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1,337 seconds
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.
Le et
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
merde
Amazing news!
They should get out more.
How ks the drill baby drill crowd going to compete against mini stars in a can?
Lmao. Fucking oil losers
I suppose we’ll need to worry about that, once we get a net positive output from a fusion reactor.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
In the past few minutes on Lemmy I have seen a graphic that France is the largest weapons exporter behind the US, and now this. Thanks for being awesome y’all.
I hope it smoked a cigarette once it finished.
Mr. Fusion now 1 step closer… 10 years late, but still!
Only ten more years, and we’ll have it!
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.
…you said 10 more years 50 years ago
In just 10 more years, it’ll only be 40 more years!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.)
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.
That’s called McFusion
And it only takes 22 seconds to consume.
And only 12 seconds to regret.
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.
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!
And keeps you sated for another 22 seconds.
Then you want seconds.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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’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.
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”?
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…
If you haven’t already seen the talk recently given at the Chaos Computer Club’s “Hacker Hotel” named “How Thermonuclear fusion works, free energy without waste”, I highly recommend it. https://libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-ff152736-e38872dd7aed088e
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.
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
