Climate Change

I hear an interesting argument:
Why do we spend so much on defense since WWII to defend America. We've been wrong pretty much every year, as we've never been attacked. But the consequences of being wrong are so dire, that we spend more on this contingency than we spend on stuff we actually need right now.
Doesn't the same hold true for global warming? What if it really is a crisis? What if the deniers are wrong and 99% of the people that actually study the situation are right? The consequences are so dire that maybe we should hedge a bit more?
 

Nuclear fusion breakthrough 'an enormous game changer,' Constellation Energy CEO says​


The U.S. Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in nuclear fusion on Tuesday that puts the world one step closer to harnessing an abundant energy source free from carbon emissions and long-lived radioactive waste.

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm confirmed that scientists achieved a reaction that created more energy than was used — known as a net energy gain — at the federally-funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

"Last week at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition,” Sec. Granholm said. “It’s the first time it’s ever been done. … Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.”

Such a development carries broad implications for renewable energy and long-term solutions to replace fossil fuels, though the benefits are still decades away.

“It'd be an enormous game changer,” Constellation Energy CEO Joe Dominguez told Yahoo Finance Live on Monday (video above). “We've been chasing this for a long time. But the developments we saw out of Lawrence Livermore are, I think, the best developments on fusion energy that we've seen since the work at Princeton probably 30 years ago with the TFTR [Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor]. So it's very exciting. It's transformational.”
Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms under extreme pressure and heat fuse into one atom, releasing a packet of energy. (Photo: National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory)

Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms under extreme pressure and heat fuse into one atom, releasing a packet of energy. (Photo: National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

A nuclear fusion reaction, which is what keeps the sun and other stars burning, occurs when the nuclei of two atoms fuse into one atomic nucleus. When that happens, the excess mass converts into energy. (The reverse process, nuclear fission, powers existing nuclear power plants and bombs.)

Scientists have been working to achieve sustained nuclear fusion since the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was founded in the 1950s, but replicating the conditions found within the massive cores of stars in labs on earth has proven to be a seemingly intractable problem.

Experts say that nuclear fusion releases 4 million times more energy than burning oil or coal. Put another way, a pickup truck filled with nuclear fusion fuel has the equivalent energy of 2 million metric tons of coal or 10 million barrels of oil. And it produces that energy without the drawbacks of other sources, namely climate change causing carbon emissions and lasting hazardous waste.

If interested. There's more at the link - here
 
wader said:
Such a development carries broad implications for renewable energy and long-term solutions to replace fossil fuels, though the benefits are still decades away.
Click to expand...
True statement, BUT we love to say "Fusion Reaction to make Helium, just like the Sun" when our terrestrial fusion reaction is different. The Sun starts off with Hydrogen for its fusion reaction, as opposed to the terrestrial use of Deuterium and Tritium.

In the interest of pure astrophysics, this is how the sun does it...

Here are the four possible overall steps available to the components that make up then entire "hydrogen fusing into helium" process in the Sun:

  1. Two protons (hydrogen-1) fuse together, producing deuterium (hydrogen-2) and other particles plus energy,
  2. Deuterium (hydrogen-2) and a proton (hydrogen-1) fuse, producing helium-3 and energy,
  3. Two helium-3 nuclei fuse together, producing helium-4, two protons (hydrogen-1), and energy,
  4. Helium-3 fuses with helium-4, producing beryllium-7, which decays and then fuses with another proton (hydrogen-1) to yield two helium-4 nuclei plus energy.
And I want you to note something very interesting, and perhaps surprising, about those four possible steps: only step #2, where deuterium and a proton fuse, producing helium-3, is technically the fusion of hydrogen into helium!

In our Sun, helium-3 fusing with other helium-3 nuclei produces 86% of our helium-4, while the helium-3 fusing with helium-4 through that chain reaction produces the other 14%. (Other, much hotter stars have additional pathways available to them, including the CNO cycle, but those all contribute insignificantly in our Sun.) When we take into account the energy liberated in each step, we find:

  1. Proton/proton fusion into deuterium accounts for 40% of the reactions by number, releasing 1.44 MeV of energy for each reaction: 10.4% of the Sun's total energy.
  2. Deuterium/proton fusion into helium-3 accounts for 40% of the reactions by number, releasing 5.49 MeV of energy for each reaction: 39.5% of the Sun's total energy.
  3. Helium-3/helium-3 fusion into helium-4 accounts for 17% of the reactions by number, releasing 12.86 MeV of energy for each reaction: 39.3% of the Sun's total energy.
  4. And helium-3/helium-4 fusion into two helium-4s accounts for 3% of the reactions by number, releasing 19.99 MeV of energy for each reaction: 10.8% of the Sun's total energy.
 
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someone told me that while energy out exceeded energy in - to the sample- the total energy needed to generate the lasers and deliver the energy to the sample exceeded energy out.
have you heard anything about that?

Curse you delta S!!
 
Matts said:
someone told me that while energy out exceeded energy in - to the sample- the total energy needed to generate the lasers and deliver the energy to the sample exceeded energy out.
have you heard anything about that?

Curse you delta S!!
Click to expand...
Haven't seen that analysis, it's probably in the same file that calculates the energy costs and carbon footprint of manufacturing, installing and decommissioning offshore wind generators. Additionally the manufacture or procurement and purification of deuterium and tritium have HUGE energy implications...

Don't get me wrong, this is a major step forward and should be celebrated, but it's a long way from being ready for prime time...
 
Roccus7 said:
Haven't seen that analysis, it's probably in the same file that calculates the energy costs and carbon footprint of manufacturing, installing and decommissioning offshore wind generators. Additionally the manufacture or procurement and purification of deuterium and tritium have HUGE energy implications...

Don't get me wrong, this is a major step forward and should be celebrated, but it's a long way from being ready for prime time...
Click to expand...
I think it was more straightforward than that. Lasers are not 100% efficient. The energy supplied to a laser exceeds the energy output by the laser. All the reports I've seen are careful to refer to the energy supplied to the fuel capsule, but not to the energy it took to generate all those lasers. Entropy is a tough nut to crack.
 
www.yahoo.com

What’s going on with the Greenland ice sheet? It's losing ice faster than forecast and now irreversibly committed to at least 10 inches of sea level rise

A turbulent melt-river pours a million tons of water a day into a moulin, where it flows down through the ice to ultimately reach the ocean. Ted GiffordsI’m standing at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, mesmerized by a mind-blowing scene of natural destruction. A milewide section of glacier...
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

The Conversation

What’s going on with the Greenland ice sheet? It's losing ice faster than forecast and now irreversibly committed to at least 10 inches of sea level rise​


Alun Hubbard, Professor of Glaciology, Arctic Five Chair, University of Tromsø
Wed, December 28, 2022 at 11:03 AM EST

I’m standing at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet, mesmerized by a mind-blowing scene of natural destruction. A milewide section of glacier front has fractured and is collapsing into the ocean, calving an immense iceberg.

Seracs, giant columns of ice the height of three-story houses, are being tossed around like dice. And the previously submerged portion of this immense block of glacier ice just breached the ocean – a frothing maelstrom flinging ice cubes of several tons high into the air. The resulting tsunami inundates all in its path as it radiates from the glacier’s calving front.

Fortunately, I’m watching from a clifftop a couple of miles away. But even here, I can feel the seismic shocks through the ground.

Despite the spectacle, I’m keenly aware that this spells yet more unwelcome news for the world’s low-lying coastlines.

As a field glaciologist, I’ve worked on ice sheets for more than 30 years. In that time, I have witnessed some gobsmacking changes. The past few years in particular have been unnerving for the sheer rate and magnitude of change underway. My revered textbooks taught me that ice sheets respond over millennial time scales, but that’s not what we’re seeing today.

A study published Aug. 29, 2022, demonstrates – for the first time – that Greenland’s ice sheet is now so out of balance with prevailing Arctic climate that it no longer can sustain its current size. It is irreversibly committed to retreat by at least 59,000 square kilometers (22,780 square miles), an area considerably larger than Denmark, Greenland’s protectorate state.

Even if all the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming ceased today, we find that Greenland’s ice loss under current temperatures will raise global sea level by at least 10.8 inches (27.4 centimeters). That’s more than current models forecast, and it’s a highly conservative estimate. If every year were like 2012, when Greenland experienced a heat wave, that irreversible commitment to sea level rise would triple. That’s an ominous portent given that these are climate conditions we have already seen, not a hypothetical future scenario.
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more at the link
 
What are the odds that 99% of the folks who should know that there will be a global sea level rise are right? Over 50%, over 10%, over 1%. but the risk of what will happen if global warming is real is so dire, maybe we should hedge a bit more?
 
Matts said:
someone told me that while energy out exceeded energy in - to the sample- the total energy needed to generate the lasers and deliver the energy to the sample exceeded energy out.
have you heard anything about that?

Curse you delta S!!
Click to expand...
Don't know if anyone caught the 60 Minutes report on the Lawrence Livermore success this past Sunday, but they mentioned a couple of key things on this.

  • Yes, they put in 2 units of energy with the laser zaps, and got out 3 units from the reaction BUT it took 300 units of energy to fire up the lasers!!! That's one hell of a ΔS...

  • The entire process was amazingly technical, and is decades away from commercial utility, even though the Federal agencies are saying we're 10 years away from commercial use.
 
dsedy said:
Brilliant speech addressed to our ‘woke’ youth fighting #climatechange by Konstantine Kisin.








ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com www.zerohedge.com
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"I find it weird that people are congratulating me on my "brave" speech. There is nothing brave about adults challenging young people to be better and to think clearly. It's our job! And if more of us had been doing it we wouldn't be where we are."
 
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