From Worldometer (new COVID-19 deaths yesterday):
DAY USA WORLD Brazil India South Africa
June 9 1093 4732 1185 246 82
July 22 1205 7128 1293 1120 572
Aug 12 1504 6556 1242 835 130
Sept 9 1208 6222 1136 1168 82
Oct 21 1225 6849 571 703 85
Nov 25 2304 12025 620 518 118
Dec 30 3880 14748 1224 299 465
Jan 14 4142 15512 1151 189 712
Feb 3 4005 14265 1209 107 398
Mar 2 1989 9490 1726 110 194
April 6 906 11787 4211 631 37
May 4 853 13667 3025 3786 59
June 1 287 10637 2346 3205 95
July 7 251 8440 1595 817 411
Aug 4 656 10120 1118 532 423
Sept 1 1480 10470 703 505 235
8 1700 9836 250 339 253
14 1934 9001 709 281 300
21 2152 8466 484 385 160
Summary:
- The U.S. suffered our worst new deaths figure in seven months.
- We had 132,538 new cases yesterday.
- Add the next highest countries--#2 UK, #3 Turkey, #4 India, #5 Russia, #6 Iran--and you have a combined new cases total lower than the USA.
- We were not the worst in new cases/million population, and note the preponderance of Republican states:
- U.S. 398
- New Caledonia 2753
- Martinique 2133
- Guam 1191 (U.S. territory)
- Alaska 1136 (the U.S. state)
- Minnesota 1129 (the U.S. state)
- Montana 1097 (the U.S state)
- Montenegro 1019
- Idaho 1017 (the U.S. state)
- Wyoming 956 (the U.S. state)
- Suriname 922
- Israel 893
- North Dakota 821 (the U.S. state)
- Wisconsin 713 (the U.S. state)
- Georgia 705 (the U.S. state)
- Georgia 618 (the country)
- Ohio 582 (the U.S. state)
- Costa Rica 535
- Lithuana 438
- Maldives 400
- Hawaii 200 (the U.S. state)
- Singapore 200
- India 20
- Nigeria 2 (they are also now suffering from a cholera outbreak)
- Afghanistan 1 (but are they reporting their cases??)
- China 0.05
Harbin has closed a raft of businesses in response, including mahjong halls, cinemas, theaters, karaoke and dance venues, pedicure shops, massage parlors, Internet cafes, gyms and churches and religious sites. It suspended large-scale meetings, implemented crowd-control policies for public places like supermarkets and scenic spots, and limited use of public transportation like subways, railways and buses. Citizens have been told to not to leave the city if not necessary.
The patient traveled more than 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) on Sept. 7 via train and plane to Harbin -- a city near the Russian border that’s home of one of the world’s largest winter ice festivals -- from the city of Ji’an in the south, according to the local government. Ji’an is in a province that borders Fujian, where a delta surge has sickened 364 people over the past 11 days.
One more bit of pandemic information. The world just reached 6 billion vaccinations in 184 countries. The population of the globe is 7.9 billion. Of course, some got more than one shot. Many countries, especially in Africa, remain way under 10% being fully vaccinated. Among the countries at 1% or less are Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Yemen, Tanzania, Haiti and Congo, which is at less than 0.1%.
On to the science topic of the day, here are the three primary options for fusion:
- Magnetic confinement: donut (looks like the kind you eat), for the Tokamak reactor is of this shape.
- Inertial confinement: laser.
- Cold fusion: micro-reactor at low temperature, some down to the comfort of your air-conditioned home.
To differentiate:
- Fission occurs when large molecules like uranium and plutonium break apart to provide energy. This is what is used today for nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. Some waste products have long half lives.
- Fusion, think hydrogen bomb, and combines small molecules like isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, to produce energy. Tritium has a half life of 12.3 years.
- Vast clouds of hydrogen and helium soon after the Big Bang began to accumulate through the magic of gravity, such that stars were able to form. These combined gases get denser, and the process which began at 0 K, heats up and gains in pressure. From a proto-star disk which might take only 50,000 years to form, further accretion occurs so that the system become a central sphere with rotating particles outside, ultimately forming planets. The core of the sphere attains sufficient temperature and pressure to ignite. This star system go on to have a life of 10 billion years. Our universe is just less than 14 billion years old. Of course this explanation is a gross simplification, but good enough for now.
- All our stars and the sun fuse hydrogen.
- The temperature at the core of sun is at about 15 million Kelvin.
- The temperature at the surface of the sun is 5778 K.
- 1 Kelvin equals 1 Celsius, which before 1949 was called Centigrade.
- Here is something that will blow your mind: the energy produced at the core can take as long as 50 million years to work its way to the surface. If fusion somehow stops, the surface would shine for millions of years
ITER (acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), and means "the way" in Latin:- Is a partnership of the European Union (which contributes 45% of the cost) and India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the U.S., each of the six providing 9%.
Facility is located at Cadarache in French Provence, which is known for lavender fields, home of historic artists (like Cezanne, and Picasso bought a castle there), and wines, like the over-priced Chateauneuf-du-Pape. I wonder what input the people of Provence had in the selection of this site?- Few remember that the whole idea was conceived in 1985 when Mitterrand, Thatcher, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Geneva, agreeing to cooperate on this project.
- 22 years later, in 2007, construction began.
First plasma is planned for late 2025 and first ignition of tritium in 2035, a full half a century after first agreement.- Their goal is to produce 500 megawatts of output power by providing 50 MW of input power.
- ITER officials estimate the overall cost will be $22 billion. You got to be kidding, remarked the USA, which thought this would cost $65 billion. Plus an additional $45-60 billion for operational costs from 2025 to 2040. Thus, the final price will be in excess of $100 billion.
- Note that the International Space Station cost $150 billion, half the cost picked up by the U.S. with Russia, the European Union, Japan and Canada contributing. Perhaps a few companies might some day be established, but it appears that this system will crash to Earth in 2028, or maybe 2030. While companies are still being recruited for commercial purposes, the reality is how can this huge facility be "safely" disposed of in the ocean?
As another aside, there is the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which cost at least $4.5 billion, where the European Union is drumming up business for a Super-Collider at a cost of $23 billion.
Back to ITER, electricity is not a goal, which will be the reason for DEMO (right), which is being optimistically planned for operation in 2054. So we're now up to just around 70 years from that Geneva agreement, and, who knows, maybe a century when all is said and done. Then you will need a first attempt at commercializing this magnetic confinement pathway. This is the status of what currently is the most prominent hope for fusion.
The other option is laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where I worked in the 1970's. I left this field for a three-year assignment with the U.S. Senate because I felt that the laser to accomplish this task was not even invented yet. That was more than 40 years ago. However:- Last month the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, the size of three football fields, reported they achieved a "Wright Brothers Moment."
- They focused laser light onto a target the size of a BB, resulting in a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second.
Huh? In short, they recreated the temperatures and pressures similar to the core of stars.- From first flight in 1903 by the Wright Brothers, it took nearly 120 years for Boeing to soon roll their 777X to replace the 747.
- Airbus has plans for their Flying V in 2035.
- What is the time line for laser fusion? Net positive and commercialization? Go back to the standard joke of commercial fusion always being 30 years away. I'm afraid even laser fusion is today part of this jest. Yet, they are so close to net positive, and I continue to think this is the better pathway to fusion.
- Cost?
- Since 1953 the U.S. government has spent about $30 billion on fusion energy science, or half a billion/year. That's half the cost of one stealth bomber.
- The National Ignition Facility has thus far spent $3.5 billion.
- Investments in clean energy amounted to more than $500 billion in 2020.
- In comparison, the Manhattan project cost $30 billion in 2021 dollars.
- Could this be the moment to get ambitious and initiate a Manhattan-like effort of $100 billion to attain star power? Just about a decade ago I published in the Huffington Post Star power for Humanity.
- Remember that since 9/11/2001 the USA has spent $8 trillion on Middle East Wars. We just left Afghanistan, and you got to wonder what did we get from this monumental expense? $100 billion is a mere 1.25% of those war costs. I'd like to see how far we can get with laser fusion in 20 years for that sum.
- What about cold fusion?
- This is the room temperature pathway that can theoretically be applied into powering even individual vehicles.
- In March 1989 U.S. chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann (right) announced net positive using two palladium plates in water laden with deuterium.
- Well, turned out that nothing credible followed.
- In 2015 Google entered the field to for $10 million pursue three experimental strands of sufficient promise. Nothing was found, except they indicated the current equipment might not be sufficient to adequately measure outcomes, and that further investigation can be justified.
- Earlier this year, cold fusion (also called low-energy nuclear reactions, or LENRs). scientist associated with U.S. Navy began an attempt to settle the debate.
- Nearly a decade ago this blog site re-looked at the Renaissance Project. To quote.
You can go to Chapter 3 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth to read the details. The bottom line was that it turned out that hydrogen from a 15 tank gallon tank of water, with electrolysis, and using a fuel cell, could take that car 500 miles. The technology that showed the best hope for providing the energy was cold fusion. I would not be surprised if some time during the century this actually happens. Martin Fleishmann, who was most responsible for this concept (cold fusion), died last week at the age of 85. Is cold fusion finally being accepted by the scientific community?
Nothing to do with fusion, but here is something funny, with Michael Paul and Willie:
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