I'll be stealing that. And if it wasn't Fukushima, people would keep fearmongering with Chernobyl, in all likelihood, with only infinitesimally less efficacy. I'm dumping some stuff, largely for my own future reference. You might've seen this before: I had been curious about that little black trace at the bottom, thinking maybe someone was low balling us to make a point. The DoE's latest budget report was easy enough to find, and basically confirms the plot above. The phrase "only several hundred million per year" should always be accompanied by "unlimited clean energy(, bitches)". Battery tech will be helpful, especially before we can miniaturize things. At least Musk is working on that one. ITER is a $14 billion thing. The U.S. is reportedly funding 9%-ish of it. If it turns out we can get some clearly* sustainable "burning"/fusing with that thing, which I honestly doubt, people might open more checkbooks. But a null result is still a result (I am required by law to say this to my reflection at least twice daily). In this case, it would pretty much put a nail in the coffin for the tokamak scheme of magnetic confinement. Stellerators are way cooler anyway, and there are some other schemes, including the "field-reversed" setup from this post: Like I mentioned therein, I'd like to revisit square one in another few months. I can't wait for all of the senior scientists to naysay my intentions! Seriously. The article I just submitted to a journal was motivated largely by comeuppance. Maybe a bit unhealthy, but it got the job done handily. Shoot, a few years back, I had a lot of folks tell me that I'd never go back to school. Hah. And I do apologize for hijacking a post about fission to yak about fusion and consolidate some links. I need all the practice talking about this that I can get. I appreciate everyone's interest. Any questions are welcome, it'll help me figure out where the gaps are in understanding. *Even declaring "success" isn't simple. See the optometrist algorithm article. --- Not required reading: Saw a guy on a friend's facebook telling folks that his old semi-truck's engine has better fuel economy than the newer models that've been engineered to emit less CO2. He feels no need to upgrade, of course. He then proceeded to tell everyone that the negative impact of wind energy is more of a concern, because of how much land area they require. Yeah, he got politely destroyed by several members of our grad department. But he still has no idea! Logic is fucking useless with these people. I might try to somehow swindle them into being better stewards of our planet. I've been avidly learning from the best: Presi-fucking-dential. But seriously, pitching this is going to be largely dependent on my own excitement about it. omfg, long-form is so nice. I'm no longer watching radar 24/7, constantly checking for tornadoes, and trying to update all my family and friends (so many texts though, I've never felt so loved :D!). The storm is screwing off, moving out earlier than expected, and the city's main bayou finished cresting a few hours ago. This entire city can start to sleep again! I've been pulling shifts with my girlfriend for several days now. I really wanna do some volunteer work, but it's so heavily discouraged by grad school deadlines... ugh.I think the issue most people have with nuclear power is they think it's invented by Einstein, built by Donald Trump and run by Homer Simpson.
So basically you're saying that the imaginary term in your dispersion relation is comparatively larger for the lower harmonics (including the fundamental?)? Yeah, I totally wanna see what assumptions you put into it, scan away, when you get a chance. I'll ruin one nasty surprise for you right now: In far too many occasions, there's nothing "intuitive" about the way plasma waves behave. And in far too many occasions, sometimes it seems almost unknowable. People do a lot of plugging and chugging. Some real genius goes into analytic approaches to simplifying the results of working in a particular regime or field topography, etc. etc. into an expression palatable for computations. A cohesive physical interpretation of the results is another rabbit hole. Right now, I'm working with anisotropies in electron velocity (phase) space (density) and applying the WHAMP model to see if it'll reproduce the waves we're seeing (some people seem to use the words in the parentheses, some don't). But the space plasma regime I'm working in is regrettably far from that of reactors :(. Still, let some of them words cook your google/noodle. Plasma is also notorious for nonlinear effects. That's part of the reason why they'll kick off a run of the engine, and even if they program in the exact same initial conditions/settings for their equipment on the next run, they hardly ever recover an appreciably identical result (obviously you know this, just translating for posterity). Like we've said before (I think?), nonlinearity seems to be a mathematical predictor of turbulence. Which seems to be somewhat ubiquitous to plasma