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The power of the sun in the palm of my hand
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.
la puissance du soleil dans la paume de ma main
Honhonhon
[Takes a drag on a sexy cigarette]
Now the reactor is le tired
But I’m le tired.
Well have a nap
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
Amazing news!
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
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.
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
China had a long history of fraudulent science that they need to dig out of to gain a good reputation.
Because a shit ton of fraudulent science hasn’t come out of the US or Europe. Nope. No sir.
Do you know what “collaboration” means?
It’s almost like they’ve got peers all over the world looking at their data!
Nothing like the very highly reliable pharmaceutical “science” done in the US, amirite?
Its not like we ever had “science” come from the US that said an extremely powerful opioid wasn’t addictive, amirite?
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.
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?
In North America they teach that North America and South America are 2 separate continents.
When someone refers to “America” in the contexts of countries they 9 times out of 10 mean the US. Since people from there usually call themselves “Americans” rather than “United statians”
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
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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So just blatant Sinophobia.
Yeah, just like all that anti-white sentiment towards the US because we elected a president who almost passes for off-white.
Though I suppose there could be other reasons if we dig deep enough.
China: Spews blatant and obvious lies about everything that does or does not cast a shadow. Heavily censors any source.
Some guy: I don’t trust information coming from China.
China (and shills): That’s sinophobic!!
Yeah. Surely we can believe the anti-China stuff! Our own government wouldn’t lie to us! /s
I never said “our” Government wouldn’t lie to us (unless you’re Chinese, in which case they definitely will). I just said that the Chinese government constantly lies, which is easily seen by anyone with eyes.
They should get out more.
Didn’t read the article.
I have no clue wtf that technology is in detail but wouldn’t it be easy to have a longer reaction time by supplying enough energy? The news should not be how long the reaction lasted but how long it lasted selfreliant.
I read thorough it for the details.
It was net negative power, requiring 2MW of power to maintain fusion. The major achievement of this particular experiment was doing so without the fusion reaction damaging the containing assembly.
It was purely a test/demonstration of the containment of fusion-like conditions.
Thanks for this TLDR. I’m too high to read actual things.
You need to be the right amount of high to properly understand fusion. Too far either way, and it doesn’t make sense.
Eh, fusion isn’t that complicated. You push things together and heat them up until they get even hotter on their own. That’s all that’s happening.
Wth is this comment?
A reasonable question.
I haven’t read the original comment and don’t know anything about how conversations work but would it not be easier to Google chatgpt?
Seems like the person wants to learn something, but with zero effort. (i.e. won’t read the article; and certainly won’t look for additional context or information.) So maybe it would be better to post the question into an AI chatbot. You can just ask whatever question, and get some plausible but possibly-bullshit answer; then feel good for satisfying your curiosity.
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.
1,337 seconds
5,318008 seconds should be a new goal.
Le et
Rumor is next they are trying for 11.6858˙3 hours
Elven time conversion is the worst.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
It produces about the same power per cubic metre as compost does, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.
Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.
Someone once told me a sun is just a fusion nuclear pile reactor and… Like… I guess.
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
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
Or a “star in a bottle”
A bulb in a bong
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.
Mr. Fusion now 1 step closer… 10 years late, but still!
Only ten more years, and we’ll have it!
I feel like the awesome back to future reference was missed completely.
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.
…you said 10 more years 50 years ago
In just 10 more years, it’ll only be 40 more years!
Garantee 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, are you interested in investing?
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.
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.
It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 lower 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Net energy production has been achieved. At this point, fusion is a set of engineering problems to be solved. What fuel to use, what material to make the walls out of, how to keep the plasma stable… different tests are experimenting with different aspects of the overall problem and net energy production isn’t the goal of every experiment. If you want to sit in a folding chair next to the scientists yelling “NOPE” every single day until the first commercial reactor opens, feel free, but wow… what a fantastically stupid way to waste your life.
Go suck a dick cunt face. P.S I didn’t read your message or click your link. So your sub-human behavior served no one.
What actually happened to you man? Reading your comments seems like you need serious therapy
Oh shit. Things are heating up in the fusion race.
Good. The only thing that was quite 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
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.
I hope it smoked a cigarette once it finished.
Why don’t we use “shatters world record” like the pro-China articles where they did this for 16 minutes?
I know why.
Because that one was over double the length of the record before it and this one is closer to a 35% increase.
So it’s probably just a “slams”
‘Boinks’
whopping
France bamboozles chinas nuclear reactor time with a steel chair
They’ll never tell.
Is it because of the Uyghurs?
Dumbass lol
Why do you care so much what an article says about France’s accomplishments of science and China’s accomplishments of science? Why can’t we enjoy the movement of technology without bickering about lines drawn in the sand by people none of us know or care about?
I know!
Because the articles were written by different people and published in different magazines ya goober.
Nah.
It’s because of the Chinese propaganda machine.
