*Slaps on top of fusion reactor*
“You can boil so much water with this.”
If China has managed to do something that scientists genuinely thought was impossible why are there several nuclear fusion research facilities all over the planet? If it’s impossible that seems like a bad use of resources.
I think maybe that scientists thought it was entirely possible, and that’s why they were trying to do it.
Fusion is possible. It just needs 20 years of research first.
Journalist reads “limit” and clickbaits it, typical
There are a bunch of things to research on fusion. Maybe they just thought this specific thing was out of reach, but were still trying to do other things.
Like the PvsNP computer science problem. Most computer scientists believe its impossible to make a polynomial algorithm that solves the traveling salesman problem, so most dont even try. But we dont know for certain that its actually impossible.
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
articles such as this one usually are optimized for their audience, you just aren’t the audience. that’s ok. I’m rarely the audience either :) a quick search should give you what you’re looking for https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040
It isnt optimized. Its gibberish written just to give some weight to the headline. People do bad jobs at science popularization too.
article didn’t say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?
Plasma is made from basicly over charging a gas with electrons the gas getting all pissy about having those electrons and starts dumping them. something do with elements wanting stability. In that process you get alot of heat out put. Now f you make it more dense I would conclude simply, you now have more ionized atoms in the plasma stream, meaning your plasma will be hotter if the stream will be the same size or if the plasma stream is shrunk but has the same number of ionized gas atoms, you have the same heat out put but in a smaller stream.
You’re having a space characters infestation, you should do something about that.
?
Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?
There is no current actual improvement other than the possibilities. By cooling the plasma edge and using clean wall materials, they broke a theoretical density barrier that could potentially bring steady-state fusion closer to reality.
That’s all it is. We’re no closer to steady fusion, but now we know we can push past the Greenwald limit.
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 wouldn’t blame AI, I would say that overall the US is becoming more and more anti-science overall. Just look how people are against vaccines or flat-earthers. Even academics are leaving US because of funding cuts by the current administration. Schools are in bad shapes…
At leas we won’t have to repect their patent…
Nothing they’ve done in recent years is ground breaking.
Room temperature superconductors? Fake.
Self-driving bus using painted lanes for navigation? We have trains and trams for that.
Thorium reactor? Germany had one in the 80s, shut it down because it was expensive, there’s around 20 different projects happening in Europe and North America to make it more efficient.
The fusion reactor from the article? They maybe potentially hypothetically achieved one breakthrough of the dozens still needed to make fusion viable.
Etc., etc.
The overwhelming majority of their so called breakthroughs are just media fluff pieces though. Their sources are more and more often AI generated studies and their supposed advancements aren‘t going anywhere a lot of the time. By the time people start asking questions and want to know more details they have already prepared another story for you to be impressed by. It‘s shock and awe.
I’ve been seeing articles like these for the past at least 10 years, it is always “New China brrakthrough, can make drinkable water from enriched uranium” or some shit. It is never scalable, sustainable, or usable, and is never really widely, used or adopted. It is always technology, pharmaceutics, construction, or energy related.
They like to fake their image to the world and have been trying for very long. The only thing they succeeded at larger scale is oppresion, tracking of people, and selling knockoffs. Of course, mass manufacturing cannot be omitted.
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.
Party’s don’t have to be part of democracy though. Nonpartisan democracy might more achievable for China than the west currently as the size of their single party continues to grow. Though I kinda doubt there is a lot of appetite for it. I’m a firm believer in democracy but it’s hard to look at the hyper polarization of today’s parties as beneficial in any way. Especially in the simple two party American system.
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?
Americans are hardworking too, but the American government is not actively working to support those hardworking Americans, which is the difference… the average American is working their ass off to earn less than ever to add wealth to the small percentage of ultra wealthy in power here. There are sanctions, tarriffs, and subsidies here, but the vast majority of them benefit the top of the pyramid, while leaving the majority to struggle.
The US government does everything in its power to make the wealthy even more wealthy. But hey, worker empowerment is communism.
You should consider effects of scale.
With the size of China it’s simply easier to do “targeted investments”.
They are almost big enough for autarky with modern technologies and conveniences.
What frustrates me is that China is indeed leading so much technological development on energy, but the amount of coal being burnt is just not budging… Please, China. Make the transition already.
That’s because 90% of these articles about their technological breakthroughs are bullsht.
It’s a bit two sided I believe. The energy demand is increasing, so there’s indeed more coal being burnt.
But at the same time, the share of clean energy sources compared to coal is also getting bigger and bigger.
So it’s not all bad. Mostly seems the demand for energy is growing too fast to decently transition, let’s hope they can catch up and get rid of coal as soon as possible.
Yeah, I hope that the renewables will continue exponentially… I agree that the growing share of renewables in the mix is awesome, but in the end what matters is each ton of CO2 emitted. And we’re not going in the right direction :(
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.
If all those stories from China from the last decade are true then science has already moved to China long ago. But it hasn‘t. Really makes you think, doesn‘t it?
Not sure, even like ten years ago when I was doing my PhD lots of students in prominent US universities like Carnegie Mellon were going to China to intern in HEP colliders.
*yeah, not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
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
You don’t have to like the government, but they’re the sole reason China is slowly starting to take the lead in science and engineering. These are the fruits of marxism-leninism, whether you like it or not.
China is not Marxist-leninist lmao. They have a market economy.
State capitalism is not the same as Marxism.
Their other fruits are despots and tyrants
Chinese government is much better than the US government
Sure, if you like to compare corrupt, totalitarian states, have fun. Don’t forget russia.
People of the world including Europe, South America, middle East and Asia feel safer from Russia and China than America.
Forgetting Ukraine?
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
Nah they all fucking suck.
- a European
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
I don’t care. They are all threatening us and I hope their leaders die very soon.
and it is a former USSR territory
So is half the EU. What’s this got to do with anything?
Greenland is more Europe than Ukraine because Greenland has been part of Denmark for over 1000 years but Ukraine is new. But It’s more likely that America will conquer Greenland than Russia conquers Ukraine.
If you look at broad based EU markets vs the S&P over the last year they grew about twice the rate.
Meanwhile USA is stealing Venezuelan oil. Good job everbody. 👍
Stay positive buddy.stay positive buddy, if oil become obsolete the struggle of the us will end. Their trouble is price of oil. They need to inject oil in the system to reduce price and stay competitive with solar, etc. And they have to attack other country to maintain the system. It stay viable for long they will have to go renewables.
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”.
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.
Thanks for your positive and refreshing comment ❤️
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.
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.
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.
I gotta be honest, as amazing as the promise of limitless fusion energy is, I’m really not optimistic that it’ll be a major or even an important technology for the energy sector, at least for the next 200 or so years.
The thing is, we already have fission power and we’re struggling to use it right now. The biggest hurdle for fission is the upfront costs of building a plant, the time needed to build a plant (construction can take up to a decade), and ongoing costs. While nuclear power is probably one of man’s greatest achievements, it’s also generally pretty expensive. And fusion has almost all the same strengths and drawbacks, but bigger. I do believe we will achieve sustainable fusion, probably soon. But I’m certain that while it will “work”, it will also prove to be the most expensive form of power generation with the largest upfront costs that the world has ever seen. And I don’t expect those prices to come down for a very long time.
Personally, I think anyone who expects fusion to be some kind of miracle technology is kidding themselves. And if people really want a miracle technology in the energy sector, keep your eyes geothermal, that’s the only tech I see that has any potential to become cheap, limitless, and constant.
I do think fusion will have good applications, but it will likely remain niche for a while. I definitely look forward to seeing spacecraft propelled by ion drives and powered by fusion, it would be amazing to be able to get to Jupiter and back on one tank of (xenon) gas.
Fission has the “long (1+ centuries) term storage solution of the byproducts” problem (output is dirty and long lasting). Fusion has no such big problem (output is dirty and short lasting).
I like hyperboles so here: If everyone did fission in their backyard, we’d have a big and long lasting problem. If everyone did fusion in their backyard, we’d have a medium and short lasting problem.
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.
God, I wonder if we could fund a next gen fission plant with what we already spent on Venezuela
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.
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
the US is more likely to invade and destroy any country that make fusion viable than to let it compete on the energy market.
Not that easy, considering the major candidates to succeed is China and the EU.
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.
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.pdfIt’s not particularly long but it’s very much in Superfund abandonment territory when you look at the economics of that “recycling” of low grade radioactive waste. I mean look at how much higher the cost per target is in this presentation alone for internal confinement is based on their kilowatt hours with recycling included. And that’s not including the reprocessing and production costs of targets or the fact that rapid target replacement will just frankly break as high energy neutrons and ablation screw up internals.
Recycling is definitely an important aspect of developing the technology to a maturity where it forms part of a power grid. But it’s not beyond the wit of man. If we can crack Q>5 for nuclear fusion, surely we can crack economically viable recycling for LLW. I don’t think it’s worth abandoning research on fusion over this issue.
I don’t think it’s worth abandoning fusion research. I just think we’re much farther than popsci ever portrays and I have serious problems with the no waste framing.
100% agree. I hope to be alive to see it. Popsci would have me believe it’s coming any day now.
I kind of get the no waste framing, since the nuance is too technical for most people to bother with. If we say anything more complex than three words about waste, then we will lose public support for fusion. It’s still not right, but I see a greater cause in that lie than the increase in clicks which is the driver for the lie that it’ll be ready tomorrow.
