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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (409423)	6/6/2019 12:29:20 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 541991

"Fusion has been 20 years away for about 60 years." the law of receding horizons: the tendency for a goal to just stay on the horizon no matter how hard you struggle towards i

To: bentway who wrote (409423)	6/6/2019 1:21:18 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541991

The problem with truisms such as fusion has always been 20 years away is that people are now down to 3-5 years forcasted for energy positive outputs. I read papers and abstracts about this as a fanboy every day and there is considerable progress every month - the hard problems are being solved - namely plasma instability and thermal problems - AI is being used and they have found some incredibly clever ways to stabilize plasmas and prevent loss of temperature. There are huge amounts of capital going into this and it is starting to be equivalent to airplane development around 1900 - there are a lot of really smart, motivated people working the problem and there is innovation coming down the pike, especially the reversed-D configuration which keeps the system from losing temperature. There are other modalities too that are coming this way. Conservation is the low hanging fruit - I am friends with a HVAC guy - he's telling me that IT data centers are way overbuilt with cooling because the processor efficiencies have increased so much that they are using 2/3's less power than they were designed for. All my lights are LED and as CFLs burn out, I replace them. But electric power pales compared to cars and trucks use of fossil fuels. By biking I'm saving more than 6 tons of CO2 a year personally from that one act. It won't take long if more people do the switch. I'm seeing three times the number of eBikers I saw two months ago on my path to work.