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schroedingershat

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What’s going on with the reports of a room-temperature superconductor? (arstechnica.com)

In late July, a couple of startling papers appeared on the arXiv, a repository of pre-peer-review manuscripts on topics in physics and astronomy. The papers claim to describe the synthesis of a material that is not only able to superconduct above room temperature, but also above the boiling point of water. And it does so at...

schroedingershat , (edited )

Superconductors work because there is one state shared by a bunch of electrons separated by an energy gap from other states they could be in. To put thermal energy into an atom (ie. Resistance), you have to have a big enough shift in energy for all of the electrons to shift out of the state. Kind of like they unionized and you can’t give one a pay cut on its own. One way to achieve this is to make a regular material very, very, very cold. Lots of conductors will work, but only at or below liquid helium temperatures. Another way is to find a material where there are only a few ways for electrons to move around and cool it down or squeeze it until there’s only one. The latter works at hundreds to thousands of times higher temperature (tens of kelvin rather than millikelvin), but still really cold.

Conductors have a lot of states electrons can be in. It’s very easy to get one moving, but as they play pachinko through the atomic lattice they exchange tiny amounts of energy with each other and the rest of the material. Probably not a good candidate unless you’re really good at squeezing.

In some ways a high temperature superconductor is more like an insulator or a semiconductor than a regular conductor.

This new material is kinda weird in a few ways. For one, the main mechanism of traditional superconductors making all electrons “the same” so they have that grouping up effect is probably not present according to some very preliminary simulations (cooper pairs). Another is that the effect is limited to movement in one direction.

There’s 40 years of history and politics behind the theory, 30 years of experiments behind the leak from the korean project, and the material is very finnicky.

schroedingershat ,

And everything is very different from when NiCd was the dominant technology. You’re welcome.

schroedingershat ,

Completely changing the construction method of the foundation of a whole house, making it out of 90% cement/10% electrolyte (releasing 200 extra tonnes of CO2) rather than 20% cement/80% gravel and increasing costs by tens of thousands for the same effect as a 70kg $2.5k rrp battery (which will be a 50kg $500 battery in two years)?

Doesn’t seem huge other than in the literal size sense.

schroedingershat ,

Don’t worry, geoengineering to mask the absolute worst of it will start soon and everyone will pretend it’s not a problem for another decade.

schroedingershat ,

Eunice Foote’s experiments in 1856 and the documentation of acid rain in the 1850s were sufficient information to stop expansion of fossil fuels without a clear and precise picture of their effects.

schroedingershat ,

Fuck off, shill.

schroedingershat ,

It’s credibly a strong diamagnet with a phase transition. Either it’s a completely new thing with no theoretical basis, or it’s the first reproducable example of a 1d superconductor. Either is a huge breakthrough.

schroedingershat ,

Of course not. There’s only been days since the research was pre-emptively published. People around the world saying “yeah, I see strong diamagnetism in a minority of samples” is the peer review. You’re goal post shifting.

Do you have peer reviewed research stating that multuple verifiable videod observations of a novel diamagnetic material are whatever alternative explanation you’re vaguely gesturing at without defining?

A neat thing happened and it’s probably the simplest explanation that fits the data (but it might not be and that’s really significant too). This extreme scepticism and semantic game-playing over whether it’s true superconductivity just sparkling bosons if it doesn’t come from the cooper-pair region of france is stupid and pedantic.

Japan: Can anything be done to stop population decline? (www.dw.com)

The latest numbers on Japanese population make for a dismal reading — the number of people who died in 2022 (1.56 million) was roughly twice as big as the number of newborn children (771,000). Based on residency registrations, the country’s Internal Ministry estimates a total population loss of some 800,000 last year. This...

schroedingershat ,

Japan’s population density is around 340/km^2 about the same as Massachusetts.

What you’re describing is a lack of sprawl, which is a good thing unless you try to cram cars into it.

The only real problem you’ve identified is an increase in car ownership. This takes massive amount of space away from people and makes infrastructure like sidewalks necessary where previously people could just walk along the road safely.

schroedingershat ,

If you’re not giving up luxuries and comfort to prevent it, then you are complicit.

schroedingershat ,

What luxuries and comforts are you giving up for the sake of future generations

Red meat, dairy, most other animal products, driving, cheap electricity, a large house, 24/7 climate control, and cheap new clothes. Cheap imported food. Bought-new electronics. Higher paying jobs I am qualified for, higher paid jobs that require a car for no reason. Not having my face in a facial recognition database my local police makes of people recorded at protests which is used to screen public servant applications (in spite of nothing illegal happening). Just to name the most significant that immediately come to mind.

I also still own my culpability for not doing more rather than narcissistically trying to deflect blame.

Your turn, asshole.

schroedingershat ,

You will likely be lumped in with everyone else, just like is being done to previous generations in this thread.

This is fine. If there is anything I can be doing differently to stop murdering current and future generations and am not, then I share some culpability. I also share blame for not reducing my impact more, sooner and for tolerating those around me who are doing far worse.

Defending the actions of the majority who do not care, or who actively care to make the problem worse is where I have an issue. You are sharing rhetoric created to help those in power amass more power and ruin the world.

schroedingershat ,

“The Japanese people all live in one place but are spread out everywhere” isn’t even a coherent statement.

schroedingershat ,

Sprawl is the opposite of high population density. You’re asserting that there is both.

So yes, you are doing the former.

schroedingershat ,

Any software that passes whatever local safety standard should be installable (or software that doesn’t pass if the car is not being used on public roads).

Otherwise the car is not being sold, it’s being rented, and all the advertising that says anything about buying is fraud.

schroedingershat ,

It’s similarly hard to make an airbag or seat belt, but you can still undo the bolt without the manufacturer in another country bricking your car without any considerations of your local laws.

schroedingershat ,

It’s not a remotely extraordinary claim though.

They claim to have found an unreliable, method for generating impure samples of a superconductor type predicted by a 40 year old theory.

One member of their group jumped the gun on publishing before the people that did the bulk of the work were ready, so the others released more detailed info on what they had so far.

schroedingershat ,

It’s a milligram of tungsten and a few grams of glass and steel.

On the other hand they’re only on a few minutes a day. Not really something to be concerned about either way.

schroedingershat ,

Daily reminder. Monocrystalline PV, LFP or sodium batteries, and the dominant onshore wind generator types involve 0 rare earths. Offshore wind doesn’t technically need them but they are used in most installations for now.

EVs can be made without permanent magnets if you don’t insist on every soccer mother car out-accelerating an early 2000s ferrari and don’t insist on perfectly silent motors (rather than merely much quieter than ICEs). EVs are also not the only form of non-fossil fuel transport.

Ban them, put a price on carbon and the green transition will happen faster. It’s not a necessary component.

schroedingershat ,

There’s moderate consensus that there’s a theoretical basis that this material should be an interesting candidate for a high temperature superconductor but is not a favourable output of the recipe used to make it.

Additionally there are now 4 independent reports (including the original and a highly prestigious chinese university) of it exhibiting diamagnetic properties (with no theoretical basis for non-superconducting diamagnetism).

This is more than enough evidence to say that the most reasonable interpretation is a room temperature superconducting material that sucks and is hard to make.

Upgrading that to a high confidence claim that the original research is reproduced will take a few weeks at least, so no super excitent yet, but the claim is fairly solid.

schroedingershat ,

The simple chemistry is pretty specific and doesn’t work very well (it usually makes a semiconductor instead, and even when it does work, it’s a few tiny impure specks most of the time).

Why is it unbelievable?

schroedingershat ,

The answer is trivial.

Stop spending billions on a “war on drugs” and make sure people have houses and healthcare (including mental health) unconditionally with no ridiculous hoops or welfare traps 10 years before they become a street junkie.

Just because some places misused a bunch of money doing very stupid things with it doesn’t validate ignoring the solution.

schroedingershat ,

Norway has much much lower homeless proportion than more neoliberal countries. It is a prime example of this strategy working.

schroedingershat ,

Hahaha! Doing that thing you said (but still with some hoops for mental healthcare and housing) only makes it way better! Check-mate! Let’s double down on spending ten times as much pujishing the homeless for being homeless!

schroedingershat ,

A mid-sized EV driven the German average consumes 300-400W averaged over the year or about the same amount of energy as a mercury street light bulb.

Additionally Solar alone has a much higher limit than any other generation method.

schroedingershat ,

Germany’s primary energy is about 4.5kW per person.

Without the waste heat inherent in using thermal generation this is about 2.4kW per person.

The worst actually populated parts of europe have about 1kWh/m^2/day of solar resource in mid winter and current gen PV captures a quarter of this.

So that’s 240m^2 per person for everything or about 5% of the land.

Any amount of transmission or seasonal demand shifting or storage or wind or hydro or not being in northern ireland reduces this to just the inhabited areas and agriculture that actively benefits from agrivoltaics. Currently commercialising tech is also better.

So you may have repeated the lie over and over, but that doesn’t make it true.

schroedingershat ,

All of these exist are being deployed at much larger scale much more quickly than nuclear ever has.

Take your two decade obsolete coal propaganda somewhere else.

schroedingershat ,

Just a heads up. France has reached germany’s per capita emissions if you don’t counterfactually decide that their uranium comes from cigar lake and that nuclear fuel cycle emissions are zero.

First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia (www.nbcnews.com)

First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

schroedingershat ,

SMR’s are even worse than the big ones. With no breeding and small, lower temperature steam generators they’d be undsr half as efficient as a traditional LWR. The fuel costs (which will only go up as the easy uranium is tapped out) alone would exceed the current all-in cost of renewables (which are still dropping rapidly).

schroedingershat ,

Thermal Fusion is much more limited than solar as an energy source. It may be useful for niche applications, but waste heat alone limits it to a tenth of the power available from solar on just the built up areas.

schroedingershat ,

Burning all actinides is pure scifi. Nothing close to it has ever happened.

Nor has a full fuel cycle of a thorium reactor burning the primary fuel (U233) to similar burnup levels as a traditional U235 reactor hecause the waste is so much harder to handle and the salts are so corrosive.

schroedingershat ,

Mean and median lifetime of a nuclear reactor is well under 30 years. Closer to 20 if you count all the ones that produced for 0 years.

schroedingershat ,

You can’t amortise your capital if just the variable operating and maintenance is more than replacing the reactor with firmed renewables. This is not the case yet, but betting that renewables won’t halve in price one more time in 30 years is a pretty stupid bet.

schroedingershat ,

Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction, €1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction, and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.

schroedingershat ,

Ah. So intentional then. You’re trying to pretend extracting the <0.7% left over U235 and Pu239 (for a 10-15% increase in U235 fuel economy) is somehow fissioning U238.

schroedingershat ,

You’re still trying to spread the “90% of nuclear waste is recyclable” myth, but now you’ve retreated to the bailey of “getting 10% more energy is technically getting something out of it so saying it is recyclable is totally true even though this has no impact on mining or the dangerous parts of waste!!” You’re also pretending it magically makes the Pu240 and Am241 go away.

Reprocessing yields a small fraction of leftover fissile material. It is in no way characterisable as recycling.

The strategy is a very boring and tiresome propaganda move that is part of the Duke Energy and Rosatom astroturfing playbook. As is the “who me? I couldn’t possibly be slyly trying to imply nuclear waste is actually fuel” act.

schroedingershat ,

All thermal generation will cause direct global warming via waste heat if used to excess.

Fossil fuels have an order of magnitude or two more thermal forcing via GHG, so it’s largely irrelevant there, but solar can produce a couple orders of magnitude more energy than the world uses now without significant land use. As such fusion (with the exception of p-B or He3 direct conversion with no steam engine which is a bit more scifi) hits thermal limits before solar hits land limits.

Intuitively you can frame this as “a small fraction of the amount of sunlight that hits the planet is the amount of energy that changes the planet’s temperature” which is basically a tautology.

schroedingershat ,

Monocrystalline solar doesn’t involve rare earths at all, idiot.

If you want to pearl clutch about them, pearl clutch about gadolinium in nuclear plants.

schroedingershat ,

Not sure what you’re even trying to say with the first bit. It’s completely irrelevant

No breeder reactor has ever produced enough fuel to run on and extracted it. Breeder programs get as far as half of a proof of concept and then run out of funding on the actually hard part.

schroedingershat ,

Not only is the amount of land required insignificant, and optional (agrivoltaics and built up areas are capable of providing enough for marginally higher labour cost). Low yield uranium mines like Inkai (so most of them going forward) take up more space than a solar farm with the same energy output because the ore has lower energy density than coal.

If you’re going to pearl clutch about land use, pearl clutch about the idea of developing any of the 90% of Uranium resource that has abysmal yield.

schroedingershat ,

Instead we only have to worry about immediately running out of beryllium for breeding blankets just on the demo reactors.

schroedingershat ,

The myth they are dog whistling is just that. You can see it repeated everywhere the topic comes up and where they tried to conflate it with breeding. The method of lying is called paltering.

In reality reprocessing has no significant impact other than leaking Cs, Kr and Tc everywhere, increasing the volume of waste so it’s harderto handle and raising costs.

schroedingershat ,

This is even more ridiculous.

It’s sand. Literally the most abundant element in earth’s crust. And quartz sand isn’t even as particular as construction sand, because only the composition is important, not the shape.

You’re literally pearl clutching about the scarcity of Silicon as a way of justifying calling it a rare earth.

The only limitation is manufacturing, and you can build manufacturing and the output faster than you can build a nuclear reactor. You’re also comparing an industry that’s adding >300TWh/yr to one that is adding zero net (and about 20TWh/yr gross) as if the latter is significant and the former is not.

The insane reaches that nukebros go to to justify their insanity would be comical if it wasn’t so harmful.

schroedingershat ,

Yes it was a “strategy” for EDF to go tens of billions into debt, and the other 30-50% of french power infrastructure is there just for fun. These mental gymnastics are incredibly tiresome.

schroedingershat ,

More deranged doublethink.

ARENH can’t be causing losses if the price it sets is profitable (so by citing it you are claiming that the french nuclear fleet has never broken even).

It also can’t be causing a production shortfall requiring buying expensive hydro if the reactors are off because of a “strategy”.

Your debt doesn’t go up every year if you’re making a profit.

Deferring maintenance doesn’t make costs magically vanish.

Decomissioning, waste management and hundreds of billions for license extensions are also completely unfunded. So the french people were just bilked another €10 billion for taking on a larger share of a half trillion dollar liability.

schroedingershat ,

Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.

Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.

For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).

Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.

This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to “scare mongering about meltdowns” are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).

schroedingershat ,

If loss of expertise were the cause, then there would have been a cost minimum in the late 80s when the maximum number of engineers had 5-15 years of experience.

Instead costs rose for each new reactor (including repeat builds of each model).

This theory has no explanatory power over reality and predicts the opposite of what happened.

schroedingershat ,

Part is the neoliberal economic model is really really bad at big projects. Part is the regulations and engineering complexity involved in not having them all shut down because they caught fire or the steam generators corroded (almost every program has “cheap” reactors at the beginning which have massive maintenance issues and leaks 10-30 years later, followed by expensive ones with massive delays). Part is corporate greed. Part is revealing and stopping rampant fraud and finding safety-compromising cost-cutting measures. Part is the lack of pressure from the military to make it happen as there is no longer a need for as much Plutonium. Part is that there actually are some semblance of environmental laws. Part is the fossil fuel industry interfering (as they do with all non-fossil-fuels).

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