Meanwhile USA is stealing Venezuelan oil. Good job everbody. 👍
Just a few years ago US labs were the first to generate more power than they put into a fusion reactor, it was one of the most important breakthroughs to date in fusion.
Even under the shitheap Trump, the US is continuing to research into fusion and building stellarators such as Infinity 1 in Tennessee.
Europe likewise is leading breakthroughs such as with Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany lasting for 43 seconds. This is being improved with the new Proxima Alpha stellarator being built.
China’s EAST reactor had a breakthrough when they achieved 1,000 seconds last year. While Europes recent ITER tokamak should be achieving its first plasma in the coming years.
Fusion is a global effort, and scientists are benefiting from the works being put in elsewhere. Stellarators and Tokamak are both breaking new grounds each year, and each has their own pros and cons.
Don’t fall for any propaganda trying to claim anyone is “winning”.
oil, coal and nuclear are clearly not winning.
we could solve the worlds energy problems today but they’d never be applied simply because oil exists. its literally why the US just attacked venezuela. They could have built another reactor or windmills or whatever the fuck else they feel they need if energy was the reason. but energy has nothing to do with energy and all to do with being a natural monopoly that’s making a small group of people quite wealthy.
Yes but those are not fusion. Fusion is the ‘holy-grail’ of energy technology. It is a long term goal that we must work towards. It’s a problem of science.
For now renewables are the cheapest, quickest, and best method we have. They should be receiving all the money wasted on those 3 methods you’ve mentioned above. That’s a problem of politics.
We easily have the means to achieve both, we are hamstrung by shortsighted corporate interests and yes this applies to China as well.
It doesn’t matter if the people with the war machines are the ones who control the grids,lines,pipes,etc.
The ‘holy grail’ will most likely result in further top down dominance. As god king tyrants demonstrate their continued uselessness to humanity by creating more powerful and destructive weapons and hoarding the infinite power supply for their own.
Nuclear is different from oil and coal.
They’re not solving the world’s problems not because oil exists, but because big powerful private oil companies exist who lobby the government and publish propaganda to manipulate the public. And big oil companies exist because of capitalism. But at this point, you start spewing all the anti communism propaganda you’ve been fed since your birth.
Why you attacking nuclear? It’s an amazing technology
Passenger vehicles and homes and most businesses could be owed by solar and wind, but oil will still be used for quite a while for cargo shipping and commercial trucks and things like tires. We could use a lot less, but oil is going to hang around for quite a while. Passenger vehicles account for about 25% of oil used.
God, I wonder if we could fund a next gen fission plant with what we already spent on Venezuela
With US being the leading oil producer and stealing all of Venezuela’s’s oil, we’re positioning ourselves to control the world’s supply …… as the world yawns and continues moving to the future of tech that we helped develop then threw away
it was one of the most important breakthroughs to date in fusion
What ? It was not really. Here’s a physicist discussing why.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/fusion-foolery/
In the end, the NIF fusion accomplishment might be called a stunt. Stunts explore what we can do (often after an insane amount of preparation, practice, and failure), rather than what’s practical. Stunts hide the pains and present an appearance of ease and grace, but it’s a show.
The “more energy out than laser energy in” equation masks several fundamental problems. NIF’s doped glass lasers have an efficiency of about 0.5 percent, meaning that they would have sucked in roughly 400 megajoules of energy from the grid in order to produce the 2.1 megajoules of light energy…
To be fair the hype machine was from the press not the scientists
Let’s pause to say: well done! Honestly. No sarcasm. What they did was ridiculously hard, and it finally worked after more than a decade of trying. They actually produced a significant number of fusion events! There’s no faking that, and I’d like to see you try. So let’s be clear that I’m not knocking the accomplishment in itself. My major beef is how we interpret the implications for society.
I’m assuming the sole reason the Orange cunt hasn’t destroyed the US’s fusion research is because he wants to give exclusive rights to build and use it to
Vault-Techthe tech broligarchs who bribe him.It’s still decades to never from being practical.
It always will be until the day it isn’t. Breakthrough’s cannot be timelined or predicted.
Tanks, jets and rockets don’t run on electric. Can’t do a big war without some good old crude oil.
But drones can. Little propeller drones are killing Russian invaders by the thousands
Pitch that to Trump and his team and see if they will run their next kidnapping op by propeller drone only.
Trump and other dictators are vain (uh, reviving an outdated class of naval ship and naming it after yourself sound familiar?) so they’ll prefer bombers, tanks, and rockets over some little robots with little propellers. They disdain things that look weak regardless of their usefulness.
I really hate how so many of these articles feel like they need to dumb it down with this “artificial sun” imagery. It feels so condescending. I’d rather learn more about the latest progress with nuclear fusion
article didn’t say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?
Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?
I generally agree that science reporting treats everyone like children, but I really don’t have a problem with this analogy. Stars are the only naturally occurring fusion we have to observe and compare it to. To me that makes sense.
Sure… but the metaphor glosses over the fact that they haven’t really told us anything of interest. It SOUNDS good, but there’s no way to tell how significant it actually is.
Fusion breakthroughs have sounded good since the 90s, but we’re still the proverbial 10 years away from anything useful.
I’m not a fan of China (government)… at all. But when I check all the technological breakthrough they are getting in these last years while the US was inflating his fucking ai-bubble. Objectively, they are getting so far ahead is not even funny. At least Europe is on a good track themself.
I’m no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.
Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don’t play well with others.
But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.
While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.
A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it’s the right one, amazing things can happen.
One thing I’ve been impressed with China for is moving towards greener technologies. They’re a leader in solar, their EV’s are apparently very good (not that I can get one here to verify that), and they’re pretty dogged in their pursuit of nuclear energy.
Meanwhile USA is apparently still in “let’s overturn regimes and take over other countries for the oil companies” mode
Hey, Americans are hard working too. Some work 3 jobs just to make ends meet.
The US government threatens other countries with tariffs and sanctions to give American companies unfair advantage. Is that not using unclouth methods?
But when China is running a huge energy surplus with new solar, wind, and battery technology, we’ll still have the most oil! facepalm.
Yea they are probably quite ahead in about %80 of critical tech. Not only that but they also seem to be investing quite alot in sustainable tech, public transport tech, medicine etc. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if center of attraction for science shifts from US to China in near future.
It already has. The West doesn’t like to advertise that though.
Given all the cuts to science, deportation of scientists, and blocking student researchersin the past year alone, I’d claim the US deserves half the credit for China’s impending science ascendancy
We’re not losing the competition, we’re throwing a tantrum and scattering the game pieces …… somehow thinking that’s the same as winning
Makes me sad I got the oppressive dictatorship that also wants me to suffer instead of pretending to give me good stuff
ESPECIALLY when statistically China would be way more likely to be born in
Thats the thing that truly pisses me off about the US govt right now.
Ok, China is doing all these things and we’re losing our advantage? Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
But noooo we do the polar opposite and also drive scientists out of the country because they can get funding elsewhere.
Hey, at least they’ve got evangelism down to a science. I’m sure militant devotion to [the parts they like from] the Bible will pay back dividends down the road. Who needs the disciplined and organized pursuit of modern science in earnest when some old book written by long-dead humans claiming to speak for a supreme being says it has all the answers (many of which involve smite-based solutions)?
Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
Oh they are. For AI. Instead of scrambling to Fusion, they’re putting the money into generating nudes of celebrities.
and kids. Look at grok
Chinese government is much better than the US government
If you look at broad based EU markets vs the S&P over the last year they grew about twice the rate.
Higher density, yes, but at the cost of lower temperatures. So not as good. Nice but old new. With painfullll advertisement.
Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels.
The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal : Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040 )in a study titled ‘Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST’.
When your result breaks the laws of physics, you need to check your measurements and maths just to be sure. Better yet, have others do it for you.
This isn’t a physics breaking finding. It’s breaking the Greenwald density limit in tokamaks. Some other types of fusions reactors can go above this limit by 2-5 times.
In this case they’re getting past that limit in the Chinese reactor. We had/have a limited understanding of exactly why this limit exists so hopefully these guy’s research can help us figure out a way to get past the limit and achieve higher energy production.
Gotta love science reporters. “Thought to be impossible.”
“A 747 jet took off from New York’s Kennedy airport this morning, accomplishing a feat once thought to be impossible.”
Ah yes, technically correct
“On this planet we obey the laws of physics!”
Well, I guess this puts it right about 30 years out now.
deleted by creator
https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
Tldr : almost no waste. What little waste there is, is much lower radiation, and even that radiation has a half life of around a decade.
without leaving behind hazardous waste
By volume blanket reprocessing and neutron activated vessel components create more hazardous waste than fission could dream of (not including the nightmare of on site fuel reprocessing for breeders that are similarly pie in the sky)
Hello. Sorry, I couldn’t find an immediate source when I did a web search with the text you quoted. Do you have a source for it you could share, or recall when you saw it?
Thanks!
It’s not a quote, just a reality for non-existent blanket recycling technology and dealing with neutron energies that far exceed anything fission produces in slow neutron reactors and the large amounts of waste created from spallation and tritium handling.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ac62f7/pdf
I understand there’s no waste with a half life >100 years, and the activated steel can be recycled a few decades after commissioning?
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/P_1356_CD_web/Presentations/Thursday/Morning/El-Guebaly SESE-KN-2.pdf
