Semirhage

2. No, although the kinds of reactors being dreamed of in the “short” long term do fit this bill. Again, the much more difficult to manage (not to mention fuel) D-3He reaction is aneutronic, and doesn’t require a breeding blanket. Another difficult reaction would be p-7Li, although the fuel would be easier to come by. I’m not claiming that we’re remotely capable of harnessing these reactions, but it’s important to point out that they exist. A high neutron flux, and the need for Trtium are not inherent to fusion in general.

3. A bigger issue would be sputtering from the neutrons and He infiltration of the vessel. Othereise, assuming d-t fusion... this is accurate.

4. We can already breed tritium, and plutonium... this is a reality we have to live with. Fusion won’t change that either way. We can also engineer plagues, and a lot of other nasty things, and every year it all becomes easier to do “out of the garage” so to speak. If we’re going to survive, we need a better solution than unspilling the milk. Maybe embracing fission energy and greatly raising quality of life around the globe would be a good first step?

5. Agreed, although it is worth mentioning that there are ways to harness energy without a turbine, they are also complex. Fusion won’t save us, it won’t save our kids or grandkids. We need fission, solar, and wind, and peobsbly a century or more of research into aneutronic fusion if we want to survive well.

My whole point is that as I said, people don’t just accept, they riot and revolt. I agree with minimum wage laws, but not because of some hyper-extreme scenario in which San Franciscans are working and living like Brazilians in favelas. Frankly we shouldn’t need to resort to that kind of hyperbole to make the case for a living wage.

If you want to see what happens, even in traditionally poor places when people face a “fight or die impoverished” scenario, see Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. People were willing to face tanks and bombs with their bare hands because the alternative was to starve. I think you underestimate the potential belligerence of the average American if faced with a similar scenario.

The larger issue though is that riot, abject poverty, and revolt aren’t actually the foundation of a minimum wage. Fairness, and Econ 101 are, and there’s no need to get so far out there as to divert the debate away from present conditions to extreme hypotheticals.

It’s possible to be far more permissive with freedom of speech than it is with free access to modern weaponry.

You just used examples of places for which a tiny one-room flat is an improvement over previous conditions. If you think a favela is bad, try being a peasant on a working farm.

The idea that people used to life in, for example, Texas or London will get used to a similar lifestyle which represents a massive downgrade is ridiculous. Historically people started overthrowing governments and sending people to guillotines for more modest losses. You’d have riots in SF if the options were “work for $1” or “starve.”

I think minimum wage laws are a good idea too, but your argument is bizarre.

I’m not prepared to argue in favor of that, but without it, there is no real argument that some man-portable guns represent a credible self defense when compared to a government. If we look out another hundred years when robots are the majority combatants of developed nations, the issue becomes even more difficult to manage. The argument can still be made that a well armed populace wouldn’t be confronted by a well armed military as in the US declaring martial law and the army being turned loose. I’ve heard staunch 2nd amendment advocates point to insurgencies in everything from Vietnam to Baghdad as examples of how a relatively lightly armed populace can hold off the US. Even if we accept that st face value, the proposition certainly dies in the face of automated warfare.

Unless your fellow technological life is within a few hundred light years, communication of any kind starts to look like throwing messages in bottles. Of course the closer your target is, the less wistfully academic it is. If Proxima Centauri had a planet with a civilization like ours, you’d have to consider what they could do other than just talk. At that point, the issue switches from insane time scales rendering the whole process moot, to potential forms of dark forest detente.

That’s not to say guns aren’t important, or rights to guns shouldn’t be protected. It is saying however that comparing speech and guns makes apples and oranges comparisons look downright apt.

All of that assumes that the arc of technology doesn’t terminate in a cosmic eyeblink after the current era, which it might. Either way, there is a sort of childish assumption that we’re always going to be as exploration-minded as we are today. If ‘c’ really is the cosmic limit, then it makes more sense to stick closer together, because any significant travel will imply either speciation, or a one-way cultural trip.

Renewable storage and transmission requires some breakthroughs. Maybe we could do it Soon, maybe in decades.

Fission requires political will, no miracles, no breakthroughs. We could have been doing it last year.

If life is constrained to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light when moving mass, and light when communicating then the universe could be teeming with life out of temporal spatial sync with each other. We might not be alone, but we’d be effectively isolated, and still see ourselves as being alone. It’s only under the assumptions of unlimited growth and expansion that the Fermi Paradox is a paradox.

Mind you, the idea that life which is likely evolve, adapt, and develop significant technology being ultimately self-destructive a la The Filter also seems very likely. The article offers squat in rebuttal to that.

There are a lot of issues outstanding for fusion to be a viable power source, and this reactor is simply exploring the dynamics of one of those issues. Putting aside hype and desperation, there is no chart yet. For a fusion plant to work and compete with any other plant, you need it to have good uptime, relatively low maintenance burdens in terms of downtime and costs, good output, a viable source of fuel, a fusion cycle that is safe and sustainable, and more.

As of today the d-t cycle isn’t sustainable because it requires tritium, produces a lot of energetic neutrons that along with helium will undermine the reactor. The problem is that more viable fusion cycles occur at significantly higher temperatures and it’s a struggle to control plasma at d-t temps. The lack of control both quenches the reaction, and exposes parts of the reactor to plasma which erodes the material. Neutron bombardment causes the metal to become brittle, and helium infiltrates and undermines it too. So a reactor would be down for maintenance a lot, which would make it difficult to work as an economically viable source of power.

As of today the tritium for the reaction has to be bred in fission reactors. There are theoretical plans to use a “blanket” impregnated with an isotope of Lithium to breed tritium within the fusion reactor, but so far no one has gotten it to sustainably work near necessary levels. As a result a fusion reactor today would require fission reactors, and it might make sense to ask why we don’t just stick to the far more mature and efficient fission technology.

There are lots of other issues that aren’t as big or obvious as what I’ve described, but ITER and desperation hype aside, there are more unsolved problems than solved. So where this reactor is concerned, be excited for what it is away from the context of “fusion any day now!” hype. Appreciate the slow, but steady progress in the context of incremental research.

If you want clean power in your lifetime, support fission plants.

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2018/02/01/479262...

The latest disengagement report showed that Waymo vehicles, in tests conducted from December 2016 through November 2017, on average logged 5,596 miles without Waymo’s safety drivers disengaging the system and retaking the wheel. Its next closest contender was Cruise, owned by General Motors Co, at 1,214 miles on average between disengagements.

And later

Waymo, for example, drove 352,545 miles in the state during the period with only 63 disengagements. Cruise vehicles drove about a third less, at 127,516 miles, and had 105 disengagements.

The third best performance came from Nissan Motor Co , which drove 5,007 miles and had 24 disengagements, meaning that its vehicles had disengagements on average every 208 miles.

The numbers fall off sharply after Nissan, with Baidu Inc at an average rate of every 41 miles, chipmaker Nvidia Corp at 4.6 miles on average, and Mercedes, with disengagements every 1.3 miles on average.

Some further discussion and context:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-autonomous-ca...

Between mistakes a human wouldn’t make unless impaired, such as accelerating into a crash barrier or into a fire truck, and the high rate of human intervention, compared to the rate of fatal accidents per x miles humans have (1.27 per 100 million miles even including drunks, the elderly and new drivers) the argument for “safer than humans” seems utterly insupportable at this time.

Edit: I don’t mind the downvotes, but I wish they came with a rebuttal rather than radio silence.

Did you miss me specifically saying that I didn’t buy into the shilling thing? Please don’t claim that I said or implied something I went out of my way to disavow.

I was protesting the war at MIT before you were even born

Holy shit, you know how old I am?

and I actually think this guy is innocent of the leaking charges. I also happen to think he's very likely guilty of the CP charges.

I think the opposite is true, but I’ll tell you what, I’d never reach either conclusion with so little information available and it all coming via one side. A prosecutor looking for an indictment isn’t an unbiased viewpoint, just like a defense attorney speaking on behalf of their client isn’t.

So yes, it would seem you have reached a forgone conclusion a while ago and have been working backwards since. For the record I don’t think that you’re a shill, just a sincerely uncritical individual when it comes to the machinations of both criminal justice, and state intelligence apparatuses and their history.

Is that better, mate?

To me, it would be like being in a warez channel full of people saying, “I want pirated material.” That at least I have experience with, and someone saying “Where the copyright violations at?” Rather than “any good ftp’s and xdcc’s?” Would raises red flags.

Oh, how I wish he'd go away...