Technology

They boiled 10 kettles of water with this energy.

Ultimately, if everything is optimized, its probably only limited by the number of kettles available.

Limitless only for the same visit. 1 customer per reaction.
No repeat visits or sharing allowed!

It's nearly limitless because they used nearly 200 lasers. If they built a new one with the full 200 lasers, who knows what could happen.

The flamingo population must remain constant for ignition to function.

There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.

D-D fusion converts about 0.1% of mass to energy (4 MeV / c^2 / 4 Daltons). E=mc^2. So we have 4.2E30 (420E28) Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 485 billion years of fuel.

Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.

You know how the sun radiates an incredible amount of power through millions and millions of tonnes of material undergoing nuclear fusion every minute, and the sun is expected to last for millions of years?

Well, not that much. But it's still a lot!

You would have enough power to play a game of Civ II to completion.

One limit less.

Only on Tuesdays between the times of 04:04 and 04:27 UTC

It's near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. ... But to be honest, the 'unlimited energy' thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That's even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn't the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it's a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.

That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It's not complete garbage green-washing (unlike "carbon capture and storage", which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it's some holy-grail of unlimited power is ... well ... basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.

You have to sign up for a two year initial contract. After that there's tons of limits.

We live in a post-scarcity world - yet people are still starving ans stilll dying from easy curable diseases.

I won't be holding my breath.

Thinking of the hypothetical scenario where in a short timeframe energy would become near unlimited and almost free:

On the positive side: with no energy limitations, Direct Air Capture technology could be scaled massively. That's one really promising technology that can take carbon off the air and use it for other things (like sustainable air fuels) or removing it altogether.

Also this would accelerate the transition to electric cars and well, electric everything: why pay for fuel for your car, your stove or boiler, when they can be almost free? That has a potential for good effects on the environment too.

On the negative side: this opens the door for more, cheap transport. If people don't have to pay for fuel, they'd be more willing to take the car everywhere. This would mean more roads, more infrastructure, more destruction of ecosystems, less space for pedestrians... A trend that is already too difficult to reverse in a world of expensive fuels.

In terms of economics, I could see this accelerating the gap between countries. Those who could benefit from semi-free energy first would have an immense competitive advantage and also lower their manufacturing costs, leaving worse-off countries in a position where they can't compete because of technology nor because of cheap labour.

I can tell you, unequivocally, without a doubt, light and noise pollution are much better than energy shortages.

I mean I assume you have to start somewhere to be able to improve, right? Like breakthroughs with TVs, no one would realistically use a vacuum tube when you can make an OLED display. But if we didn’t start with the vacuum tube we wouldn’t know what to improve on.

Once we know that we can do it, we can start working on how to do it easier.

IMO the current best bet on who builds an actual fusion plant first is Proxima Fusion, a spin-out of the Max Planck institute. They're planning on building a large Stellerator by 2030 based on their experiences with Wendelstein-7X, which exceeded all expectations (as in: It behaved exactly as predicted), proving that the concept scales without issue. Still some kinks to figure out but those are about economical efficiency, not achieving power output.

The NIF generally does research on nukes. I have a hard time believing them talking about civil applications is anything but marketing.

The first step is always the hardest. You have to start somewhere. You don't start by having something fully scalable right away, you have to work towards it.

Yeah pretty much my understanding as well, I don't think anyone has a notion of what it would take to generate power from inertial fusion and whatever if it would be practical.

Same, I never understood the scope of this lasers-on-a-pill approach, other than being a starter. I like the Polywell concept more.

Fortunately we already have a fusion reactor available to us, we just have to get better at harnessing the energy it produces.

Today, climate change is a right now problem

Only for a significant majority of humanity. And species in general. You just gotta hustle and get that bunker built and you'll be all good. Climate change is a hoax anyway, I saw a picture once of the ocean in the 50s, and a recent picture with no reference to tides, and the water levels were the roughly the same from about 500 metres away.

It is also about the philosophy of many people who are focused on fusion as the future. If we just had unlimited cheap power that would solve alllll of our problems…. which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really the crisis here.