In the news

Posts article about the potential for unabundant clean energy, worlds friendliest forum jumps straight to can we weaponise this, this is why we can't have nice things

your a weapon

Probably the only viable power source.

I still think it's unlikely.

It looks pretty big and heavy. You could just drop it directly on to an Afghan wedding.

"...the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves..."

Oh. So, rubbish then.

Do they do the same with all the tokamak type reactors too though, ignoring how much energy is needed to maintain the plasma?

It’s fascinating, but I think it was on here someone posted an article which said the main issue was going to be a lack of tritium as all the Canadian reactors that produce most of the worlds tritium are reaching the end of their service life

They have built a “materials detritiation facility” at Culham to recover trititum from low level waste for re-use. Had an interesting tour of it a few years ago when I worked there (I was an engineer in the remote handling team)

It’s fascinating

Horses for courses, I guess.

Just imagine one of the nuclear scientists is a Traitor and then you'll get in to it.

Modern physics package in nuclear weapons can be under 700 pounds. Nobody would bother weaponising that laser powered doohickey.

Tory politicians under Stephen Harper destroyed Canada’s nuclear program and sold off billions of dollars in assets for less than pennies on the dollar.
My dad got fired along with hundreds of scientists. Massive amounts of research shredded, lab equipment worth millions scrapped.
Tories are ignorant anti science assholes.

the main issue was going to be that it just doesn’t fucking work

Ii think that the potential for use as a weapon may be what unlocks enough investment to see it through development until it’s viable as a power source, such is the way of the world.

Do they do the same with all the tokamak type reactors too though, ignoring how much energy is needed to maintain the plasma?

No, the claim is that a net gain of energy occurred. That’s what they’re all trying to achieve.

The news from LLNL is misleading to some extent, as the experiment’s not really aimed at power generation. LLNL is one of the two nuclear weapons labs in the US (the other is Los Alamos) and the purpose of the fusion experiments they do is to examine the physical processes inside a nuclear weapon - hence their interest in x-rays compressing a pellet of solid deuterium-tritium. They’re (presumably) excited because a net gain of energy is what they would be looking for in a potential ‘4th generation’ weapon, which wouldn’t need a fission primary to set it off. So perhaps not the great news for the world that the FT report suggested.

In news that will surprise no-one

This is not a Covid problem. This is an austerity problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/12/decade-of-neglect-means-nhs-unable-to-tackle-care-backlog-report-says

Ha. They obviously just need a bigger and more expensive magnet donut

Thanks. Potentially much less exciting then.

Got to get those oil sands investments to pay off somehow.

Isn't free/cheap energy going to wipe out life on the planet a lot faster? A lot of the wasteful lifestyle of the rich would become available to more people eating up a lot more resources and destroy all of unspoiled nature that is left.

Will be interesting / depressing to read the full report when published.

Health spending has been a roughly constant % of GDP for the last 10 years but service levels have fallen off a cliff (all setting COVID to one side). Are we just demographically fucked?

One that's about 12 times the size of Jupiter?

destroy all of unspoiled nature that is left.

Yeah but then we'll just move on to the next planet

Are we just demographically fucked?

Yes, on several levels.

Ageing population, more long term conditions and a public sector pension liabilitty of £2tn+. There are not enough young people in the UK to bankroll the old folk, which is one of the reasons the Uk follows a high immigration policy (immigrants tend to be working age and have kids). And we are still ten to twenty years away from the worst effects of this situation biting.

And we are still ten to twenty years away from the worst effects of this situation biting.

Agree, and it could get into a negative spiral. The Callaghan quote comes to mind - "sometimes when I go to bed at night, I think that if I were a younger man I would emigrate".