/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9714550
nah, 20 years ago breaking even was very much a 20 years from now type thing in the researcher's eyes. Various news reports probably hyped beyond what they should have.

>Where is innovation ? Where is the future ?
Currently unfolding

>Where is nuclear fusion ?
In progress, it's an extremely hard problem. ITER will likely succeed although only in a research setting rather than generate useful power
>Where is my lunar colony ?
Very expensive, little buisness case for now
>Where is my electric car ?
Exists, improving year after year, look forward to a 300 mile range EV base model corolla for 25k in maybe 6 years or so
>Where is my virtual reality ?
Exists, and is getting really good, go pick up a Vive with some hardware mods
>Where are my pills to cure cancers ?
In progress, an extremely hard problem, Immunotherapy has a shitload of promise and will likely have commercial therapies within 5 years
>Where is my artificial organs ?
Also hard problem, mostly because of the print resolution needed to make blood vessels within the organs.

i am hoping to god that the cassimir effect has macro scale effects when you get a material made almost entirely of extremely fine lattice, because that's like the only way you're getting anything like negative energy that concentrated
also there's the whole "compressing spacetime on such a small scale" problem

i mean, even if you don't break C with it, it's still super handy at sub 10% C because you don't experience inertia inside the bubble, meaning there's no need to accelerate or decelerate for a journey, saving a lot of time on trips inside the solar system over traditional rockets.

nuclear
specifically fusion
a daily battle with the fucking sadistic asshole that is plasma fluid dynamics

>>8858217
the hard part is designing a system able to self assemble using materials in the asteroid belt, which then assembles solar panels that fuck off to solar orbit

once that's designed, you build some of them, send them out, and wait a few years for them to do the rest.

and like i said, transmission to earth is....difficult.
my wet dream is to use a dyson swarm to generate kugelblitzes as mobile energy sources but that's a fuckin ways off

>>8853731
>but that's not that realistic is it?
dyson swarms aren't actually that difficult or outlandish. if you think about it from an automated manufacturing perspective, you don't "build" a dyson swarm, you design and build self assembling machines which basically colonize the asteroid belt and convert it into solar panels which then become the dyson swarm over time.

the hard part is getting that power back down to earth where we need it at the moment. microwave beam transmission is the definition of a death ray, just aimed at the right place

>what i wish was the future

-Solar for residential and some commercial, no baseload
-Wind where it makes the most sense
-Geothermal where possible
-Hydro wherever feasible
-Nuclear as a universal baseload to keep everything smooth and give the heavy juice necessary for industry. Preferably thorium based, either two fluid reactors or once through burner designs with a reprocessing industry to back it up

>what will actually happen

-all the above but replace nuclear with a viciously complex, expensive, and unstable smart grid with a fuckload of horribly expensive grid battery backups, also attempting to make solar baseload meaning massive solar farms taking up shitloads of land and windfarms everywhere. Also natural gas as long as possible for necessity.

>>8851498
>I'm sure a reactor build today could experience something bad happen to it, but they're far more resilient than anything that came before.
and before you jump on this; Yes, there are scenarios you could dream up that are catastrophic, but being so removed from the industry you really have no idea what's in place to prevent that. Sidestepping all of those prevention with "well what if" is silly.

Do you apply that reasoning to everything else or just nuclear energy?
How do you feel about disease research? what if we make a horrible virus by accident and its accidentally gets out?
How do you feel about <potentially very bad thing>? How many things do you need to ignore or handwave in order for that to happen? Probably a lot.
Alternatively you're focusing this philosophy on nuclear energy alone because the hypothetical worst case is very dramatic

>>8851400
i want to stop buy you keep bringing up shit
>My point stand that the two biggest nuclear disasters were caused by safety measures. You need to do a detailed critical analysis of the system to be able to say whether a safety measure will actually make it safer, and even then you can be surprised. You can't just believe what you read in the marketing brochure.

no, the two biggest nuclear disasters were caused by many conflating factors, failures of some systems and success of others, design problems and people causing problems and people fixing problems and on and on. It's really unfair to judge the building of a new nuclear reactor based on the madness of the soviet union and reactor design standards from 70 years ago, essentially. I'm sure a reactor build today could experience something bad happen to it, but they're far more resilient than anything that came before.

>If they hadn't shut the reactors down just in case something bad might happen because of the earthquake, there wouldn't have been a meltdown. So yeah, maintaining normal operation was an alternative to shutting down the main source of power for the cooling system.
You really, really, REALLY don't want a running reactor during an earthquake for a shitload of reasons. You shut that bitch down the second seismographs say it's on the way. Normally this is fine, backup generators keep it cooled during the most dangerous parts of the shutdown. With fukushima several things went wrong in succession for it to get worse.

>You mean like there is in the nuclear industry today about how everyone's against them for no reason, and it's totally unfair, and they should just lift all of these regulations and shut all the NIMBYs up?
oh god no, the modern nuclear industry's safety is great. As much as i belly ache about the NRC they run a fucking tight ship. My only wish is that they be a little more willing to permit testing on new reactor designs instead of "if it aint BWR it aint shit"

>>8851293
there's lots of great information on both chernobyl and fukushima, a number of good documentaries on chernobyl in particular
this one has good detail on the incident itself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eEpaSLi5WQ
and this one touches a lot on the atmosphere of paranoia and ass kissing and secrecy that was the soviet union at the time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njTQaUCk4KY

perhaps a general rule is that if you're making some kind of generalization about nuclear power as a whole, you're missing important information about something. There are so many factors and ways to do it right (and wrong, but nowadays its god damn hard to do it wrong because of regulation)

>>8851252
honestly, it doesn't really matter in the end. Folks like you are the ones in power making decisions and writing on the topic, so nuclear will never get a fair shake and solar and wind will be the defacto standard even with their problems. but might as well point out some things

>Chernobyl was caused by a botched test of an emergency shutdown system
so, here's where i know you're very uninformed about reactor design, reactor safety systems, soviet era nuclear engineering, and soviet area nuclear "politics". Chernobyl was a worse case scenario for that particular reactor design, which itself was about as bad a design as you could get. The safety test was botched on top of a critical flaw in the reactor's design (one of many) being hidden from the operators due to soviet era bullshit on top of layers and layers of shit going wrong and fucking up.
You're boiling it down to "a botched safety test and thus more safety systems = more bad things happen", which is about as gross an oversimplification as "quantum mechanics is weird dude lol"

>The reactors were shut down because there was an earthquake, making the system rely on the backup power for cooling, which failed because of flooding related to the earthquake.
So the alternative is to keep the reactors running? Again this was a confluence of factors that are unique to the design and age of the reactor. None of that shit would fly on a newly built reactor but we're not getting any of those ever again thank to people like you.

>you're the one who keeps changing your argument as I point out how it's inconsistent with reality or offering a value proposition that's unacceptable to most people.
I think the problem is you're operating in a reality that doesn't actually exist and i'm trying to bring you back to the real one where engineers design for things and newer things are generally better than older things, also a gross oversimplifcation but yeah.

>>8850914
>You seem to be pretending they always act like they're supposed to. Something that was supposed to work didn't, and we got the Fukushima disaster. Other things could have failed, instead or in addition to, causing a far more serious disaster.

the other end of the spectrum, which you're sitting on, is "if everything fails and nothing works ever, how bad can it be?" which of course is very bad. I really fail to see how much else could have gone wrong given the design of the reactor, complete coolant failure is very very bad for a reactor of that era and due to both the reactor's design and hard work by the operators, it didn't get worse. A much more modern reactor would not have all its generators in a basement, and would have more passive safety and more failsafes. However modern reactors are buried under litigation and political pressure from all sides which drives costs way up and by doing so gives even more fuel to those opposing nuclear energy, "it's too expensive and never goes according to budget"

in the end you have a philosophical opposition to it which i don't think anyone could ever remove from you, since you'll just keep moving the goalposts and say "well what if" until eventually you're talking about what if a meteor hits the reactor vessel head on

>>8850763
you seem to be ignoring reactor safety systems exist, which for a seventy year old reactor could have been much better. There is such a thing as a worst case scenario given the design and exterior factors like a once in 5000 year tsunami.

I'll give you wind patterns did help but losing ALL cooling for hours is about as bad as it gets, and an evacuation and exclusion program are intrinsically part of reactor safety, you can't just pretend as if it's some nebulous completely separate factor which won't be present for any other reactor out there.

You're going directly for the worst possible case and ignoring anything else, which is great for clickbait articles but not productive for solving energy problems. Even the NRC which is about as neurotic about reactor safety as you can get does reach a point where they say "ok, that's not a reasonable concern"

>>8850705
if your objections are based largely around "if done wrong, there will be serious health risk and loss of life", that applies to absolutely any method of generating energy.
solar panels and wind farms require mining plenty of rare earths, and a lot of those come from china which has a non existent environmental protection agency, so all the waste products of processing go into rivers and dramatically increase the cancer risk of anyone downstream (which is to say, a shitload of people). We don't care because these people are essentially invisible.

could china be more serious about cleaning up its mining act and stop this? of course. Can it be 100% eliminated? of course not. Can the same logic of "if it was better it would be less bad" be applied to nuclear energy? Of course, but you're demanding perfection unevenly

nuclear energy's downsides are very dramatic to think about. The downsides of everything else are just as real, but more subtle and distributed and vague, not as exciting.

To put things in perspective; Fukushima is about the worst case scenario for a 70 year old reactor. However you have to remember that it is SEVENTY years old. Newer reactor designs are not nearly so vulnerable so a worst case scenario for them is bad but not even close. Also the fukushima area has been essentially safe to live in for about two years now since everything's decayed down pretty far, it's just nobody wants to because muh radiashun.

>>8850526
something-proof is an impossible goal and not worth pursuing, diminishing returns and all that
something-resistant it.
your two points are basically just proliferation and waste storage. For proliferation, the sort of "main" liquid fuel reactor technology to go for is a two fluid reactor which produces material that could potentially be used to make a weapon but it's a VICIOUS gamma emitter and would kill your bomb assemblers right quick in any fissionable concentrations.

as for waste, you're right, a two fluid reactor makes some NASTY products. like seriously bad shit, but it doesn't make much of it at all, and because it's so nasty it tumbles down the decay chain fast as fuck. boiling water reactors make kinda dangerous stuff that's dangerous for a fucklong time, this stuff is horrible but only for a few years and is back to background levels within a century or two, and designing low-volume waste storage for two centuries is actually rather easy

The real problems with liquid fuel right now is designing machinery and containment for fucking neutron-rich fluorine salt, like the worst kind of hell lava you can imagine.


>Nuclear power isn't compatible with human nature, which is inherently sloppy and often malicious. We need to base our society on forgiving technologies which untrustworthy people can be allowed access to.
that's a fancy brand soap box you just leaped onto at the last second there bub

>nuclear is an old dead technology, nevermind that it could get better
>solar is getting better guys just hold up

the second point is true but the first is silly.
it's almost entirely a perception issue, and because of fukushima boiling water reactor perception probably won't ever reverse.
Really is time to shift into liquid fuel reactors, they have better PR

>>8847879
see this is the fucking problem, you'renothelping.jpg

just get tyson and nye on TV more. i know /sci/ hates them but they promote basic science literacy and basic critical thinking and even a little bit helps a lot.

>>8847748
See, you just politicized it again
If you want to fight on policy, go for it, more power to you
but if you want to push policy and science in general at the same time, please don't

Congrats, march for science, you managed to further politicize objective reasoning and experimentation and only further alienate various "skeptics". They can now point at shit like
>>8840684
and claim global warming is a hoax made up by trannies or whatever.

this march is the definition of "YOU'RE NOT HELPING"

>>8781731
>Flyback boosters, when mature, might save 80+% of the TOTAL launch cost on their own, and enable 99+% savings as part of a fully-reusable system.


hmmmm, [citation needed], that sounds pretty hyperbolic

>>8779727
eh, not necessarily, rockets are expensive no matter what and really reliable really cheap rocket re-use is a ways off yet.
as with many things, change will be gradual but appreciated

>>8779686
there have been several sea landings already by the reusable first stage booster on the falcon 9

this will be the first flight and re-use of one of those boosters, the eventual goal being to launch a rocket, let the booster land, take it back to a refurbishing facility, and launch again very soon after

if it doesn't explode, hooray?

>>8778080
>they claim that they know everything about universe.
nobody with a degree in anything science related has ever said this

>>8777899
trouble is, the "change the laws" argument does not and cannot account for excess gravitational lensing