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by noleary5 hours ago |
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upvoteby themanmaran4 hours ago|
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> Not an expert or a nefarious actor

If it helps, I know @noleary and can confirm this is a true statement!

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upvoteby dfee4 hours ago|
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isn't that what a second non-expert or nefarious actor would say, though? :p
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upvoteby qwertox4 minutes ago|
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we'll let it slip, this one time.
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upvoteby iugtmkbdfil8343 hours ago|
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I mean.. nefarious actor probably would, but non-expert? Non-expert would likely find some petty way to invalidate the argument.
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upvoteby emmelaich2 hours ago|
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I for one am not leery of noleary.
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upvoteby IhateAI_34 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby djoldman1 hours ago|
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I'm not sure about some of the numbers. PCD is pretty dominant in gas and oil drilling.
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upvoteby gkanai1 hours ago|
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You may want to attribute the site/article to yourself.
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upvoteby emmelaich2 hours ago|
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To what extent is tungsten recyclable? i.e. What does it mean for a fusion reactor to consume tungsten?
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upvoteby BizarroLand2 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby ErroneousBosh1 hours ago|
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If you whack enough neutrons into it, you'll eventually get Rhenium and Osmium. Both are actually pretty useful and while not actually dangerous you might not want to get any on you, especially if it's still hot from the reactor.

Osmium in powder form will oxidise to osmium tetroxide, and you want to avoid that because it stains just about any kind of plant or animal tissue including the surface of your eyes, and is spectacularly poisonous.

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upvoteby stevenwoo4 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby cumquat4 hours ago|
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Landscape mode helps.
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upvoteby red3693 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby NedF4 hours ago|
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upvoteby hunterpayne4 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby dotancohen4 hours ago|
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  > how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat?
The traditional answer to that question is vacuum and magnetic confinement (usual toroidal). Whether that will turn out to be the practical answer is yet to be seen.
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upvoteby hunterpayne4 hours ago|
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I said efficiently, you would be lucky to get 1% efficiency there. Vacuums don't conduct heat very well do they.
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upvoteby bmacho3 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby ben_w3 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby refulgentis1 hours ago|
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Okay, now I'm thinking you're trolling :) (if not: how warm is it where you are, i.e. how much above 0 kelvin? How?)
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upvoteby noleary4 hours ago|
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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 :)

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upvoteby montyanne4 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby BigTTYGothGF4 hours ago|
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> how do you efficiently harness 1,000,000C heat

Very carefully.

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upvoteby refulgentis1 hours ago|
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> We are nowhere near an actual breakeven fusion reactor.

This isn't true.

I understand why you said it. Always 5 years away from being 5 years away. Years and years and years of nothing and hopecasting. Post-COVID market and startup antics. Data center power antics. Well-educated people pointing out BS and that even the best shots we had were example systems that were designed to be briefly net-positive in the 2030s.

But it's just not true.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Book it. 2027. They've hit every milestone, on time, since I started tracking in...2018?

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