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I really hate how so many of these articles feel like they need to dumb it down with this “artificial sun” imagery. It feels so condescending. I’d rather learn more about the latest progress with nuclear fusion
article didn’t say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?
Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?
Plasma is made from basicly over charging a gas with electrons the gas getting all pissy about having those electrons and starts dumping them. something do with elements wanting stability. In that process you get alot of heat out put. Now f you make it more dense I would conclude simply, you now have more ionized atoms in the plasma stream, meaning your plasma will be hotter if the stream will be the same size or if the plasma stream is shrunk but has the same number of ionized gas atoms, you have the same heat out put but in a smaller stream.
You’re having a space characters infestation, you should do something about that.
?
I generally agree that science reporting treats everyone like children, but I really don’t have a problem with this analogy. Stars are the only naturally occurring fusion we have to observe and compare it to. To me that makes sense.
Sure… but the metaphor glosses over the fact that they haven’t really told us anything of interest. It SOUNDS good, but there’s no way to tell how significant it actually is.
Fusion breakthroughs have sounded good since the 90s, but we’re still the proverbial 10 years away from anything useful.
Most Americans read at or below a 6th grade level
I’m not a fan of China (government)… at all. But when I check all the technological breakthrough they are getting in these last years while the US was inflating his fucking ai-bubble. Objectively, they are getting so far ahead is not even funny. At least Europe is on a good track themself.
I’m no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.
Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don’t play well with others.
But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.
While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.
A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it’s the right one, amazing things can happen.
One thing I’ve been impressed with China for is moving towards greener technologies. They’re a leader in solar, their EV’s are apparently very good (not that I can get one here to verify that), and they’re pretty dogged in their pursuit of nuclear energy.
Meanwhile USA is apparently still in “let’s overturn regimes and take over other countries for the oil companies” mode
Hey, Americans are hard working too. Some work 3 jobs just to make ends meet.
The US government threatens other countries with tariffs and sanctions to give American companies unfair advantage. Is that not using unclouth methods?
Americans are hardworking too, but the American government is not actively working to support those hardworking Americans, which is the difference… the average American is working their ass off to earn less than ever to add wealth to the small percentage of ultra wealthy in power here. There are sanctions, tarriffs, and subsidies here, but the vast majority of them benefit the top of the pyramid, while leaving the majority to struggle.
The US government does everything in its power to make the wealthy even more wealthy. But hey, worker empowerment is communism.
Party’s don’t have to be part of democracy though. Nonpartisan democracy might more achievable for China than the west currently as the size of their single party continues to grow. Though I kinda doubt there is a lot of appetite for it. I’m a firm believer in democracy but it’s hard to look at the hyper polarization of today’s parties as beneficial in any way. Especially in the simple two party American system.
tax billionaires out of existence and the polarization will solve itself in short order
Yeah I suspect that’s right.
The overwhelming majority of their so called breakthroughs are just media fluff pieces though. Their sources are more and more often AI generated studies and their supposed advancements aren‘t going anywhere a lot of the time. By the time people start asking questions and want to know more details they have already prepared another story for you to be impressed by. It‘s shock and awe.
Thats the thing that truly pisses me off about the US govt right now.
Ok, China is doing all these things and we’re losing our advantage? Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
But noooo we do the polar opposite and also drive scientists out of the country because they can get funding elsewhere.
Hey, at least they’ve got evangelism down to a science. I’m sure militant devotion to [the parts they like from] the Bible will pay back dividends down the road. Who needs the disciplined and organized pursuit of modern science in earnest when some old book written by long-dead humans claiming to speak for a supreme being says it has all the answers (many of which involve smite-based solutions)?
Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
Oh they are. For AI. Instead of scrambling to Fusion, they’re putting the money into generating nudes of celebrities.
and kids. Look at grok
Nothing they’ve done in recent years is ground breaking.
Room temperature superconductors? Fake.
Self-driving bus using painted lanes for navigation? We have trains and trams for that.
Thorium reactor? Germany had one in the 80s, shut it down because it was expensive, there’s around 20 different projects happening in Europe and North America to make it more efficient.
The fusion reactor from the article? They maybe potentially hypothetically achieved one breakthrough of the dozens still needed to make fusion viable.
Etc., etc.
Chinese government is much better than the US government
Sure, if you like to compare corrupt, totalitarian states, have fun. Don’t forget russia.
People of the world including Europe, South America, middle East and Asia feel safer from Russia and China than America.
Forgetting Ukraine?
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
That would be attacking EU citizens. Bullies don’t like difficult targets.
At leas we won’t have to repect their patent…
Whoever develops fusion will be in the history books forever. I think that’s what they’re going for.
If you look at broad based EU markets vs the S&P over the last year they grew about twice the rate.
You don’t have to like the government, but they’re the sole reason China is slowly starting to take the lead in science and engineering. These are the fruits of marxism-leninism, whether you like it or not.
China is not Marxist-leninist lmao. They have a market economy.
State capitalism is not the same as Marxism.
Of course they are led by a marxist-leninist vanguard party. Just because they are leading a state owned market economy in order to build up their productive forces so they can counteract the power of US hegemony/imperialism, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing socialist state building.
No, they aren’t Marxist-leninist.
There’s no overthrowing of capitalism. China is capitalist as fuck.
Socialism is not “when the government does things”.
Socialism is a transition period between capitalism (and other modes of production that came before it) towards communism. Socialism even by Lenin’s and Marx’s words is a period riddled with contradictions. The state’s role is to work towards communism. China is applying marxism-leninism to its context and is doing amazing while at it. Strengthening the productive forces as to combat imperialism is the way to go and China knows it. China doesn’t need western ultra-lefts living at the tit of the empire to tell it what it has to do to ensure the survival of its sovereign state for the betterment of the working class’s material conditions.
Their other fruits are despots and tyrants
How so? They’ve got less tyrants than most of the western world for sure
*Slaps on top of fusion reactor*
“You can boil so much water with this.”
Higher density, yes, but at the cost of lower temperatures. So not as good. Nice but old new. With painfullll advertisement.
Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels.
The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal : Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040 )in a study titled ‘Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST’.In sum, these guys at EAST got the Greenwald limit elevated in their tokamak, which indirectly influences the Lawson criterion: nTTau, density * time at said density * plasma energy released. Lawson is the master finish line for measuring whether a fusion system can actually make more power than it consumes.
To date, when you cross the Greenwald limit, the man/woman in the operators seat should expect the plasma inside the device to become uncontrollable, hurting the reactor by touching the walls or instruments inside, a so-called “disruption”. Only a few topologies like the stellerator can exceed the limit, and so far, only by 5x.
But here we have a way to exceed the limit in the much more researched tokamak. This research has positive impact for all but the weirdest/niche fusion devices.
Artificial sun rising from the EAST? These guys know how to name things.
Only 75 more years to go!
Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.
US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
Lol any year now!
ha hahahahaahaaaa… oh boy… you techno utopians are funny. Maybe build a Space Elevator out of 3D printed AI Bitcoins and run a fusion reactor at the Lagrange point? Privately! On the Moon! To colonize Mars and mine the asteroids! Become a multi star species!
OK, time will tell. How about I save you the wait: nothing will happen. At all.
you techno utopians are funny.
I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.
It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.
Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”
Dude, 10 years ago was 2016… We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least. I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.
I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.
I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)
I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.
To be fair there was and is huge push back against EVs, the US is setting itself back a couple centuries just to not admit it is viable.
You’re so dense you could fuse hydrogen.
What a low quality joke. The humor was bad too.
Unlike this captain positivity’s social life, fusion is making some sizable strides forward in short order.
I design diagnostics going into systems like these, there’s a lot of positive news coming our way.
Helion’s gonna have some problems though.
Is it only me that had the C&C Generals Nuke Cannon tagline going off in their heads saying BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN in a deliberate voice and a heavy Chinese accent?
“I am big!”
This day is to be remembered.
China has been generous
Hey, is that game any good? I only every did Tiberian Sun and RA2, is it worth getting into?
IMO it’s great but it is a departure from earlier titles in more than just going to 3D, and the sides are a 90s caricature of the US/China/Middle-Eastern people, so it’s something that you definitely couldn’t make today.
Like the “terrorist” side gets suicide bombers and a unit called “angry mob” to which Chinese flamethrowers or American snipers are a good counter, while China gets two soldiers for the price of one and propaganda loudspeakers everywhere that makes units fight harder.
The story is barely there as well, which was a strong point of the RA2 and Tiberium universes.
I loved that game so much back in the day
https://chronodivide.com/ play online man, try demo mode against the PC for a bit too to practice
Completely free andnopen source
This diagram shows the LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) for various technologies - i.e. how much does one kWh of electricity cost if you divide the total number of generated kWh by the total cost of the power plant.
“utility-scale solar” means large-scale flat-area solar parks
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
I doubt it; It’s not only about technology costs but also about advantages like decentralization. If you can generate your own electricity in your own back-yard, you’re much more independent than if you’re dependent on large-scale fusion power. Because that will necessarily be very large-scale and centralized because nobody can set up a fusion reactor in their own back yard.
Solar has the problem of storage. You need something like a generator to tide those in-between times. Also you need the signal to be a clean 60 hz and solar apparently isn’t very good at keeping the power clean.
Yeah i was thinking one could probably generate something like synthetic petroleum when one has excess clean energy and store the synthetic fuel for many months.
Solar is technically fusion though
Solar is Fusion as a Service or FaaS technology.
The sun is in the cloud(s)?
Technically, there’s only two sources of energy in the universe: nuclear energy and the expansion of the cosmos.
Like, solar is fusion, ofc, the light coming from the sun. So is wind and water and bioenergy (indirectly). Geothermal is fission (heat comes from radioactive decay inside Earth).
But then there’s another source of energy that nobody ever talks about: tidal power It works by converting the rise and fall of water with the tides into electrical energy. This energy ultimately comes from the moon orbiting around Earth, more precisely, its mechanical energy: The fact that the moon is distant from Earth is only because the universe expanded after the big bang. Had it not done this, the moon and earth would be located at the same location, and there would be no “orbiting” to extract energy out of :P
I just made a post about this here
but isnt it being centralized being the point? I have the (probably not so rare) tin foil theory that big energy spends a lot of money to dampen solar and other decentralized power generation. As a politician you have to ask yourself, do I get nice packages from big energy for not looking so closely when another forest is turned into a hole or do I hope that 20000 random people try to bribe me for something. In terms of money gain for a few big power plant is double plus good. Boring solar might be better for all of us, the rest, but not for the guys calling the shots. This all assumes of course that there is no empathy at all in the local legislation
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
Eventually. But, much like traditional fission power, you’ll need a very large and complex piece of infrastructure to deliver it.
You won’t be able to put a fusion plant in your basement like you can put solar on your roof.
There are fusion reactors that fit between your fingers.
Solar power is not a feasible solution in all parts of the world, though, and large-scale storage is still very much an issue.
So I take it Doctor Octavos is a Red LoL
without leaving behind hazardous waste
By volume blanket reprocessing and neutron activated vessel components create more hazardous waste than fission could dream of (not including the nightmare of on site fuel reprocessing for breeders that are similarly pie in the sky)
Hello. Sorry, I couldn’t find an immediate source when I did a web search with the text you quoted. Do you have a source for it you could share, or recall when you saw it?
Thanks!
It’s not a quote, just a reality for non-existent blanket recycling technology and dealing with neutron energies that far exceed anything fission produces in slow neutron reactors and the large amounts of waste created from spallation and tritium handling.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ac62f7/pdf
deleted by creator
RIP bro
Didn’t delete more like moved to to be replying to the article proper
Just a reminder that even if you have a fusion generator that reaches over unity, untill you can fit that in the space and weight of a car or truck engine, you still need a lot of oil, and you still need a lot of rare earth minerals for batteries.
Either that or a whole new transit / economic trade paradigm.
Not saying that it would not be great to be able to retire coal oil and gas power plants from the grid as a theoretical over unity fusion power source someday becomes a thing…
But I am saying its not a cure-all.
you still need a lot of oil, and you still need a lot of rare earth minerals for batteries.
If the power is free, you can synthesize hydrogen or even hydrocarbons from captured CO2.
Cool and hows all that coming along?
Hydrogen vehicles?
The whole initial pitch from Tesla, that basicslly got EVs conceptually over the hump into being potentially practical… at a paradigmatic level…
… was Elon saying he was gonna build a whole network of infrastructure for that, charging networks.
… and then 90% of that never happened.
Remember when we were gonna have basically a carwash type thing but it would just do a battery swap on your car?
Remember when he was all giddy about the SOLID METAL SNAKE that was gonna basicslly just be a robot tentacle that would automagically plug in to your charging port?
Yeah, basically none of that shit happened, similar to all that money we gave to the ISPs and such to build out fiber networks, most of which just went into stock buybacks, not infrastructure.
So my point is, you run into the same fundamental problem with hydrogen, now you need to build a whole new set of infrastructure.
… Who is going to pay for that?
Oh and also power would not be free.
Not for a long long time, not untill you solve capitalism.
Even with the magical thinking of an over unity power generator, you have do another order of magnitude of magical thinking to think that that somehow just makes power, in general, free, in a capitalist system.
They’ll find a way, many ways, to make it cost money.
Ok, so use the hydrogen to make heavier fuels, you just need heat and CO2.
America might not do anything, but China would be happy to sell USA’s emissions back to them for profit.
… so you’re saying to use i guess infinite amounts of energy to … do abiotic synthesis and just literally produce hydrocarbons?
… Like, just Fischer-Troph everything?
I suspect you are wildly oversimplifying the complexity of the chemical processes involved…
…for the general concept of what you are saying, to make actual sense…
Your abiotic hydrocarbon synthesis process would have to be less energy demanding than the constant surplus energy production rate of a theoretical over unity fusion generator.
Just getting any fusion generator than is any miniscule amount of truly over unity, thats not enough.
Thats infinite energy… if you have an infinite amount of time to wait, and an infinite amount of some kind of battery system to contain that energy in.
Synthetic fuel production is kind of notorious for being immensely energy intensive.
And for FT at least, you need a feedstock of either biomass, coal or natural gas.
If you want to just do some kind of variant of an FT like process, where your feedstock is ultimately ‘refined air’… you’re going to need even more energy, a fusion generator than is over unity by an even larger margin.
It is a little more complicated than just ‘heat up CO2’.
Unless you can point me to … somebody who has actually worked out the chemistry of how you can just synthesize hydrocarbons from… ambient CO2… that you’re scrubbing from the air… demonstrated this entire process at a tiny scale as proof of concept… and described the total amount of energy required to power this process…
Yeah I’m calling bullshit.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212982022003808
Yes, it requires significantly more energy than you get from burning the hydrocarbons, but the whole promise of fusion is virtually limitless clean energy with minimal nuclear waste.
Well hey, ok, that’s what I asked for, its a detailed outline of the process!
What that whole process ultimately is, is pumping a bunch or energy into a machine, a process, that outputs hydrocarbons, which are basically energy in another form.
(Or maybe more accurately, precursors to being able to form more typical HC energy, or useful inputs to some other chemical sysnthesis process)
So, for this to even conceptually make sense, overall, you’d need to have your … fusion reactor be able produce an over unity surplus of energy, at a constant rate, that is equal in $$$ value to… basically, the sellable price of the hydrocarbon fuel you are producing, at that same rate.
And that’s simplifying out, assuming that you don’t need to further refine or otherwise transform the hydrocarbons produced by this process, which you probably would.
They do outline output volumes and concentrations, as well as… enough info that you could work backward and figure out how much energy they’re actually pumping in to this process, to achieve said yields.
So, from that, you could figure out what the required… ratio of over unity-ness of the fusion generator would have to be.
But, also, note that prices of various forms of energy, input energy, output hydrocarbon, they’re a major factor in whether or not this whole idea is viable or not, and prices can and will fluctuate.
It seems to me that this particular process … the authors seem to be describing it as not producing very high amounts of the most useful kinds of precursors for general fuel production, but is producing potentially useful amounts of precursors for other kinds of processes:
The low DME concentration and high H2: DME molar ratio in the CO2-to-HC reactions in this study may facilitate hydrogen transfer for the chain growth termination step and therefore limit the C chain length of the products, leading to formation of isobutane and isopentane as dominant products instead of isobutane and triptane, as observed at greater DME concentration. These light branched paraffins (isobutane and isopentane), which are not ideal blendstocks for high-octane gasoline, are in fact versatile precursors for SAF synthesis via commercially available alkane dehydrogenation and alkene oligomerization processes.[29], [34], [35].
They also seem to reference other attempts at modifying something like an FT process, that are more productive at producing precurors for, general fuel:
Other research groups have investigated CO2 hydrogenation over similar composite catalyst systems…
Hydrophobic modification of HBEA to improve water tolerance substantially increased C4+ HC yield and selectivity to 6.1% and 22.3%, respectively. [19] Using a 2-stage reactor system provided flexibility to control temperature of the reactors independently to achieve high CO yield in the first reactor which facilitated MeOH and MTH synthesis at the second reactor at 300 °C. The inter-stage water removal improved the activity of HBEA for MTH, resulting in C4+ HC yield and selectivity of 6.8% and 14.9%, respectively. [16]
This is genuinely novel and interesting, so I do thank you for actually informing me of this, and rescind my earlier claim of ‘bullshit’, modifying it to ‘needs further research’, specifically in the realms of how you’d scale this up, and what surrounding infrastrucure and economic parameters you’d need for this to be economically viable.
It is neat to learn that this is a thing that we can actually do… but you’d still have to work out the math of the conditions under which it would make sense to do, and be overall productive and useful… figure out how much over-unity-ness you’d need from a theoretical fusion generator for doing this to make sense.
Also:
We have termed this approach the high-octane-gasoline (HOG) pathway.
I just want to take a moment and laugh at that, lol.
Seems obvious to pick a new transit paradigm for personal cars, obviously trucks can stay.
Also in the current era, coal plants already have a good replacement: nuclear. At least for bigger countries, but most are shutting down rather than improving. This might be (hopefully) starting to change though in recent times.
Also I don’t know what fusion power is, I shall be on wikipedia now. Good day sir.
Assuming you mean commericial grade hauler trucks and such, I absolutely agree with all your points.
… Are we running commercial trucks on biodiesel yet?
But yeah, for personal transit… a huge amount of the world gets around on bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles. Cars are basically a luxury, like, any car.
Of course that works because public transit over long distances tends to work, and the whole country tends to not be laid out as just a cancerous mass of utterly useless suburubs, strewn out around urban cores that are half parking lot.
I dunno, if we just say, banned pickup trucks and SUVs for private use, well, that’d cut down on road maintenance a good deal, would make being a moped or bicycle or motorcycle commuter a bit more feasible.
Assuming you mean commericial grade hauler trucks and such, I absolutely agree with all your points.
Oh yes, I mean commercial hauler trucks, etc. The ones that do their job well of course. Of course theres other types of trucks for maintenece, last mile deliveries, etc.
(Side note, europe has nice delivery vans)
Definitely not the things the average american has started calling a “truck”, which has 5mpg and is used solely for one person to go to and from an office job, etc, never hauling anything.
And plus 1 for bikes, idk about motorbikes though, sadly they seem like death traps because of how fast you can go, one mistake by you or someone else on the road and you could see black.
Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.
Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.
Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.
Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.
With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.
But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts of the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap, and if you have a traffic law paradigm and road system that accomodates them, they totally make sense.
Motorcycles… have more effective maximum range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.
Theyre a bit more popular in south america, which generally has less medium/long distance mass transit.
Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.
The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.
And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?
I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has ~60% the top speed, maybe ~20% the overall range.
Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a spread out US city, that is 50% parking lot by land use.
And bicycles are not street legal in the US, the way that cars and motorcycles are.
They get shunted into their own sort of ruleaet governing where they can be ridden, which is highly variable and not standardized from city to city.
Practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really tried to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.
Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, on a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, following the road laws of basically juat being a very small car, being cautious…, than I would on a bicycle, where…
… you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just no bike lane at all, but its illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk… if there even is a sidewalk.
Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t-bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.
Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.
Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.
Motorcycles can do that.
So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.
I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.
We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.
We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.
I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.
Luckily major european countries that have well designed streets publish a lot of their found research, it just has to start being adopted in the more car-centric places.
The US as an example is pretty far gone, but if the major cities went fully in the correct direction, it probably would only take a few decades to look completely different (amsterdam is decent proof of this).
While I agree with you in theory, in practice, no, we could not transform that fast, to a significant degree, unless we first basically had something like a Maoist genocide of current landowners, burned all the existing building and land use codes, and started over.
More than just the whole… rich people have way too much control over society thing…
The amount of NIMBYism in the US is insane.
(Not In My BackYard)
Every single element of every city’s zoning laws and building regulations are designed to benefit existing property owners and existing properties, as they currently are.
We would have to dismantle a whole lot of that to actually change the fundamental street grid system.
… The problem is complex not so much in technical, engineering, how do we actually do this kinds of ways… but in the way of: there are way too many powerful groups and actors that will fuck up every stage of any process that is attempting to change anything about urban design.
I guess you could say our governance structures are as gridlocked as the actual streets are.
That’s true, reading your comment reminded me of SUBURBIA!!! Definitely not easy to fix that.
Certainly a good place to start with better zoning as you say.
No no no. You just use the fusion to heat the water to make the steam to turn a turbine and then distribute that energy. Boom electric cars are a thing. While it’s technically possible to make a car with 0 petroleum products, it’s not financially viable in the current market.
Oil is remarkably cheap. I always find it funny that a gallon of gas and a gallon of water stay about the same price when one literally falls from the sky for free.
Its not ‘funny’, its the result of enormous structural subsidies for the oil and gas industry for … what like 125, 150 years now?
Brought to you by all the people who preach the merits of the perfectly competitive free market for everyone else.
… Its a multi generational, ongoing crime.
I wonder what Smedley Butler would have to say about the Trump-ezuela operation.
… on the other hand, nuclear fusion powered steam engine car… what could go wrong?
There are topologies which don’t require steam heating for electricity generation…
I mean, if we’re in the sci fi timeline where fusion is a developed technology to the point where energy is effectively free with no env impact, then we can still do a lot to avoid that. Cars don’t need huge batteries when your roads are powered, etc.
Your… roads are powered?
Via what, a third rail, that can electrocute anyone who touches it, does ‘funny stuff’ in snow or rain or ice?
Every road segment has a… gigantic cellphone style wireless charger?
That sure wont be a nightmare to maintain.
… Cars somehow become maglev trains?
What are you talking about?
You know, the fictional concept of cars being powered by the road, via whatever technobabble the author writes
Sorry I don’t read sci fi with garbage worldbuilding.
Sounds like you just prefer science nonfiction =)
