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Worse than that. It’s more along the lines of asserting that they are happy with the financial arrangement and “jokes” as per the status quo, and that they stand by him and his decision to advertise their product for money on the “apoplogy” video. They’re making fun of the ones raising the issues, not linus. Even further they’re trying to milk to controversy for attention.
I’m not sure if the time scale would be measurable. Nanoseconds at most. But the relevant part is that it’s ignition.
A device to harness inertial confinement fusion would work very very differently to a magnetic confinement one if that were the goal here (it’s not, it’s a weapons research facility). Essentially heating something up a lot in milliseconds and then extracting the heat over hours to months.
This research comes frim the llnl weapons complex: https://wci.llnl.gov/
There is an international treaty against nuclear arms testing, so as new weapons and platforms are developed there is no way to expose them to the conditiona they’d encounter if they actually had to deploy nuclear weapons (or operate in an environment where they are being used such as trying to take out the other bomber that is on its way to destroy your other city while the first city burns).
In addition to the enormous military budget, They take large quantities of civilian money via the DOE because they pay lip service to it being “energy research”. This is the part that is objectionable.
It’s a cool thing, and arguably necessary given we recently got to see what happens when a country bordering Russia gives up its nuclear weapons altogether, but there is little application for energy. It may also see the development of some micro-fusion warhead with no fission component which is technically a nuclear bomb, but nigh-impossible to make if you don’t have the US military budget so they’ll use it anyway and say “nuh-huh!” when anyone objects.
Either the technology is highly limited in the volume where the reaction is self sustaining, so the machine as a whole will never break even energy-wise, or it is not, and every inertial confinement generator produced is essentially a weapon of mass destruction that the US will never let exist outside of the control of nuclear armed countries.
There may be some limited application to energy, but it’s a stretch (essentially it would look like asking the US military nicely to come set another bomb off in your artificial geothermal reservoir every few months). It will certainly never be deployed in a non-military mobile application (which rules out most of the use cases where renewables are not strictly superior).
Except this one isn’t basic physics research. It’s an end run around nuclear weapons treaties to test how missiles and planes respond to H-bombs going off nearby.
It could have an energy application (maybe), but given that the targets are ludicrously expensive, the most viable power plant would resemble the attempts in the 60s to use bombs in underground caverns to heat things up and put essentially a geothermal plant on top. Except with a laser detonator rather than a fission one. Chances of making it economically viable or reliable are slim.
The amount of energy you can get per m^2 without heating the planet is definitionally the amount you can get by covering a small fraction of the planet with PV. No thermal power generation can beat this.
Large, inflexible, overly centralised generation is also unable to reach high grid penetration (for example france produces 20-30% of their load from dispatchable sources like gas and hydro even on a summer’s night during the pandemic where demand is <50% of their nuclear fleet’s nameplate capacity)
Assuming for a moment it is real and works and this class of material is useful for transmitting current with 0 resistance or making magnets, many attributes of other ceramic superconductors also shouldn’t apply given the theory that predicted it says it’s not one of those either.
This also leads to a very very stupid reactionary semantic argument you’ll start seeing more and more over the coming weeks.
Evidence that the class of materials is a thing is decently solid so far (but will still take a few months to confirm).
The hard bit of finding a process or another material in the class with a yield of more than a couple of milligram specks per kg of input starts after that.
Plus even then, the anisotropy (it only works in one direction) will give it some odd limitations. Still really cool though
Each breakthrough had elements that were messy and complicated and once you break through the hype and look at what the breakthrough actually was, you can see they’re in hearing aids, and single use applications and many of them (even ones not originating in lithium batteries) are now in lithium batteries.
Hence why they went from barely more than lead acid in energy density with abysmal lifetimes to at around 90Wh/kg and <200 cycles to 500Wh/kg for pilot-scale (still larger than the total scale of lithium in the early 2000s) commercial batteries that do 1000s of cycles, charge ten times as fast and cost a tenth as much using no precious or rare earth metals and a 20th of the lithium. 2015-2020’s breakthroughs are gearing up to give us 700Wh/kg expensive batteries and 160Wh/kg dirt cheap sodium batteries.
The breakthroughs happened and are in mass production, just because the charge carrier is the same (with good reason) doesn’t make the other parts the same. Stop focusing on a single word as if that defines the entire thing.
That saie, this 'breakthrough" is pure hype. The concept is interesting, but the suggested application of residential energy storage is worse than a sodium ion battery by every metric.
Completely changing the construction method of the foundation of a whole house, making it out of 90% cement/10% electrolyte (releasing 200 extra tonnes of CO2) rather than 20% cement/80% gravel and increasing costs by tens of thousands for the same effect as a 70kg $2.5k rrp battery (which will be a 50kg $500 battery in two years)?
Doesn’t seem huge other than in the literal size sense.
Bifaciality isn’t new or limited to perovskite based PV. Ground reflection is also not the only source of indirect light.
This article is very bad, but bifacial panels are starting to dominate the industry for good reason. The backside gives a 5-20% boost in total annual yield (which is worth it on its own), but more importantly that boost is skewed towards times with low direct irradiance (such as cloudy days). This reduces the amount of storage required.
It also allows other orientations. Vertical installations have huge advantages including better compatibility with agrivoltaics, generation skewed towards times where low tilt panels don’t produce (morning-evening for east-west and winter for north-south), better dual use, and lower racking cost. Glass-glass encapsulisation is also more durable and this alone pays for most of the added cost.
I think it’s really interesting how people who aren’t familiar with computers never think to themselves, “there has to be a better way to do this.”
Sort of a communal learned helplessness. Years of abusive user interfaces and faceless corporations providing an all or nothing platform instead of modular tools leads to a mindset of “that’s just the way it is and I have to deal with it”.
If we correct for toyota falseadvertising range estimates (-10%), assume they mean 90km/h at similar consumption as a model 3 in ideal coditios (around 120Wh/km), and take “a charge” as 10-80% then it needs 90kWh or about half a megawatt.
So still not within current chargers, but well within what a megawatt charger would provide (and there are four standards basically ready to roll out).
Spain and china managed just fine. Rail costs way less than 20 lane highways.