Here: While, wind is a part of energy diversity, ask, what is not being said here? (As in, fluctuations and non load following.) END PS, part of this is to equip us to detect balanced or balancing information from what leaves out significant issues or buries the lead. That is significant as it is then easy to trot out the buried reference to X, when someone asks questions. Meanwhile, the rest of the story — X — is subtly marginalised relative to the pushed point P.
Energy is a central issue for the future, and we need a positive focus on where we can go. Accordingly, let us consider the Chinese pebble bed initiative: As a backgrounder, Wiki: The pebble-bed reactor (PBR) is a design for a graphite-moderated, gas-cooled nuclear reactor. It is a type of very-high-temperature reactor (VHTR), one of the six classes of nuclear reactors in the Generation IV initiative. The basic design of pebble-bed reactors features spherical fuel elements called pebbles. These tennis ball-sized pebbles (approx. 6.7 cm or 2.6 in in diameter) are made of pyrolytic graphite (which acts as the moderator), and they contain thousands of micro-fuel particles called TRISO particles. These TRISO fuel particles consist of a fissile material (such as 235U) Read More ›
2.5 MJ in, 3.15 MJ out . . . not counting the inefficiency of lasers: Counting 400 MJ to get the 2.5 MJ from the lasers, that is not yet “there” but it is a step. Here is another recent attempt, based on firing two plasma “donuts” at each other: The Helion people explain the challenge involved, here. Let us watch as we inch towards a fusion world. END
It seems helpful to illustrate cosmological scale apparent aging as stars depart main sequence: An idealised, Hertzsprung-Russell chart for Hydrogen-rich balls prone to become fusion furnaces is: Here is a comparative plot (for open clusters), constructing a “clock” by projected pattern as a cluster ages, in effect seeing what is left as a candle burns down: This can be taken as illustrative of how our cosmos shows entropy-associated aging on the grand scale. Further illustrative, here is a NASA-derived cosmological timeline model, integrated with fine tuning: Speaking of fine tuning, Barnes et al summarise: All of this ties to core thermodynamics: Food for thought. END
Our civilisation is haunted by the ghost of the Rev. Thomas Malthus. His core vision of resource exhaustion and population crashes haunts our imaginations. As BBC profiles in brief: Malthus’ most well known work ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ was published in 1798, although he was the author of many pamphlets and other longer tracts including ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent’ (1815) and ‘Principles of Political Economy’ (1820). The main tenets of his argument were radically opposed to current thinking at the time. He argued that increases in population would eventually diminish the ability of the world to feed itself and based this conclusion on the thesis that populations expand in such a way Read More ›
A recent news item suggests that AI may help bring fusion power to the table on the long used but challenging Tokamak toroidal reactor architecture. This would be a major positive use of AI technology, if it proves sufficiently reliable: Artificial intelligence (AI), a branch of computer science that is transforming scientific inquiry and industry, could now speed the development of safe, clean and virtually limitless fusion energy for generating electricity. A major step in this direction is under way at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University, where a team of scientists working with a Harvard graduate student is for the first time applying deep learning — a powerful new version of Read More ›