Major next steps for fusion energy based on the spherical tokamak design
pppl.gov
pppl.gov
Few of those states invested in their people and their infrastructure. Instead they created an almost UBI for their population. It's enough to keep them relatively passive. Cheap gas and just enough to get by. All the while they've created a sense of entitlement in their population. Look at how they treat immigrant labor.
Sadly this population didn't take their minimal freedom to pursue the arts or sciences. While there are instances of individuals improving their life, developing skills and preparing for a post-oil world, the bulk of their society just floats. Moving off oil will pull the plug on their basin. Their societies will probably go down the drain.
Watch out for Europe when that happens. These groups will migrate north and west. I don't think you'll see an exodus into Asia. Given their poor skills, Europe will have a hard time incorporating them into general society. In the end they will probably ghetto-ize. Now Europe will be a melting pot of terrorism. Disaffected young males, the primary target of extremist groups, will be sitting, by the millions, in slums in and around major European cities.
TL;DR: Oil, for all of its faults, stabilizes the world. The US military budget keeps that around.
So maybe oil hasn't been a net benefit for these countries. In any case, if we stop needing their oil, their capacity for causing trouble will be drastically diminished.
I think in a few decades their new need for self reliance could pay dividends. They could be living much better in the long run.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/12/03/what-ha...
I really hope you're mistaken. I'm terrified you aren't.
How about climate change? Meteors, supervolcanos? These are all things that have destroyed the majority of either humanity or life on earth at some point in the past. And then there's horrors of war, plagues, earthquakes, and tsunamis, which have the capability of killing double-digit percents of regional populations in short amounts of time. Terrorism has never killed even a tenth of a single percent of any population.
Sure, you can worry that terrorists /might/ get nukes or biological weapons. But unstable national governments already have these things. The number of times that the USSR and the USA accidentally almost started a nuclear holocaust via tens of thousands of superbly-engineered ICBMs is vastly more concerning than a bunch of poorly funded, poorly organised idiots that might set off some homebrew weapon.
There are vastly more impactful things that /have already proven to exist/ to be worried about and prepared against.
Yes, some currently turn to terrorism and kill fewer people than automobiles. You're implying that the number of deaths won't grow at all when an entire region of the globe loses it's major cash cow.
Now try that at a global level, I'm betting entire countries would have their life styles completely altered. Who knows, maybe entire currencies would become worthless in the process. Would it eventually even out where everyone could do well. Yeah, probably, but would people let you see the plan play out?
I hope someday that yes, we could stop fighting over resources and come togehter as a world to ensure we all have what we need. This is one area that I wonder if we can change in time.
[0] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/us-has...
Senator Mich McConnell has done the exact same for those poor people... Nada.
I supposed we have to try if nothing else. I don't have in mind any other solutions other than universal basic income.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/better-than-raising-the-minimum-...
As an engineer I much prefer the latter, something with a bit of urgency that "we need to develop this as quickly as possible because it unlocks a lot of solutions to problems which are threatening billions of people." Not "Ohh look at all the shiny ways we can turn three two small atoms into one slightly bigger atom!"
I would be the first person to tell you that I am way further on the D side of the R&D spectrum than the R side.
What does that say for software?
Sometimes. The early history of radio was one instance where the engineering ran ahead of the science.
He mostly talks about practical engineering issues: modular reactor construction, easy maintenance, testing current flow through joints in superconducting tapes, 3D printing a reactor chamber with complex cooling channels, immersion in FLiBe for ample cooling and breeding 14% more tritium than the reactor consumes, etc.
The reactor would be about the size of JET, which was built in four years. MIT has pretty good experience for this, since their Alcator C-Mod has more powerful magnetic fields than any other tokamak in the world.
Of course the startup companies pursuing fusion are also taking an engineering approach. Here's an interesting panel discussion[2] between the MIT guy and people from Tri Alpha, General Fusion, and Lockheed.
People generally say stellarators are harder to build but easier to operate.
As much as I want any of these "experiments" to succeed- and don't want to denigrate the hard work of people focused on these projects- this is one of those areas you have to really read between the lines on. It turns out it's really hard to create a mini sun in such a way that you can reliably and cost-effectively generate electricity from it.
It will be interesting to observe how science converges with science fiction
Also, when it comes to fusion, I suspect we'd be much closer to fusion energy generation if the bulk of funding hadn't been put into a single basket (the tokomak approach). There are promising fusion approaches that are closer to achieving net energy from fusion than tokomaks that are massively underfunded in comparison.
While I agree there should be more funding for non-tokomak projects, this is simply not true. JET has reached 70% of breakeven and JT60 in Japan reached "theoretical" breakeven (if it had tritium). Nothing else has ever gotten close.
The following is taken from an article published on June 2016...
http://lppfusion.com/git-12-z-pinch-achieves-6-joule-fusion-...
"GIT-12 Z-Pinch Achieves 6 Joule Fusion Output with Deuterium Fuel"
"Z-pinch devices are closely related to plasma focus devices in that they also use the currents through the plasma itself, not external magnets, to produce the strong magnetic forces that confine hot plasma. In a z-pinch, however, the current flows between two electrodes in a line, rather than the plasma focus’s concentric electrodes. At the Prague conference, Russian and Eastern European physicists announced new experiments with the powerful GIT-12 z-pinch. They used a configuration in which the plasma was arranged in two concentric rings, puffed into the gap between the electrodes right before the discharge. Nearly 6 J of fusion energy (producing 6×1012 neutrons) were released with a 3 MA current and 3 MJ of input energy to the device. Since only 500 kJ of energy was released from the capacitor bank prior to the pinch, the ratio of 1.2 J of fusion per 100 kJ of input rivaled or slightly surpassed the best results obtained in either plasma focus devices or tokamaks, both of which are close to 1 J per 100 KJ input."
The implication is that both Z-Pinch and DPF devices are close to tokamaks in terms of energy efficiency, based on the experiments performed to date. Do you disagree with this? If so, why?
> 1.2 J of fusion per 100 kJ
That's a "Q" value of 0.00001. Tokamaks have reached Q=0.7.
Were people in ~1955 really so naive as to believe we'll have complete AI by 1975? Outside of science fiction writers, of course.
The golden years 1956–1974
The years after the Dartmouth conference were an era of discovery, of sprinting across new ground. The programs that were developed during this time were, to most people, simply "astonishing": computers were solving algebra word problems, proving theorems in geometry and learning to speak English.
Few at the time would have believed that such "intelligent" behavior by machines was possible at all. Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years.
That brings the earliest predictions to the range 1976-1994.
http://aiimpacts.org/category/ai-timelines/predictions-of-hu... has better data. It puts the earliest prediction at 1978 (but also has one predicting 1973-1985). Apparently, Minsky, in 1967, predicted "within a generation"
(Textual description of the part of their dataset that includes reasoning as to how the prediction was reached at http://aiimpacts.org/list-of-analyses-of-time-to-human-level.... That list is a bit less optimistic. Excel sheets for the full dataset also are available from that site)
If you've just made the most complicated computer system (see e.g. the General Problem Solver), it's easy to believe that you just need to pile on some more complexity until you have a thinking thing.
Before it becomes a significant part of our energy mix, fusion needs to be cheap, safe, and reliable. It is nowhere close to any of these things right now, and it will take a lot of time and money to get there - especially the "cheap" part. It's simply not going to happen before the year ~2050.
The technologies that have a chance to stop climate change are solar, wind, and energy storage.