Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ triggered in a lab

Re:Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ trig... by elihu on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @11:28PM (#28847924)

I wish there was more interest in electrifying our major roads and freeways (i.e. allowing cars to charge while they're moving) in part to reduce the necessity of hauling giant batteries around everywhere, but also to shift EV power use from mostly-nighttime to mostly-daytime when more solar power is available.

Another option is to get some high-capacity high-voltage DC lines connecting continents so that countries around the world can sell power during the day and buy it at night. We can keep the fossil fuel plants around as emergency backup.

At this point, though, we're a long way even from being able to shut off the fossil fuel plants during the day while the sun is shining.

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Re:Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ trig... by epistasis on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @12:18AM (#28848186)

Eh, storage is a solved problem for passenger vehicles. It's really only long haul that's a problem. Electrifying roads is too expensive, for too little benefit. Electrifying rail, however, would be a fine idea.

Nearly all vehicles are parked for most of the day. We should incentivize workplace charging, to help with that.

But really, we must drastically reduce our need for driving. We simply can't scale EV production quickly enough to make the impacts we need to. If we want to reduce car emissions by half by 2030, we need to be at 100% EV sales very very soon, and we are no where close to it.

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Re:Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as ‘ignition’ trig... by elihu on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @06:03PM (#28858230)

I'm not sure that electrified roads would really be all that expensive relative to the benefits. I mean, if you only add electrification to a two mile segment every twenty miles on a few major interstate highways, it means that long haul trucking that uses those highways can be fully electric. That seems like a pretty big deal.

If all the major roads and highways are electrified for 100% of their distance (like we would have had to have done in order to switch to electric, say, back in the 70's during the oil crisis when lead acid was the best battery tech available), that would be far more expensive and probably not worth it.

Driving less, more workplace charging, more mass-transit, and electric rail are all good. It'd be great to see electric shipping too, but I'm not sure how to get there; you'd need multiple charging stations in the middle of major oceans or something.

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