FTFM: Fixed That For...Myself?

At least deuterium derived from water is a more abundant fuel source than oil. The energy density for deuterium fusion is so much higher than oil combustion. And clearly, we do have a lot more water than trees or oil. But it should make us all a little bit uneasy that ultimately, using water this way is nonrenewable.

It won't be "scuppered" until Lockheed has a product for sale cheaper than the remainder of work left on ITER ready to install. Even then, ITER is a valuable engineering research project that may survive anyway; the alleged breakthroughs Lockheed has made are almost certainly informed by the engineering work that's already been done on ITER.

First, not a troll. Trolling means trying to incite a response that devolves the conversation. An example: turn the topic into an attack on Thorium reactors, knowing that some people will defend the idea and others will flame the people that defended it. I don't see any such possibility in this, and I certainly don't see the intent.

Second, some numbers. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.

What else is supposed to power our megawatt lasers?

Sadly, far too many Slashdotters would not have read this information if you had merely posted a link to Wikipedia. But maybe use a <blockquote> next time.

I think the egomania is getting worse, because the Slashdot audience has been steadily expanding for its entire existence. It's not necessarily a matter of what sort of people make up the community. It's probably more a matter of the size of the community and why people joined. When you join a small community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to contribute. When you join a large community, it's because you like what it has to offer and want to enjoy the benefits. On Slashdot, the biggest benefit is and always has been the ease with which we can communicate our opinions to our peers. Surely lots of people, new members and existing ones who've gone through subtle personality changes, now use Slashdot primarily to try and assert their opinions. All they needed was an audience.

Presumably with an announcement this large, they've solved those problems somehow. Even if the article tried to explain how, it would certainly be wrong considering the factual accuracy of some of its claims about nuclear power in general. The details are probably very complicated. I know you (and I, and most Slashdotters) are not accustomed to missing some of the information, but this is how most people get through life. Just accept the announcement, perhaps with a bit of healthy skepticism, and hope like everyone else does that they're telling the truth because from what little we understand, this could be revolutionary.

That is the next stage of development. When they say "the design can be built and tested within a year", they're talking about the smaller proof of concept versions. They are aiming for a full-scale prototype within 10 years.

Run out of oil? You do realize that we are constantly running out of oil, and the oil companies have just gotten really good at finding new sources? The latest breakthroughs are twofold:

• Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", making accessible broad swaths of previously unharvestable shale oil.
• New reserves opening up in the Arctic, primarily opening up due to longer summers and milder winters melting the ice caps.

How long do you think before these sources dry up, like every other source before them already has? Pennsylvania, Texas, and California all used to be world-class suppliers of oil. Saudi Arabia is believed to have reached its peak oil extraction and is declining, although they won't admit to it. And do we really want to count it as a good thing that global scale climate change has opened up more fossil fuels with which we can induce even more global scale climate change?

And as for trees, deforestation in northern Europe had major economic consequences and contributed to the constant stream of instability and war over the last 3000 years. The Amazonian rainforest and the African jungles are our largest remaining reserves of trees, and the Brazilians are in the process of systematically clearing them for farmland. But we won't run out of trees. Unlike fossil fuels or water, it is possible to grow enough of certain trees (especially pine) to sustain forest ecosystems and supply human needs.

Water, at least, is a bit more abundant, but still not renewable. The Earth has a total of ~1.67x10^21 kg of water, and assuming each individual consumes 60 kg of water per year (as another Slashdotter calculated), and assuming we could actually access all of that water, that gives us roughly 4 billion years of fusion power before we run out of water. While that is less than the remaining lifetime of our planet (based on the remaining lifetime of the sun, between 5 and 7.6 billion years), I cannot imagine the human race surviving for so long, or what we would look like in even a tenth of that time.

And I suppose you have magical powers that let you convert mass into energy at will? And E is measured in Joules, or for some reason when we're talking about electricity consumption, Kilowatt-Hours. 1 Megawatt would mean 1 Megajoule per second. In any case, the energy source is still your magical mass-to-energy power, not the concrete.

If An Atomic Bomb Explodes...

Bomb Safety Drill from Matinee (1993)

Unfortunately the video does not quite touch on the lynchpin of the operation: how they are achieving the high ß. He explained that tokomak shaped reactors generate the magnetic field with the plasma itself, but he did not explain how the magnetic field is being generated apparently by the containment cylinder itself. If it's as simple as superconducting magnets, then what makes this a breakthrough? Is it just another useful but ignored approach like Thorium reactors?

An idea I've been rattling around in my head recently is that marriage may have actually been about clan building. Think about it: the oldest traditions of marriage involve the wife going off to be with the husband, at a time when families otherwise tended to stick pretty close together. There were many arranged marriages often made for strategic reasons, even among the common people in smaller tribes. The husband even had to pay the wife's family a dowry - presumably because they were essentially buying a young, healthy worker away from her family. On top of that, polygamy was also very common. What's the overall result? Birthing HUGE numbers of children all definitely belonging to the same tribe (at least the boys), despite high mortality rates for childbirth. Since the wives go off to be with the husband's family, they aren't striking out on their own or finding any kind of balance; they just are part of this large, loyal hierarchy that ultimately can accomplish more together. And according to the book of Genesis in the bible, this was God's plan to raise up the nation of Israel. Even if you don't believe the story, the people of the resulting ancient nation must have thought it plausible and believed it; otherwise it would not still be held up as part of the foundational story of three major religions.

Of course there's no use for clan building now. We have enough people and enough newer and fairer ways of organizing people. But this kind of marriage tradition could bootstrap a nation in a time when there was no such thing as national loyalty.

P.S.: According to tradition, the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael, Israel's brother that Abraham conceived with a slave woman because he doubted God's word that he would conceive with his wife. Ishmael and his mother were then cast out into the wilderness because Israel's mother was jealous. Just a little wrinkle in Arab-Israeli relations of which most of them are probably aware but most Americans, even alleged Christians, probably aren't.

In name (and ritual) only.