Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend.
I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.
Hey, I wrote the article. This is my personal website that I wrote mostly over the weekend.
I went down a rabbit hole reading about metals and mining and just thought it was interesting. Not an expert or a nefarious actor, unfortunately.
> Not an expert or a nefarious actor
If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!
isn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p
I mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.
I for one am not leery of noleary.
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To what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?
My guess is that while it is running it will dump spare neutrons into the tungsten, converting the tungsten into exotic materials that are not fit for task for various reasons.
The formatting of the website on iOS safari moves the left margin off screen so I could not read all of your essay. But you may enjoy reading Material World by Conroy based on what I could read, he does not cover Tungsten.
Landscape mode helps.
I found reading mode worked perfectly. It usually does for me, and for a while I actually set it to enable by default for all websites with manual exceptions. The cases where it doesn’t work well are usually very long articles which load in parts, which I try not to read on my phone anyway (and of course websites that aren’t primarily one large block of text).
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Nice work but no offense, but it comes off as you describe. I think you are overall right about needing to switch W sources. You are wrong that it will be used for fusion reactors. That won't happen in the lifetime of anyone alive today. It will get used for armor for weapons and possibly some fission reactors. We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor. We are only close to theoretical break-evens which are themselves more than an order of magnitude from actual working powerplants. Ask yourself this, how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat? Even at 900C we can only get about 55% and we have materials which can withstand that temperature for decades. We have nothing physical that can take anywhere near 1,000,000C.
I said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.
While true in isolation, that is the wrong reason to care.
We get power from the sun very effectively over 150 billion meters of vacuum.
Biggest problem with fusion is doing the fusion for a low enough input power (or for pulsed, energy) cost.
Literally 100% of that heat travels from the 1000000C stuff to the environment throught that vacuum. Vacuum doesn't just remove energy.
If you use a steam engines it doesn't matter if your source of heat is 900C or 1000000C, all heat will be captured, and 40-60% will be turned into electricity.
I'm not smart enough to stake an opinion on the viability of fusion. I pretty much only have high school mechanics and Wikipedia in my toolkit.
I can only ever make material conditional claims about things like this :)
Commonwealth fusion is theoretically pretty close with their high temp superconductors.
Far from a slam dunk, but I don’t think we’re as far from net gain as we were 10 years ago.
> how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat
Very carefully.