ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

Re:ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly by epistasis on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @10:51PM (#23983093)

The steam turbine has to endure super heated steam, requiring very specific materials. Steam turbines also require boilers, cooling, etc. Wind turbines have the potential to require far less in terms of the input materials. And with solar, who knows how efficient we can get with that!

We have been optimizing steam turbines for more than a century, but are just barely getting started on optimization for wind and solar. So far, the rate of improvement hasn't start to slow at all, so I'm fairly confident that due to greater simplicity, wind and solar will end up being less costly than steam turbines. Predicting the future is tricky business, but in the 90s it would have been foolish to think that semiconductors wouldn't get better for more than just a few years. And we are in a very similar place with wind and solar techs now as we were with semiconductors in the the 90s.

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Re:ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly by ClumsyPilot on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @06:41AM (#23985250)

Mist of this post is badly wrong, wind turbines are essentially a close cousin of steam turbine, and are massively more expensive per Mw of power. A single steam turbine can generate a GW and will weigh less than a wind turbine that generates a MW, a thousand time less!

We run steam turbines as high pressure because that gives us efficiency, not because we have to.

"he rate of improvement hasn't start to slow at all, so i am confident"

You have no evidence, so you are confident?

Also airdinamics are well understood, there are no miraculous effficiencies coming to wind turbines

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Re:ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly by epistasis on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:31AM (#23987750)

You don't even address some of the core points: a GW of steam turbine is going to require massive cooling infrastructure that wind turbines do not require.

The learning rate will not stop overnight with wind turbines; there is more than enough research and industrial improvements that are in the works that we will start to see a slowing of the learning rate before it suddenly stops.

Also, airdynamics and not well understood as it relates to wind farms, and new research comes out all the time to improve efficiency of future designs.

For somebody who's claiming that the other person is not providing any evidence, you are operating without any links, only with certainty that I must be wrong about predictions that I admit are tricky to make.

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