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
1,337 seconds? That… that number used to mean something, but now i can’t recall what…
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?
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 - 1337
1337, leet, elite
Shh, don’t let the kids hear you say that
France’s 22-minute plasma reaction is a bold stride toward sustainable fusion energy but remains experimental.
🐱🐱🐱🐱
Just one more giga joule guys …
Pro fusion research btw just a chronic shitposter
I felt that
I hope it smoked a cigarette once it finished.
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
huh, I learned a few new words today
for others who want to know
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Jingoism: noun
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Extreme Nationalism characterized by a belligerent foreign policy
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A bellicose patriotism; aggressive chauvinism; belligerence in international relations
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Bellicose: adjective
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warlike or hostile in manner or temperment
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inclined to war or contention
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warlike in nature/aggressive;hostile
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Chauvinism: noun
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Militant devotion to and glorification of one’s country; fanatical patriotism.
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Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own gender, group, or kind.
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Blind and absurd devotion to a fallen leader or an obsolete cause; hence, absurdly vainglorious or exaggerated patriotism.
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TIL not believing a genocidal dictatorship is extremist nationalism
Don’t you DARE disrespect dear leader!
Who’s talking about America?
America doesn’t have a government. It’s a continent. Are you possibly referring to the USA?
Comrade Xinnie.
This is great if so, is it so?
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: https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/nuclear-energy/chinas-artificial-sun-shatters-nuclear-fusion-record-by-generating-steady-loop-of-plasma-for-1-000-seconds
Yup it is related to ITER -project, so this is a nice thing going on in international scene apparently
SUM: it is so
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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’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.
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…
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
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
30 years guys.
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
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?
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.
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…
So much has manifested in the ripple effects from the pursuit of great things.
To moon landing, maybe. To fusion, no.
The space race gave us space age materials and advances. It wasn’t for nothing.
1,337 seconds
5,318008 seconds should be a new goal.
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.
Rumor is next they are trying for 11.6858˙3 hours
Elven time conversion is the worst.
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”.
Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.
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
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.
It produces about the same power per cubic metre as compost does, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.
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.
Someone once told me a sun is just a fusion nuclear pile reactor and… Like… I guess.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
Don’t worry, it will stabilize
@Toribor @notsoshaihulud with great power comes great responsibility
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.
Or a “star in a bottle”
A bulb in a bong
Maybe if it runs longer, we all get to jump to a better timeline. 😅
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.
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. 🙂
