• @[email protected]
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        24 months ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      564 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        54 months ago

        Good shit. I’d rather this be a global cooperative effort rather than a jingoistic dick-waving contest.

        • Sceptiksky
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          14 months ago

          It’s several cooperative and competitives projects. Diversity is not bad for science anyway. ITER itself involve tons of countries.

  • @[email protected]
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    14 months ago

    France’s 22-minute plasma reaction is a bold stride toward sustainable fusion energy but remains experimental.

    🐱🐱🐱🐱

  • Match!!
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    14 months ago

    1,337 seconds? That… that number used to mean something, but now i can’t recall what…

    • Pumpkin Escobar
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      424 months ago

      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.

    • Sceptiksky
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      14 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      04 months ago

      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?

      • @[email protected]
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        14 months ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    04 months ago

    Well, I’m still skeptical, but I have far more trust in France’s reporting than Chinese claims.

  • @[email protected]
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    14 months ago

    How ks the drill baby drill crowd going to compete against mini stars in a can?

    Lmao. Fucking oil losers

    • @[email protected]
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      04 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        04 months ago

        The food has been impregnated with microplastics as well. This machine runs on sugar, but someone put oil in the tank. :-/

        • @[email protected]
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          14 months ago

          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.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cST99piL71E&list=PLE8LmUoWei5Qp5Nz7C4FMNs6hGNx7M3Jg&index=2

          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 http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.f… Keto-adaptation Demonstrated Vermont Study Phinney et al JCI 66:1152, 1980

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            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.

    • @[email protected]
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      14 months ago

      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.

    • Schadrach
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      14 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      374 months ago

      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”.

      • @[email protected]
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        24 months ago

        Someone once told me a sun is just a fusion nuclear pile reactor and… Like… I guess.

      • @[email protected]
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        154 months ago

        I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.

    • @[email protected]
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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.

  • @[email protected]
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    874 months ago

    Why don’t we use “shatters world record” like the pro-China articles where they did this for 16 minutes?

    I know why.

        • @[email protected]
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          84 months ago

          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?

        • @[email protected]
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          44 months ago

          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

        • @[email protected]
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          154 months ago

          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 spez
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            54 months ago

            I would like to subscribe for more graphene facts.

  • @[email protected]
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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?

      • @[email protected]
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        4 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          144 months ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          184 months ago

          It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight

        • @[email protected]
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          604 months ago

          LLNL has achieved positive power output with their experiments. https://www.llnl.gov/article/49301/shot-ages-fusion-ignition-breakthrough-hailed-one-most-impressive-scientific-feats-21st

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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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.

            • @[email protected]
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              354 months ago

              If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.

              • @[email protected]
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                4 months ago

                We were absolutely not sure how fire really works (low temperature plasma dynamics and so on) when we used it in caves eons ago.

                • @[email protected]
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                  114 months ago

                  We also did not build turbines then.

                  Also, a campfire is not plasma, so you probably shouldn’t be building any turbines either.

              • @[email protected]
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                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  34 months ago

                  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.

        • @[email protected]
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          194 months ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          134 months ago

          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”

          • @[email protected]
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            4 months ago

            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?

            • @[email protected]
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              204 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  4 months ago

                  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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  54 months ago

                  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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  44 months ago

                  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.

        • @[email protected]
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          164 months ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            Generating massive amounts of heat and harvesting that and converting it to power are two (or three) different problems.

            • @[email protected]
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              174 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                64 months ago

                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  124 months ago

                  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?

                • @[email protected]
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                  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.

    • @[email protected]
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      34 months ago

      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.

        • @[email protected]
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          14 months ago

          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.

  • @[email protected]
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    1144 months ago

    Meanwhile in America we’re trying to make macdonalds cheaper by bundling an extra sandwich to go along with a value meal…

        • Jesus
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          14 months ago

          It’s not the size the matters, it’s the amount of hands that matters.

      • @[email protected]
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        14 months ago

        la puissance du soleil dans la paume de ma main

        Honhonhon

        [Takes a drag on a sexy cigarette]

      • Echo Dot
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        14 months ago

        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.