albedo cars. The cars in LA alone have a total surface area of 5.8 square kilometres. That's going to make quite a difference in terms of absorbing heat.
I really wanted 161 to have been posted by Opinionated Big Yellow Taxi.
In other news, my SILS does not have any tumours according to scans. Neurologists will be investigating further. Kind of good news but most of the potential causes I can think of for her symptoms (bouts of collapsing with weakness down one side / speech failure) could be worse than say, a benign easily operable tumour. This is a fit outdoorsy (her job in involves supervising / teaching at an activity centre + training youth workers) woman aged about 36. She does have PCOS but is not significantly overweight (through her own serious efforts).
Moderate joy at 180, in that case... what do they reckon it could be? TIA or stroke?
What 181 says. The one sided weakness and speech failure sounds a little like my slow bleed a couple of years ago, although I didn't do the collapsing. Were it such a thing it says nothing as to whether it's serious or trivial. Fingers crossed in any event.
180: It's no fun being a medical mystery. Best to her and wishes for an easily remedied problem.
I get all this at third hand but don't think anything has been suggested right now. Would be nice if they could rule stuff out in the meantime.
151: I know we'd talked about that and it sounds amazing, but ten it turns out that's the one night this year Lee and I have a date to actually go do something, because as she drove to her job interview she saw a billboard for a show they'd be hosting and decided it was a sign in more ways than one, so well be at a comedy thing up there and my parents will watch the girls since three babysitters in a row bailed. Plus a birthday party and pre-Halloween stuff.... Just low culture all weekend, I think.
130: Volume 2 was to have been the fusion technology one, but he never wrote it. The other book of his you mention might be worth a read.
Fusion: Science, Politics, and the invention of a New Energy Source is good but it was written in 1985, and it's at a pop-science level of detail and you probably want a bit more than that. A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy might be the book you are looking for, but I have not read it and it looks like it focuses heavily in ITER.
Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking is a skeptical look at fusion, focusing on politics and history rather than technology. Of these three (based on reading Amazon reviews and reading a few pages via "look Inside") I'd say the most promising is A Piece of the Sun.
None of the books I found seem to have details or even much mention of the dark horse candidates, or even a survey of fusion device concepts. As I work on one of these I'm always a little discouraged that they give the impression that fusion research consists of ITER, NIF, and a bunch of wild-eyed crazies building devices in the garage.
I found the patent. Looks like I was right about the basics of the idea.
Let me be the first to solicit guest posts if you read anything else in the future that seems interesting about this -- it sounds more plausible, it sounds less plausible, you have something to say about what they're doing that might explain it to a lay audience, whatever.
If you're taking requests, what this blog needs is a good old-fashioned music-mix sharing thread. Or, maybe the blog does or doesn't need it, but my music library sure needs it. Those used to be semi-regular features, but it's been quite a long time. ("A long time.")
Have a lovely date!
I think someone else expressed interest, was it von wafer? Can't remember.
The same way that the constraints imposed by rules enhance the beauty of a sonnet or a haiku, we should have some limitations on the music sharing. I suggest only songs by Fleetwood Mac or members of Fleetwood Mac.
190.1: I'm glad SOMEONE thinks that would be a good idea. I do actually hope it will be fun. Things have just been bad and I'm worn out and we mostly just don't spend any time together because that avoids conflict. A good night out could presumably help a lot, so I'll work very hard on being pleasant and agreeable and all that.
Also on being relaxed and enjoying yourself, I hope!
Further to 63 and the following discussion: first, the claimed signal wouldn't directly have anything to do with dark matter, since the axions they're claiming to have maybe detected would be produced in the Sun. Second, the paper is not very clearly written, but based on a few scattered remarks in the paper and the figure in the news article, it appears that they need the X-rays to arrive at the satellite from a direction that doesn't line up with the direction to the Sun. This seems completely nuts: the axions can convert to X-rays in the Earth's magnetic field, but this process has to respect momentum conservation, so the X-rays are going to keep moving in the same direction the axions moved in, meaning they will appear to come from the Sun.
All of the axions I've found curve about 30 degrees to the left. Don't know why.
The book togolosh recommends in 90 and the other book by the same author I mentioned in 146 are both available through my employer's library website as free PDF downloads. Sweet.
182: Yeah, the one-sidedness reminds me of my ischemic stroke of 2007 but the recurrences don't. I can see where the symptoms from a slow bleed might wax and wane tho'.
195: All of the axions I've found curve about 30 degrees to the left.
So, similar to LB's sampling problem.
The one sided weakness and speech failure sounds a little like my slow bleed a couple of years ago
Reported with impressive sang-froid in the comments here, in fact.
"A small bit of emergency brain surgery in the morning. Saw a blue tit and several chaffinches on the hospital grounds. Returned Mr. Chuffney's copy of Burton that I had borrowed."
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