We’re using graphene! Almost entirely for it’s electrical properties true, but we’re using graphene doped batteries in consumer electronics currently. We also use fusion and ITER research for a whole lot more than just power generation - plasma dynamics, just one tiny subfield concerned with physics, has applications in everything from radio transmission beam forming techniques to satellite engines to magnetodynamic modeling to the EMI shielding on your vacuum cleaner.
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Feb 01:52
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I would like to subscribe for more graphene facts.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 23:35
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No, but some guy proved that we could use that to our advantage. If you don’t use the magnetic constrictors to compensate for the heat from the fusion expanding the vessel, you can have it enter fusion and leave fusion several times a second. Wrap the thing in copper wire coils, and you have now got your vessel in a state of flux, and producing enough power to blackout your local grid, and get lots of fines from the feds in less than 5 seconds of runtime. He obviously didn’t continue working on that particular method of generating power with a Tokomak
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 12:32
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Can you link to something so I can read more about this please?
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 14:40
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Wish I could. Only reason I know about it, is that it was mentioned briefly in the Navy Nuclear Power Program training materials.
IIRC it was expected because previous record from China was essentially a trial for this one. It all happens under ITER project so it’s not that much of a race.
That’s not what this is, and even then, that competition wasn’t even good. You had two countries hoarding technological advancements for themselves, with everything having to be discovered twice.
This is a worldwide collaboration, where each assists the others, and it’s a much better way of making progress. See ITER.
Jericho_Kane@lemmy.org
on 20 Feb 07:11
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America would blow up a fusion reacto, call it dangerous, elon musk has a lot of things to say about it and then it would be illegal worldwide. Have you guys heard about coal? We already fixed it, just burn coal.
JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 14:52
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That was such a culture shock when I went to the us for the first time.
In Germany and many places in Europe do not think of burgers as sandwiches. I was so confused when I ordered a sandwich and got something like a burger.
Only difference between that and a burger is a burger is usually on a roll, not slices of bread. (And a burger is always hot, but then so are some sandwiches.)
DarkCloud@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 20:38
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Guarantee you they weren’t generating a whole lot of power though… And if you can’t do that part then what’s the point?
garretble@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 20:39
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The first planes only flew for a few seconds.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 20:43
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Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.
So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…
I’ll let you fill in the blank.
P.S I have a “perpetual” motions machine that can run for 30 minutes (8 minutes longer than this fusion reactor), are you interested in investing?
EDIT: Four years ago the British Fusion reactor (J.E.T. originally built in 1984) produced “59 megajoules of heat energy” none of which was harvested and turned into electricity. The project was then shutdown for good after 40 years of not generating power.
A fusion reactor has already output more power than its inputs 3 years ago. Running a reactor for an extended period of time is still a useful exercise as you need to ensure they can handle operation for long enough to actually be a useful power source.
Agreed. But just to go along with the flight analogy proposed earlier, it took hundreds of years from Da Vinci’s flying machine designs to get to one that actually worked.
In 1932, Walton produced the first man-made fission by using protons from the accelerator to split lithium into alpha particles.[5]
We’ve been at this for coming up to 100 years too.
Let me know when they actually generate power. I don’t want another article about a guy jumping off the eifle tower in a bird suit. A successful flight should be measured by the success of the flight.
Power generators should be measured by the power generated.
0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing.
America, the UK, France, Japan, and no doubt other places have been toying with fusion “power” for 90 years… We’ve created heat and not much else as far as I can tell.
Fission isn’t fusion, the first artificial fusion was two years later in 1934. That gives us a mere 332 years to beat the time from Da Vinci’s first design to the Wrights’ first flight
0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing
He demonstrated pretty clearly his idea didn’t work.
At least learn a little bit about the technology you’re criticizing, such as the difference between fission (aka not fusion) and fusion (aka…fusion), before going on a rant about it saying it’ll never work.
None of the reactors are being built with output capture in mind at the moment, because output capture is trivial compared to actually having an output, let alone an output that’s greater than the input and which can be sustained. As you’ve clearly learned in this thread, we’re already past having an output, are still testing out ways to have an output greater than an input, with at least one reactor doing so, and we need to tackle the sustained output part, which you’re seeing how it’s actively progressing in real time. Getting the energy is the same it’s always been: putting steam through a turbine.
Fission is what nuclear reactors do, it has been used in the entire world, it’s being phased out by tons of countries due to the people’s ignorance of the technology as well as fearmongering from parties with a vested interest in seeing nuclear fail, is still safer than any other energy generation method, and would realistically solve our short term issues alongside renewables while we figure out fusion…but as I said, stupid, ignorant people keep talking shit about it and getting it shit down…remind you of anyone?
cubism_pitta@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 20:53
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Predicted fusion energy and energy actually harvested and converted to usable electricity are not the same thing. Your article is about “fusion energy” not experimentally verified electrical output.
It’s a physicist doing conversion calculations (from heat to potential electricity), not a volt meter measuring actual output produced.
Very hot flames can contain enough ions / free electrons to be considered a plasma but a wood campfire the likes of which cavemen built, which is what we are discussing here, do not achieve such temperatures. If cavemen wielded acetylene torches then they might have more experience with plasma.
If you were thinking something simple like “fire is plasma” that is reductive, and the cases where flame is plasma are not the everyday kind. Hence, when I said “a campfire is not plasma” I was being pretty specific. Your reply that ”fire is a low temperature plasma,” as an unqualified blanket statement, is wrong. Go read on it. It’s interesting.
If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.
Leaving the arguments up to this point aside (because I am not agreeing with or supporting @DarkCloud), your comment on its own doesn’t make much sense. In general, the beauty of of a steam turbine electrical generator is that you don’t have to care how the heat gets generated. You can swap it out with any heat source, from burning fossil fuels, to geothermal, to nuclear, to whatever else and it works just fine as long as the rate of heat output is correctly calibrated for the size of the boiler.
That’s my point: fusion is just another heat source for making steam, and with these experimental reactors, they can’t be sure how much or for how long they will generate heat. Probably not even sure what a good geometry for transferring energy from the reaction mass to the water. You can’t build a turbine for a system that’s only going to run 20 minutes every three years, and you can’t replace that turbine just because the next test will have ten times the output.
Good point. Uncertainty over the magnitude and longevity of the heat source, and therefore how big to make the turbine and whether it would remain in operation long enough to exceed the payback period of its cost, is definitely a valid reason not to bother attaching a steam generator to a thing.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 20:56
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I’ll let you fill in the blank
Code switch for: “I don’t have a point so why don’t you make it for me”
Verified electrical output, the answer is verified electrical power generated.
…as in we should measure power generation experiments by how much power they generated.
Isn’t that obvious?
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org
on 19 Feb 21:59
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They weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.
Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.
Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up.
I don’t think we do have a means of converting this heat energy into electrical energy right now. With nuclear we put radioactive rods into heavy water to create steam and drive turbines…
What’s the plan for these fusion reactors? You can’t dump them into water, nor can you dump water into them… I don’t believe we have a means of converting the energy currently.
Even if we could dump water into them it would explosively evaporate because they run at 100 million degrees Celsius. That would be a very loud bang and whatever city they were in would be gone.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 22:25
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The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge. I get your frustration where it feels from news coverage that they’re not focusing on the right stuff, but what you’ll likely eventually see is that the time between “we figured out how to durably confine a healthy plasma” will quickly turn into “we have a huge energy output” much like inventors puttered around with flight for hundreds of years until a sustained powered flight design, however crappy, finally worked. From that point, it was only 15 years until the first transatlantic flight.
The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.
If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.
SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 20:59
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Yes, but you’re asking how much cargo it can take while we’re barely off the ground. Research reactors aren’t set up to generate power, they’re instrumented to see if stuff is even working.
Evil_incarnate@lemm.ee
on 19 Feb 21:02
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Not equivalent. Let’s measure the aircraft performance by its ability to carry passengers between capital cities.
It’s baby steps and we need to encourage more investment. Not dismiss the Wright brothers for being unable to fly from New York to London after ten years of development.
Well, there were a lot of fundamental steps that had to be completed first, not least of which was a high pressure vessel. This all took a lot of materials science, advancement in seemingly unrelated fields, etc., etc. Not unlike fusion technology… The difference is we have 2000 years more advancement than they had when they invented the steam engine.
eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 20 Feb 18:02
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Why do you care so much what an article says about France’s accomplishments of science and China’s accomplishments of science? Why can’t we enjoy the movement of technology without bickering about lines drawn in the sand by people none of us know or care about?
notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world
on 19 Feb 21:33
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A headline without calling it an “Artificial Sun”?!
The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.
It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.
notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 00:19
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I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.
Arguably, the nearby sun scale fusion reactor has been fairly useful for us. Nowadays we can convert its output directly into electricity using solar cells
I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.
_stranger_@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 15:23
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What I’m hearing is that we should mine the sun and make better use of all that fuel.
That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 18:29
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They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.
Yea one of the most interesting applications of fusion reactor research is the requirements in advancements for material science also benefits fission and even solar power generation, so the research bears fruit well and above the stated goals.
Gold_E_Lox@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 02:44
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not to say its the greatest form of energy production ever, but, what are your gripes with nuclear these days anyway?
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 08:17
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Well, really it’s the opposite, nuclear works already. So why not just build nuclear plants at 1/20 the cost? (and actually get some net positive energy)
If you’re of my generation you kind of grew up being told fusion energy was the holy grail of energy production as it’s clean and doesn’t produce a bunch of radioactive byproduct. (Stuff like SimCity etc. made fusion reactors seem like a miracle technology)
In reality fusion also produces a massive amount of radiation and radiative byproducts, so it’s not the holy grail of energy that I think most people might assume it is.
Fusion and Fission are two sides of the same coin, so fusion experiments are important because they aid in making fission reactors safe as well!
I’m especially looking forward to seeing how material scientists attempt to solve the massive fast neutron radiation that fusion reactors produce, as Thorium reactors have the same issue.
The primary issue is that deuterium-deuterium reactions (the only practical fusion process that seems to work is deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium, as you need insane temperatures for proton-boron, so in any realistic reactor deuterium will end up reacting with itself) produce 3 times the radiation of equivalent power output from fission reactions, so you need MASSIVE amounts of shielding for a reactor to run for an extended period of time.
This also highly irradiates the materials inside the reactors themselves, to a degree that maintenance requires built-in robots because the inside of the reactor is too radioactive for humans (this also eventually destroys the robots). The most optimistic estimates for how long a reactor could possibly last is 100 years. At that point the entire reactor would need to be torn down and buried because most of the components would be too radioactive to use anymore. At which point you have the exact same issue as radioactive waste storage, but no recycling process for something crazy like a radioactive isotope of silicon.
However! That’s why these experiments are important! As every advancement they make towards making fusion safe, also makes fission safer, as they’re two sides of the same coin.
hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Feb 15:17
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no. that’s thermodynamically impossible.
though it is true that fission and fusion are opposites, you cannot gain energy by fissing and fusing the same material. There’s an inverted bell curve where medium sized elements are the lowest energy state. You can get energy by making atoms more medium, fusing the smallest atoms or fissing the biggest ones. Doing the opposite costs energy.
I’m sceptical. Even if somebody would present a working fusion reactor today, what would the timeline to replace everything based on fossil fuels even be? Build several thousand of expensive fusion reactors in every country of the world, even in geopolitical rivals like China, Russia or North Korea or war-torn third world countries? Replace every car with an electrical one? Replace home heating everywhere? Rebuild every ship and airplane worldwide?
frezik@midwest.social
on 20 Feb 13:03
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If there were a practical fusion reactor shown today, it’d be 10 years before it could be started to be deployed at commercial scale.
More to the point, fascism isn’t going away just because we have better electricity sources. Cheap power is a problem in capitalism.
But pushing for more renewables can also be a way to stop fascism. Those texan oil barons are funding Trump exactly because they want to keep their business. Putin is funding all those right wing parties because he wants to keep selling gas. And the Saudis, Qataris and other dictators are also not to keen on not selling oil and gas.
Techbros are ready to pick up where the oil barons left off. Finding capitalists to fund fascism is never a problem.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Feb 17:22
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The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).
Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.
Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.
JayObey711@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 14:35
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I mean yea that’s the plan. What are the other options? Force every countrie to stop producing instead to reduce carbon emissions that way? Wich one Sounds more realistic? And I feel like you assume that fusion reactors are dangerous because your comments about war torn countries. But it’s not possible to turn them into weapons. They run on hydrogen. And if they ever oberheat or something the magnets stop working and the reaction stops.
I was just making an abstract sci-fi joke based on how cold fusion has been presented like a Holy Grail in the past. Obviously a better source of energy isn’t going to solve all our problems, no matter how good it is.
Progress is progress, and it’s good to be skeptical (I literally just posted a comment saying “I’m skeptical”!), but progress is good. 🙂 What other alternatives are there?
If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. That’s why the electric car movement is having a hard time really taking off rn; it is hard to justify & all the tech, all our builds, aren’t exactly super economical yet. And they’re not built for tough conditions, heavy towing, long commutes, and easily workable & recyclable components.
…but things are, indeed, getting better. If you look at it from a macro view. Lithium recycling can be done even a decade ago, but IIRC it was relatively small scale & the lithium could be refreshed “most of the way”, not fully. The right things will catch on when their time is right & its viability is realized.
Man’s greatest strength is our shared knowledge, technology, science, and innovation. I encourage you to make good decisions in your personal life and be positive. 🙂
No tech will give you a better timeline, back on the floor please ^^
It’s a political problem before anything else, and energy production is far from being the first problem.
Scientists: invents commercial scale fusion
Capitalist: hordes the almost free energy because why not? Poor people are only useful as a resource anyway.
Krik@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 20 Feb 01:51
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Doesn’t sound that impressive when Wendelstein 7-X achieved 17 minutes of plasma in 2021.
Madison420@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 02:05
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I can’t find a reference to that but China did 17 minutes in January this year. I think you’re confusing the announcement that they increased power by 17x while maintaining plasma.
This test was 20 minutes at a higher power setting without being incredibly destructive, that’s their milestone.
So much has manifested in the ripple effects from the pursuit of great things.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 17:13
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People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.
The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
on 20 Feb 18:24
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The space race gave us space age materials and advances. It wasn’t for nothing.
naught101@lemmy.world
on 21 Feb 00:16
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Wait, what is the cheaper alternative to the moon landing?
Rovers as opposed to humans. Humans need food, a pressurized, temperated air environment, a discharge for their excrements, a higher level of safety and return mechanisms, much stronger radiation protection…
Once commercial fusion comes out, it’s likely to be about half the cost of wind.
[more] reliable
There’s absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.
and safer alternatives
Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the “nuclear waste” that is produced by a fusion plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that’s not nothing, but it is almost nothing.
As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that’s almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we’re manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there’s a literal sun’s worth of hydrogen hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It’s hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that’s why stories like this are news: because it’s a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into the machines that keep it running. Once the power to those machines is cut, a fusion reaction cannot continue.
akakevbot@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Feb 01:54
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It was net negative, requiring 2MW of power to maintain hydrogen plasma in a state analogous to fusion. The major achievement of this particular experiment was doing so without energies equivalent to a fusion reaction damaging the containing assembly.
It was purely a test/demonstration of the containment of fusion-like conditions.
TomHanx_TripleSix@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 20 Feb 05:30
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Thanks for this TLDR. I’m too high to read actual things.
Seems like the person wants to learn something, but with zero effort. (i.e. won’t read the article; and certainly won’t look for additional context or information.) So maybe it would be better to post the question into an AI chatbot. You can just ask whatever question, and get some plausible but possibly-bullshit answer; then feel good for satisfying your curiosity.
DataDisrupter@feddit.nl
on 20 Feb 08:23
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I didn’t see any mention of the output in the article. 22MW injected, but does anyone know if the reaction was actually generating a positive output?
No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.
The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.
The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.
Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.
DataDisrupter@feddit.nl
on 20 Feb 12:10
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I wasn’t aware of that distinction about the energy for the laser to generate the heat energy within the reaction not being factored into the Q value, very interesting, thank you!
Would that energy for the laser still be required in a “stable reaction” continuously, or would it be something that would “trail off”?
Inertial confinement doesnt produce a “stable reaction” it is pulsed by it’s nature, think of it in the same way as a single cylinder internal combustion engine, periodic explosions which are harnessed to do useful work. So no the laser energy is required every single time to detonate the fuel pellet.
NIF isnt really interested in fusion for power production, it’s a weapons research facility that occasionally puts out puff pieces to make it seem like it has civilian applications.
It would be more productive if you said how you think im wrong. Just saying ‘youre wrong’ doesnt really add anything to the discussion.
BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan
on 20 Feb 16:36
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In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…
I’ve seen a few mentions of positive output in the last few years.
BalderSion@real.lemmy.fan
on 20 Feb 16:26
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OK, so we should be clear there are broadly two approaches to fusion: magnetic confinement and inertial drive.
In magnetic confinement a plasma is confined such that it can be driven to sufficient density, temperature and particle confinement time that the thermal collisions allow the fuel to fuse. This is what the OP article is talking about. This Tokamak is demonstrating technologies that if applied to a larger the experiment could probably reach a positive energy output magnetically confined plasma.
The article you referenced discusses inertial drive experiments, where a driver is directly pushing the fuel together, like gravity in the sun, a fission bomb shockwave in a hydrogen bomb, or converging laser beams in Livermore’s case.
Livermore’s result is exciting, but has no bearing on the various magnetic confinement approaches to fusion energy.
The input energy doesnt matter that much. Nobody is going to use 1980s laser tech to power a real reactor. As with OP, inertial confinement is interested in very small nuanced science aspects, not making a power plant.
simplejack@lemmy.world
on 20 Feb 14:56
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Sounds like the goal of the test wasn’t to vet ignition power in relation to output. These people are testing the durability of system designs that can maintain a reaction after ignition.
If this was a car, they wouldn’t be testing the fuel efficiency, they’d be testing how long they could drive before the wheels fell off.
Article said 2.6GJ input, 2.6 output so 1Q, but I’m not certain it’s really the case.
Edit: I can’t find my source back, so it’s likely false
antor124@leminal.space
on 20 Feb 08:30
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This is an incredible milestone for fusion power! 22 minutes of plasma reaction is a huge step forward. Looking forward to seeing how this technology evolves. Check out more details here: <a href=“markdown-viewer.com”>markdown viewer</a>.
It used to be better. The subtitles were all in 13375p34k if you turned them on, but it looks like they got replaced by the YouTube automated subtitles at some point.
tehbilly@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Feb 03:10
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It’s still there as an option: Zulu - 1337
acockworkorange@mander.xyz
on 22 Feb 14:33
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humorlessrepost@lemmy.world
on 21 Feb 19:13
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1337 SP33K iz 8USSin 0n 90d phr phr
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
on 21 Feb 00:54
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I still use 1337 sometimes, for joke names like 1337h4xX0r, or I use 1337 where others would use 42 or 69, but it’s always that nobody gets it. How could past internet culture vanish like that?
I think it means what the Oxford dictionary defines it means. You?
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
on 20 Feb 20:20
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You don’t think uncritical and nationalistic dismissal of the “enemy’s” achievements as they must be both strong and weak has a place under “aggressive or exaggerated patriotism?”
As far as I can tell by their comment history they are American, so I don’t know how is trusting France to be “nationalistic”. Or “patriotic”. Or aggressive, for that matter. Not a hint of militarisitc feeling either.
I might be racist too, because I don’t trust what comes out of China as much as what comes from France. Or Germany. Or Switzerland. Or Japan. Or south Korea. Or Australia. Or India. Or Kenya. Yes, it must be racism.
First of all, leave the goalpost where it was and re-read the definition of the word. Nowhere it mentions allies, friends, or the wife of your cousin’s neighbor. So on that you were dead wrong.
Second, if one trusts Japan or South Korea but not China… You say it’s because of racism. There is no aaaany other reason. Not at all? Really?
I love the little downvotes, I hope they help with your frustration. Keep them up!
In North America they teach that North America and South America are 2 separate continents.
When someone refers to “America” in the contexts of countries they 9 times out of 10 mean the US. Since people from there usually call themselves “Americans” rather than “United statians”
Yeah. Surely we can believe the anti-China stuff! Our own government wouldn’t lie to us! /s
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
on 22 Feb 01:23
collapse
I never said “our” Government wouldn’t lie to us (unless you’re Chinese, in which case they definitely will). I just said that the Chinese government constantly lies, which is easily seen by anyone with eyes.
Idk dude, we already have the sun and wind but they hate that stuff too, despite it being very close to free. Hell they’ll probably bitch about fusion causing a surplus of power outside peak loads.
If it doesn’t perpetuate the broken ways we currently do things it doesn’t give their buddies money, so it’s woke or something else bullshit.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
on 21 Feb 15:22
nextcollapse
Plastic Straws. Plastic cups. Wrapping indvidual food items in plastic and then putting them in a larger plastic bag which you carry home in an even larger plastic bag.
Summary: In 1984 our group published the first modern study of the effects of adapting to a low carbohydrate high fat diets on athletic performance. I have spent the next 31 years expanding on this research. In my presentation I will present the results of that research program and conclude with our exciting new evidence for the role of low carbohydrate diets and ketosis in the prevention of whole body inflammation in athletes training daily at very high loads. I will also present evidence to show that elite ultra-endurance athletes have an unexpectedly high capacity to oxidize fat during exercise and so potentially to run at fast paces for prolonged periods without the need to ingest exogenous fuels.
The 1928 Bellevue Stefansson Experiment
McClellan W, et al. JBC 87:651,1930
www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.f…
Keto-adaptation Demonstrated Vermont Study
Phinney et al JCI 66:1152, 1980
Well, if I lived in the world of American liberals and conservatives I was taught about growing up, the game would be over the moment fusion power became cheap, and everybody would be happy.
In the real world though? We’ll wait way too long, then get excited when it finally starts to happen, and then right before The Big Day some smooth brained asshole will blow up part of the reactor or fly a plane into the facility or something.
How ks the drill baby drill crowd going to compete against mini stars in a can?
Nu-Cu-Lar Bad? That’s…about as far as they’ll make it. To be fair, that might be as far as they need to. It’s all the oil companies will approve of them learning, at least.
Of course, it sounds like the big problem of how to remove more power from it than you spend keeping it reacting remains an issue, presuming they can continue to extend reaction lifetimes to be functionally unlimited.
This is so cool. I remember seeing that Europe is working on a massive mega project to build an even bigger reactor for more experiements. Its costing like 75 trillion
threaded - newest
Mr. Fusion now 1 step closer… 10 years late, but still!
Only ten more years, and we’ll have it!
…you said 10 more years 50 years ago
In just 10 more years, it’ll only be 40 more years!
So, some as graphene.
We’re using graphene! Almost entirely for it’s electrical properties true, but we’re using graphene doped batteries in consumer electronics currently. We also use fusion and ITER research for a whole lot more than just power generation - plasma dynamics, just one tiny subfield concerned with physics, has applications in everything from radio transmission beam forming techniques to satellite engines to magnetodynamic modeling to the EMI shielding on your vacuum cleaner.
I would like to subscribe for more graphene facts.
I feel like the awesome back to future reference was missed completely.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/557888cb-b17e-4900-9b6e-2b4495708350.png">
Flexing
Flexing is not good for the containment
No, but some guy proved that we could use that to our advantage. If you don’t use the magnetic constrictors to compensate for the heat from the fusion expanding the vessel, you can have it enter fusion and leave fusion several times a second. Wrap the thing in copper wire coils, and you have now got your vessel in a state of flux, and producing enough power to blackout your local grid, and get lots of fines from the feds in less than 5 seconds of runtime. He obviously didn’t continue working on that particular method of generating power with a Tokomak
Can you link to something so I can read more about this please?
Wish I could. Only reason I know about it, is that it was mentioned briefly in the Navy Nuclear Power Program training materials.
Le et
Rumor is next they are trying for 11.6858˙3 hours
Elven time conversion is the worst.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8b54360c-f383-44de-baef-4625b7541d23.jpeg">
5,318008 seconds should be a new goal.
Oh shit. Things are heating up in the fusion race.
IIRC it was expected because previous record from China was essentially a trial for this one. It all happens under ITER project so it’s not that much of a race.
Good shit. I’d rather this be a global cooperative effort rather than a jingoistic dick-waving contest.
It’s several cooperative and competitives projects. Diversity is not bad for science anyway. ITER itself involve tons of countries.
Good. The only thing that was
quiteremotely good about the cold war was the competition.That’s not what this is, and even then, that competition wasn’t even good. You had two countries hoarding technological advancements for themselves, with everything having to be discovered twice.
This is a worldwide collaboration, where each assists the others, and it’s a much better way of making progress. See ITER.
I should’ve replaced ‘quite’ with a more clear ‘remotely’ but you’re absolutely correct
Meanwhile in America we’re trying to make macdonalds cheaper by bundling an extra sandwich to go along with a value meal…
That’s called McFusion
And it only takes 22 seconds to consume.
And only 12 seconds to regret.
Which means you are still consuming the burger for 10 seconds fully regretting your decision.
110% commitment to the burger and the regret. USA! USA!
That’s way better than Taco Bell, where the regret sinks in when you consider going there.
Spoken like someone who’s never had a cheesy gordita crunch
Oh I have, and they’re delicious. I still regret it every time though because of how low quality everything is.
And keeps you sated for another 22 seconds.
Then you want seconds.
America would blow up a fusion reacto, call it dangerous, elon musk has a lot of things to say about it and then it would be illegal worldwide. Have you guys heard about coal? We already fixed it, just burn coal.
When the fuck did maccas start doing a sandwich?
Day one? A hamburger is a sandwich.
That was such a culture shock when I went to the us for the first time.
In Germany and many places in Europe do not think of burgers as sandwiches. I was so confused when I ordered a sandwich and got something like a burger.
<img alt="I expected something like this" src="http://cdn.taste.com.au/images/recipes/sfi/2005/07/1018.jpg">
I expected something like this. My confusion must’ve been quite the sight, the waitress even seemed concerned. Tasted great though.
Only difference between that and a burger is a burger is usually on a roll, not slices of bread. (And a burger is always hot, but then so are some sandwiches.)
Guarantee you they weren’t generating a whole lot of power though… And if you can’t do that part then what’s the point?
The first planes only flew for a few seconds.
Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.
So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…
I’ll let you fill in the blank.
P.S I have a “perpetual” motions machine that can run for 30 minutes (8 minutes longer than this fusion reactor), are you interested in investing?
EDIT: Four years ago the British Fusion reactor (J.E.T. originally built in 1984) produced “59 megajoules of heat energy” none of which was harvested and turned into electricity. The project was then shutdown for good after 40 years of not generating power.
A fusion reactor has already output more power than its inputs 3 years ago. Running a reactor for an extended period of time is still a useful exercise as you need to ensure they can handle operation for long enough to actually be a useful power source.
Generating massive amounts of heat and harvesting that and converting it to power are two (or three) different problems.
Agreed. But just to go along with the flight analogy proposed earlier, it took hundreds of years from Da Vinci’s flying machine designs to get to one that actually worked.
We’ve been at this for coming up to 100 years too.
Let me know when they actually generate power. I don’t want another article about a guy jumping off the eifle tower in a bird suit. A successful flight should be measured by the success of the flight.
Power generators should be measured by the power generated.
0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing.
America, the UK, France, Japan, and no doubt other places have been toying with fusion “power” for 90 years… We’ve created heat and not much else as far as I can tell.
Fission isn’t fusion, the first artificial fusion was two years later in 1934. That gives us a mere 332 years to beat the time from Da Vinci’s first design to the Wrights’ first flight
He demonstrated pretty clearly his idea didn’t work.
At least learn a little bit about the technology you’re criticizing, such as the difference between fission (aka not fusion) and fusion (aka…fusion), before going on a rant about it saying it’ll never work.
None of the reactors are being built with output capture in mind at the moment, because output capture is trivial compared to actually having an output, let alone an output that’s greater than the input and which can be sustained. As you’ve clearly learned in this thread, we’re already past having an output, are still testing out ways to have an output greater than an input, with at least one reactor doing so, and we need to tackle the sustained output part, which you’re seeing how it’s actively progressing in real time. Getting the energy is the same it’s always been: putting steam through a turbine.
Fission is what nuclear reactors do, it has been used in the entire world, it’s being phased out by tons of countries due to the people’s ignorance of the technology as well as fearmongering from parties with a vested interest in seeing nuclear fail, is still safer than any other energy generation method, and would realistically solve our short term issues alongside renewables while we figure out fusion…but as I said, stupid, ignorant people keep talking shit about it and getting it shit down…remind you of anyone?
LLNL has achieved positive power output with their experiments. llnl.gov/…/shot-ages-fusion-ignition-breakthrough…
No fusion reactor today is actually going to generate power in the useful sense.
These are more about understanding how Fusion works so that a reactor that is purpose built to generate power can be developed in the future.
Unlike the movies real development is the culmination of MANY small steps.
Today we are holding reactions for 20 minutes. 20 years ago getting a reaction to self sustain in the first place seemed impossible.
Predicted fusion energy and energy actually harvested and converted to usable electricity are not the same thing. Your article is about “fusion energy” not experimentally verified electrical output.
It’s a physicist doing conversion calculations (from heat to potential electricity), not a volt meter measuring actual output produced.
If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.
We were absolutely not sure how fire really works (low temperature plasma dynamics and so on) when we used it in caves eons ago.
We also did not build turbines then.
Also, a campfire is not plasma, so you probably shouldn’t be building any turbines either.
Fire is low temperature plasma. A campfire has fire.
Very hot flames can contain enough ions / free electrons to be considered a plasma but a wood campfire the likes of which cavemen built, which is what we are discussing here, do not achieve such temperatures. If cavemen wielded acetylene torches then they might have more experience with plasma.
If you were thinking something simple like “fire is plasma” that is reductive, and the cases where flame is plasma are not the everyday kind. Hence, when I said “a campfire is not plasma” I was being pretty specific. Your reply that ”fire is a low temperature plasma,” as an unqualified blanket statement, is wrong. Go read on it. It’s interesting.
We used very hot flame later. Still without full understanding of plasma.
I may have to yield this point to you as a demonstrated authority on not understanding plasma.
Leaving the arguments up to this point aside (because I am not agreeing with or supporting @DarkCloud), your comment on its own doesn’t make much sense. In general, the beauty of of a steam turbine electrical generator is that you don’t have to care how the heat gets generated. You can swap it out with any heat source, from burning fossil fuels, to geothermal, to nuclear, to whatever else and it works just fine as long as the rate of heat output is correctly calibrated for the size of the boiler.
That’s my point: fusion is just another heat source for making steam, and with these experimental reactors, they can’t be sure how much or for how long they will generate heat. Probably not even sure what a good geometry for transferring energy from the reaction mass to the water. You can’t build a turbine for a system that’s only going to run 20 minutes every three years, and you can’t replace that turbine just because the next test will have ten times the output.
I mean, you could, but it would be stupid.
Good point. Uncertainty over the magnitude and longevity of the heat source, and therefore how big to make the turbine and whether it would remain in operation long enough to exceed the payback period of its cost, is definitely a valid reason not to bother attaching a steam generator to a thing.
Code switch for: “I don’t have a point so why don’t you make it for me”
Verified electrical output, the answer is verified electrical power generated.
…as in we should measure power generation experiments by how much power they generated.
Isn’t that obvious?
They weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.
Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.
I don’t think we do have a means of converting this heat energy into electrical energy right now. With nuclear we put radioactive rods into heavy water to create steam and drive turbines…
What’s the plan for these fusion reactors? You can’t dump them into water, nor can you dump water into them… I don’t believe we have a means of converting the energy currently.
Even if we could dump water into them it would explosively evaporate because they run at 100 million degrees Celsius. That would be a very loud bang and whatever city they were in would be gone.
The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge. I get your frustration where it feels from news coverage that they’re not focusing on the right stuff, but what you’ll likely eventually see is that the time between “we figured out how to durably confine a healthy plasma” will quickly turn into “we have a huge energy output” much like inventors puttered around with flight for hundreds of years until a sustained powered flight design, however crappy, finally worked. From that point, it was only 15 years until the first transatlantic flight.
Thank you for your understanding and explanation.
Most fission plants transfer the heat away from the reactor before boiling water. The same can be done with fusion.
The main difference with fusion is you have to convert some of the released energy to heat first. Various elements have been proposed for this.
The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.
If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.
Yes, but you’re asking how much cargo it can take while we’re barely off the ground. Research reactors aren’t set up to generate power, they’re instrumented to see if stuff is even working.
Not equivalent. Let’s measure the aircraft performance by its ability to carry passengers between capital cities.
It’s baby steps and we need to encourage more investment. Not dismiss the Wright brothers for being unable to fly from New York to London after ten years of development.
It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight
Well, the first ones didn’t fly at all, they usually just killed the inventor.
That’s basically where we are today with fusion, they don’t work at all yet. Luckily it’s not killing people.
.
.
.
It was about 1800 years between the first steam engine and a practical steam engine. I’m sorry that one or two generations is too long for you.
TIL. That sucks.
Well, there were a lot of fundamental steps that had to be completed first, not least of which was a high pressure vessel. This all took a lot of materials science, advancement in seemingly unrelated fields, etc., etc. Not unlike fusion technology… The difference is we have 2000 years more advancement than they had when they invented the steam engine.
Has DOGE cut funding to ITER yet?
They sacked everybody. Now they are trying to get them back.
/s
But only the white middle aged men with regular male names and above average height.
What about my racist and misogynist views I try to hide underneath my crazed and incompetent rantings about DEI? Is there room for someone like me?
You are now leading the department.
Why don’t we use “shatters world record” like the pro-China articles where they did this for 16 minutes?
I know why.
Is it because of the Uyghurs?
Because that one was over double the length of the record before it and this one is closer to a 35% increase.
So it’s probably just a “slams”
‘Boinks’
whopping
France bamboozles chinas nuclear reactor time with a steel chair
I know!
Because the articles were written by different people and published in different magazines ya goober.
Nah.
It’s because of the Chinese propaganda machine.
Dumbass lol
They’ll never tell.
Why do you care so much what an article says about France’s accomplishments of science and China’s accomplishments of science? Why can’t we enjoy the movement of technology without bickering about lines drawn in the sand by people none of us know or care about?
A headline without calling it an “Artificial Sun”?!
Or a “star in a bottle”
A bulb in a bong
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
@Toribor @notsoshaihulud with great power comes great responsibility
Don’t worry, it will stabilize
The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.
It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.
I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.
Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.
That’s about the energy output per volume of a 70 year old cyclist.
Right, for the Americans here that hate metric.
Cyclist-years is a unit that has served us well for generations
Someone once told me a sun is just a fusion nuclear pile reactor and… Like… I guess.
Arguably, the nearby sun scale fusion reactor has been fairly useful for us. Nowadays we can convert its output directly into electricity using solar cells
I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.
What I’m hearing is that we should mine the sun and make better use of all that fuel.
That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.
Just make sure you do it at night.
It produces about the same power per cubic metre as compost does, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.
Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.
They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.
This is cool but also remember the practicalities of Fusion make it not much better than nuclear:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmHBMaS6Sw
Well nuclear is great, so even “not much better” would be great.
Yea one of the most interesting applications of fusion reactor research is the requirements in advancements for material science also benefits fission and even solar power generation, so the research bears fruit well and above the stated goals.
not to say its the greatest form of energy production ever, but, what are your gripes with nuclear these days anyway?
Well, really it’s the opposite, nuclear works already. So why not just build nuclear plants at 1/20 the cost? (and actually get some net positive energy)
Just saying…
this (specific project) isn’t about harvesting energy…
I understand that, it can’t be. Because fusion power generation hasn’t all been worked out yet. Unlike fission. That’s my point.
Also, once fusion does work, it will still be the most expensive way to generate energy man has ever devised, so there’s that too.
None! My comment may be misunderstood.
If you’re of my generation you kind of grew up being told fusion energy was the holy grail of energy production as it’s clean and doesn’t produce a bunch of radioactive byproduct. (Stuff like SimCity etc. made fusion reactors seem like a miracle technology)
In reality fusion also produces a massive amount of radiation and radiative byproducts, so it’s not the holy grail of energy that I think most people might assume it is.
Fusion and Fission are two sides of the same coin, so fusion experiments are important because they aid in making fission reactors safe as well!
I’m especially looking forward to seeing how material scientists attempt to solve the massive fast neutron radiation that fusion reactors produce, as Thorium reactors have the same issue.
.
The primary issue is that deuterium-deuterium reactions (the only practical fusion process that seems to work is deuterium-tritium and deuterium-helium, as you need insane temperatures for proton-boron, so in any realistic reactor deuterium will end up reacting with itself) produce 3 times the radiation of equivalent power output from fission reactions, so you need MASSIVE amounts of shielding for a reactor to run for an extended period of time.
This also highly irradiates the materials inside the reactors themselves, to a degree that maintenance requires built-in robots because the inside of the reactor is too radioactive for humans (this also eventually destroys the robots). The most optimistic estimates for how long a reactor could possibly last is 100 years. At that point the entire reactor would need to be torn down and buried because most of the components would be too radioactive to use anymore. At which point you have the exact same issue as radioactive waste storage, but no recycling process for something crazy like a radioactive isotope of silicon.
However! That’s why these experiments are important! As every advancement they make towards making fusion safe, also makes fission safer, as they’re two sides of the same coin.
no. that’s thermodynamically impossible.
though it is true that fission and fusion are opposites, you cannot gain energy by fissing and fusing the same material. There’s an inverted bell curve where medium sized elements are the lowest energy state. You can get energy by making atoms more medium, fusing the smallest atoms or fissing the biggest ones. Doing the opposite costs energy.
Maybe if it runs longer, we all get to jump to a better timeline. 😅
Or the world blows up and it’s all over. I guess what I’m saying is, no downside, fire it up and let’s see what happens.
I’m sceptical. Even if somebody would present a working fusion reactor today, what would the timeline to replace everything based on fossil fuels even be? Build several thousand of expensive fusion reactors in every country of the world, even in geopolitical rivals like China, Russia or North Korea or war-torn third world countries? Replace every car with an electrical one? Replace home heating everywhere? Rebuild every ship and airplane worldwide?
If there were a practical fusion reactor shown today, it’d be 10 years before it could be started to be deployed at commercial scale.
More to the point, fascism isn’t going away just because we have better electricity sources. Cheap power is a problem in capitalism.
But pushing for more renewables can also be a way to stop fascism. Those texan oil barons are funding Trump exactly because they want to keep their business. Putin is funding all those right wing parties because he wants to keep selling gas. And the Saudis, Qataris and other dictators are also not to keen on not selling oil and gas.
Techbros are ready to pick up where the oil barons left off. Finding capitalists to fund fascism is never a problem.
The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).
Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.
Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.
I mean yea that’s the plan. What are the other options? Force every countrie to stop producing instead to reduce carbon emissions that way? Wich one Sounds more realistic? And I feel like you assume that fusion reactors are dangerous because your comments about war torn countries. But it’s not possible to turn them into weapons. They run on hydrogen. And if they ever oberheat or something the magnets stop working and the reaction stops.
I was just making an abstract sci-fi joke based on how cold fusion has been presented like a Holy Grail in the past. Obviously a better source of energy isn’t going to solve all our problems, no matter how good it is.
Progress is progress, and it’s good to be skeptical (I literally just posted a comment saying “I’m skeptical”!), but progress is good. 🙂 What other alternatives are there?
If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. That’s why the electric car movement is having a hard time really taking off rn; it is hard to justify & all the tech, all our builds, aren’t exactly super economical yet. And they’re not built for tough conditions, heavy towing, long commutes, and easily workable & recyclable components.
…but things are, indeed, getting better. If you look at it from a macro view. Lithium recycling can be done even a decade ago, but IIRC it was relatively small scale & the lithium could be refreshed “most of the way”, not fully. The right things will catch on when their time is right & its viability is realized.
Man’s greatest strength is our shared knowledge, technology, science, and innovation. I encourage you to make good decisions in your personal life and be positive. 🙂
No tech will give you a better timeline, back on the floor please ^^ It’s a political problem before anything else, and energy production is far from being the first problem.
Scientists: invents commercial scale fusion Capitalist: hordes the almost free energy because why not? Poor people are only useful as a resource anyway.
Doesn’t sound that impressive when Wendelstein 7-X achieved 17 minutes of plasma in 2021.
I can’t find a reference to that but China did 17 minutes in January this year. I think you’re confusing the announcement that they increased power by 17x while maintaining plasma.
This test was 20 minutes at a higher power setting without being incredibly destructive, that’s their milestone.
Yes but 22 minutes is longer than 17 minutes
Think of it like a pizza oven
How well done is your pizza?
.
Agreed. Plus, when talking about that reactor you get to say “stellarator”, which is always fun.
This is freaking awesome. Only a few years ago it was exciting to see a fusion reaction last a fraction of a second.
It is awesome. Whichever country develops it first will be remembered as the next ‘moon landing’ event forever.
So a big event without any practical relevance because there is more cheaper, reliable and safer alternatives available?
To moon landing, maybe. To fusion, no.
So much has manifested in the ripple effects from the pursuit of great things.
People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.
The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.
The space race gave us space age materials and advances. It wasn’t for nothing.
Wait, what is the cheaper alternative to the moon landing?
Rovers as opposed to humans. Humans need food, a pressurized, temperated air environment, a discharge for their excrements, a higher level of safety and return mechanisms, much stronger radiation protection…
Once commercial fusion comes out, it’s likely to be about half the cost of wind.
There’s absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.
Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the “nuclear waste” that is produced by a fusion plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that’s not nothing, but it is almost nothing.
As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that’s almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we’re manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there’s a literal sun’s worth of hydrogen hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It’s hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that’s why stories like this are news: because it’s a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into the machines that keep it running. Once the power to those machines is cut, a fusion reaction cannot continue.
<img alt="The Power of the Sun - Spider Man 2" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/d2627af2-ca8d-4335-8c43-968467503758.jpeg">
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand
la puissance du soleil dans la paume de ma main
Honhonhon
[Takes a drag on a sexy cigarette]
But I’m le tired.
Well have a nap
Now the reactor is le tired
The only reason to pursue fusion power research is so you can say this on a weekly basis. Any benefits to humanity are purely secondary.
How big are your hands???
It’s not the size the matters, it’s the amount of hands that matters.
Nuclear powered hands in the palm of my hands
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I read through it for the details.
It was net negative, requiring 2MW of power to maintain hydrogen plasma in a state analogous to fusion. The major achievement of this particular experiment was doing so without energies equivalent to a fusion reaction damaging the containing assembly.
It was purely a test/demonstration of the containment of fusion-like conditions.
Thanks for this TLDR. I’m too high to read actual things.
You need to be the right amount of high to properly understand fusion. Too far either way, and it doesn’t make sense.
Eh, fusion isn’t that complicated. You push things together and heat them up until they get even hotter on their own. That’s all that’s happening.
Wth is this comment?
A reasonable question.
I haven’t read the original comment and don’t know anything about how conversations work but would it not be easier to Google chatgpt?
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Seems like the person wants to learn something, but with zero effort. (i.e. won’t read the article; and certainly won’t look for additional context or information.) So maybe it would be better to post the question into an AI chatbot. You can just ask whatever question, and get some plausible but possibly-bullshit answer; then feel good for satisfying your curiosity.
I didn’t see any mention of the output in the article. 22MW injected, but does anyone know if the reaction was actually generating a positive output?
No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.
The biggest reason we haven’t had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.
The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won’t have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.
Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.
I wasn’t aware of that distinction about the energy for the laser to generate the heat energy within the reaction not being factored into the Q value, very interesting, thank you! Would that energy for the laser still be required in a “stable reaction” continuously, or would it be something that would “trail off”?
Inertial confinement doesnt produce a “stable reaction” it is pulsed by it’s nature, think of it in the same way as a single cylinder internal combustion engine, periodic explosions which are harnessed to do useful work. So no the laser energy is required every single time to detonate the fuel pellet.
NIF isnt really interested in fusion for power production, it’s a weapons research facility that occasionally puts out puff pieces to make it seem like it has civilian applications.
Your take is incorrect.
It would be more productive if you said how you think im wrong. Just saying ‘youre wrong’ doesnt really add anything to the discussion.
In my experience the community will usually distinguished between “scientific Q” and “wall plug Q” when discussing fusion power gain. Scientific is simply the ratio of power in vs power out, whereas wall plug includes all the power required to support scientific Q. Obviously the difference isn’t always clearly delineated or reported when talking to journalists…
theguardian.com/…/us-scientists-achieve-net-energ…
I’ve seen a few mentions of positive output in the last few years.
OK, so we should be clear there are broadly two approaches to fusion: magnetic confinement and inertial drive.
In magnetic confinement a plasma is confined such that it can be driven to sufficient density, temperature and particle confinement time that the thermal collisions allow the fuel to fuse. This is what the OP article is talking about. This Tokamak is demonstrating technologies that if applied to a larger the experiment could probably reach a positive energy output magnetically confined plasma.
The article you referenced discusses inertial drive experiments, where a driver is directly pushing the fuel together, like gravity in the sun, a fission bomb shockwave in a hydrogen bomb, or converging laser beams in Livermore’s case.
Livermore’s result is exciting, but has no bearing on the various magnetic confinement approaches to fusion energy.
Aha, thank you for clarifying. Not my area of expertise, did not know the difference.
The input energy doesnt matter that much. Nobody is going to use 1980s laser tech to power a real reactor. As with OP, inertial confinement is interested in very small nuanced science aspects, not making a power plant.
Sounds like the goal of the test wasn’t to vet ignition power in relation to output. These people are testing the durability of system designs that can maintain a reaction after ignition.
If this was a car, they wouldn’t be testing the fuel efficiency, they’d be testing how long they could drive before the wheels fell off.
Article said 2.6GJ input, 2.6 output so 1Q, but I’m not certain it’s really the case.Edit: I can’t find my source back, so it’s likely false
This is an incredible milestone for fusion power! 22 minutes of plasma reaction is a huge step forward. Looking forward to seeing how this technology evolves. Check out more details here: <a href=“markdown-viewer.com”>markdown viewer</a>.
Which lemmy client are you using? Your reply has
And visiting the website is a mess as well
I hope it smoked a cigarette once it finished.
30 years guys.
It’s always thirty years away because every time it gets close to 15 years away they cut the funding in half. Zeno’s Dichotomy in action.
1,337 seconds? That… that number used to mean something, but now i can’t recall what…
The translation has been lost to the ages
Found someone who can help.
youtu.be/O2rGTXHvPCQ
Hahaha thank you for this gift
It used to be better. The subtitles were all in 13375p34k if you turned them on, but it looks like they got replaced by the YouTube automated subtitles at some point.
It’s still there as an option:
Zulu - 1337Oh, glorious!
megatokyo.com/strip/9
HNNNGG, right in my nostalgia.
Time for another reread I suppose.
1337, leet, elite
Shh, don’t let the kids hear you say that
1337 SP33K iz 8USSin 0n 90d phr phr
I still use 1337 sometimes, for joke names like 1337h4xX0r, or I use 1337 where others would use 42 or 69, but it’s always that nobody gets it. How could past internet culture vanish like that?
All your base are belong to us
Move zig move zig move zig, you know what you doing take off every zig!
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1 I>0|\|+ |<|\|0\/\/
Well, I’m still skeptical, but I have far more trust in France’s reporting than Chinese claims.
They’re part of the same global research effort.
Nice jingoism tho
I don’t think that word means what you think it means…
What do you think it means?
I think it means what the Oxford dictionary defines it means. You?
You don’t think uncritical and nationalistic dismissal of the “enemy’s” achievements as they must be both strong and weak has a place under “aggressive or exaggerated patriotism?”
I guess that just makes them a racist then.
As far as I can tell by their comment history they are American, so I don’t know how is trusting France to be “nationalistic”. Or “patriotic”. Or aggressive, for that matter. Not a hint of militarisitc feeling either.
I might be racist too, because I don’t trust what comes out of China as much as what comes from France. Or Germany. Or Switzerland. Or Japan. Or south Korea. Or Australia. Or India. Or Kenya. Yes, it must be racism.
.
First of all, leave the goalpost where it was and re-read the definition of the word. Nowhere it mentions allies, friends, or the wife of your cousin’s neighbor. So on that you were dead wrong.
Second, if one trusts Japan or South Korea but not China… You say it’s because of racism. There is no aaaany other reason. Not at all? Really?
I love the little downvotes, I hope they help with your frustration. Keep them up!
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This is great if so, is it so?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
Oh, good old ITER. There where news from records from China, anyone know if this is related to ITER-project somehow and is it multinational project?
edit. probably this: livescience.com/…/chinas-artificial-sun-shatters-…
Yup it is related to ITER -project, so this is a nice thing going on in international scene apparently
SUM: it is so
huh, I learned a few new words today
for others who want to know
Jingoism: noun
Extreme Nationalism characterized by a belligerent foreign policy
A bellicose patriotism; aggressive chauvinism; belligerence in international relations
Bellicose: adjective
warlike or hostile in manner or temperment
inclined to war or contention
warlike in nature/aggressive;hostile
Chauvinism: noun
Militant devotion to and glorification of one’s country; fanatical patriotism.
Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own gender, group, or kind.
Blind and absurd devotion to a fallen leader or an obsolete cause; hence, absurdly vainglorious or exaggerated patriotism.
TIL not believing a genocidal dictatorship is extremist nationalism
Who’s talking about America?
Comrade Xinnie.
America doesn’t have a government. It’s a continent. Are you possibly referring to the USA?
In North America they teach that North America and South America are 2 separate continents.
When someone refers to “America” in the contexts of countries they 9 times out of 10 mean the US. Since people from there usually call themselves “Americans” rather than “United statians”
Don’t you DARE disrespect dear leader!
China had a long history of fraudulent science that they need to dig out of to gain a good reputation.
Because a shit ton of fraudulent science hasn’t come out of the US or Europe. Nope. No sir.
Nothing like the very highly reliable pharmaceutical “science” done in the US, amirite?
Its not like we ever had “science” come from the US that said an extremely powerful opioid wasn’t addictive, amirite?
Do you know what “collaboration” means?
It’s almost like they’ve got peers all over the world looking at their data!
So just blatant Sinophobia.
China: Spews blatant and obvious lies about everything that does or does not cast a shadow. Heavily censors any source.
Some guy: I don’t trust information coming from China.
China (and shills): That’s sinophobic!!
Yeah. Surely we can believe the anti-China stuff! Our own government wouldn’t lie to us! /s
I never said “our” Government wouldn’t lie to us (unless you’re Chinese, in which case they definitely will). I just said that the Chinese government constantly lies, which is easily seen by anyone with eyes.
Yeah, just like all that anti-white sentiment towards the US because we elected a president who almost passes for off-white.
Though I suppose there could be other reasons if we dig deep enough.
Just one more giga joule guys …
Pro fusion research btw just a chronic shitposter
I felt that
France’s 22-minute plasma reaction is a bold stride toward sustainable fusion energy but remains experimental.
🐱🐱🐱🐱
How ks the drill baby drill crowd going to compete against mini stars in a can?
Lmao. Fucking oil losers
Idk dude, we already have the sun and wind but they hate that stuff too, despite it being very close to free. Hell they’ll probably bitch about fusion causing a surplus of power outside peak loads.
If it doesn’t perpetuate the broken ways we currently do things it doesn’t give their buddies money, so it’s woke or something else bullshit.
Plastic Straws. Plastic cups. Wrapping indvidual food items in plastic and then putting them in a larger plastic bag which you carry home in an even larger plastic bag.
The food has been impregnated with microplastics as well. This machine runs on sugar, but someone put oil in the tank. :-/
The ironic thing is the human body runs on fat and a huge portion of our illness stems from the insane amount of sugar we consume.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cST99piL71E&list=PLE8LmUo…
Summary: In 1984 our group published the first modern study of the effects of adapting to a low carbohydrate high fat diets on athletic performance. I have spent the next 31 years expanding on this research. In my presentation I will present the results of that research program and conclude with our exciting new evidence for the role of low carbohydrate diets and ketosis in the prevention of whole body inflammation in athletes training daily at very high loads. I will also present evidence to show that elite ultra-endurance athletes have an unexpectedly high capacity to oxidize fat during exercise and so potentially to run at fast paces for prolonged periods without the need to ingest exogenous fuels.
The 1928 Bellevue Stefansson Experiment McClellan W, et al. JBC 87:651,1930 www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.f… Keto-adaptation Demonstrated Vermont Study Phinney et al JCI 66:1152, 1980
Thanks for sharing. As a frequent cyclist who loves cheese and doesn’t drink soda or eat many sweats, I feel like this will be an interesting read.
I suppose we’ll need to worry about that, once we get a net positive output from a fusion reactor.
Well, if I lived in the world of American liberals and conservatives I was taught about growing up, the game would be over the moment fusion power became cheap, and everybody would be happy.
In the real world though? We’ll wait way too long, then get excited when it finally starts to happen, and then right before The Big Day some smooth brained asshole will blow up part of the reactor or fly a plane into the facility or something.
Nu-Cu-Lar Bad? That’s…about as far as they’ll make it. To be fair, that might be as far as they need to. It’s all the oil companies will approve of them learning, at least.
Of course, it sounds like the big problem of how to remove more power from it than you spend keeping it reacting remains an issue, presuming they can continue to extend reaction lifetimes to be functionally unlimited.
They should get out more.
Amazing news!
merde
This is so cool. I remember seeing that Europe is working on a massive mega project to build an even bigger reactor for more experiements. Its costing like 75 trillion