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Just thought i'd resurect this topic because I read this today:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37627198/ns ... e-science/

If they cancel the project I will be a very angry man, what are your opinions?

I have hard time seeing this making history as the danger it is to do this. You can't just have these places all over the world can you?

Thats the general end game idea. Nuclear fusion is practically the only thing (currently within our reach) that will be capable of generating the energy we need. The best thing about it is that it will only produce light elements (helium, lithium etc) and only requires hydrogen (and a bit of kick start energy) to get a fusion reaction going. The trick is containing this vast quantity of energy and then harvesting it. This at the moment is attempting to be done with magnets. Another probelm we have at the moment is trying to get the reaction to become self sustaining (so once its on, we can keep it on practically indefinatly (unless we want to shut it down for what ever reason) whilst making sure the reaction doesnt spiral out of control and results in effective a nuclear explosion.

Although a nuclear explosion would be a very bad thing, we run this risk all over the world in fission driven nuclear reactors and we have only had one or two major incidents and neither of them resulted in a nuclear explosion (chernobl's reactor did explode, but it wasnt a nuclear explosion, I think it was a massive release of pressure or something, but the resulting explosion did litter radioactive material over a large part of Europe, fusion doesnt leave radioactive material)

I think this would be massivly historical as this reaction is what goes on in stars! and we would be reproducing this on our planet to meet our energy needs. Thats something.

Anyway if they shut this project down and go for an efficiency drive and invest in renuables then this will really only be delaying the fact that existing power generation techinques will not be sufficient nor sustainable to meet our needs. I'm not saying we should become 100% dependant on fusion but we need it to make up a significant amount of our energy supply, if we kill the project we will be sorry down the line.

What's wrong with solar though? No waste there (except old batteries and panels I guess).

Current normal solar cells are rubbish, it actually takes more energy to make the damn things than they will ever produce. Although a lot of interesting research will make solar cells more viable down the line all of this is in the very early stages and solar power can be tempermental in most climates (weather etc)

The other solar option is the solar-thermal power plant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_power

This is viable technology but is only really effective in countries either near or on the equator. To transport any energy produced there to countries further away from the equator however is not viable unless you use superconductors and they currently require conditions -200 or less degress centegrade to work and there really expensive. So thats not really viable. The other thing about solar power is that it requires alot of maintanence to keep it working efficiently. So solar thermal is a viable local solution in some areas but for most of the world its not.

So if storing energy is such a difficult process, then how do you figure spending all this money going to TESTING nuclear fusion then how do you assume they'll store it effectively? I think it may be a waste to be honest.

I didn't say anything about storing energy ;) once you get the electrical energy thats it, you either use it or lose it. Conventional energy transfer is a problem over long distances because the resistance just goes up and up, wasting more and more energy per meter (thats what I meant by transport, a bad use of the word).

Yes this is testing nuclear fusion but we're funnelling all of this money into it for a reason because all of the scientists recognise its massive potential, i've not met one physicist who says fusion research is a bad thing but I have met tonnes of physicists who say fusion research needs to be done and we need to master it. The estimate for energy produced to energy spent in fusion (once we get it going) is 50-100J produced for every 1J spent. That dwarfs anything we have today.

Since when do physicist know anything about the world economy? How is this type of energy going to be cheap to create and distribute? It seems that it's just going to cost the consumer more and nobody cares about the environment if that means less money in their pockets.

The energy is going to be cheap because its fuel is going to be very cheap. The bonus of nuclear fusion is that it gets through its fuel slowly and that fuel is hydrogen (more specifically deuterium and tritium, which are its isotopes) which will probably be obtained from sea water. The biggest cost, which will make up most of the overall cost, is to build the reactor and then to maintain it. As you have seen its quite hefty.

Unlike fission nuclear reactors the fusion reactor will not have a set life time.

Right anyway, so although it will cost alot more to build a fusion reactor than say a coal fired power plant, that output the same energy you wont have to buy nearly as much fuel to keep it going. This means that over a long enough period the cost of building and running the coal fired plant will be about the same if not more than the nuclear fusion reactor. For this reason its been estimated that the price of energy from a fusion reactor will be about 4c/kwh (thats cents per kilowatt hour) and will be a fairly stable price throughout the world. Coal,gas and oil are fairly stable in terms of prices (although getting more expensive for obvious reasons) throughout the world, these give prices ranging from 3.9c - 5.5c/kwh.

Although renuables essentially have free 'fuel' the price of thier energy is entirely dependant on where you locate them has to travel, for instance if I put a wind turbine in the scottish highlands where there is an abundance of wind I will generate alot of power and therefore can give lower prices but if I put one outside my house, I wont generate alot of power and have to charge higher rates. So basically you want to put renuables in the best places possible, of which there is limited space. So even though I can potentially generate alot of energy for not alot I wont be able to get that energy everywhere. Typical rate for a wind turbine is 4 - 6c/kwh.

So to sum up:
Fusion reactors can be built and operated in most places in the world and they will give competitive prices for thier energy.
They have an incredably abundant fuel source and this should just be first generation reactors. We might even be able to make the reactors more efficient later on and fuision could get even cheaper.

Are those numbers (specifically the cost of the power generated from nuclear fusion) accurate or estimated? If you have to built a plant of that magnitude and then build the reactors, get hydrogen (which isn't a big deal I will admit) and then generate power, how is it going to be that cheap? No one will create a plant like that because it is not economically viable. You'd have to sell a lot of power to get back the costs of the building. Then very specialized workers would be required because it's not as simple as hydro or coal. After all of the costs I don't think the revenue would kick back enough. Obviously nuclear fusion is a good idea but I think it is too costly.

Some of you guys might find this an interesting read:

http://www.asylum.com/2010/06/14/10-inv ... your-life/

Meat Farms.....that just sounds disgusting. I'll take my meat from a living breathing cow thank you very much. The other stuff is pretty sweet!

In the past couple of months,

Yet it talks about technologies much less recent.

What does teleportation have to do with quantum computing? Also it's quite a coincidence because I was getting confused reading up about it a little while go. Those qubits make no sense. Super-positioning? How does that work?

The artificially grown meant will likely taste rubbish.

Quantum mechanics generally doesnt make sense :?

I actually had a guest lecture on this topic, even though I don't remember much about it, I do know the general idea behind a quantum computer:

Firstly remember the number 1 rule about QM ==> it doesn't make any sense look at the quote in my sig, that was said by a leading QM scientist back in the day and my lecturers repeat it all the time.

So as you know a quantum computer will have these Qbits and Qbytes. The main difference between a Qbit and a normal bit is that the Qbit is in a quantum state, this means that it hasn't 'offically announced what state its in', unlike a normal bit which is either a 1 or a 0, period, it will never change unless you tell it to.

Now once you perform a measurment action of a Qbit it will take a random state (lets call it 1 or 0) and depending on the way you take that measurement you can effect the probability of what state the Qbit will take. lets say 1 has a 60% prob and 0 a 40% prob in our measurment. By taking 100 measurments (or more) we should get more 1 measurments than 0 measurments and we can make it so the computer will take that measurment.

Now after we have made our measurment we can reset the Qbit to be random again. This excercise may seem pointless until you realise this can be repeated again and again and again, each time utilising different measurments to create different data from a relativly small set of Qbits.

This means that the computer can call upon any data it requires at any time from a very small harddrive. The more Qbits you have the more complicated the more requests can be proccessed and delivered.

Anyway thats all that I understand about quantum computers at the moment. No idea where entalnglement and teleportation can come into it but it probably has something to do with the way the computer might request the imformation it requires.

I hope this explanation made some sense, like I said before i've only just started to engage with these theories

It still make no sense. You say based on the way you try to measure something (Measure what and how?) it will be more likely to be measured as a 1 or 0.

So basically you would measure it in a way which would more likely to be a 1? Hence you might as well skip that idea and just recognise you wanted a 1 all along?

Or did you mean there are two different states and you don't know what they are until you try to measure a state. A state could be a 1 or 0. A qubit essentially becomes like two bits for each state.

00,01,10,11 being the combinations of those two states?

So what is being measured and how?