You must log in or register to comment.
Doesn’t sound that impressive when Wendelstein 7-X achieved 17 minutes of plasma in 2021.
Agreed. Plus, when talking about that reactor you get to say “stellarator”, which is always fun.
Yes but 22 minutes is longer than 17 minutes
Think of it like a pizza oven
How well done is your pizza?
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. 🙂
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.
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.
Amazing news!
1,337 seconds
Le et
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.
5,318008 seconds should be a new goal.
Rumor is next they are trying for 11.6858˙3 hours
Elven time conversion is the worst.
Meanwhile in America we’re trying to make macdonalds cheaper by bundling an extra sandwich to go along with a value meal…
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.
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.)
That’s called McFusion
And it only takes 22 seconds to consume.
And keeps you sated for another 22 seconds.
Then you want seconds.
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.
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.
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
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?
removed by mod
removed by mod
removed by mod
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.
The first planes only flew for a few seconds.
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.
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.
It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight
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.
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.
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.
I mean, you could, but it would be stupid.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A headline without calling it an “Artificial Sun”?!
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
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.
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.
Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.
deleted by creator
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.
Just make sure you do it at night.
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.
It produces about the same power per cubic metre as compost does, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.
Or a “star in a bottle”
A bulb in a bong
1,337 seconds? That… that number used to mean something, but now i can’t recall what…
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!
The translation has been lost to the ages
HNNNGG, right in my nostalgia.
Time for another reread I suppose.
Found someone who can help.
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!
1 I>0|\|+ |<|\|0\/\/
France’s 22-minute plasma reaction is a bold stride toward sustainable fusion energy but remains experimental.
🐱🐱🐱🐱
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.
merde
removed by mod
Which lemmy client are you using? Your reply has
Check out more details here: <a href=“https://markdown-viewer.com/”>markdown viewer</a>.
And visiting the website is a mess as well
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.
Just one more giga joule guys …
Pro fusion research btw just a chronic shitposter
I felt that
