The Glade 4.0

I'll be dogged if I know what that's all about.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

My hovertank is full of eels. I can't get rid of the damned things.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Bah. Why choose? Use a Veritech Hovertank!



(I so rarely qualify as an anime fan-girl, that I thought I should point it out one of the few times that I am.)

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Because the only mode you actually need is the tank.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Robotech actually attempted to provide a rational reason for mecha being useful.

The enemy was a bunch of 40' tall humanoid aliens that were tougher than tanks. Human mecha were counter-infantry.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The problem with that being that the tank can do the same thing, unless they're saying that making a giant robot magically makes it tougher than a tank (which is especially silly when the same vehicle becomes a tank).

A humanoid structure is much harder to armor effectively, has a huge profile that can't easily use cover (and the giant humanoid aliens did have guns; they didn't just smash stuff with their fists), and takes a much larger more powerful powerplant to move the same mass. The gun recoil is a lot harder to absorb with the gun-mounted-in-the-arm thing since it's way out there on the... arm, creating a lot more moment rather than going through the structure. The armor that is on it can't effectively be sloped. Joints are mechanically complex and problematic. Much higher ground pressure. So on and so forth....

Giant robots are fun for their own sake, but they really aren't terribly practical. With whatever advanced materials and technology you used to make the robot, you could make a tank or a plane that's even better using the same advancements. Arguably, Robotech gets around this by having different "modes" for different situations, but it's pretty hard to imagine why you'd actually use the robot mode. You could eliminate all the weight and mass of the transformation mechanisms and put that to better use either as actual combat systems, or just reducing the size, mass, and cost of the platform - incidentally, all potential benefits of fusion power.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Hovertanks were the worst things ever. And holy crap Southern Cross was stupid.

_________________

Holy shitsnacks!

Russia doesn't get to lord it's natural gas reserves over Europe so it can be belligerent to its neighbors.

American natural gas prices fall to the point where CnG cars become viable.

You can imagine what that means for the middle east.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Ah, but the magical super alien tech in Robotech was entirely based upon modular reconfigurability! It added no mass or power requirements to make them reconfigurable - the alien "protoculture" powered tech was inherently reconfigurable. All they had to do was give it direction. (Also, vehicles are never as agile in combat as life forms tend to be. If the 40 foot alien infantry closed to melee range with the tanks, they'd have been in trouble. Until they became 40 foot armored infantry themselves...)

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Nobody would use natural gas. Even if you kept the same combustion tech, hydrogen would almost universally replace it.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

And there you have it!

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Exactly.

Because relying on magic in military endeavors works very well, Insha'Allah.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The latest generation of fission plants can't melt down either. That's also why I said thousands of years, the supply of fuel for both fission and fusion reactors isn't realistically limited at all.



This could only potentially be true if the fusion power not only works, but also ends up being much cheaper than both fission power and conventional methods of generating power. If it costs significantly more or is even on par with these options, the irrational fears keeping fission power from seeing widespread use today will also apply to fusion power. Fusion plants still produce nuclear waste through neutron activation, and the fact that these wastes only last 100 years instead of thousands isn't going to sway the scare-mongers. More importantly, fission plants don't leak radioactivity, fusion plants DO. Hydrogen gas is hard to contain, and any fusion plant will have some level of tritium leakage. The fact that lifetime of tritium is rather low and that very low amounts of radioactivity would actually escape this way isn't going to turn them around. OMG, they're poisoning the atmosphere with radiation and killing us all we have to stop it!

That's why I said that the miniaturization is the real breakthrough. Fusion powered planes, ships, trains and trucks are the real potential game changer, not static fusion plants.

Actually, the supply of all types of fuel is very limited. Seems you don't understand how exponential growth works. Energy consumption has been increasing exponentially since the industrial age, or even before.

Fission plants inherently can't melt down. Furthermore, fission plants still produce high-level radioactive waste, and fission has a much better power-to-mass ratio.

You've gone from "I don't believe this really exists" to "Yeah well fission is good!" and it seems you just want to be negative about this for some reason.



The nuclear waste fusion reactors would produce would be orders of magnitude less dangerous, discussed in the second article. As for tritium, tritium is used to make wristwatch hands glow. Yes, some people will find an excuse to panic because nuclear. Most people are not like that. Fusion power is almost certain to be quite cheap, and the technology is almost certainly going to be used by the military regardless - which will demonstrate that.



What makes you think loons are going to freak out less about mobile reactors that stationary ones?

Yes, practical mobile reactors are a big "game changer" but static plants are still a huge breakthrough. Tritium and deteurium are readily available in seawater, not in deposits that have to be mined, and that may not even be in this country. They're incredibly easy to access. Fission, at 100% efficiency has an energy density of around 8.9E13J/Kg; deteurium fusion around 6.2E14J/Kg - that's most of an order of magnitude higher. The energy density alone is an incredible benefit - a much smaller reactor can produce the same power from a much more readily available fuel.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Even if fusion is only has 3-4x more energy production than fission, that's still a shitload more energy. Imagine every single fission plant in the world had 3-4x more output right now, that would be amazing. Now imagine you can put one on a semi truck and deliver that power wherever you want.

You're right, that doesn't sound like a big deal at all.

Oh, for the record, I still don't believe this is the real thing. Fusion power has been "just 10 years away, we swear!" since about 1955. I'm just accepting that it might be true for the sake of argument.

I'm not sure why the power-to-mass ratio is all that relevant for a power plant. The cost of the fuel is a miniscule fraction of the cost of the plant and its upkeep, and the weight/size of the fuel is not really a big factor when it comes to this application.



Well, it's because I agree with you when you say that people will discard their prejudice against nuclear power if you give them enough incentive. The applications of miniaturization will give people enough incentive to do so, but just switching from fission plants to fusion plants won't. The fact is the world has largely abandoned nuclear power despite its obvious benefits. Building a plant that has wastes you only need to store for 100 years instead of 1000 but which also leaks radioactivity is not going to be the type of thing to change their minds. To be honest, I can't discard the possibility entirely, if they've discovered a super-cheap method of containing and extracting energy from the plasma, such that you can build a fusion plant for much less than it costs to build a fission plant and its containment building, then there could be something here. There's nothing in the article or anywhere that indicates it would be that much cheaper, though.

People with abundant resources are harder to control

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Xeq, how much do you mass? I'm figuring you're probably within normal ranges for volume, but you're so dense.

_________________

And all your skepticism has been based on the inability of backyard crackpots to get results, or else the failure of bureaucratic international organizations to solve the problem by throwing more money at it. Everyone that has tried to make a practical fusion reactor has tried the same basic approach; Lockheed departed from that approach and lo and behold, they made a breakthrough! They're also not overstating or overselling where they're at.

Lockheed has one of the best histories in the world of solving difficult engineering problems - and make no mistake, fusion is an engineering problem, not a theory problem. It's much like breaking the sound barrier. We know fusion works in nature; we know how to make uncontrolled fusion reactions (i.e. bombs) work, we even know how to make fusion reactors - they just can't generate a net power gain yet. Fusion is not a pie-in-the-sky concept, and the fact that past predictions were overly optimistic in terms of timeframe doesn't really justify a lot of skepticism against what's actually a pretty sober prediction from a company that's known for getting results.



*facepalm* Because a powerplant is a large structure. If you can get 10x (or, like Lenas said, even 3-4x) more power from the same plant that means you can have fewer power plants, and that land can be used for other things. You don't need as many workers, creating savings. You can power more buildings - homes and businesses - before you need to find space for another new plant.

You should have been able to figure this out on your own. I'm not an engineer anything, maybe Arathain or Coro can explain why power-to-mass (or power-to-space or whatever the most appropriate ratio is) is important much better than I can. If my psychology-degree *** can figure it out, there's no excuse for you.



The fact that its only dangerous for 100 years means that it's also a lot less likely to kill anyone in the event of an accident. Furthermore, lots of benefits of fusion have been explained to you. Trying to say "well, people aren't going to be convinced by reducing the danger of the waste from 1000 years to 100 years" as if that's the ONLY improvement is incredibly intellectually dishonest. And, for the record, it's more like from 20,000 years down to 100 years.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The advantages over a fission reactor are comparatively huge for magnetic containment fusion reactors, of which tokamak, ITER, and the new Lockheed CFR all are. I don't have any more training in regards to the engineering of fusion reactors than most of you (i.e. non-research articles) but I've been in nuclear fission reactor design for 7 years, now, so I can speak to those designs.

All fission designs currently operating and permitted to operate, run on essentially the concept of controlling a runaway fission reaction of low enrichment metals. These include all Gen II, III, and III+ designs. Even theoretical so-called Gen IV designs which are mostly fast fuel breeding heavy metal or gas cooled, share this design paradigm. In order to achieve criticality and "useful" levels of heat, a substantial amount of scale is required. That makes the reactor vessel itself large and heavy which means opening it to refuel it (although heavy water reactors get around this limitation, somewhat) is not economical as it is slow and inefficient to reach 100% power. Thus, the operating philosophy for these designs revolve around putting in as much fuel as possible and operating at 100% power for very long times without going offline. Indeed, most designs are analyzed and safest when running at 100% power rather than any transient condition. It is the ultimate locomotive in terms of time to reach full speed, time and dynamics to go to hot shutdown (emergency procedure), and magnitude of things going wrong when the train runs the tracks.

The best analogy I can think of between a fission reactor and the proposed magnetically contained fusion reactor designs is being on top of a hill with a huge boulder versus being on top of a hit with the same boulder broken into thousands of hand size pieces. A fission reactor puts the massive boulder in motion restrained by a team of workers with a rope. At any moment, if he rope breaks, if too many workers lose their grip, if it starts to rain and the hill becomes slippery etc. the boulder will run down the hill out of control. A fusion reactor of the proposed design allows control for how much fuel is inside the reactor/containment at a time. Unless it's in containment, it will not react, as it needs the precisely stabilizing conditions of the magnetic flux to achieve fusion. One person can stand atop the hill and throw the rocks down one at a time with little or no consequence.

The unintuitive consequences of fission reactor design can also be eliminated. If you haven't ever stepped foot inside a 1,000+ megawatt unit, you might be surprised at how much **** is actually in there. There are thousands of huge pipes, pumps, motors, associated electrical switchgear, and other components which have nothing to do with generation. Many are redundant safety coolant injection systems, which require massive pumps/motors to run, which themselves require support cooling and lubrication systems necessitating their own use of pumps, motors and valves. The balance of systems are chemical treatment systems of one type or another for processing leaked and recovered coolant, or to maintain the chemical composition of the nuclear coolant/working fluid, itself. The amount of energy diverted from generation back into the plant to run all these systems is not trivial.

Furthermore, plant operators have to know exactly which procedure to follow to know which combination of valves, instruments, switchgear/breaker cubicles to manipulate in response to any of the thousand of hypothetical scenarios and sub-variations of scenarios which might occur. One might say this environment is prone to human error. As you can imagine, in an industry where mistakes are politicized, even if benign on their own, for a design and philosophy built around defense-in-depth, where the ultimate risk to radioactive release to the public is measured in probability, there is simply a lot of bullshit going on with corrective measures.

This is the average looking control room for an operating plant.


All of that goes away with a small, inherently safe, reactor design. This proposed Lockheed design, if their literature is true, is more of a power generator than a power plant. That is indeed, game changing.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Where in blue hell did you get this information?

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

There's also some fundamental advantages that petrol fuel powered systems will hold for quite some time due to the long development history refining combustion propulsion: cost, power to weight ratio, and stability of fuel.

Electric batteries suck when, pound for pound, compared to gasoline in terms of available potential energy and stability in real-world environments. Hopefully, what cheap, plentiful electricity does is spurs the development of battery technology. Here, electrical engineers are simply at the mercy of material science research, just as mechanical engineers have been at the mercy of chemists.

CNG and petrol fuel powered engines will remain in use, particularly for certain applications such as aircraft, small watercraft and some types of automobiles. Eventually, batteries and other energy storage systems will be developed enough to phase that out.

_________________
"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I've said it before The average age of the American auto is something like 11 years. If we had a hydrogen (or cng) filling pump at every gas station to tomorrow, Big oil isn't going anywhere soon. That doesn't even mention tires and plastics and asphalt.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"