Serious quesiton for people who deny human involvement in climate change/global warming

[Siro]

I was under the impression that the ITER was an experiment that would run for the most a few seconds. I don't believe Lockheed. To my knowledge no one has ever achieved more than a second and no one has ever pulled out more energy than they used to get the damn thing going. It seems to me that physicists without a financial incentive are crazy cynical about it. Could somebody make it work? sure. Is it likely? I don't think so.

It's true that ITER's goal is to achieve 500MW reaction sustained over 1000s. That is because the dynamics of large scale tokamak magnetic confinement need to be more closely studied, as well as evaluating strategies to contain the high energy neutron emissions from the reactions. But if those goals are achieved, then a large reactor with a continuous reaction will be built shortly after. That's the whole point of ITER.

It's not exactly true that nobody has pulled out more energy than they put in. That was achieved by NIF last year, if only juuuuuust barely.

Lockheed may or may not have made a breakthrough. The problem with academic labs is that they are relatively underfunded. I think there is a chance that a private company can crack a commercial design before the scientific community. But since Lockheed is supposed to unveil their reactor within the next couple of years, I guess we'll soon find out.

From all I've read and heard, I think fusion energy have a very high chance of being commercially viable within the next 25 years. But I don't want to play the game of probability. We'll know more in the next decade.

 

[franklin]

 

[franklin]

 

[Darkwing Duck]

Doubling down on your straw man by admitting you're making assumptions? This convo would go far....

I do find it amusing that you post with such general ambiguity that to ANY response made you can claim strawman. Makes for quite entertaining thread derailment.

 

[Deleted member 848]

I think I'll side with nearly every climate scientist who's looked at Bangladesh over someone who would probably have difficulty naming a single city from the country.

 

[Darkwing Duck]

I think I'll side with nearly every climate scientist who's looked at Bangladesh over someone who would probably have difficulty naming a single city from the country.

To be fair, a climate scientist has no need to know any the name of any city in Bangladesh and is completely unrelated to his/her work.

 

[Deleted member 848]

To be fair, a climate scientist has no need to know any the name of any city in Bangladesh and is completely unrelated to his/her work.

you'd have to have the IQ of a chair to think that that was the point I was trying to make.

 

[Harambe]

I do find it amusing that you post with such general ambiguity that to ANY response made you can claim strawman. Makes for quite entertaining thread derailment.

/end thread

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

Shouldn't there be a risk/reward calculation for everything? Coal power plants have the reward of cheap and abundant energy source, versus the risk of increased CO2 emissions. Solar Panels require energy storage infrastructure and take up vast swaths of land (which why Japan is struggling to meet its power need. Not enough surface area). Why is this risk versus reward only brought up when discussing nuclear power? It's curious is all.

As a purely methodological issue, I think some form of risk/reward or cost/benefit calculation should be part of all such policy deliberations. There is no policy option that does not have costs and benefits, both actual or potential, and thus it makes sense to have some method for systematically considering them in relation to each other.

Note that as someone who does cost-benefit assessments routinely as part of my job, I have a certain amount of skepticism about them--they often, in my opinion, assume too much certainty. (I tend to do numerous alternative scenarios and use them to frame the likely C/B within a particular range.) I like to think of them more as trying to work through the ball park order of magnitude cost/benefit of different decisions or policies.

 

[jimmy eat jazz]

Doubling down on your straw man by admitting you're making assumptions? This convo would go far....

I make assumptions all the time. So do you. So does everyone else.

So what???

Noting this is hardly an insightful or particularly helpful revelation.

I still fail to see any evidence that you actually know what strawman means.

 

[Dr. Jones]

I make assumptions all the time. So do you. So does everyone else.

So what???

Noting this is hardly an insightful or particularly helpful revelation.

I still fail to see any evidence that you actually know what strawman means.

You're scary to crows.

 

[Dr. Jones]

I make assumptions all the time. So do you. So does everyone else.

So what???

Noting this is hardly an insightful or particularly helpful revelation.

I still fail to see any evidence that you actually know what strawman means.

Why would you insult frank with this attack of his manhood?