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Posted by sam 1 day ago

Fusion Power Plant Simulator(www.fusionenergybase.com)
171 points | 116 commentspage 2
ajmarsh 21 hours ago|
Loved this game when it first came out.

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/three-mile-island-7mu

ndmrs 3 hours ago|
I found that Nucleares on steam has filled the same niche of simulation/button pressing games for me recently.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1428420/Nucleares/

NooneAtAll3 22 hours ago||
For whatever reason the game doesn't load until I switch to the dark mode

If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers

Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode

sam 22 hours ago|
Thanks - what browser?
NooneAtAll3 8 hours ago||
technically LibreWolf, but it should be just latest Firefox with some privacy options preselected (like blocking your requests to cloudflare insights)

other that said cloudflare, I see no other errors/warnings in f12

the "load only on lighting theme switch" has fixed itself, the other 2 problems are still there for me

caldis_chen 22 hours ago||
I think the first thing I thought when every man opened this project was: how to make this thing explode.
rao-v 23 hours ago||
This would sell on Steam with a light Godot reskin
logicallee 22 hours ago||
Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...

ck2 23 hours ago||
fantastic PBS Space Time on what the last steps are going to be to finally make fusion possible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE

(fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually, lol)

dale_glass 19 hours ago||
It's a nice video, but a striking thing about it is that it ends with "I just want my infinite free energy". Where on earth is that supposed to come from?

Fusion is ultimately a fancy way to boil water. The tokamak (or stellarator) heats a given amount of water per second, which after losses to power the plant itself and the losses in the steam turbine, makes some finite amount of MWh to output to the grid. This contraption is as the video says very non-trivial to design and build and so it costs some very non-zero amount of money, and lasts a finite time (walls are damaged)

Big $$$ / finite_amount_of_mwh / life_expectancy = min_cost_per_mwh, if we want to pay this thing off. Very possibly more than existing methods.

I'm extremely on the side of doing scientific research, but I'm baffled by constantly bumping into people who suggest somehow fusion is going to mean infinite free power, or anything even close to that.

So far the tech seems headed towards just being an alternate form of a fission plant -- complex, expensive, slow to build, possibly won't ever make a profit. Likely worse, since fission is a known, mature tech.

toraway 15 hours ago||
I had the same thought recently, that if a new power source was created that was like, a perpetual superheated cube or something with no input costs, it still might actually be beaten by solar + batteries. If not right now, then in just a few years.

Since you'd still end up having to build a gigantic heat exchange setup with steam turbines, pipes/ducts/pumps, generators, valves, gauges, vents, maybe even a cooling tower, etc. Plus a labyrinth of catwalks, ladders, access tunnels for workers in hard hats servicing/inspecting/replacing stuff who are on-site 24/7 and exposed to non-trivial occupational hazards dealing with superheated liquids at high pressure every day.

The entire concept of a steam turbine is just fundamentally a big hassle compared to an inexpensive solid state slab + batteries that are modular and basically plug-and-play by comparison.

JumpCrisscross 23 hours ago||
> fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually

Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.

rcxdude 20 hours ago|||
IIRC the one of the first times a group put timelines to a fusion reactor they had time vs funding level of something like 20 years/50 years/never, and the funding level that actually materialised was below the 'never' amount and yet it started the 'always 20 years away' joke. Now I think the timeline was probably still optimistic but fusion is also obviously a very expensive thing to develop and while it's gotten a lot of funding it's still at the 'in the background' level.
ck2 21 hours ago|||
the PBS Space Time episode suggests to me the housing walls might be the biggest problem

it consumes itself or makes molecules that are destructive to the walls or insanely toxic so can never risk leaks

whatever solution they come up with I suspect it will require a lot of constant maintenance on the first generation

hunterpayne 14 hours ago||
Then they are wrong. The biggest problem is efficiently gathering energy from the fusion reaction. Right now, we can only get a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of the energy out. If that can't be raised to 50% or so, fusion will never happen.
johnea 17 hours ago||
Great... Decades, and probably trillions of dollars later, we have a really cool fusion simulator.

That's awesome. Maybe we can fly it around the moon and take selfies with it!

Might as well roll all the high cost pseudo-science into one big instagram package...

p.s. Of course this is in contrast to using the giant fusion reaction that we have running, literally over our heads...

stefantalpalaru 14 hours ago||
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Lapsa 22 hours ago|
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