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[–] 143 points 10 months ago (20 children)

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

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  • [–] 44 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 27 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    article didn't say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?

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  • [–] 19 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    Most Americans read at or below a 6th grade level

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    So we hear. But the world is not America and this is a British newspaper.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    To be fair I don't think literacy rates in the UK blow the US out of the water or anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (4 children)

    I check on this. So first thing I found, literacy rates and average reading age are different things. Literacy rate, able to read at all, is clearly tracked and both countries are like 99%. Reading age seams really mushy. If you can get some numbers, please share!

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    Oh I couldn't get any hard data on reading age for the UK. Search engines are trash now.

    Just figured out the apples to apples term to search is "functionally illiterate"

    From a quick glance it seems to be about 18% (UK) vs 21% for the US. So as I expected, better but not anything to write home about.

    https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (2 children)

    You mean you don't just trust the AI summaries?

    18% or 21% sounds like a lot of people. Not an easy problem. :-(

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  • [–] 69 points 10 months ago

    *Slaps on top of fusion reactor*

    "You can boil so much water with this."

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  • [–] 294 points 10 months ago (30 children)

    Meanwhile USA is stealing Venezuelan oil. Good job everbody. 👍

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  • [+] 164 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (23 children)
  • [–] 43 points 10 months ago (16 children)

    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.

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  • [+] 37 points 10 months ago* (7 children)
  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

    This is true, the waste issue is different with these two technologies, but I don't think it's all that significant in either case.

    Fission produces some awful waste, but what I like to point out is just how little it produces. My favorite example is nuclear submarines. Nuke subs have to come to port every so often for food, equipment, supplies, etc, but not because they're low on fuel. They don't carry a lot, about 500kg (half ton) and that lasts them a very long time. So how often do they need to be refueled? Once, most subs are refueled just once in their ~30 year lifetime. Some subs will be decommissioned before ever refuelling, using just one set of uranium fuel rods for their whole life.

    Edit: I wanted to visualize how much 500kg is, and I know uranium is heavy but I really didn't have any idea what a half ton would look like. Turns out, it's about 26 liters, 1 cubic foot. (Though, ideally your uranium wouldn't be measured in either of those units, you really don't want liters of liquid uranium, and that's exactly where a solid cube is headed too...)

    Given the tiny volume of waste produced over such a long time... We can figure out the storage. Even if the solution is costly, there's really not much to store, this is very manageable.

    So yeah, I'm not saying waste isn't an issue for nuclear power, it is. But I think it's not the biggest drawback, it seems like the overall cost is still the bigger problem in operating a plant.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    My problem is that waste being unborn next generation's problem. Who are we to demand them to keep guarding our shit? With fusion, the waste is the alive-generation's problem.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    You could say that of any infrastructure. Bridges are expenses, ongoing maintenance for them is a burden our children will have to bear. But I expect they'll be willing to do it.

    The fact is, most of what we do affects the next generation, we just don't think about it, or can't quantify it. The only difference with nuclear is that we can quantify it.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    Nuke subs are a bad example for looking at waste because they use higher enriched uranium. And that creates big casks of depleted uranium hexafluoride that we just have no idea what to do with other than sitting them in fields and hoping they don't leak.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [+] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    nuclear is the current dream for capitalists. because fuel is controlled and power is a monopoly - nuclear is guaranteed to always be profitable whereas hydro, solar and wind tend to run at a surplus and collapse the market by going into the negative value. since power can't be stored, they have no choice but to supply power at no cost. with nuclear, they control the flow of power production and can always keep supply at the breaking point of demand to keep prices high.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Why you attacking nuclear? It's an amazing technology

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    it's only amazing as long as the government owns it. in my country we could technically have free power because of renewables (and almost did, but EU stopped us from doing it because it would crash the commercial power market elsewhere - EU bs even made power more expensive just to make it competitive and not to crash oil and coal markets). but because of surplus power generated from renewables, our current neoliberal government has been getting rid of solar and shutting down windpower and attacked hydro in favor of constructing nuclear power plants; on top of making it law that the government isn't allowed to own or buy the nuclear power plants and also offered to fund private interests the construction of nuclear power plants.

    the reason? power is a natural monopoly, and nuclear is fuel based. which means the supplier of power decides the supply and demand by artificially controlling the fuel flow - the idea is to never let power run at a surplus supply generated by solar, wind, and hydro ever again so there is no risk that privately owned power monopolies would be unprofitable.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    Passenger vehicles and homes and most businesses could be covered 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.

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  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago*

    Well. At least it will guarantee the USA's eventual fall from power.

    Can you imagine the tech bros and anti-intectuals groveling to rejoin the scientific community?

    Unfortunately science is not a morality structure.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] -5 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Tanks, jets and rockets don't run on electric. Can't do a big war without some good old crude oil.

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  • [–] 23 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    But drones can. Little propeller drones are killing Russian invaders by the thousands

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Pitch that to Trump and his team and see if they will run their next kidnapping op by propeller drone only.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Well, current electric helicopters don't have a long range. But that's a 2026 problem, when battery tech improves they can be made just as good. Actually, better, since electric helicopters are quieter

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    [–] 75 points 10 months ago (12 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    Fusion is possible. It just needs 20 years of research first.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago

    Fusion was achieved decades ago. But right now it takes more energy than it produces. The theoretical possibility of energy-positive reaction is more or less established. The problem right now is engineering and a little bit of material science. And when (and if) it will be solved there will be whole another set of economical problems, how to make it a commercial product.
    All of that hinges less on science and more on whatever intersection of politics, economics, and psychology occupies this space. It was always 15 years away, and it was always correct estimation, it's just it's supposed to be 15 years of founded research and development, not 15 years of begging for funding, trying to navigate political situation, and restarting everything from scratch because previous two were unsuccessful

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)

    That is what they said. Twenty years ago.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Yes, because the argument was never "we'll have fusion in 20 years", it's always been "we COULD have fusion in 20 years IF research was properly funded". It's never been properly funded, hence it's always 20 years away.

    It's a bit like my boss coming to ask me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. We don't get funding. 6 months later he comes and asks me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. Queue shocked Pikachu face that the estimate is still 6 months, 6 months later.

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  • [–] 25 points 10 months ago
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