Topic: A breakthrough in thermonuclear fusion technology! End of the era of hydrocarbon - page 3. (Read 655 times)

I can't wait to see bitcoin mining farms and power stations running on nuclear fusion. Talk about going carbon-neutral overnight.

I know this sounds far-fetched, but if I was involved in mining, I'd be happy to set up the first such farm.

I feel grateful that I will be probably alive to witness one of the most important advances of humanity in terms of energy generation.
However, one should also wonder what company or organization will have the power over this kind of future-changing technology?

I would feel optimistic if this technology was free knowledge, no patents. But I assume either Siemens, General Electric, or other one will be the only ones authorized to build and operate these facilities in the long run.

The government of the United States, might donate one of two of these facilities to their allies in order to move the world closer to zero carbon emitions, but I don't see this wonderful technology going all around the world.

I will reply to everyone
1. Yes, before the industrial design - still years of work, and honing technology. But I am sure that modern technologies and science will make it possible to reduce the time for the implementation of this, I will not be afraid of this word - a fundamental transition to a new level of humanity.
2. Conceptually, thermonuclear reactors can be implemented both in the form of gigantic stations, on a national scale, and "personal" for households, or, for example, apartment buildings. It's only a matter of time. Now you are sitting and reading this from a laptop weighing only 1.5 kg and a screen a couple of millimeters thick. 50 years ago, such power, which is now at your fingertips, occupied huge areas and looked more like a separate building
3. Now billions of dollars of investments will flow into this project and technology, from the same UAE, Qatar and others who now live off oil / gas, but understand that they need to invest in the future. And they have that opportunity. This will further accelerate the development and implementation of technology in our lives.
4. The technology is much safer than any other existing one, because if the integrity of the "container" where thermonuclear fusion takes place is violated, the plasma is instantly destroyed, and the process stops, without the possibility of "self-launch". In addition, primary fuel is absolutely harmless... When switching to Helium 3 (it's true, it is still a difficult process, due to its almost complete absence on Earth, but huge deposits on the Moon), the process becomes absolutely safe and environmentally friendly.

I think fusion energy could be the wrong path to pursue. It could be fundamentally flawed in terms of the containment and insulation necessary to sustain the process over the long term, not being suited to applications smaller than planetoid in scale. While the sun can sustain a fusion reaction for millions of years. The mass and gravity a sun requires to make that a long term achievement might never scale down to a miniaturized industrial grade application.

Fusions extremely high efficiency is due to its near zero energy leakage. The suns high gravity keeps everything contained providing insulation and low heat (thermal energy and mass) loss. Developing alternatives which perform the same functional tasks in a smaller application is difficult to conceive of even from a purely theoretical perspective.

For a long time I have thought that this is the real future of clean energy, the rest of the solutions to replace carbon-based fuels while important are nothing but a bridge to allow us to develop nuclear fusion as they have too many inconveniences and cannot give a constant supply of energy, and even if we are still at the experimentation stage this is a technology that will eventually become real and will generate so much excess energy that a revolution will come after it is fully developed.

I've read the news earlier today and they are great!
However, it is said that a realistic time frame for implementing this for real use is somewhere at 15-30 years.
Even more, the price of such a facility would be enormous.

So.. we'll need a little more patience...
Still, it's a great step forward, I won't deny that. We're finally on the right track.

I absolutely agree that this will not become a mass product tomorrow, and most likely it will take more than one year, or maybe 10 years, for industrial solutions. But this is a transition, a qualitative transition to a completely new level of energy. In a sense, almost free and accessible.
It's hard to say how equipment manufacturers will behave. But I am sure that after everything that the world has experienced in 2022, after "hydrocarbon economic terrorism", they will try to remove hydrocarbons, or rather dependence on them, as soon as possible!

Those countries will probably invest in the machinary for doing fusion instead imo - or just do like they did with green energy and make it hard to get and expensive...

I think it was only a matter of time until fusion replaces everything for energy production, but a long time. The experiments here are 5-40 years away from becoming mainstream depending on how much is invested in making them that way.

Oil and gas may become like any other legacy technology there is too, you're certainly not powering a car off fusion for quite some time - and those would definitely be expensive. Is one of the main sources of hydrogen currently not from hydrocarbons which could have been used for fuel?

Scientists in the US have moved closer to achieving completely clean energy by achieving the first net energy gain in an inertial confinement fusion reaction. The experiment was carried out using a small granule of hydrogen plasma and the world's largest laser, writes the Financial Times, citing three interlocutors who got acquainted with the preliminary results of the work of scientists.

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, they managed to reproduce the process of nuclear fusion (the same process that occurs on the Sun) and get about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which is 120% higher than the energy used in lasers - 2.1 megajoules. Two FT sources noted that more energy was received than planned, causing damage to diagnostic equipment and making it difficult to analyze the results, a breakthrough already widely discussed by scientists.

https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589dc7


Your opinion ? Forecasts? Are we witnessing an unexpected end to the era of hydrocarbon fuels? Should all oil / coal / gas producing countries prepare for a "new poor life"?