JoeSchmuckatelli

Okay, Dr. Evil...

Monitor spec? 1080p / 60hz?

Molten Salt Battery https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rechargeable-molten-salt-battery-freezes-energy-in-place-for-long-term-storage/

December, 2020 SN8 February 2021 SN9 March 2021 SN10 March 2021 SN 11 May 2021 SN 15 We were spoiled with this pace. Having to remind myself that Iterative Rocket Season should start again, soon. But like any fan - I'm antsy for it to begin.

I agree it would be a totally fun game to play.

The real crime is how science allowed the politicians to be swayed by those who want nuclear vilified. Even the worst bogeyman - nuclear waste - is fairly simple to deal with safely. Note: I don't blame the populace. People can be stupid.

But they won't know they need it until it does something. That's what I was hoping Musk would do this year... but he's gotten distracted

Disagree. When he's focused, the SS development went very, very fast. He's willing to spend his money. Since getting distracted, SS has slowed down and become much more staid. Admittedly, perhaps faster than other companies due to institutional culture... but he's a decidedly dynamic feature of SX.

@Pthigrivi [In Germany] the national average for the year was hours of sunshine a day or 158 full sunny days. The number of sunny days in Germany by federated state, by year and month (ru-geld.de) German 'flip-flops' on Nuclear Power. EXPLAINER: Why Germany is delaying its nuclear shutdown | AP News Unsurprisingly, the flatter, coastal adjacent areas are best for wind - with much of the country 'not ideal' Global Wind Atlas The energy density issue (how much land you need to produce corresponding amounts of power) is a non-trivial issue: INFOGRAPHIC: How Much Power Does A Nuclear Reactor Produce? | Department of Energy Need over 400 modern utility-scale turbines, or over 3 million solar panels to equal the output of one average nuclear power plant.

You realize that the chance I'm correct is slightly higher than the chances of winning the lottery

The video I link above does go into this, too (for those who want more on what Mike's referring to). One of the problems with shutting down nuclear fission reactors is that the deuterium and tritium are most easily obtained from nuclear reactors and a healthy nuclear energy industry. Tritium is particularly problematic as the supply is currently very low. Apparently the guy who made the video above is visiting a commercial effort that is trying to get away from steam turbines... Video supposed to be out next week. Of course - now I'm seeing why @HebaruSanwanted to split the topic: I'm having trouble keeping up with which technology we are talking about. (Mike's on the NIF topic and Stranded is on the Tokamak / magnetic plasma topic

Fie AGAIN! Fie! You are missing out on the 'killer app' of the show (to use the parlance you kids these days might understand). The Babel is practically the raison d'etre of the show! ... ... Frankly - the show is ...okay. It has some really interesting elements and I'm pretty sure the show runners were counting on at least two seasons to tell the story they wanted to tell. It's like 'The OA' - a show that was compelling, unique and very well acted - but that kind of got lost in itself or could not get past a certain thin-ness in the writing/underlying story. They wanted to get cute with a thing but couldn't find a way past to something deeper. 'Dark' on the other hand was really well done and managed (in most ways) to navigate those problems.

The director admitted this during the presentation. The 'new' is that for the first time at the pellet they were strongly energy positive. It was here that she told the press that one of the reasons they were seeking funding is that this was done by lasers that are effectively '80s technology. There is A LOT of efficiency to be achieved before even thinking about developing it into a power plant

Here's one of the newer 'crisis in Cosmology' articles - it came out after Webb data started flowing. I've cited this before - but its a pretty good read (in case you missed it) JWST's First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology - Scientific American

Most 'News' these days is people repoasting twitter nonsense. Fox, Huffpoast, CNN - they all do it. Hell, all the NIF articles about Fusion were all expansions on the theme "Financial Times Reports Fusion". So... yeah. You are the SOURCE for PC Gamer... like it or else!

Webb takes a peek at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. This area is in and around the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field. Scientists used Webb’s NIRCam instrument to observe the field in nine different infrared wavelength ranges. From these images, the team searched for faint galaxies that are visible in the infrared but whose spectra abruptly cut off at a critical wavelength. They conducted additional observations (not shown here) with Webb’s NIRSpec instrument to measure each galaxy’s redshift and reveal the properties of the gas and stars in these galaxies. I can't count that high, but if you multiply 100 Billion by all the little dots (except for the star)... that's a lot of stars, given that pretty much everything you see in the image is a galaxy. JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) (webbtelescope.org)

How do researchers know they're getting actual data or 'corrected data'? Question comes from a recent paper on the 'Crisis in Cosmology' where the researchers had to first figure out what the 'standard correction' was, and then take that out to make their inferences. The 'standard correction' in this case was making sure the spectra aligned with LCDM theory. Is there a way to get observatories to just give you what the telescope is seeing - or do they all control the data and only put out what they want to put out? (To be fair, as far as I can tell, the researchers in question were using other folks' published data - so it may have been the clients of the telescopes applying the 'correction' rather than the telescope it/themselfs.

Yep

Here's an article with more information on the NIF accomplishment. Nuclear-fusion lab achieves ‘ignition’: what does it mean? (nature.com) The facility used its set of 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a pea-sized gold cylinder containing a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The pulse of energy caused the capsule to collapse, creating temperatures only seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons, and the hydrogen isotopes fused into helium, releasing additional energy and creating a cascade of fusion reactions. The laboratory’s analysis suggests that some 3.15 megajoules of energy was released — roughly 54% more than the energy that went into the reaction and more than double the previous record of 1.3 megajoules. ... NIF scientists readily acknowledge that the facility was not designed with commercial fusion energy in mind — and many researchers doubt that laser-driven fusion will be the approach that ultimately yields fusion energy. But Campbell believes that its latest success could boost confidence in the promise of laser fusion power and ultimately open the door to a new programme focused on energy applications. “This is absolutely necessary to have the credibility to sell an energy programme,” he says. ... The engineering challenges faced by NIF are different from those at ITER and other facilities. But the symbolic achievement could have widespread effects. "A result like this will bring increased interest in the progress of all types of fusion, so it should have a positive impact on fusion research in general,"

and @Gargamel I fully understand Hebaru's concern. It was a bit confusing for me too when I first started trying to figure out what LLNL had done differently at the NIF than was being done on the commercial side. But - given that this is a nascent technology area and that advancements are likely to be few and far between - maybe it does make sense to keep the two together so that when a Fusion topic comes up... we can find the ongoing (pastgoing?) conversation. The key, in that case is for those of us who post to try to clarify what Fusion tech is being talked about. (Frankly, I once thought a tokomak was a thing to do on a large scale what the lasers did on a point target, just using magnets for compression rather than lasers and radiation).

...no kidding

The quick down and dirty: LLMN has done ignition fusion, which differs from all the Tokamak and other commercial endeavors referred to in the video I linked above (not the SKY). The lasers they're using are 1980s technology. The hope is that with this new advancement and proof of concept (power can be generated) that they can get the funding necessary from Congress to keep pressing and upgrade their gear. There are very real defense implications (including non-proliferation) from their work, and so they're briefing on two points; they know the audience - science nerds, lefties who want to peel everyone away from carbon burning fuels, and national defense minded people who will only spend money if it keeps 'Murica safe. The 'from the wall' energy needed to get the ignition started is exponentially greater than the energy output - that's not the point. The point is that for the first time they got a net energy gain (2Mj in, 3Mj out) at the ignition source; that is both exciting and a clear indication that they need to invest more to improve efficiencies - before ever even thinking about commercial applications.

Maybe. But I kind of doubt they're going full Assassin's Creed on this. I see it as more of a Minecraft-lite, likely multiplayer (no time warp to worry about b/c handwavium), build-and-play and explore to do SCIENCE!!! type game. There are some real possibilities in 'doing science' that can be both fun and educational. Like really fun and really educational. They can take some of the very many ideas we've thrown at them in the 'KSP2 Science' thread and work it into a new game. You can have different Kerbals with different specialties that go out and do 'stuff' (geologist, biologist, zoologist, chemist, engineer... you name it). Players could start off with a small number of Kerbals, grow their 'teams' and build stuff to do stuff; maybe you need a ship to carry a pair of trucks and an excavator to another planet / location where you offload miners and set up a lab to do ISRU / Science. Your team will need a pilot, truck drivers, on-site researchers (various science specialties), engineers, etc. While there, you discover a deposit that needs a different set of specialized equipment to explore/exploit and once you unlock that, you can build the new thing and recruit a new Kerbal to bring to that location and do new science/ extract new resources. Along the way, while you are playing a game, you learn not only about the Kerbolar Universe - but also about real science that can be done here on earth. If done right, they can do for 'the sciences' what KSP did for 'orbital mechanics and rocketry'. So many possibilities.

So... Only a few decades of investment and concerted efforts before commercialization