1,337 seconds
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
Rumor is next they are trying for 11.6858˙3 hours
Meanwhile in America we’re trying to make macdonalds cheaper by bundling an extra sandwich to go along with a value meal…
That’s called McFusion
And it only takes 22 seconds to consume.
And only 12 seconds to regret.
Which means you are still consuming the burger for 10 seconds fully regretting your decision.
110% commitment to the burger and the regret. USA! USA!
And keeps you sated for another 22 seconds.
Then you want seconds.
A headline without calling it an “Artificial Sun”?!
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand.
@Toribor @notsoshaihulud with great power comes great responsibility
Don’t worry, it will stabilize
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”.
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.
Or a “star in a bottle”
A bulb in a bong
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.
Is it because of the Uyghurs?
Oh shit. Things are heating up in the fusion race.
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. The only thing that was quite good about the cold war was the competition.
Mr. Fusion now 1 step closer… 10 years late, but still!
Only ten more years, and we’ll have it!
…you said 10 more years 50 years ago
In just 10 more years, it’ll only be 40 more years!
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.
Maybe if it runs longer, we all get to jump to a better timeline. 😅
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.
Has DOGE cut funding to ITER yet?
They sacked everybody. Now they are trying to get them back.
/s
But only the white middle aged men with regular male names and above average height.
What about my racist and misogynist views I try to hide underneath my crazed and incompetent rantings about DEI? Is there room for someone like me?
This is freaking awesome. Only a few years ago it was exciting to see a fusion reaction last a fraction of a second.
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand
Doesn’t sound that impressive when Wendelstein 7-X achieved 17 minutes of plasma in 2021.
Yes but 22 minutes is longer than 17 minutes
Think of it like a pizza oven
How well done is your pizza?
I can’t find a reference to that but China did 17 minutes in January this year. I think you’re confusing the announcement that they increased power by 17x while maintaining plasma.
This test was 20 minutes at a higher power setting without being incredibly destructive, that’s their milestone.
This is cool but also remember the practicalities of Fusion make it not much better than nuclear:
Well nuclear is great, so even “not much better” would be great.
Yea one of the most interesting applications of fusion reactor research is the requirements in advancements for material science also benefits fission and even solar power generation, so the research bears fruit well and above the stated goals.
Guarantee you they weren’t generating a whole lot of power though… And if you can’t do that part then what’s the point?
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 (8 minutes longer than this fusion reactor), are you interested in investing?
EDIT: Four years ago the British Fusion reactor (J.E.T. originally built in 1984) produced “59 megajoules of heat energy” none of which was harvested and turned into electricity. The project was then shutdown for good after 40 years of not generating power.
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.
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.
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.
It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 power 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.
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.
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.
Even if we could dump water into them it would explosively evaporate because they run at 100 million degrees Celsius. That would be a very loud bang and whatever city they were in would be gone.
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.
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.
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