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314 comments on DrumBeat: November 21, 2006

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JimK on November 21, 2006 - 5:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

History shows that all energy breakthroughs/research/developments are requiring vast amounts of money and time.

This doesn't sound correct to me. Steam engines, water wheels, fission reactors... none of these things required huge investment to get going. Of course each such advance is built on the prior technology. E.g. fission relied on the work of folks like Marie Curie. And refining the technology usually does involve huge investing. But the prototypes demonstrate effectiveness first, and the huge investment follows. It almost never happens that folks make a huge investment in some direction that isn't generating some profit along the way. Real progress relies on working feedback systems to correct little errors that start to accumulate along the way. When people invest huge amounts in hopes of some eventual profit that has yet to appear even in any small degree - the end result is usually a disaster.

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LevinK on November 21, 2006 - 5:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Steam engines, water wheels, fission reactors (?)

It took an awful lot of money in research & development for the nuclear industry to get to its current state. Which is still not as decent as I'd like it to be, but still much more acceptable than the level of the disastrous experiments like commercial RBMK reactors or the magneseum cooled reactors in the UK.

Steam engines and water wheels are not very relevant here as they have little to do with the way we do things today.

Maybe the experimental prototypes of all of those were relatively inexpensive. But we already have several working fusion prototypes based ot the TOKAMAK technology. Getting from the laboratory to the full-scale industrial application, maturing the technology, finding the weak spots - all of this costa awful lot of time&money.

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JimK on November 21, 2006 - 6:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

It took an awful lot of money in research & development for the nuclear industry to get to its current state.

That's certainly true. Today's steam turbine methods to turn coal into electricity are very refined also, the result of huge investments.

My point was that the first nuclear reactor, under the stadium in Chicago in 1942, got a sustained reaction going without a huge investment.

http://hep.uchicago.edu/cp1.html

This was three years after the basic principle of a fission chain reaction was discovered. This was a working reactor, not just some isolated fragnmentary demonstration of some principles involved.

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314 comments on DrumBeat: November 21, 2006

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