Good News Everyone

[SecretAsianMan]

 

There have been a lot of really terrible, depressing things happening in the world lately.  While I don't want to try and draw attention away from those very important topics, I think we also need reminders of the good, positive things in this world.  So this thread is going to be about positive stories that can hopefully help restore our faith in humanity.  Then afterwards we can go back to talking about how terrible everything is.

[SecretAsianMan]

The first one I'd like to talk about is the most recent Nobel Peace Prize winners: Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai.

 

Kailash Satyarthi, in the tradition of Ghandi, has worked for years to help protect the rights of thousands (over 80,000 as of right now) of children from exploitative labor and slavery.  Malala Yousafzai, after surviving being shot in the head during a Taliban attack, has campaigned for the rights of children (especially girls) to receive education.  At the age of 17, she is the youngest Nobel Prize laureate ever.  A girl from Pakistan and a man from India are sharing the Nobel Peace Prize.  Sounds pretty awesome to me.

[Bigperm]

I had a chili dog from Dairy Queen today.  My first chili dog of the year.  They're so good on a chilly day

[Cleinhun]

chili dog

 

chilly day

 

THREAD RUINED

[Merus]

City Spends Months Debating Smoking Ban In Public Parks, Discovers Smoking Was Already Banned In Public Parks

[syntheticgerbil]

I beat Wario Land II 100%

[N1njaSquirrel]

This cheers me up. Hopefully it'll do the same for you (turn on subtitles for english translation)

 

[Architecture]

Lockheed's Skunk Works division is saying they've cracked nuclear fusion. Via Forbes:

 

Lockheed Martin, the industrial conglomerate based in Bethesda, MD with close ties to the U.S. Department of Defense,  is claiming to have made a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion, which could lead to development of reactors small enough to fit on the back of a truck within a decade.

 

In the simplest terms, nuclear fission breaks a single atom into two whereas nuclear fusion combines two atoms into one.

 

Fusion, the holy grail of nuclear power, creates three to four times as much energy as fission. More importantly, fusion’s key advantage over fission is that it does not produce cancer-causing radioactive waste.

 

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, told Reuters that his team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed’s Skunk Works program for the past four years, but decided to go public with the news now to recruit additional partners in industry and government to support their work.

 

Last year, while speaking at Google’s Solve for X program, Charles Chase, a research scientist at Skunk Works, described Lockheed’s effort to build a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus enough energy to power a small city.

 

“It’s safe, it’s clean, and Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month instead of six,” Evan Ackerman wrote in a post about Chase’s Google talk on Dvice.

 

The key breakthrough involves using a “magnetic bottle” to contain the vast amount of heat, which rises into the hundreds of millions of degrees, created by the nuclear reaction. Containing and controlling the staggering levels of heat and pressure involved has hampered countless previous efforts to use fusion for generating electricity. The challenges associated with controlling the heat and pressure created by nuclear fusion has been especially difficult at smaller scales, which makes Lockheed’s claimed breakthrough all the more impressive.

 

“By containing this reaction, we can release [the heat] in a controlled fashion to create energy we can use,” Lockheed said in a statement. “The heat energy created using this compact fusion reactor will drive turbine generators by replacing the combustion chambers with simple heat exchangers. In turn, the turbines will then generate electricity or the propulsive power for a number of applications.”

 

Lockheed said in a statement that it would build a pilot fusion reactor in the next year.

 

If it works, the world will be a different place.

 

But in the meantime the emphasis should remain on the word “if.”

[Roderick]

Incredible! It's not the same thing as cold fusion, or is it? In any case, a magnificent, promising energy revolution is just around the corner. Combine this with renewable energy and the world will indeed be a different place.

 

Most exciting is the idea that the stars will have come a little more into reach again. Humanity must spread out over the galaxy!

[Dewar]

They say it's safe, but aren't they just a little worried that if the reaction gets loose it might start chaining to all the hydrogen in the atmophere? Not that it stopped them when testing the Atomic Bomb.

 

Worrying aside, this is really awesome if it's true.

[brkl]

Yup, pretty incredible. I haven't been optimistic enough in years to believe such stories. Would be rather nice to avoid all the death and destruction the coming century will bring, though.

[aeolist]

Incredible! It's not the same thing as cold fusion, or is it? In any case, a magnificent, promising energy revolution is just around the corner. Combine this with renewable energy and the world will indeed be a different place.

 

Most exciting is the idea that the stars will have come a little more into reach again. Humanity must spread out over the galaxy!

Cold fusion was supposedly a reaction that could take place at or near room temperatures as opposed to very high temperatures like natural fusion (i.e. stars). Unfortunately it was a hoax.

 

This is just normal fusion, the breakthrough has apparently come from the shape of the reaction chamber and the magnetic field used to contain the plasma. http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details

 

Normally I would be beyond skeptical but Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division doesn't fuck around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

[aeolist]

They say it's safe, but aren't they just a little worried that if the reaction gets loose it might start chaining to all the hydrogen in the atmophere? Not that it stopped them when testing the Atomic Bomb.

 

Worrying aside, this is really awesome if it's true.

The reaction uses deuterium and tritium, not normal hydrogen. A reactor breach would just disrupt the reaction because the plasma field wouldn't be under enough pressure for fusion to continue, and the radiation leakage would be very light and would not last long. Waste isn't a problem either.

[eot]

If that reactor design works out it'll be one of, if not the biggest technological breakthrough in all history. They're still a ways off even a prototype though, and even if they get that there are significant challenges left. I'll remain skeptical for now.

[SecretAsianMan]

Cold fusion was supposedly a reaction that could take place at or near room temperatures as opposed to very high temperatures like natural fusion (i.e. stars). Unfortunately it was a hoax.

 

This is just normal fusion, the breakthrough has apparently come from the shape of the reaction chamber and the magnetic field used to contain the plasma. http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details

 

Normally I would be beyond skeptical but Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division doesn't fuck around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

 

Even calling it "room temperature" is on a relative scale.  The process by which you get usable energy from nuclear reactions is by turning water into steam which is used to turn a turbine so you're still talking hundreds of degrees.  The temperature of the water being used to create steam at the plant where I work is around 550 F.  Fusion is tricky because like aeolist said, you're talking about the same process that powers stars.  I'm generally a skeptic so I'll believe this when I see it, but its still a pretty cool and exciting thing.

[aeolist]

If that reactor design works out it'll be one of, if not the biggest technological breakthrough in all history. They're still a ways off even a prototype though, and even if they get that there are significant challenges left. I'll remain skeptical for now.

So long as they can build a working prototype I'll be fine getting hyped. It won't have the energy cost associated with inertial confinement or current tokamak designs, and any remaining problems will get literally billions of dollars thrown at them since the first people to crack a marketable design will make even more ungodly amounts of money.

[Merus]

I just love the timing here: literally three days ago our (dumbass) Prime Minister claimed coal was the future of energy. If Lockheed Martin have cracked fusion then coal is dead.

[SecretAsianMan]

I just love the timing here: literally three days ago our (dumbass) Prime Minister claimed coal was the future of energy. If Lockheed Martin have cracked fusion then coal is dead.

 

Coal is a terrible energy source in the long term.  Of course I'm biased toward nuclear.

[Mangela Lansbury]

This is just normal fusion, the breakthrough has apparently come from the shape of the reaction chamber and the magnetic field used to contain the plasma. http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details

 

Instead of constraining the plasma within tubular rings, a series of superconducting coils will generate a new magnetic-field geometry in which the plasma is held within the broader confines of the entire reaction chamber. Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. “So for us, instead of a bike tire expanding into air, we have something more like a tube that expands into an ever-stronger wall,” McGuire says. The system is therefore regulated by a self-tuning feedback mechanism, whereby the farther out the plasma goes, the stronger the magnetic field pushes back to contain it.

 

I spent two years studying this kind of science. The mere thought of the level of math and theory behind this being real and workable is going to leave me with nightmares.

 

But also fusion has been a decade away for decades, so...

[Merus]

Coal is a terrible energy source in the long term.  Of course I'm biased toward nuclear.

 

And in the short term! Smog from coal plants is an actual problem that we have now, and the most visible corruption in Australian politics comes from coal magnates. 

[Roderick]

'Coal is the future of energy' is an astounding thing to say. Here in the Netherlands we're still talking about becoming a major gas hub for Europe, which, you know, gas isn't the same thing as energy, but talk about betting on past resources. Not to mention increasing dependency on Russia. Wait, this is the 'good news' topic!

[Ben X]

All we need now is 3D printing to be able to make anything from anything, and possibly teleporters (the type that fling your atoms around, not the ones that clone/kill you).

[James]

So you want ones that merely dismantle and reassemble you?

[Ben X]

Yeah! Better than killing me!

[Twig]

Ben is correct. Fuck teleporters that kill me! Also I don't want my consciousness put into a machine. I want nanomachines to keep my brain alive. The rest of the body can fuck off and die, though. As long as my brain doesn't die, I'm still me!

 

Also yeah we need a 3D printer at the atomic level. Basically make The Diamond Age a reality but without the malevolent nanomachine clouds accidentally going at war with each other and killing everything in close proximity. That'd be mighty awkward.