Currently we still don’t know whether it’s possible to generate more power than you need to maintain the fusion.
ITER is the European project that should test that. It still is an experimental reactor and won’t generate power.
Several other reactors are currently being built, but only recently they started building ones that in theory could run for a longer time than a few minutes.
But nobody knows if it will be useful.
Wow it’s pretty cool that it can maintain magnetic confinement with that giant window cut out of the containment vessel.
I’m not sure that lab coats and hard hats will protect against the x-ray black-body radiation though.
The AI generated image is such an eye sore.
I was going to write something about Gordon Freeman and Resonance cascade failure. And then I saw that it was AI generated, and that explains a lot.
At least they disclosed that it’s ai.
at least we can be pretty sure the text isn’t LLM generated - it’s so clunky and hard to read 😬
Something will have to power the billionaires’ sealed private luxury ecosystems.
Wow it’s pretty cool that it can maintain magnetic confinement with that giant window cut out of the containment vessel.
I’m not sure that lab coats and hard hats will protect against the x-ray black-body radiation though.
Isn’t the Times of India not reputable? I seem to recall some shady shit from them, including I think Russian sponsored anti vaccine propaganda aimed at poor countries.
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.
artificial sun
You can just say fusion reactor
This development by the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) is another move towards achieving clean fusion energy, whose ability to generate unlimited amounts of electricity with little to no carbon emission is promising.
The article, like so many others concerning nuclear technology, refused to address the unit cost of energy.
Why is building a large, complex, and temperamental fusion engine more economical than churning out an equivalent number of wind turbines or solar panels? The article doesn’t say
A single solar panel is basically useless. You need a huge field of them per small city, and by the time you do have your huge fields of wind and solar, you then need giant grid batteries, and you still often fall short, which means that to be safe you need to double or triple your solar and wind build out.
Which is why most solar and wind projects are backed up with methane burning generators.
Nuclear on the other hand, takes up a tiny fraction of the space and outputs orders of magnitude more power, safer and cleaner than any other form of energy.
South Korea doesn’t have a lot of land mass for solar, they do however have competent engineers and scientists.
Fun fact, most of the fearmongering around nuclear has been paid for by oil companies, starting with Hermann J. Muller working for the Rockefeller Foundation, to Robert O. Anderson, CEO of ARCO giving $200K to a man to start an anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth. The Rockefeller Foundation directly funded Greenpeace up until just a few years ago.
As for Fusion, yeah, we can sustain a reaction by feeding energy in, and sometimes, we can observe more energy out than in, but we have absolutely zero ways to capture that energy.
Water+heat = steam = power
For the same reason someone would have asked “why is building a large, complex and hard to produce solar panel more economical than churning out an equivalent number of coal plants?” decades ago.
It’s improving the tech, which could eventually far and away outpaced every other energy producer. Maybe not now, but in the future. Some are just gung-ho about trying to produce a bunch when they’re not quite ready.
why is building a large, complex and hard to produce solar panel
Solar engines have historically been simple and easy to produce relative to coal and gas engines. We’ve had industrial solar heating technology since the 19th century, even. Sort of the joke of fossil fuel technology, in that it’s been a consequence of heavy R&D investment and industrial build out as much by choice as by any engineering advantage.
It’s improving the tech, which could eventually far and away outpaced every other energy producer.
It’s been a pop science empty promise for decades. We were talking about fusion technology in the 1960s like it was just around the corner. Yes, there’s an enormous amount of output in fusion technology. But it requires even more energy input. What’s more - as the article downplays but is forced to concede - it is highly unstable and difficult to sustain, even at a super-sized laboratory setting.
This is a far cry from fission which can be achieved practically by accident (see the Chicago Pile-1) and is comparatively straightforward to control via mechanical methods.
Even in the event you manage to produce something approaching stable fusion at the size-scale necessary for industrial deployment, there’s still no reason to believe the technology would be cheaper per watt than the indirect capture of an already running supermassive fusion system (ie, the Sun). In that case, it wouldn’t outpace every other energy producer for the same reason conventional nuclear power hasn’t.
There’s a good reason why it’s been talked about since the 60s but never happened:
I mean, that’s certainly some napkin math.
But $3-9B is pretty cheap by modern corporate standards. Does this mean OpenAI will have a working fusion engine some time in the next ten years?
If they devoted billions of dollars per year to it and nothing else, maybe.
Keep in mind that OpenAI still hasn’t made any profit, their entire valuation is based on hype that will be exploited to steal money via the ipo, and then the Altar will beg Trump for a bailout to prevent a bankruptcy.
Altman and Musk both tried to get their companies into Nasdaq and the S&P 500
They really pushed, because retirement funds are required to buy shares of the the entire index, and if any of the companies in that fund have sudden bankruptcy issues, the government is more likely to step in to save the company. Theoretically, this saves the retirement funds. It never has, but that’s how saving the company is sold.
Anyway the Indexes refused to change their rules so the bailout will have to come from bribing Trump.
If they spent real money (not paper passing around deals between companies) over a decade and had tens of thousands of scientists and engineers and institutional knowledge and partnerships with academia in order to do it properly, yes they could.
But we both know they don’t have any of those things, so no practically they couldn’t.
(Not my field. The following is armchair speculation.)
Why is [fusion] more economical than [solar/wind]
TLDR — It’s not. For distributed/residential, bulk power generation, and light-duty transportation, solar has already won so decisively that fusion is not likely to catch up this century. But those aren’t usually the target applications.
TMK, Fusion offers most of the known advantages of fission (smaller footprint, superior energy density + capacity, output that’s weather-independent and geography-agnostic, etc.) but with significantly better safety and waste profiles.
Its versatility as a thermal source enables many industrial applications requiring temperatures difficult or impossible to achieve via electrification alone.
The reaction itself is directly applicable to neutron production.
There’s some even more far flung applications like outer planetary and deepspace space travel.
And others. All to say, it’s for niche and future applications PV can’t touch.
Its versatility as a thermal source enables many industrial applications requiring temperatures difficult or impossible to achieve via electrification alone.
That’s fair. I guess if you really need a spicy blowtorch…
You can just say fusion reactor
The Times of India is a rag that literally accepts bribes for positive coverage; sensationalist garbage is their bread and butter.
But it gets worse: this story is over two years out-of-date.
The KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced on the 20th that during the ‘2023 KSTAR Plasma Campaign’ conducted from December of last year to February of this year [2024], it achieved a 48-second operation of ultra-high-temperature plasma at an ion temperature of 100 million degrees and a record 102-second operation in high-confinement mode (H-mode).
This happened back in 2024. Here’s a paper.
I remember reading about russian intelligence sponsored anti vaccine propaganda from the time of india, targeting poor countries like pakistan and in africa and the like.
Technological progress.
Need sun for solar, so won’t work well for space when you get further out, and no wind in space.
no wind in space
Can it be used to power a turbine? Or just propulsion like a sail, because what if we want to go towards the sun…?
It also has diminishing returns in relation to distance to the sun.
In space…? Because that requires moving one part while the others stationary…. The friction from generating power would spin the rest of the satellite, or would need to expend power to resist it.
Windmills have used sails as fins for long time lol, its nothing new, im trying to get you think critically here.
In space…? Because that requires moving one part while the others stationary….
Or moving one part opposite the direction of another, to create resistance.
Windmills have used sails as fins for long time lol, its nothing new, im trying to get you think critically here.
There’s plenty of conversation to be had about efficiency, heat venting, gross productivity. But “you can’t capture energy from another moving body” is something billards disproved several centuries ago.
It doesn’t.
Fusion isn’t as bad as fission or fossil fuel. If they can get it to work. The reactor needs to run continuously (for days) and the energy output needs to be positive. Then it would have a huge impact.
Every energy source as its drawbacks. I.e. Solar panels and wind have the recycling of compound materials issue - it’s all glued together. And the environmental impact of source materials production, i.e. neodymium. Mining, refining,…
Some are worse than others. But none is or will be impact free in terms of sustainability or environmental destruction.
Fusion isn’t as bad as fission or fossil fuel.
To date, terrestrial fusion has been a net-negative energy system. That’s strictly worse than fission or fossil.
Every energy source as its drawbacks. I.e. Solar panels and wind have the recycling of compound materials issue - it’s all glued together. And the environmental impact of source materials production, i.e. neodymium. Mining, refining,…
Do you think we’re getting terrestrial fusion without mining or materials compositing? What do you think fusion reactors and their attendant facilities are made out of?
We’re getting into reactionary FUD about wind turbines when we start waxing poetic about the environmental impact of big fan blades and dynamos (which are just as critical for coal and gas plants, btw). At some point, you’re still just converting mechanical energy to electrical energy, no matter what system you’re proposing. All of that will require industrial metals and conductors.
Fusion isn’t as bad as fission or fossil fuel. To date, terrestrial fusion has been a net-negative energy system. That’s strictly worse than fission or fossil.
My mistake. I did not specify in what regard. I had the waste in mind. Fusion waste is radioactive for a few decades. Fuel wise, there is an abundance of Deuterium, like a gram of it in every bucket of ocean water give or take. Tritium? That’s the harder part.
You are right. It doesn’t work yet. And it will be too late to solve the current energy crisis. If they get it working at all. But I see no harm in trying.
Your remaining statements: I did not intend to say that solar and wind power are bad, but they are not flawless (again: sustainability and sourcing).
Is this a bot? These can’t be real responses…
People want to vote for trump a 3rd time. It’s definitely possible those are real responses.
I’ve seen this headline in different ways for the last 20 years.
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Tanning beds will never be the same…
Seems like maybe they shouldn’t sit and stand so damn close to it?
