Someone needs to bash these scicomm journalists over the head until they stop using the words “artificial sun”
Also, where’s the study? Is it even peer reviewed?
what an incredible achievement. rome wasn’t built in a day and real.science takes time and effort. so much effort by these scientists!
I’m so used to hearing that this technology is 10 years away, or whatever the old adage was, that i can’t believe we’ve been seeing actual progress on this front in the last few years. Maybe it will actually happen eventually!
It just took someone without a profit motive
Well, there’s been incremental progress all along. I remember reading about milliseconds being a big accomplishment at some point.
Also, it’s pretty heavily dependent on the exact plasma in question. One hot enough to do lots of fusion will probably be different, so this isn’t the finish line. Relevant XKCD.
Maybe they miss the sun because of all the smog in the air.
lemmy.world. Yep. Checks out.
I feel like little fusion has kind of missed the boat. It’s been “just a few decades away” since I was in school, and that’s a good while ago now.
We can already get limitless clean energy from the real sun.
Here’s why it’s been so long:
A) solar energy isn’t clean, and it’s the exact opposite of environmentally friendly; it’s just that current power sources are so much worse it looks good by comparison.
B) fusion cannot ever be profitable. The fuel for it is the most common on the planet, if not the universe, requires no special refining, and can’t be made artificially scarce. A post fusion world is a post energy industry world. It’s the practical end of what currently owns the US and other countries.
This has drastically reduced funding for it and has blocked advancement for decades. This project among others in China have no profit motive, they are trying to accomplish a goal without caring how they can become rich off it. If fusion energy is possible, it’ll be done in China.
As far as I know, the current plans for fusion require deuterium and tritium. Whole deuterium can be easily obtained from water, tritium is a bigger problem. Its replacement, helium-3, is also not really frequent on earth.
The fuel for it is the most common on the planet, if not the universe, requires no special refining
It is true that regular hydrogen (with 1 proton and no neutrons) fuses in the Sun, first to deuterium (2 protons combine into a nucleus that immediately decays a bunch of radiation and becomes a proton and neutron), then another hydrogen proton to create helium-3 (2 protons, 1 neutron), then two helium-3 nuclei fuse to create 2 hydrogen protons and a stable Helium-4 nucleus (2 protons, 2 neutrons).
But nobody on earth is trying to accomplish fusion through that difficult pathway. We don’t have the ability to create the pressures and heat to ignite that reaction.
The way all of these fusion projects are trying to achieve are deuterium (1 proton, 1 neutron) plus tritium (1 proton, 2 neutrons), to form Helium-4 (2 protons, 2 neutrons) plus a neutron and a bunch of energy. That is a reaction that human technology can ignite. So all the research goes into this particular reaction.
And for that, tritium is exceedingly rare. We can make it as a byproduct of fission reactors, from lithium.
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We should do both
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There is no two.
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Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave!
With a box of scraps!
We’re not Tony Stark, sir.
Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Yeah, but Hawk could ride those pipes way better.
Also, Tony Hawk is a goddamn excellent game!
Dare I say that it was a pro skater too!
Not to mention that the guy in those games looks really similar to Tony Hawk (an ex professional skater), what a coincide!!
0 theoretical hope for fusion energy to ever provide electricity under 30c/kwh. These are hot plasma experiments, which could be used to produce mass HHO from water vapour at just 2200C-3000C, even if endothermic. Can get energy from concentrated solar mirrors or just PV solar if plasma is used. Cooling magnets is a huge energy drain. HHO provide the highest turbine energy gain, though a net gain pathway is just slightly more in reach than fusion.
Yes but do you concur?
I’m studying Physics at the moment and Prof. gave us a printout of a textbook last week stating that the internal of the sun generates approximately 150 W / m³ on average. That’s about as much as a compost pile, so, not very much. The sun only generates enormous amounts of power because it’s so huge. In other words, reproducing fusion on Earth might actually not be very efficient.
I’m pretty sure the reason for that is that the sun is actually mostly not hot enough to do nuclear fusion, but has to instead rely on quantum tunnelling. This makes the fusion rate much, much lower. Now while this is good, because otherwise, the sun would burn up far too quickly and kill all of us, it also explains the low power, or energy per time.
Source: Doing my master’s in cosmology.
Different kind of fusion. Don’t forget hydrogen bombs have been around for decades, right? They’re just not very controlled and harnessable.
To the sun’s credit, it’s 4.5 billion years in and it’s still got plenty of juice left to go.
Yeah that is not how that works
The sun is enormous, yeah, but fusion only really happens at the core. A very tiny fraction of the sun is doing the fusion, the rest jlgets heated up, makes gravity and such, bit doesn’t really do anything of interest energy wise.
Fusion creates a shit tonne more energy than 150w/cm3. Heck, you’ve never seen what a nuke does
No, OP is right - or rather, OP’s physics professor. There’s different kinds of fusion, though, and nobody’s suggesting we do the exact same kind here on Earth (we basically can’t).
Fusion creates a shit tonne more energy than 150w/cm3. Heck, you’ve never seen what a nuke does
That’s power density (Watts). Multiply by 10 billion years to get energy density.
Found this article
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.htm
And it looks like it’s saying that the energy produced by nuclear fusion (which happens in the relatively small core) divided by the entire mass of the sun, gives you that low number.
Terrestrial fusion power plants are aiming to be sun cores, so that all the hydrogen they put in gets fused, and not just a few atoms here and there.
Why do people assume that scientists don’t sanity check themselves? Genuine question, no offense to the OC here.
“guys, I know we’ve been working on this for decades, but I’ve been going over this first-year textbook, and I have some bad news…”
Cause maybe they assume scientists are hyping things up like VCs for AI.
In a dishonest world, the honest would be mistrusted more.
It’s low in the core too, just not quite that low.
How does nobody else here know that we’re talking about artificially fusing some blend of deuterium or tritium? The sun fuses ordinary hydrogen at this point in it’s evolution - that’s why it’s a nice slow 10 billion year burn.
Look up the etymology of the word “sophomore”.
Good job scientists!
Meanwhile in America
Literally has tons of the same kind or reactor, and Europe is working on one that might actually do practical things.
Anyone here calls paste glue?.. Yup, wrong country. And now we got a word that we can use to detect AI.
I just looked up glue eating gifs. And posted the funniest one
Living in the UK I suspect you have the same problem we have. Plenty of people capable of doing all the impressive shit China is doing (science, infastructure, whatever) and all of them being starved of funding as all the money dissapears into gigantic blackholes of backroom deals where huge amounts of money are spent on vague things that never seem to materialize or even be adequately explained; but whatever they are they sure do generate enormous profits for the cronies of whoevers currently in power.
My country is in this comment and i don’t like it
Well at least here we can pretty easily see where the money goes by looking at the billions of dollars given to Israel and the military.
You know instead of the artificial sun we could use the real one no? I still think fusion is a good investment on the skill tree but not for consumer energy. Also can someone explain why we use solar panels instead of mirrors that heat up water and spin turbines? Almost every other method of producing energy uses that and from my understanding its more efficient and probably cheaper.
Also can someone explain why we use solar panels instead of mirrors that heat up water and spin turbines? Almost every other method of producing energy uses that and from my understanding its more efficient and probably cheaper.
This is called concentrated solar power, and there are operating facilities representing less than 2% of total worldwide solar capacity (as of 2017): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
In short, as with most things, the answer to “why don’t we do more” is that it’s more expensive than the alternatives. Because the “feedstock” (sunlight) is free, efficiency doesn’t matter much unless land is expensive. The complexity of these systems is also much greater than PV, leading to higher capital and operating costs.
The promise of concentrated solar is that it can serve as energy storage as well (the hot heat transfer medium can continue to heat water and generate power into the night) meaning it has greater potential for base load power than PV. Plus, I think power towers look damn cool.
Porque no los dos?
Why shouldn’t fusion not be good for consumer energy? If they find a way to produce electricity with it the grid doesn’t care who uses it.
Why don’t we use mirrors to heat water with sunlight and spin turbines with it? We do! But photovoltaic cells are more space efficient and have gotten really cheap. Also you can just plop them on almost any roof and call it a day. Also converting light to heat to electricity is kinda dumb when you can just convert it directly to electricity.
We also use the sun to make tap water warm.
Forget artificial suns, let me tell you right now how to make an artificial moon:
- Be a robot.
- Pull down pants.
- Bend over.
- Point robo-crack towards recipient
- Artificial Moon.
Can’t wait for my Trumper boss to bring this up at work again as “Did you hear China secretly replaced the sun?”
That’s fucked up. I don’t even know my boss’s politics, (as it should be). Do you have an HR department? This is a huge liability for your company…
It should be a huge liability, but the US is a fucked up place. Even “blue” states are full of people at work voraciously politicizing everything, always thinking they are right about everything. These people are everywhere, they lack humility and critical thinking, and they are insufferable.
Bro this is the American Bible belt, almost every person I’ve ever directly reported to across a dozen or so jobs, has been the exact same way. I’ve always known my bosses politics, much to my displeasure, and they’ve always been extremely conservative, regardless of the field of work.
That is one technology that I don’t care if China steals secrets to make it happen faster.
im pretty sure almost unilaterally, every country would like the solution to near infinite energy regardless. its extremely vital if as a species, ever want to start a colony outside of earth.
the only people against it would be those in the pocket of other forms of energy monetary wise.
No need!
The data gathered by EAST will support the development of other reactors, both in China and internationally. China is part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program, which involves dozens of countries, including the U.S., U.K. Japan, South Korea and Russia.
If we were a smarter society, we’d end our stupid cold war with them and cooperate.
If they were a more humane society, we likely would.
Yeah more humane like Israel… America has been installing dictators all around the world for decades what are you talking about? You think America cares about humanity? You cant even birth a child without a $10,000+ bill.
America cares about moneyyyyy and nothing more
We topple democratically-elected leaders because it suits our economic plans. People downvoting the above comment don’t know shit about history. And that’s because our schools don’t accurately teach it.
Is the argument here that China isn’t worthy of the United States’ cooperation? We here in the US need to get over ourselves and stop acting as if we have the moral high ground over everyone else. There are a lot of things about the US that are far from humane, and we do cooperate with countries that engage in far worse, often on our behalf. Our adversarial disposition towards China has nothing to do with human rights and everything to do with geopolitics.
More like if they were willing to embrace capitalistic western values and bend over for America whenever we’re feeling frisky
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Never said they weren’t. Just that it doesn’t align with capitalistic western values.
More humane like Nazi-America, or more humane like Warcrimes-Russia? Description unclear, please clarify.
More humane as in respecting human rights I suppose
Is there a state that is not disrespecting human rights ? I for one haven’t heard of any.
Degrees in hell maybe.
To clarify, what you’re doing is “what-aboutism”. Asking China to be more humane is not a comment on anything but China being more humane.
Honestly China might start looking moderate compared to what I expect our new Dear Leader to do in the coming years.
They weren’t just asking China to be more humane, though. They were suggesting that China doesn’t deserve our cooperation because they are inhumane, which implies we have the moral high ground and is explicitly hypocritical. It isn’t whataboutism to point out hypocrisy.
There’s a lot of assuming, implying, and suggesting in that take. The original just said if they were more humane we would work with them.
You don’t at all see how that implies moral superiority? Or are you just giving them the benefit of the doubt?
The problem is holding China to a higher standard than we hold ourselves to.
Try to read up and understand what whataboutism means. Because you clearly didn’t get the point of my comment.
You brought up other societies as compared them to us. It’s the definition of what-aboutism, just read up on it again to make sure.
China could stand to be more humane, but it wouldn’t make the US cooperate with them.
More humane like the best of us wish to be and the majority of us never will be
Post-scarcity society def scares capitalists.
I’m noticing in these comments that the tech bros that want to solve climate change by magical technological advances instead of using what we have had an interesting effect: some people on the other side have grown tired of the real technological advances that would actually help.
Meh, net gain is the point, long cycles well be useful for production. Useful, eventually. Cart before the horse, otherwise.
