hobscoop

6 ms·

1.
by hobscoop 7mo ago
Do you have the manual? It might be possible to configure a non-beeping mode. (I recently learned this was the case with my Panasonic model, to great delight.)
2.
by hobscoop 2y ago
This cannot work: the power balance doesn't close for a 25 MWe tokamak. Otherwise people would have made plans to build one already. Tokamaks want to be big for physics reasons, way before economics reasons. This is part of why DEMO is
3.
by hobscoop 2y ago
Rubi is great. When I'm stuck on an integral in Mathematica with the builtin Integrate, I load up Rubi and sometimes it can find a solution.
4.
by hobscoop 2y ago
Are they able to adjust the color and brightness simultaneously? Or would brightness be controlled with PWM?
5.
by hobscoop 2y ago
Strong echoes of the Onion's reporting on Dr. Lester Mordock's giant crabs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uq9pp586AE
6.
by hobscoop 2y ago
This would eliminate the failure mode of my grayscale attempts. I would appreciate knowing the configuration steps.
7.
by hobscoop 3y ago
Plasma physicist here. While this is an idea worthy of study, the answer to the (spaceweatherarchive.com) title question is "no". The researcher's article makes simple errors in what they call " undergraduate physics&qu
8.
by hobscoop 4y ago
Actually, I think the strength of modern steels is a limiting factor for fusion magnets. Plasma "beta"s are only a few %, so for a few atmospheres of plasma pressure your magnetic cage needs to be like a pressure vessel that con
9.
by hobscoop 4y ago
I thought they were ultimately limited by problems of corrosion at the electrodes? Helion's scheme to turn fusion heat into pushing E&M fields back through their magnet to generate electricity is pretty different from a standard MH
10.
by hobscoop 4y ago
Yes. We're currently living through a golden age of stellarator design powered by new algorithms and optimization techniques.
11.
by hobscoop 4y ago
It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing&qu
12.
by hobscoop 4y ago
It sounds like they're trying to build a device with a distribution of ions in velocity space which is very far from the equilibrium Gaussian-type distribution ('Maxwellian'). This is difficult because there will be about a m
13.
by hobscoop 5y ago
It's pretty different. This is pulsed; LM's was going to be steady state. LM's design had magnets internal to the plasma which has significant difficulties. The proposed fuels are different. As far as I can tell LM's fu
14.
by hobscoop 5y ago
For a long time fusion was funding constrained: there were many more ideas than could be tested and examined under government budgets. In the US nearly all funding went to one concept, the tokamak. While the tokamak has achieved the best pe
15.
by hobscoop 5y ago
It's not plausible that even fusion power plants would make energy 'basically free'. 1) Fusion plants still require site infrastructure, power conversion technology, waste heat removal, and (though not for this particular con
16.
by hobscoop 5y ago
There are more plausible and less plausible concepts/companies out there. Helion in particular was founded by respectable scientists who have a background in plasma physics, and they've developed their idea pretty quietly for the
17.
by hobscoop 5y ago
There's some interesting arguments in favor of the combination of magnetic and interial approaches. This is broadly known as 'magneto-inertial fusion', and there's a continuum of ideas between 'mostly inertial'
18.
by hobscoop 5y ago
SPARC is very important, but it's a physics demonstration facility, not a reactor. Its not going to generate any electricity. CFS (SPARC's parent company) will use SPARC to demonstrate that their magnet technology and plasma physi
19.
by hobscoop 5y ago
Helion's scheme would require a specific isotope of helium, of which there's not much of in current stockpiles. Assuming that you had some He-3, remember that since this is a reaction between nucleons, the typical energy scales ar
20.
by hobscoop 5y ago
No currently operating device is 'attempting' to achieve Q_total; they are all physics experiments, not simply searching for a magic combination of knobs that will ignite the plasma. The Europeans are doing quite a bit of prelimin
21.
by hobscoop 5y ago
SPARC is aiming for Q_plasma of about 10 in 2025, but not to generate energy at all: it doesn't have any of the required 'blanket' system for breeding tritium. SPARC is a physics test, to make sure our theories of burning pla
22.
by hobscoop 5y ago
If only the US Forest Service knew about this, they could have properly answered Rep Louie Gohmert's questions!
23.
by hobscoop 5y ago
ITER is planning to do its flagship D+T runs in 2035, not 2050. While inertial confinement fusion facilities like NIF are also used for weapons work, the physics of magnetic confinement fusion plasmas are quite different from the physics ne
24.
by hobscoop 5y ago
I don't understand the promise of lattice confinement fusion. While it is certain believable that they measured fusion events, the explanation they give involves several unlikely steps of one particle hitting another. Since each step i
25.
by hobscoop 6y ago
Try H3 mining of Uranus or Neptune rather than Jupiter! The gravity well is much smaller.
26.
by hobscoop 8y ago
Say you shoot the deuterium and tritium ions at each other in beams. Making two ions fuse isn't quite the same as hitting a fixed bullseye. Typically, physicists consider a 'cross section' for a reaction between two particles
27.
by hobscoop 9y ago
We would not be sun-transiting to them, at least at the moment: the current declination of Ross 128 happens to be less than 1 degree [1], meaning it's near the celestial equator rather than near the ecliptic. Since the ecliptic plane i