Magnets for fusion energy: A revolutionary manufacturing method developed
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
So what they're proposing is to make relatively small sections of cable which can be made by simple stacks of conductor. Then they'll join them together in the final assembly by soldering. This of course is much easier than trying to wind one massive coil in one go, but now you have a plethora of conventionally-conducting joints between sections, which will heat up under operation. They argue that removing some additional heat at the HTS operating temperature of 20 K is preferable to having to cool to 4 K for conventional superconductors, which sounds reasonable.
However I feel that this is tough to support on the mechanical front. Energized magnets want to move, and you can't let them move because that leads to heat production, which leads to quenching. You need structure to keep them from moving. So in addition to the electrical connections, you need lots of structural steel and welds. You've got a bunch of stuff in there with different expansion coefficients, so making it work out in practice should be challenging. The LHC program was set back over a year due to overheating in one bad magnet splice.
The reason this is significant is because the current was flowing through a superconductor, and so would flow forever (well, forever-ish). Imagine the biggest bolt of lightning you've ever seen, and then imagine it going around in circles inside a loop about the size of a person.
If a real breakthrough occurs making fusion cheap and easy, a huge chunk of economic activity could be made redundant overnight.
Huge social unrest, starting in the middle east and U.S. to a lesser degree is possible as incomes vanish.
Hopefully will replace fossil fuels incrementally, just as the transistor replaced the vacuum tube incrementally, etc.
A huge breakthrough in affordability and practicality could be dangerous though.
By publishing their results to the broad masses it will be hard for concerned governments to discredit them.
Fusion is the opposite of that. Cheap energy is the greatest driver of economic growth and social prosperity the world has ever known. The fact that fossil fuels are becoming increasingly expensive and at the same time destroying the global climate is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster. Anything legitimately capable of reducing energy costs while fighting climate change is rightly hailed as an economic and social miracle.
All that money could be spent on something else that's actually meaningful instead of on oil-extraction infrastructure and the fortunes and lifestyles of Saudi Arabian oil princes.
The day/night cycle isn't a problem for desalination because fresh water is easy to store, and the places that most need water tend not to be cloudy.
I think the killer app for fusion is large vehicles: cargo ships, spacecraft, helicopter islands, etc.
Awesome utopia.
I am not worried.
I just skipped around and didn't read the whole thing. What is their explanation for inflation+redshift, and what is their motivation for posting this?
Even if you completely replaced all electical generation with fusion sources (something that would take decades even if fusion were a viable replacement today), we'd still need a lot of petroleum.
With unlimited energy you can move mountains, convert Sahara in to green farmland, build giant spaceships of the size of cities, colonize pretty much all planets and so on.
There would no shortage of material because you can mine entire solar system and even with current technologies you can pretty much automate making everything. That means there will be no employment because most people would not need to work to meet their basic needs. People would work on things if they felt like so. There won't be shortage of fuel and transportation because material become ultra cheap and making copies of vehicles would be done by automated factories. Robots would run almost entire operations, they themselves can be mass produced like soap because building them is cheaper and they would have lot of energy available to themselves to virtually do anything.
There won't be wars on tiny land disputes because you can virtually fly anywhere and settle yourself with most modern amnesties in your giant mention built mostly by robots anywhere you like, including in the Antartica or in depth of seas or middle of Neveda.
I know you are already raising your eyebrows over this because one can argue that we can also easily vaporize our own planet and robots can take over the world. Yes, sure. My theory is that there is certain kind of maturity required for species before it can attain "unlimited energy" prize from the nature. We have became more and more civilized over the centuries as we have gotten more and more power starting from rocks to swords to guns to basic atomic energy. We now have recognition for sovereign countries and aggressors gets punished by mutual boycotts. There will be no more Chengiz Khan or Alekzanders - they are all simply artifacts of our history where we consider their acts as unnecessarily barbaric.
So there will be a day when human kind would be culturally ready and I think that day will align with invention of unlimited energy source - may even just direct conversion of mass to energy (fusion is really not that efficient).
I hope some of what you say happens, and I do think if we can make all resources abundant and accessible to all then war and conquest will no longer be part of human culture since lack of resources is the root cause of those activities. However I also think it is not so simple and one super-volcano eruption or one asteroid can completely reset the clock.