Topic: A breakthrough in thermonuclear fusion technology! End of the era of hydrocarbon (Read 645 times)

they cant legislate plastics out of the single-use industry as it would just leave stock piles of sludge at the refineries.

its the single use industry that was established to give purpose to sheer amount of sludge by-product of refineries..

in short you cant poop in a toilet and then ban fertilisers because otherwise your just left with a pile of poop at the sewerage plant that then feeds back to your toilet and overflows onto your nice bathroom tiles

unless you can find a new use of poop. the only options are to continue using poop as a fertiliser while reducing how much poop is flushed by finding new tech ways to deal with bowel movement

..
until a country can ramp up demand for long-use plastic to cover the sludge supply. the single-use industry would always be needed

.. they are however trying to find alternative tech to power vehicles to reduce the oil demand to then reduce the sludge that needs to be made into single use. but thats a 40 year goal.

whereby the hope is reducing oil ned by 90% extents oil reserves from 40 years to 400 years. where the sludge by--product meets the 10% demand of long life plastics.. (thats the hope)

yep i said it hydro carbons are not going to end. there would still be oils converted to fuels and plastics. the idea is to bring it down to like 10% and then offset that by having more then 90% renewable energy and carbon sequestration

The bad effects of misuse of plastic items are really big, but if it can be legislated to follow the correct recycling and its use, it will definitely give good results to the world. About your way of reducing the use of plastic in the household is also better.

The only problem this is there big companies that use plastic bottles are really the ones responsible.Every country should watch out for and put a law of using glass or things that are easy to rot to put them in the product. Every day they release billions of plastic bottles and is not better.

hydrocarbon refinaries only have until about 2069 until oil reserves deplete. so they want to reduces the burn rate from fuel industry to then expand the reverses years left by 100+years instead of 47. because they know even after 2069 people will still want and need plastic products (car dashboards, house window frames, house guttering, etc)

my view on plastics(in 2022) is this
oil becomes fuel. and leaves some nasty toxic sludge behind, if they just burred or burned that, its super dangerous for the environment

however converting that sludge (as they have always done) into useful products has saved that super toxic effect. but now we are at level two. what happens with that converted plastic

having it as single use then disposal is just delaying problems. yes its form is less toxic, but at same time while they pretend that it takes a millenia to break down. we are already seeing microplastics inside animals and ourselves in just about 100 years from first industrial scale use

this is because thin plastic products like grocery bags break down in decades not millenia

we should be prioritising that toxic sludge to becoming long term use plastic such as window frames and other utilities that keep it from disposal for 50 years and then can be ripped out of windows when housing is demolished and recycled into something else with a 50+ year lifecycle

development needs to be done to get cost effective non plastic wear for temporary things like grocery bags, soda bottles, packaging, while meeting the sludge supply and long lasting plastic demand to keep hydrocarbons from just going to waste.

i know some has been done for instance fast food used to have polystyrene trays, now they use card/paper
grocery stores offer paper bags or card board boxes or even cloth bags
some drinks companies are moving to strictly metal cans or glass bottles. but their progress is slow

i understand the fuel refinery need to get rid of toxic sludge quick and cheap which means due to lack of demand of long life plastic the sludge mainly ends up going to one-use product industry cheap cost or free
where by if the one use product industry didnt take the sludge then the fuel refineries end up stock piling and disposing of more toxic sludge

but we need to start finding more long term use demand of plastics to take that sludge and also recycled plastic while reducing how much sludge goes to one use products or even just burned/disposed of at refinery

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im also looking into the new industry of desalinating water which leaves behind the brine by-product where researchers are currently trying to develop products/demand to use that brine rather then re-toxifying the oceans with it.
this unsurprisingly ends up showing the thermo fusion industry demand for heavy water which can be found in brine.. as well as lithium for EV car batteries

For me if there should be a regulation that enforces the proper use of harmful things like plastic it's make reduce a damage to in our environment.

About that kind of bacteria, if it is possible that it will help to reduce the amount of harmful plastics that have been increasing for a long time. If it continues to be used improperly, the world will surely become a huge garbage dump.

Not all physicists support the claim that this scientific breakthrough is something special that could change our world. More precisely, he can, but perhaps not for the better. Experts believe that this achievement of American physicists is too insignificant, and besides, it was done too late. And this discovery could lead to even more deadly nuclear weapons. Indeed, in a similar reactor, where American scientists conducted their experiment, neutrons can be produced that can be used to create nuclear explosive elements such as plutonium-239, uranium-235 and uranium-233. That is, a thermonuclear reactor can be used to produce raw materials for nuclear bombs.

These reactors will also be able to produce tritium, a form of heavy hydrogen used to increase the yield of a nuclear explosion, making nuclear bombs smaller and easier to use in a missile warhead.

Such a statement is not unfounded, because the Livermore National Laboratory. Lawrence, founded in 1952 in response to the USSR's atomic bomb test, has long worked on nuclear weapons research.

So far, scientists have not reached a consensus on whether the scientific breakthrough of American physicists is the way to obtain clean energy in the near future. Some experts say fusion power is unlikely to save humanity from the rapidly looming climate crisis.

The energy involved in nuclear fusion is very high and the ability to reproduce same in a controlled experiment consistently is a major issue that has to be overcomed also it's costly.... I also heard that somewhere in the Philippines that there's a research that maelworms can feed on styrofoam and complex polystyrene so if more investment is done we can tackle the menace of the seemingly non biodegradable waste while we await a perfect application of nuclear fusion....

Second post replies to first post
Really - the negative impact of the massive use of plastic, especially for domestic purposes. And most likely, alternative solutions will be found. What will it be ? It can be a replacement from natural components, such as derivatives of flora. Or materials that, though mostly composed of hydrocarbons, are easily recyclable or degradable. The insane use of plastic is a really huge problem. At home, we probably refused by 95%, all bags are now either made of paper or starch-based materials (tactilely a very pleasant replacement for household plastic bags), disposable tableware - paper or recycling, and so on. Plastic bottles are perhaps the biggest problem. We try to buy in glass, and we collect plastic ones separately and give them for recycling.

In my opinion, it is not necessary to introduce strict bans on the production of plastic products.

How can we save our planet from harmful plastic pollution?

This question can be answered differently.  You can breed special bacteria that will feed on plastic.  These bacteria can be kept in special containers and plastic trash can be periodically loaded into these containers.  

This will make it possible to effectively dispose of harmful plastic, which practically does not decompose into the simplest elements and harms the ecology of our planet.

The only problem is that the use of materials that affect the environment such as plastic continues to increase, no matter how much we recycle, reduce and reuse if companies continue to produce heavy plastic ware, it will definitely be useless . But if all the different countries talk about this problem, it can definitely be solved, especially if the ban on anything that damages the nature can be enacted.

my problem with the END the Era of hydrocarbons.   


Plastics.   everyone seems to forget that part. 

your phone... your clothes.  your car.   your medical equipment.. your furniture...your computers...LED diodes... all your equipment has plastic.   ALL of it is Hydrocarbons.      the lists while Not endless is freaking huge and we have ZERO replacements for hydrocarbons in 99% of it. 

the future of oil is still quite firm. 

Here I absolutely agree! Reusable goods, and goods that can be recycled and recycled, are also a way to reduce financial costs, and it is possible to reduce the consumption of hydrocarbons, for direct or indirect needs. By the way - the use of environmentally friendly solutions, such as the one you gave as an example - is a good move, in all respects! This is environmental friendliness, this is some help to the environment, this is not pollution due to extraction, and this is an intermediate positive effect - for example, photosynthesis and the subsequent absorption of carbon dioxide. In one word - oil and gas monopolies must be abandoned and any available alternatives used!

As far as I can see, recycled or even reusable items will probably make up for the most things. Look at the bamboo carton cups, they are made out of bamboo, and they are grown and can be grown forever, all those starbucks cups and so forth could be pure bamboo. Or we could use something else, or if you want to make sure it's better, mugs and similar stuff that people carry their coffees in? That could hold water too, and nothing wrong with that.

So all in all, maybe the items we will buy could change, maybe we won't buy a plastic bottle of water anymore, or a bottle of coca cola or whatever, maybe the thing they put that into will change, a reusable one or another item, but we will survive, no plastic is not a bad thing.

In my opinion, Mankind has no other alternative than to force the development of new technologies.  

Only scientific and technological progress can save Mankind.  Yes, there is a great temptation to slow down scientific and technological progress, but this will not help solve environmental problems, but will make Mankind absolutely defenseless against new external threats.

Mankind needs to simultaneously preserve the ecology of the Earth and colonize the near, middle and outer space.  

Expansion is necessary for the preservation of Humanity as a species.  And for this, technologies are needed (in particular, the technology of thermonuclear fusion).

The advantage of thermonuclear controlled fusion is that there is no process of nuclear decay with the appearance of various dangerous isotopes, here the diametrically opposite principle is the combination of nuclei, with the appearance of a new nucleus + the release of large amounts of energy. Both at the entrance and at the exit - completely safe substances. when using Helium-3, there is generally zero danger.
Yes, I do not argue that fossil hydrocarbons will disappear, moreover, I wrote that they will occupy a niche where there is nothing to replace them with. For example, the production of plastics - I still do not see an alternative to hydrocarbons for the mass production of plastics

Fusion Reactor is very dangerous and cause a lot of heat. it needs to be cooled down 24/7. One moment it does not receive cooling, it can cause a blast. Maybe they have found a way to maintain that. Only in cold country it can produce the maximum output. The question is, are they getting the energy equivalent to the expenses?
Well many country may not have access to the technology if it cost more to implement the fusion reactor. If it comes at a cheap price and all country in the world can access it then they may consider using it. But the gas/ oil/ coal can be sold in the country itself with cheap price which could help them to use it in factory to produce more and export the goods to other country to earn foreign money. Thus, increasing the economy itself.
If this is a breakthrough, then it will be helping the world to grow. Not making other poor. I think the positive thing here is both hydrocarbon fuels and this could be used together to increase the power that we can get.

New poor life you say, lol.. anyway, that's the expectation for nations with over dependency on crude and crude products but, its unlikely that, the nuclear energy source would be one that would be readily utilised anywhere based on safety reasons.

I'll make a particular reference to what is stated in OP which centera on the effects on the equipments as per its destruction due to unprepared or foreseen results. These are radioactive substances we are talking about and I as harmful as it could get and having other nations go about building nuclear reactors for such experiments would be arming them as well for a time we might not know to exist or come.

I don't think the advent of crude products is over with this invention.

This is of course a great development for the world and our future, there is no denying in that. However, what people are failing to realize, and that is unfortunately very very sad, is the fact that the climate change everyone loved to ignore and made so political is already underway, and that means we are already quite screwed.

I am not saying that we should be not working towards a better world, a fusion tech with a great cheap electricity would be such a lovely thing, but the clean energy we needed had to come so many years ago instead of having such high pollution and having such high not clean energy method as well. So, even though this is still a great development, it's not enough, and it's too late unfortunately, our future will suck.

I agree that there were a lot of statements. But they were mostly theoretical or unprovable. And what I described is already a PRACTICAL implementation of this technology! As a result of the constructed new system, it was possible to spend less energy to maintain the process than this process generated energy. Useful energy that can be "selected" for practical consumption. It does not sound very logical and some will say that a closed system cannot produce more energy than it consumes - a contradiction to the basic laws of physics, but here is a different system, a different principle of operation.

Yes, and someone wrote above - no, this is not a synthesis. This is a process diametrically opposed to a nuclear reaction with nuclear fission, with the release of energy. A nuclear reaction simply has a very high efficiency, but not 100%. Here the process is based on the MERGING of the nuclei of elements.
The safest, from the word at all, thermonuclear process is possible on Helium-3, as a result of which no by-product, hazardous waste is produced.

It's a long way from an experiment that yielded minimal gains to a commercial solution.
Those megajoules sound like much but in reality, the whole energy (not the gain) is the equivalent of around 50 ml of oil, or since somebody mentioned mining, the whole gain from this experiment would be able to power one! s19 miner for almost one minute.
So we just need 200 000 times more once and another 1440 on top, just to power all the bitcoin mining, so that's what, just 3 million more! 

Just as we have devices that can have power at wind speeds of 1m/s, the problem is that they have only some 200 microwatts capacity, so, we need a few trillion o quadrillions of them.

We should stick to fission for a while, cause commercial fusion will not be here next decades.
 

I think the only currently feasible fusion fuel we can get in large quantities exists on the moon in the form of Helium-3. If we can somehow transport enough of that back to earth, fusion energy will be halfway ready. The other half is designing a fusion reactor which can function in perpetuity. Right now the inner workings of the reactor either melt away or give off by-products (caused by the heat) which interrupts the fusion process.

As far as fuel goes, not enough fuel exists naturally. So unless we find a way to fuse heavier elements, our only option is to mine the moon.