Who knows, commercial fusion power might actually be less than 50 years away now. LOL.
Edit: Do keep in mind that this stuff doesn't have to be the efficiency of the Sun because the Sun is actually quite inefficient and takes millions of years for the heat to get from the core where it is fused out into the galaxy. They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun and more efficient.
They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun
Well they don't strictly speaking have to but to get fusion you need a combination of pressure and temperature and increasing temperature is way easier than increasing pressure if you don't happen to have the gravity of the sun to help you out. Compressing things with magnetic fields isn't exactly easy.
Efficiency in a fusion reactor would be how much of the fusion energy is captured, then how much of it you need to keep the fusion going, everything from plasma heating to cooling down the coils. Fuel costs are very small in comparison to everything else so being a bit wasteful isn't actually that bad if it doesn't make the reactor otherwise more expensive.
What's much more important is to be economical: All the currently-existing reactors are research reactors, they don't care about operating costs, what the Max Planck people are currently figuring out is exactly that kind of stuff, "do we use a cheap material for the diverters and exchange them regularly, or do we use something fancy and service the reactor less often": That's an economical question, one that makes the reactor cheaper to operate so the overall price per kWh is lower. They're planning on having the first commercial prototype up and running in the early 2030s. If they can achieve per kWh fuel and operating costs lower than gas they've won, even though levelised costs (that is, including construction of the plant amortised over time) will definitely still need lowering. Can't exactly buy superconducting coils off the shelf right now, least of all in those odd shapes that stellerators use.
In a potential future conflict, high-value GPS satellites risk being hit or interfered with. If this happens, the loss of GPS could have severe consequences for communication, navigation, and banking systems in the United States.
The worry isn't that HFT stops working. It's that it causes a failure state that brings down the legitimate parts of the financial sector.
Like how we're not worried about AI pilots malfunctioning and being grounded, the same way we'd worry about AI pilots malfunctioning and bombing humans.
I worked in a place where the machine room had a network time device that connected to an attena getting gps reading to give time to all the other hosts. Im pretty sure any ntp server a host has configured is only a hop or two away from a device like this.
Once these get advanced enough and the human cost of starting a conflict goes to zero (because they most likely will be able to scale these to whatever kind of conflict is wanted) why wouldn't countries be more likely to start a war.
Or if most regular military battles only become an economic problem then why wouldn't an enemy turn towards more terrorist like attacks like happened in Russia with ISIS.
America’s second-highest ranking military officer, Gen. Paul Selva, advocated Tuesday for “keeping the ethical rules of war in place lest we unleash on humanity a set of robots that we don’t know how to control.”
Fusion is a field where you can't have the "statup mindset": investments are in hundreds of millions and take at best a decade (and most likely two) to pay off. That's one field where it can't go anywhere without public funding.
It is very possible that China gets there first, considering how ridiculous western fusion efforts have been.
We've proved we can do fusion, but we're still at the stage of just having singular reactions. None of these are power stations with a continuous flow of output, and they're not even close to being so.
Are there particular pros and cons to the scale of each individual turbine? I think this is the first time I've seen that figure reported as opposed to the capacity of the wind farm as a whole
With larger turbines you need fewer for the same capacity. This means less manufacturing, easier maintenance, they are taller, which means more stable and stronger wind, and a lower price of construction. However larger turbines also lead to greater stresses on the system, so that can again increase maintenance and large blades are hard to transport on land.
So it is a compromise. Up to now offshore wind turbine manufacturers always built bigger turbines with newer generations. However the engineering challenges increases, so many have stopped going for bigger then 14-16MW and instead go for increased numbers of turbines with higher reliability.
Over a large range of sizes for many physical reasons larger turbines can be more efficient per space and per cost. For example there is less ground effects for larger turbines and the rotor area scales quadratically with hub height.
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