> this breakthrough

Improving from one level of uselessness to another level of uselessness is *not* a breakthrough.

Consider NIF, for instance.

> Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever

Yeah, because private companies *never* do that...

Westinghouse
RCA
Kodak
Xerox
Sunbeam
AMC
Curtiss
(list continues for another 5 million entries)

> More passive safety features

Sure.

> Easier to handle fuel

Tritium (which this thread is assuming, not the p-B reaction TriAlpha works with) is pretty dangerous stuff. It replaces hydrogen when meeting water and turns into radioactive water/rain. A fire in a fusion plant where the lithium caught on fire would be a major, major, issue.

> No weapons proliferation issues

Not even remotely true. D-T reactions give off a 14 MeV neutron which can be used to enrich natural uranium to plutonium and then separated chemically. Because of the geometry of the reactors, you can easily hide this, and do small-scale continual extraction.

This is precisely why the UK instantly classified all their fusion research in the 1950s after Klaus Fuchs was discovered passing information on the atomic program to the Soviets.

"has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs"

No, that is inaccurately broad.

The correct statement is has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier **FRC** devices at U.S. universities and national labs"

Earlier FRCs sucked by about four or five orders of magnitude. This sucks by one less.

This is not a breakthrough. T-8 was two orders of magnitude better than Stellarator C, but 45 years later it's still two orders too little to be useful.

"To avoid the 20% to 40% power loss when converting from DC to AC"

The original author, Self, has exactly zero idea what he is talking about.

The power loss in a modern inverter like the one in the PowerWall is about 2%. On the panel side, efficiency of 95% is no longer considered competitive. The numbers he's quoting are decades out of date.

Be glad the Koch brothers didn't own any companies making CFCs.

"and only a slight majority said it would be a net positive."

So the proper headline is actually "Majority of actual AI researchers believe strong AI is good".

And how people on slashdot who soak up new tech are quick to proclaim the problems storing or distributing renewables can't possibly be solved.

And they do that ON THE INTERNET.

> Otherwise most of it is lost.

PFFT. The entire US electrical grid loses 7% of the energy fed into it. Most of those losses are in the last mile.

HVDC lines lose about 2.5% per 800 km and 0.6% in the end-point stations.

Read something before posting next time. Here:

http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/2012-07-wismar/factsheet-hvdc-e.pdf

> Wind and solar = electricity. 98% of transportation is powered by oil

Today perhaps.

> Since 1kg of oil contains as much energy as 100kg of batteries, don't hold your breath

The differences is that in 5 years the oil will still have the same amount of energy, while the batteries will hold 25% more and cost 50% less.

> Besides, transportation is not just cars

True, but cars are half. If you remove half of that half you've gone an extremely long way to fixing a lot of problems.

Do some math, that's what it's for:

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/future-grid-energy-in-the-not-so-distance/

> The practical solution is, of course, nuclear power

If you define practical like the rest of the world, that is, "cost effective", then this statement is demonstrably not true.

Modern nuclear plants have a CAPEX of about $8 and a CF around 90%. That is an effective production cost of $8.90

Modern wind turbines have a CAPEX of about $1.50 and a CF around 30%. That's an effective production cost of $5.00

So if your goal is to decarbonize the electrical supply, wind does it for a little over half the cost.

> Just wait until China and India

China's maximum planned buildout was to make about 1/2 the number of plants as the US to provide supply for four times the population. After the one-two punch of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake pointing out horrible safety violations in building and then Fukishima, these plans are on hold. Meanwhile, China installs more wind and solar than they ever planned for nuclear, about two to three times.

> For electricity generation, oil (the fuel oil portion) is only used for peaking units, and
> from what I've seen the cost is significantly higher than natural gas peaking units

Oil fueled plants cost about twice the cost of natural gas peaking units.

http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf

Page 2. GCC plans are *way* less expensive, but even they don't compete with wind any more.

"Anectodal evidence is hardly evidence, but"

There's no "but".

"While, truth be told"

It's not truth.

"Wikimedia Foundation is a honest and decent entity"

Undemonstrated rhetorical jibe.

"let other careless people"

Which "others"? The sample of two who you now denigrate?

"we need your donations to survive!"

Which is, by definition as a charitable organization, demonstrably true.

"they don't really mean what you think they mean."

They mean precisely what the *say*.

"Is that ok with you?"

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

"Yet millions of people continue to contribute, seeming to think that Wikipedia will "go offline" if they aren't given more donations."

Says who?

"Yet as a new Wikipediocracy"

Oh. So then the first quoted sentence should actually read:

"We imagine that bunch of people we invented so we could complain about the Wikipedia, which is the entire reason for the existence of our site, might think that donating is a good idea, which it is. We didn't conduct any sort of study or analysis, because that would take time away from writing additional whiny articles."

News flash: slashdotter reads article about article, finds something to complain about, stops to post complaint, and never reads actual paper.