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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2022 1:48 am
by BeAChooser
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/08/ ... ed_fusion/
Speaking to the UK's Parliament in May, the aptly named Dame Sue Ion, former chair of the UK Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board, said the physics might demonstrate net gain this decade or the beginning of the next.

"But when will you get a prototype plant that demonstrates that commercial fusion may be even remotely possible? You're talking about post-2040. If you're talking about the availability of fusion power on the grid, then it is well into the second half of the century, if all the engineering and technical challenges that are yet to come are solved," she told MPs.

"I think there's a difference between confidence that it will work and confidence that it will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year and satisfy an economic environment in which it's got to live. And my answer to that is, I honestly don't know."

At the same hearing, Tim Luce, head of science and operation at ITER, the world's largest fusion experiment relying on magnetic confinement, warned that any economically viable fusion power source was unlikely to arrive in time to avoid the "sacrifices" that will be necessary to meet climate change targets.
That sure doesn’t sound very promising for a project taxpayers have already spent around $60 BILLION dollars on ... so far ... and which was justified on the basis that it would save us from climate catastrophe. Furthermore, it sounds like commercial fusion is still at least 30 years away even though fusion proponents have been promising commercial fusion in 30 years for at least 50 years now. I think we've found a black hole for our money.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2022 4:57 pm
by GaryN
Nuclear Fusion Is Already Facing a Fuel Crisis
It doesn’t even work yet, but nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium, the key fuel source for the most prominent experimental reactors.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nuclear ... uel-crisis

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2022 9:35 pm
by BeAChooser
According to ...

https://www.space.com/what-is-nuclear-fusion
There are currently over 200 tokamaks in operations across the globe
That’s a lot resources devoted to the pursuit of one type of controlled fusion. And after more than 50 years pursuing it, they still admit, in candid moments, that they are likely 30 years or more away from making it a commercial success ... assuming it works at all. In the meantime, they try to keep the taxpayer funding coming. For example, the article states
If all goes according to plan, ITER will be the first fusion reactor to produce net energy, which means producing more energy than it takes to generate superheated plasma and keep it contained in a powerful magnetic field.
Except ITER is not really slated to produce more energy than it takes to GENERATE the super heated plasma and keep it contained … not to mention convert it back into some useful amount of electricity to the public. But by making it sound like they are close to that goal, the complicit media help keep the money spigot open, ensuring that yet another generation or two of fusion scientists and many others do quite well economically.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2022 11:28 pm
by BeAChooser
Hate to say it, but here’s a good example of why the government shouldn’t be involved in anything …

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/article ... 53397.html
NASA’s $93B Artemis Moon Project Price Tag Is ‘Unsustainable’

NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin predicted that the first four missions will cost $4.1 billion each and told Congress that price "strikes us as unsustainable."

He projected that by 2025, NASA will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis lunar program.

The price tag is far more than the space agency’s lunar program was projected to cost a decade ago, CNBC reported.

In 2012, NASA officials estimated each mission would cost about $500 million, with the first rocket shooting off in 2017. Now, the cost has increased eightfold, according to the NASA auditor.
Maybe this is the result of NASA pushing bogus agendas like Climate Change, Dark Matter, etc?

The comments below the article point out other federal programs that have cost far more than projected.

So maybe the real lesson is that we need to get the government out of nearly EVERYTHING we do?

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2022 3:38 am
by BeAChooser
Here's yet another fusion company …

https://www.zapenergyinc.com

Here’s a video on their concept …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZNBup-ifC4

Wouldn’t it be ironic if after all the flack he's taken from mainstream astrophysicists, physicists and *science communicators*, Lerner was right all along … that the Z-pinch is the road to commercial fusion?

And on the lighter side ... God help us ...

Posted: Sun Oct 02, 2022 2:16 am
by BeAChooser
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/styl ... -week.html
The Science of Style

By Vanessa Friedman

Sept. 30, 2022

PARIS — Gabriela Hearst of Chloé is really, really excited about nuclear fusion. You know: the reaction that occurs when two atomic nuclei combine to form a bigger one, like in the sun and other stars, and that offers the promise of almost limitless clean energy for the planet, if only we can figure out how to recreate it in a controlled way.

She is so excited about it, in fact, and its implications for solving the climate crisis, that she has spent the past two years learning about it. So excited, in fact, that she took field trips to three fusion research centers: ITER (a.k.a., the world’s largest fusion experiment, located in the South of France), Commonwealth Fusion Systems (a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff in Cambridge, Mass.) and Helion Energy (in Washington state).

So excited that she designed an entire collection around it.

She created a set in the circular shape of a tokamak, the name for the reactor that scientists hope to use to produce thermonuclear fusion. Commissioned an installation from the artist Paolo Montiel-Coppa involving zipping beams of light and giant glowing rings. Invited scientists from the various fusion energy companies to sit front row (you could tell them by their ties). And featured the hydrogen isotope as her aesthetic throughline.

The hydrogen isotope!

Fashion often seems to obey the laws of physics (all hems that go up must come down; every trend has an equal and opposite trend reaction), and Ms. Hearst has a long history with embedding sustainable practices in her work and using them to bring awareness to the climate crisis. But even in that context, this was taking things to a new level.

As for those isotopes, they came as a trio of circles cut out of the sides of stretch knits, hand-stitched as pebble-shaped embeds into the body of a leather tank dress, represented by sun-like bursts of studs on dark denim (made from recycled cotton and hemp) and otherwise incorporated into the earth mother-appropriate power urbanity that has become Ms. Hearst’s Chloé signature.

Or so it seemed; the clothes were kind of hard to see because of the beams that kept shooting overhead. It was also kind of hard to see how Ms. Hearst’s newfound passion, authentic and important though it is, would make the leap from garment to general public. Most people, after all, will see a racer-back knit covered in leather discs and think “modernist mermaid.” As opposed to, say, “nuclear fusion, the solution to the energy crisis, if only we can make it work.”
I prefer to call this the Death Of Science Collection.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2022 5:04 am
by BeAChooser
https://interestingengineering.com/scie ... usion-2040
World's first fusion reactor will be open in UK by 2040

The UK Government has committed to operationalizing the world's first commercial nuclear fusion reactor by 2040. Once complete, the facility (which in theory could offer virtually infinite clean energy) will be constructed in West Burton, Nottinghamshire.
Do any of you believe they'll achieve the 2040 date?

And if so, do you believe "the facility" will offer “virtually infinite clean energy”?

Infinite? LOL!

Now this one fusion power plant is being sold as costing about $2 billion dollars.

But you can be relatively certain it will have cost a whole lot more by the time 2040 arrives. They always do.

And the one power plant is advertised as producing about 100 Megawatts (MWs).

By way of comparison, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, now under construction in the UK, is expected to cost about $23 billion … 10 times more. But it will produce 3.2 Gigawatts of electricity … 32 times more than the one STEP plant (assuming it works at all).

Three hundred percent more. That’s expensive electricity.

Now the UK government says it's committed to achieving "net zero" by 2050. SERIOUSLY?

How much fossil fuel electricity will they have to replace to do that? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrici ... ed_Kingdom , the UK currently produces about half it’s energy from fossil fuels, with is about 38 gigawatts of electricity. A 100 MW plant … indeed the planned 5-10 STEP plants, won’t even make a dent in that.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Sat Oct 22, 2022 4:15 am
by BeAChooser
https://www.newsweek.com/nuclear-fusion ... uk-1752740
The world's first nuclear fusion power plant is planned to be built in North Nottinghamshire in the U.K., and hopes to match fossil fuel power plants in terms of energy output.

According to ITV news, the site will be the first in the world to use fusion reactions to generate electricity commercially. It is due to begin construction in the early 2030s and be fully operational by roughly 2040.

… snip …

The design of the plant and specific power output isn't yet determined, but the UKAEA have indicated it might be in the range of 100MW (roughly enough to power 100,000 homes)
100 MW? LOL! Just for the record, commercial fossil fuel fired power plants these days produce far more electricity than that. 1000 MW fossil fuel plants are pretty common these days. Poland has a coal fired plant that produces 5400 MW. Fifty-four times as much! There are some natural gas fired power stations that are bigger than that. So the first paragraph of this article is either an extreme misunderstanding on the part of the *journalist*… or it's a lie to promote fusion.

Read the fine print …
the ambition is that subsequent commercial plants would have much higher outputs than that, potentially equivalent to fossil fuel or nuclear plants or offshore wind farms
The Ambition. Ah … I see. They haven’t even crawled and they’re already promising marathons. And MIT and the other efforts are doing pretty much the same thing. Promises, promises. In fact, according to the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) … https://www.eetimes.com/fusion-energy-m ... the-2030s/ … “the industry is becoming more optimistic that fusion power will be accessible to the grid by the 2030s”.

Anybody here believe that?

And listen to the hype …
private funding is entering the fusion business, enabling it to create test devices that will demonstrate the viability of fusion energy. The private industry has attracted new investments totaling over $2.8 billion, raising the overall amount of private investment to over $4.7 billion, according to the FIA study.

The FIA also noted an additional $117 million in grants and other government support this year—more than tripling the industry’s previous investment in only one year.

With the help of this investment, fusion firms will be able to quickly construct the pilot plants necessary to demonstrate that fusion energy is ready for commercialization.
LOL!

But then they warn that “governments must take a genuine partner role in this endeavor as fusion advances from the lab to the marketplace.” Well ... the US sure is getting on board with that. Why “the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) announced the government would spend as much as $50 million on a fusion-development program, as authorized in the Energy Act of 2020.” 50 million dollars! LOL.

You can tell that lots of people see a cash cow. Just look at all the fusion companies that have sprung up in the last few years …

https://www.eetimes.com/wp-content/uplo ... gure-3.jpg

DOZENS. And note that according to the Newsweek article … “the substantial majority of businesses anticipate fusion to power the grid sometime in 2030.” In the 2030s now. LOL!

And here’s the funniest statement of them all … right at the end of the article … “Despite the advancements, there is still work to be done in some areas, such as the creation of a more diverse workforce, to include the likes of physicists and thermal engineers, the FIA said”. Of course, when you go to the various websites of the various fusion efforts, you'l find out that diversity means something entirely different to them ... something WOKE. LOL!

Green Energy Pipe Dreams …

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2022 5:50 pm
by BeAChooser
You’ve already heard me talk about how there isn’t nearly enough tritium to run all the fusion power plants being imagined by the fusion geeks. Let me recap. The current world stockpile of tritium is only about 25 kg. The oceans contain tritium but all told only another 30 kg. And the oceans replenish tritium very slowly (via cosmic rays). Tritium can be made but the world’s only commercial source is the 19 Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) nuclear reactors. They each produce about 0.5 kilograms of the stuff a year … about 10 kg. But half to the reactors are due to be retired this decade. And on top of all that, the half life of tritium is just 12.3 years. All told the amount of tritium is obviously very limited.

How limited? Well, the ITER experiment alone is going to use more than 12 kg over it’s 20 year operating lifetime. But here’s the real problem. Each of the commercial fusion reactors which we’re told will be the follow on to ITER, DEMO, will require at least 100 kg of tritium a year to produce just 800 MW of electricity (assuming they can even be made to work). And the number of such reactors that will be needed to replace CO2 producing fossil fuel plants will be immense. So the amount of tritium that will be needed will far exceed available supplies.

Now the fusion proponents talk of plans to supply the needed tritium by breeding more inside the fusion reactors themselves, but there are HUGE technical problems to making that work and they’ve barely even started to address them. Some of those problems now appear to be almost insurmountable. Experts also point out that the space in the fusion reactors for breeding tritium will be so limited that they may only be able to produce slightly more tritium than the reactor consumes. That’s a problem when tritium can leak away by permeating metal walls and escaping through even tiny gaps. So now the proponents are talking about building more fission reactors to supply the tritium, at great cost. And we thought the left hated those things.

In any event, now we learn that there’s another huge problem for the dreamers of a Carbon Free world.

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/10/22/net ... nt-report/Net Zero Bombshell: The World Does Not Have Enough Lithium and Cobalt to Replace All Batteries Every 10 Years – Finnish Government Report”. The article notes that the replacement of the batteries “needs to be done when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt and not enough minerals.” So now the solution offered by the Finnish report is “a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.” All because these idiots insist that CO2 is a problem … WHEN IT IS NOT … and when there is no shortage of fossil fuels.

The truth is that the elitists are using this as an excuse to force a totalitarian world government on us. They want to make us slaves.

THAT IS THE REAL PLAN. And maybe it's a pipe dream too because some of us won't go willingly into that long goodnight.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2022 1:59 am
by BeAChooser
Still another company announces plans …

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/bu ... _id=619255
San Diego-based General Atomics has announced a program to design, build and operate a pilot plant aimed at taking a crucial step toward making the long sought-after potential of nuclear fusion a reality — providing a warming planet a power source that is practically limitless, emissions-free, safe and cost-effective.

… snip …

The first phase of the General Atomics pilot project will center on developing the technologies needed to make the fusion pilot work and then firming up its design.

In the second phase, project officials will concentrate on developing the plant itself — determining where to build it, when to break ground, construction, etc.

The pilot plant will not be some theoretical research project. Upon completion, the plant will be one that “uses real fuel and produces real electricity with generators,” Grierson said.

As for when the plant will start operating, no specific date has been announced but General Atomics’ Solomon said the company is looking at the mid-2030s.
So only about a decade from now? PIPE DREAM.
It’s still to be determined where the plant would be located. Solomon said it will probably not be at the company’s headquarters near La Jolla or on its Poway campus. Theoretically, the pilot plant could be built anywhere in the country but, Solomon said “all of our folks working here would love to see it being built in Southern California,” if costs and regulations prove to be amenable.
LOL! Good luck with THAT.
General Atomics officials estimate the plant’s footprint would resemble that of a conventional electricity-generating station. “It is something certainly much smaller than a large solar farm or a wind farm or anything like that,” Grierson said.
The side of a conventional (meaning fossil fuel) power plant?
The plant is expected to produce a minimum 50 megawatts of electricity.
Just 50 megawatts of electricity? LOL!
No price tag has been attached to the pilot plant yet.
Really? No idea at all?
General Atomics’ fusion pilot plant will require building a brand new tokamak, among other infrastructure.

The project will utilize a number of innovations, including:
• … snip …
• the development of a concept called a “breeding blanket” for tritium (a fusion energy fuel source) which would allow operators to turn fusion power into high grade heat so they can spin turbines and connect them to generators.
The fusion blanket is a concept that right now is at a relatively low-technology readiness level,” Grierson said. “But we have plans for advancing that technology with test stands and demonstrations that we find is a key technology that we need to close the gap before doing a final engineering design.”
All in under 10 years. Really? LOL!

Now time for a little honesty …
Fusion fever

General Atomics’ pilot plant comes as increasing numbers of companies are jumping into a burgeoning fusion landscape, with the Fusion Industry Association counting at least 33 companies reporting more than $4.7 billion in private investments.
Yeah, lot’s of folks think there is money to be made in this scam.

... and a little realism ...
Once a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, Jassby thinks concepts proposed so far are vulnerable to “power drains” to such a degree that they would not be practical.

“If your so-called power plant is absorbing 500 megawatts of electricity, it doesn’t make much sense to produce 550 megawatts,” he said.

Now retired, Jassby said of overcoming the hurdles: “Not in this century; maybe in a hundred years.”
But ...
“We really need new energy sources like fusion,” Solomon said.
Sure … in time. But is it really so urgent that we must throw money at it and hope some of it sticks?

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Wed Nov 09, 2022 1:13 am
by BeAChooser
https://www.forbes.com/sites/walvanlier ... 7f561a7220
Net Zero Needs Fusion. What Should Investors Be Asking The Frontrunners?

Wal van Lierop

The urgency for fusion energy cannot be overstated.
No? Well I beg to disagree. In fact, I say the urgency is a SCAM to make a bunch of people rich and promote an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with Climate Change or the earth’s temperature. And you, sir, are just a mouthpiece for that scam, hoping to enrich yourself.
There is one issue with fusion, however. No lab or company has generated more energy than they have put into a fusion reaction, let alone developed a system that could work in a commercial setting.
Yes … just a MINOR problem.
Understandably, investors wonder where fusion really stands and which projects could deliver on this multitrillion-dollar opportunity to replicate the power of the Sun on Earth.

As a long-time fusion investor, I want to discuss why fusion matters, the progress this industry has made and the questions savvy investors should be asking of fusion companies.
Ah … so he's not quite an unbiased journalist. He admit's he's a “long-time” fusion investor. So he's hoping to cash in on it. Maybe that’s why he insists fusion matters … because if he didn't, he might not see ANY return on his already invested dollars. The truth is that there needs a LOT more investment to have any chance of commercial fusion becoming a reality by … 2050 ... much less the 2030s.
At present, no energy technology besides fusion shows potential to replace fossil fuels.
At present fusion promoters haven't actually offered a convincing argument that we need to replace fossil fuels with any urgency.
Nothing else appears capable of satisfying the world’s growing demand for energy and powering air conditioning, desalinization plants, electric vehicles, green hydrogen production, etc. on the scale we need for the energy transition and life on a hotter and dryer planet.
LOL! I’m looking out the window as I type this, watching snow come down on are day with temperatures that were below the average for this day. And ironically, it’s the urgency to decarbonize that has led to country after country in Europe facing a winter with no means to keep millions of people from freezing. Ironically, it’s the urgency to decarbonize that has caused energy prices to spike ... double and even triple in some places in the United States, with more increases coming this winter and next year.
We of course need to scale wind and solar, but their land, weather and energy storage requirements mean they can’t enable a full energy transition.
Gee, that’s not what green advocates told us years and years. In fact, back in 2016, Forbes magazine published (https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016 ... cf44b9d440) an article declaring “We Could Power The Entire World By Harnessing Solar Energy From 1% Of The Sahara.” In 2021, Forbes published (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvett ... 91583822ee) an article titled “Could Rooftop Solar Really Provide Enough Electricity For The Entire World?” that concluded “in theory,” citing an assessment in Nature Communication from a team of energy researchers at the University of Cork in Ireland. Back in 2008, the HuffPost published (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/can-we-p ... o_b_104355 ) an article titled “Can We Power The Whole World with Solar Power”. It looked at land requirements and concluded that “if it was spread among a few deserts (for solar thermal power) and already existing rooftops (for photovoltaic), it would be manageable." But now, all of a sudden, solar isn’t the answer?

Could that be due to all the failures in solar projects the last decade … like DC Solar, Solyndra, Amonix Solar, Bright Source, Abound Solar, Sun Power, A123 Solar, UniSolar, Evergreen Solar … just in the US. Efforts in Spain and many other countries have also collapsed. They failed, partly because of the urgency with which they were implemented. But now we’re told to forget all that … because there's and urgentnew idea … fusion.
Industry insiders believe that by 2050, fusion plants could supply anywhere from 18% to 44% of the world’s energy.
Promises, promises. Industry insiders have been promising commercial fusion in 30 years ... for more than 60 years. They, like the author of this article, have a vested interest. They too are living off the twin cash cows of fusion research and climate change hysteria.
The Fusion Industry Association reports that private fusion companies have raised over $4.8 billion USD in funding to date and more than doubled the industry’s total funding last year. Several frontrunners have made such technical progress that it is credible to assume they will bring commercial fusion to market in the 2030s. The list includes General Fusion (in which I am an investor), Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion, TAE Technologies, Zap Energy, General Atomics and First Light.
Some of those companies (like Helion) were among those promising fusion in a decade … 20 years ago. Promises are cheap. How many of the companies have actually kept to the schedule they promised so far? I know that Helion didn't. I don't expect any of the others to do so, either.
Each of these fusion companies intends to open a demonstration plant by the second half of this decade. These will prove whether their technology can work at scale and produce net electricity.
So you and they claim. The reality is that each of them intend to make BILLIONS of dollars trying to build a demonstration plant … that may not work at all. During that time, all those involved in those efforts are going to live VERY comfortable lives and sock away a lot of retirement money. Guaranteed.

Remember, just a couple decades ago, we were told that we needed to *invest* billions of dollars on ITER (which now is admitted to have cost over $20 billion so far with some insiders in the US government saying it will cost $45-$65 billion in total) to conduct experiments that were "needed" in order to learn how to design the demonstration plants. Now they are already starting to design and buying the land to build them and ITER isn’t even complete … won’t be for several years at least. Never mind that ITER was supposed to run experiments for decades …experiments that the industry insiders said were needed to design the demonstration plants. But then the purpose of ITER now is and also has been to provide VERY comfortable lives for all involved. Just as the demonstration plants’ purpose will be to provide comfortable lives … with no accountability when they don’t work as promised.

The wildcard is China, which is working on its own fusion technology. For obvious reasons, Western governments would rather not depend on China for this crucial technology.

Don't worry ... China won't prevent the elites from making western taxpayers or western fools pay for western demonstration plants. The only thing that could mess up such plans is China actually succeeding with their efforts in the next few years ... which won't happen. And not just China can’t be depended on to assist the West, but now Russia and bunch of other countries can't be either. In fact, all of them will be continuing down the path of using fossil fuels and generating lots of CO2, making all the efforts of the West in that regard moot. Making them more cost efficient than the West. And my, isn't that going to toss a monkey wrench in the West's economic plans. Big Science strikes again.
There is also ITER, the international, publicly financed fusion project in the south of France that hopes to deliver fusion power by 2045.
What about ITER? It seems this article is just going to gloss over what ITER was supposed to do … and how much it has already cost ... and what it will cost. And what does the author mean by “deliver fusion power by 2045”? Isn’t that what all these new companies are promising, only on a MUCH compressed timescale? Perhaps the author, if he was really trying to inform prospective investors, should explain the discrepancy in ITER’s timeline and that of all the new companies one can invest in? Maybe he should be telling governments to save the billions they were planning to still spend on ITER and invest them instead in the newer ventures. Why through good money after bad, right?
The Questions for Investors to Ask Fusion Companies
1. How durable is the machine? … snip …
2. How plentiful is the fuel? … snip …
3. How efficient is the energy conversion? … snip …
4. What additional systems complexities could prevent a timely roll out? … snip …
5. Where does the demo plant and commercialization strategy stand? … snip …
6. What will be the size? … snip …
7. Last but not least, what is the forecast cost per MWh (megawatt hour)? … snip …
Wow! That’s a lot of questions that haven’t been really answered for an industry that is supposedly going to be selling a lot of electricity in less than 15 years. Are ANY investors smart enough to discern fact from fiction? Seems like an industry just waiting for scammers to take people's money.
While these remaining challenges seem surmountable
Do they? In just 15 years? I have to disagree.
the question I asked years ago remains: Who has the guts to finance the demonstration plants and push fusion to market?
I predict that next comes the pitch to have YOU fund the effort ...
I say it’s time to finally face the music. Given the threat of climate change and growing demand for energy, fusion is critical to achieving Net Zero by 2050. No other technology can outcompete fossil fuels, make a bigger dent in CO2 emissions or do more to eliminate energy dependence on hostile regimes, like Putin’s Russia. Fusion is the gamechanger that could make energy truly local, secure and plentiful. It portends a shift from a centralized, autocratic energy industry to localized, democratic energy provision.

And fusion is not 20 years away anymore. Once the first fusion plant is commercially operational at reasonable cost, the switchover could be quick. Remember, it took centuries to develop the technologies behind an automobile, but it only took cars about a decade to replace horses in London and New York City. As soon as there is a better and cheaper innovation, it inevitably wins.
Yep. But most of you will be losers in this race ... maybe all of you. Just because you believed the scam this *expert* is trying to sell through *fear* ...
The hard truth is that without a step-change innovation in energy, we will blow past 1.5° C this century. Let’s hope fusion commercialization moves quicker than the temperatures.
By the way, it's already too late to keep us below the 1.5C boogeyman (threshold) the author mentioned at the start of his article. That's assuming the climate does what they claim ... and it hasn't been. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5C this century, emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be cut by 45% by 2030. Not a single fusion plant, even with the best Hopium in the world, will be producing commercial power by then. In fact, AGWalarmist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and director of the Potsdam Climate Institute, said a few years ago that "The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can't be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020." One of the highlighted statements in the 2018 IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5C. Well they haven't peaked (https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0 ... levels.jpg) and it's 2022 ... so we must all be doomed. My advice? Spend your money on something better than fusion pipe dreams and Wal van Lierop's next house or car.

Just saying ...

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2022 6:34 am
by BeAChooser
File this under *Oh no … say it ain't so!*

https://news.am/eng/news/732214.html
World’s biggest nuclear-fusion project faces delays due to component cracks

Cracks in a key silver-lined component are creating new delays and cost overruns in the $23 billion project to prove whether nuclear fusion can generate limitless clean energy, Bloomberg reported.

… snip …

new ITER Director-General Pietro Barabaschi warned members this week the project faces problems that are potentially “extensive,” along with new requirements for time and money that “will not be insignificant.

… snip …

At issue are two South Korean-made components: thermal shields built by SFA Engineering Corp. and vacuum vessel sectors made by Hyundai Heavy Industries Co.

The thermal shield, which is lined with 5 tons of pure silver and designed to contain heat 10 times hotter than the sun, showed cracks along cooling pipes, ITER reported. The vacuum vessel sectors, each weighing the equivalent of 300 cars and as tall as a telephone pole, show slight differences in manufacturing that complicates the welding process used to put them together.

… snip …

More than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of pipe will need to be ripped out and reassembled on site, with engineers forced to figure out new ways of putting together the dizzyingly complex reactor. More than a million individual pieces have been commissioned to go into the project, which ITER figured was close to 70% complete before the defects were discovered.
Pietro Barabaschi is reported to have said that if there is one good thing about this situation, “it is that it is happening at a moment we can fix it”. Ouch. Wonder how much extra time this will delay the schedule? Another year? Meanwhile, CO2 keeps climbing. :o

And one more comment ... where do they get this $23 billion dollar figure anyway?

Physics Today reported in May of this year (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/ ... /PT.3.4997) that there were going to be delays at ITER due to every excuse but production errors and noted that “The EU in 2017 estimated its 45.6% share of the project will total €18.1 billion ($19.6 billion) from 2017 to 2035, the year experiments with tritium are currently scheduled to begin.”

Let’s see, ASSUMING that the author made a mistake and that $19.6 billion included costs before 2017, then the total cost would be $43 billion BEFORE experiments even begin ... in 2017 dollars. But if that statement is correct and they did only estimate costs from 2107 to 2035, then the total cost would have to be approaching $60 billion by 2035, which curiously enough is close to the estimate the US Department of Energy told the US Senate in April of 2018 ... $65 billion for construction alone.

However, inflation since 2017 is over 22%, if you believe the government’s ridiculously low claims about inflation. More likely, it's nearly twice that. If so, then even if the $43 billion was total cost in 2017 dollars, the cost estimate now would again have to be $60 billion or more. But I'm sure the DOEs estimate didn't include the effects of COVID and Build Back Better so that estimate would probably be $80 billion or more by 2035, even if the Physics Today statement was in error.

In any case, it sure sounds to me like ITER, who is still claiming a $23 billion cost, may now be outright lying to the nations of the world about the eventual total cost for fear that someone with more common sense than they (not the politicians, but people like us) will pull the plug on their project. After all, ITER was initially sold on the premise it would cost about $7 billion when completed.

That's right, about 16% (or even less) of what it now appears will be the actual eventual cost. And this is at a time with other controlled fusion efforts are overshadowing it because if they pan out as promised they'll be producing commercial fusion for the grid before ITER even begins experiments and for less cost. So how stupid are we to keep funding this black hole (perhaps the only real one in the universe) that keeps sucking up more and more of OUR money and other vital resources?

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2022 6:46 pm
by BeAChooser
More on ITER’s expected delay …
Hard blow for the fusion reactor built in France. After more than 2 years of assembly, part of the ITER research tokamak will have to be dismantled after discovering cracks. The installation was already unlikely to see its “first plasma” in 2025…

… snip …

The time to test, observe, dismantle and replace the cracked elements, then to ensure that the defect will not reoccur before resuming work, ITER should “lose” about 2 years on the current schedule, which planned a first plasma for 2025.

But this will be added to other delays that were not yet taken into account, in particular those due to the health crisis (the elements of ITER are produced all over the world over periods of several years) and those caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which indirectly created tensions over the supply of materials and parts, while Russia is still part of the consortium. Experts thus evoke 5 years of delay and 1 billion euros of additional costs in an article on The echoes.


OUCH. Five year delay and another billion dollars (probably two)? If so, ITER won't even see first plasma before some of the other, newer efforts, if they go as claimed, are producing commercial power. So why are we continuing this boondoggle? Because it's too big to end? Because too many well paid jobs depend on it? Remember ... this is YOUR money going down this black hole ... so the elite can have even more power over YOU.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2022 7:10 pm
by BeAChooser
https://www.mlive.com/news/2022/11/this ... nergy.html
‘This is really save-the-planet kind of stuff.’ MSU at forefront of fusion energy.
Oh brother …
“The joke is that fusion is always ten years off,” said Andrew Christlieb, a Michigan State University mathematician. “It’s a technology that hasn’t really lived up to its promises.”
Try to get the joke right. It’s not “ten years off” … it’s thirty years off. And it still is, if truth be told.
Except maybe it’s about to, and Christlieb is leading a five-year, $15 million project for the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the computational tools needed to make it happen.
Ah ... more promises, promises. And more HOPIUM …
And, after decades of stop-and-start progress, there have been promising recent developments.

Last year, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility generated 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for the barest fraction of a second by focusing lasers from the football-field-sized facility onto a target roughly the size of a raindrop.

In February, the Joint European Torus project in the United Kingdom, which uses powerful magnets to compress fusion fuel and produces temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun, broke its own world record for energy projection.

And then there’s ITER, a $23 billion collaboration between the European Union countries, the United States, China, Russia, and India and others, which is building the world’s largest tokamak, a doughnut-shaped magnetic fusion device, about an hour north of Marseilles in France.

It is shooting to achieve what project leaders call “first plasma” at the end of 2025.
Not any longer, as pointed out in my last post.

And the real accomplishment of those other developments I discussed even earlier on this thread.
But, to date, the National Ignition Facility reaction last year is the only one to create what’s known as a burning plasma, one that heats itself from its own internal reactions, and scientists there haven’t been able to recreate it.
What? It wasn't reproducible? Why do you suppose that is?
The center led by MSU, dubbed the Center for Hierarchical and Robust Modeling of Non-Equilibrium Transport or CHaRMNET, was created to devise computational approaches that will allow researchers to simulate plasmas in real time.

Which is even harder than it sounds.
Especially when you only think you understand plasmas. Perhaps this a consequence of believing in gnomes for so long?
There is a fundamental equation that, in theory, would allow the researchers to model plasmas.

The problem is that solving it would take “longer than the life of the universe,” given the limitations of modern computers, Christlieb said.

The problem is something mathematicians call the “curse of dimensionality.”

“Every time you add in a new parameter as part of your problem, it’s multiplicative,” said Bill Spotz, an applied mathematics program manager with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “The size of your problem, you multiply it by the size of your new dimension, and then you add another dimension and another and so the curse there is that it very quickly becomes very large.”

The problem of modeling plasma will have to be solved in at least seven dimensions, he said.
So now, I suppose, the gnome believing mathematicians and programmers are coming to the rescue? LOL!
The center will involve 20 research teams
Think $$$$$$, folks.
Fusion, according to Christlieb, has “a funny storied history.”

“If you look at the history of fusion funding, there were major advances there were also cuts in funding that along with it, that slowed progress down,” he said.
Oh, hear that folks? The scores of billions of dollars they already spent wasn’t enough. It was our fault for not giving them more!
But recent breakthroughs and the promise of developing technologies “have got people’s creative ideas surfacing again,” he said, both at universities and at spinoff startup companies.
Meaning, I suppose, there’s more gnomes in the works? And more hands out begging for our money.
“I think this is the time to really try and nail down the tools we need to be able to push this sort of physics experiment into an engineering reality,” he said.
Unsaid ... *and we promise, fusion is only 30 years away!* LOL!

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2022 7:34 pm
by BeAChooser
https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/11 ... rgy-claim/
New Head of ITER Organization Withdraws Reactor Net Energy Claim

By Steven B. Krivit

November 15, 2022

The ITER organization has revised both its English-language and French-language web sites to more accurately describe the goals of the ITER program, and to remove the misleading claim that the ITER reactor is designed to produce net energy.
Krivit goes on to describe what "The Old Regime" in terms of lying about ITER and how the "The New Regime" has at least stopped lying (on their website, at least) about net energy. Then Krivit gives an excellent summary of how ITER lied since it’s inception and under the old boss. He cites instance after instance of their dishonesty. Then he says ...
By Oct. 31, 2022, the “What is ITER?” page no longer implied that the reactor was designed to be the first fusion device to produce net energy. The pop-up message was gone. Instead, Barabaschi’s revision was accurate and unambiguous.
That’s wonderful …. but I don’t agree with the author that ITER is now on the “Road to Integrity”. ITER management knows that none of their admissions now matter because they no longer have to sell the project to gullible government leaders and a gullible public. They have accomplished their goal of getting this forty … sixty … eighty billion dollar boondoggle to a point that’s beyond stopping. So now they can act like they’re honest. But don’t kid yourself. They mean to spend every last dime we have, if necessary, with the goal (unsaid and unadmitted) of enslaving us (through centralized power only they control) while continuing to enrich themselves, all based on AGWAlarmist lies.