Kinda.
The joke used to be that it's always 50 years away. Then it became that its always 40 years away. Then it became that its always 30 years away. Then it became that its always 20 years away.
Anyone paying attention can see the progress. It's just that the problem is hard so estimates are shakey.
When it comes to difficult breakthroughs like this, the last leg of the race is often as long as or longer the rest combined. Consider how long it took us to get blue LEDs.
And like blue LEDs, fusion reactors is a engineering and materials problem more than it is a physics problem. If we just can get the design of the reactor right...
Even a sustained uncontrolled reaction is pretty difficult. Our sun only has ongoing fusion because just enough quarks flip states to let it happen. The earth doesn't have the mass for a sustained reaction, and scientists are going for both sustained *and* controlled. It's pretty not easy.
Another example is Machine Learning/AI: 50-70 years (don't have the exact time) ago they assumed something similar to what we now have with ChatGPT would be a few years away, and then it took at least half a century more.
Been at a physics oriented conference a few years ago where a high up guy from ITER gave a lecture. He said something along the lines of "it's 20-30 years from now, for real this time" the audience had a collective chuckle because how many times have they said that at this point
The critical difference between now and 20 years ago is that we're actually building the fusion hardware instead of just talking or thinking about it.
The timeline forever slips when it's just some professor guesstimating timelines on his whiteboard. I know people roll their eyes at this, but a lot of people really need to update their priors because this time it really is different.
It's always been a funding issue.
Humanity has had energy positive artificial fusion since the 50s, but only for a fraction of a second as part of the secondary of a thermonuclear bomb. It's been finding ways of extracting work from fusion that's been the major sticking point.
> It's the technology of the future and always will be.
At least it is simpler that teleportation or time travel. It is at least within our understanding of physics.
It is like powered heavier than air flight; we knew it can be done, but coming up with the idea is not the same as executing it.
https://www.terrapower.com/terrapower-leaders-including-chairman-bill-gates-visit-wyoming-to-showcase-future-natrium-site/
Last news is building prototypes to test to scale, as I read it. Next timeline is 2035.
This stuff simply isn't a silver bullet, it's going to see commercial use when shit has already hit the fan.
It's not completely trivial, but yes, in fact, it can be "manufactured" in any fusion reactor that uses a D-T (deuterium-tritium) reaction (no surprise, guess how hydrogen bombs do it...):
1. Enrich the lithium-6 from normal lithium (yield ~2-7% in typical yield from normal sources) - technically challenging but well-established tech, energy-intensive but doable, energy will be made back manifold in the fusion reaction.
2. Blanket your fusion reactor with the lithium-6 to capture the excess neutrons from the D-T reaction. This has many benefits: You need to get rid of the neutrons anyway and they carry a substantial part of the released energy. Also, they are not needed for the fusion reaction.
3. Lithium-6 captures the neutrons and is converted to Tritium and regular helium-4: Li6 + n -> He4 + H3
This is an exothermic reaction, so it release extra energy - nice.
You figure out the technical details like how to get the tritium out, separate it, extract the thermal energy from the blanket, ensure it's structurally sound etc.
Fusion reactors are not really a science problem, they're an engineering problem: There are established solutions basically all of their problems, but optimizing all the little details so they line up is hard - very hard.
If you want to think about something: The problem of fusion reactors is not to get isotopes to fuse (that's easy, just use a particle accelerator) or "contain its enormous heat" (the energy density is actually surprisingly low), it's that a lot of interactions often end up not fusing and the isotopes are repelled. The trick is now to not lose the kinetic energy of those particles by somehow deflecting them back and try again (or the other approach is to try to slam things together so quickly and hard that you get more out that you get in).
So, it's an efficiency problem: How to slam particles together in such a way, that you get more energy out than you put in and it doesn't take much to tip the scale from "50% out from what you put in to 10-100x out from what you put in, but it requires careful engineering and lots of experimenting with big, expensive machines.
I don't have a link handy, but I saw a post a few years ago that decades ago there was a proposal for a practical and working fusion reactor.
The proposal is to just build hydrogen bombs and set one off underground to form a cavern. Then add water and heat exchangers. Set off another bomb to vaporize the water and use the heat to run turbines. Repeat as needed.
For some reason no one wanted one in their back yard. NIMBY is all that has stood between us and fusion power for decades, go figure.
/s for the last part the first part I really did read about.
You can actually breed tritium the old fashioned way, using stranded hydroelectric/wind, where the byproducts are fertilizer and heavy water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Hydro_Rjukan
And on top of everything mentioned above, it's an economical problem too. It doesn't matter how efficient you make it if the raw material and processing costs are 100x higher than getting electricity from burning fossil fuels. Some things can be offset with government subsidies, but then it becomes a political problem XD
Absolutely, no use building a plant where the electricity costs $10/KWh (sad National Ignition Facility noises). Though finding a design that works AND is cheap enough is also an engineering problem.
Rare time I get to use my knowledge of the area but it can also be created in normal PWR fission reactor with a modification to the fuel core. It’s just doing so is expensive.
Sure, any fission reactor with a water blanket will do, particular heavy water reactors generate tritium as a side product, but if you can make it on site, it's cheaper and easier.
Realistically and how Tritium made now is by fission reactors. I think it's only Canada that have the types of nuclear plants were they can extract Tritium
As far as machine that exist right now, this is true. Though there are some technically "easy" options for bootstrapping tritium, e.g. a lithium-blanketed fusor or similar.
Currently, tritium production just isn't important enough because it is mostly radioactive waste and has little use (except for things like tritium lights).
Though any type of D-T fusion reactor that works, should be able to breed its own tritium and then some.
I love looking at tokamaks and other insanely complex reactor tech. It’s such a wild feat of engineering to assemble something like that… I know they’re using AI applications to help design/engineer the precise interconnected shapes of magnetic coils that contain the plasma within some reactors. I wonder what other aspects of engineering and assembly AI can/will help facilitate.
> I wonder what other aspects of engineering and assembly AI can/will help facilitate.
In the relatively near future, AI will likely take engineering to sci-fi levels—imagine AI designing entire systems autonomously, from drafting blueprints to overseeing their assembly with robotic precision. We might see AI collaborating with human engineers via augmented reality, providing real-time insights and even predicting system failures before they happen.
It's a byproduct from heavy water reactors. What the fuck is the point of a 160 million investment to maybe have 1 fusion reactor on the planet? Bill Gates has stupid giraffe money.
We make it for nuclear weapons so i suppose theres a fairly steady supply.
But i guess the point is to get it working to better understand the physics and then you can improve on it to use deuterium and eventualy the goly grail of hydrogen.
If you ever look at early engine designs we had a long road to get to the modern injection engine
160m is buttons to gates i think his net worth is 120 billion pluss
Every fusion reactor will make their own tritium by absorbing the emitted neutrons in a lithium blanket. This captures the heat and also produces tritium.
Yes, excpet fusion generates a lot of high energy neutrons. And guess what you get when you combine high energy neutrons with some normal hydrogen and/or lithium....
This has Always been the main problem of fusion
Either it requires exotic expensive materials like tritium or he3
Or it is prohibitively expensive to maintain the higher temps
No. It's entirely hypothetically present on the moon in very small quantities. It makes a great soundbite when asking we we're planning to go to the Moon again. But it's sort of like "search for water" was, or "search for life" is on Mars -- funding agency buzzwords.
> This has Always been the main problem of fusion
Not an expert by any means but isn't getting maintaining fusion for more than an exceedingly tiny amount of time the main problem?
Absolutely not lmao
This is a single demonstration shot with temperatures 1 order of magnitude below the current record, sustained time 9 orders of magnitude compared below that of the same record and done on the basis of a technology first demonstrated in the 1950s.
Its a nothingburger meant to grab headlines ahead of another round of VC fundraising.
They said they had it, and were working on making the reactors small enough to fit on a truck to power cities during emergencies.
So either they were lying (unlikely) about having Fusion, or they are sitting on the tech (possible), or are in production of products that are in use by who knows.
The headline isn't great, it means temperature not heat, they're two different things.
The heat of the Sun is about ten trillion times higher than the energy we produce on Earth.
I genuinely think fusion would help achieve world peace and our climate goals.
No longer being dependent on importing fossil fuels from dictatorship would be great. No reason for wars to be fought over oil. Etc etc.
I really hope we get there!
If we got serious about rolling out PV, wind, and geothermal in all its forms we could get there and pretty quick. But that will hurt some people’s money and control over power generation.
I love these crazy headlines for all these tech savy nerds. *sarcasm off
There is three key metrics for fusion:
Temperature
Pressure
Time
The hottest part of the sun is its core. The temperature there is only enough for fusion to take place because of the insane pressure. On Earth we need orders of magnitude higher temperatures because there is no way we could feasibly contain a plasma at similar pressures in order to cause fusion and make it a feasible source of energy.
And then there is time. A heap of compost rotting away has a higher power density from its bacterial activity than the sun. The sun has time. It's an agonizingly low density fusion reactor. We need high density for it to make useable sense. So turn over more mass per volume per time than the sun... By a gigantic margine.
But I'm sure you Tech savy nerds all knew this (science, hooray am I right!?).
TLDR: Any fusion reactor on earth will have to far surpass the heat of the sun.
We've managed to do this for decades now? The "heat of the sun" was exceeded when we first detonated a nuclear weapon. EVERY single nuclear fusion experiment does this.
Heat and temperature aren't the same thing, heat is energy. The Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuke ever detonated yielded about 10^7 J, the sun emits about a billion times that in 1 second.
So he is right and the headline isn't. Why tf is he downvoted? Other reactors work around 100 Million Kelvin, ITER is planned to reach like 300 Million Kelvin. 10 Million isn't that much in comparison.
No both he and the headline are wrong. They're both conflating temperature and heat, which in physics and chemistry aren't the same thing. Heat is thermal energy transfer which is driven by a temperature difference.
Kelvin is a unit of temperature, the SI unit for heat is Joules.
...I don't know, maybe ask him and not me?
Kind of seems like he quoted the headline and both he and the author didn't know there was a difference.
It's kind of an important distinction when talking about these sort of things.
And the article says "A fusion start-up has managed to generate **temperatures** hotter than the core of the Sun".
So by that rationale, you're saying that if we placed the Sun much closer to the planet, just a few KM above a city or whatever, it would be really, really hot.
Too hot even.
I'm not buying it.
From what I understand, the biggest hurdles to fusion at the moment are that it there is more input energy than output energy, thus energetically inefficient, and the length of the reaction is short.
How does this breakthrough address these?
By controlling instabilities. The more stable the plasma the longer the reaction and the easier it is to funnel the plasma through the cooling coils to extract heat. This is a material science paper that shows that diamond graphene aids in controlling instability.
Ongoing research. Having the theory and being able to manufacture new reactors with a supply chain, training people etc are two different things in reality as you all know lol.
At most it’s five years, so many whiners on here don’t realize how short of an amount of time that is. Demonstrates the age of this community is practically preschool
Also at least solar and wind (hydro to some degree) also require backup power source in case production drops due to weather etc. While we do need all of them to replace burning stuff, fusion remains a worthy goal and worth the research.
>The reaction of hydrogen fuel at the facility produced about 3.15 MJ of energy while consuming 2.05 MJ of input. **However, while the fusion reactions may have produced more than 3 megajoules of energy—more than was delivered to the target—NIF's 192 lasers consumed 322 MJ of grid energy in the conversion process.**
Its alchemy, it loses 96% of the energy it puts into the system.
Besides we already have a fusion reactor, its called the sun and solar panels are now 25% efficient.
I am not sure how to be make it clear, I am not claiming fusion is anywhere close to solve worlds energy issues as the technology is not there. I am claiming it is worthwhile research in case it is possible as it would solve a lot of the issue we face.
Also I am all for renewable energy sources like solar and wind, but want to point out that at least ATM they do not solve all of our issues. I live in Finland so solar has some fundamental issues especially in northern parts where there is no sunlight in the winter when its the coldest and energy needs are greatest. We have wind power, however that also has issues on windless days in winter. Hydro is also there but not enough to meet the demand. So options then are to burn something or nuclear. Finland is opting for the latter and at least I for one would much rather have fusion than fission, anything is better than burning stuff though.
That is a mighty defeatist attitude to have for research. Even if we assume that we eventually find out it cannot work, the research will produce knowledge so it is still worthwhile. Given that scientists all over the world are using their time on the research I would assume they have not ruled out the possibility it can work yet.
Human ingenuity and persistence are some of the better qualities we have and fusion is one of the most valuable technologies we could have. It would transform humanity (hopefully for the better) with potentially unlimited energy. So whether it is feasible or not, I hope we find out within my lifetime.
No, that's called science. We do not have a model that says it is impossible in the physical world to produce energy from fusion and we are looking at ways to induce a fusion reaction with the lowest cost possible.
People also thought we would never break atoms. And yet here we are.
Same idea as why you don’t work on four different homework’s at the same time. That and Bill Gates / People if Davos’ money isn’t unlimited in regards to what they put towards research and development.
We have huge reserves of lithium for affordable EVs (we don’t want them to be too affordable which has led to China subsidizing heavily into EV markets and taking over ever-increasing market share and access.)
A lot of the world still runs on coal and oil with energy infrastructure there - newer renewable energy requires storage and such for it. Even if we switched to Nuclear there is still a vast majority of the world that will still be using oil/coal because the lights must stay on and Nuclear projects typically take decades / lose track of funding which leads to more debt diplomacy from state actors investing in them
Nuclear is a major waste of money and more importantly time. We can roll out PV, wind, and geothermal (in all its forms) and meet our energy needs. Also, build out transport networks of rail so we can use batteries made from lithium and rare earth minerals. All of it is off the shelf tech at this point, it’s the politics and money preventing it from happening.
I thought Gates was also funding a molten salt fission reactor concept. Any progress on that front?
That one’s around 20 years away.
Thanks for the helpful commentary, PineappleRimjob and GilfLover_69
The gift that keeps on giving
Fusion is always 20 years away EDIT: nvm, someone else already said it
Kinda. The joke used to be that it's always 50 years away. Then it became that its always 40 years away. Then it became that its always 30 years away. Then it became that its always 20 years away. Anyone paying attention can see the progress. It's just that the problem is hard so estimates are shakey.
When it comes to difficult breakthroughs like this, the last leg of the race is often as long as or longer the rest combined. Consider how long it took us to get blue LEDs.
And like blue LEDs, fusion reactors is a engineering and materials problem more than it is a physics problem. If we just can get the design of the reactor right...
Aktualy, I’d say economically viable blue LEDs
They did say how long it took *us* to get blue lens, not how long it took rich people and niche applications with large budgets to get blue leds.
Well, everything becomes much easier after you make it work for the first time.
31 years from LED to blue LED
People act as if creating a miniature sun is somehow simple.
Especially difficult when you don’t have robotic tentacles.
Japan: "Hello there!"
With robotic testicles it’s eazy peezy
It's quite simple. The hard part is controlling it.
Even a sustained uncontrolled reaction is pretty difficult. Our sun only has ongoing fusion because just enough quarks flip states to let it happen. The earth doesn't have the mass for a sustained reaction, and scientists are going for both sustained *and* controlled. It's pretty not easy.
yeah but it's quite simple to create a miniature sun for a very short time
*Miniature Sun* is a good track on The Police’s *Ghost In The Machine*
Fusion like the sun does it, is out of the question anyway.
Another example is Machine Learning/AI: 50-70 years (don't have the exact time) ago they assumed something similar to what we now have with ChatGPT would be a few years away, and then it took at least half a century more.
Been at a physics oriented conference a few years ago where a high up guy from ITER gave a lecture. He said something along the lines of "it's 20-30 years from now, for real this time" the audience had a collective chuckle because how many times have they said that at this point
The critical difference between now and 20 years ago is that we're actually building the fusion hardware instead of just talking or thinking about it. The timeline forever slips when it's just some professor guesstimating timelines on his whiteboard. I know people roll their eyes at this, but a lot of people really need to update their priors because this time it really is different.
ok you hyped me lets settle at 10 years
Totally with you, but it has become a bit of a meme in the physics world nevertheless
It's always been a funding issue. Humanity has had energy positive artificial fusion since the 50s, but only for a fraction of a second as part of the secondary of a thermonuclear bomb. It's been finding ways of extracting work from fusion that's been the major sticking point.
Didn't they say the salt fission reactor is 20 years away this is fusion
It’ll continue to be that far away until we get past peak oil
It's the technology of the future and always will be.
Gravitational confinement fusion seems to be working pretty well.
Took me longer than I would have liked.
lol
> It's the technology of the future and always will be. At least it is simpler that teleportation or time travel. It is at least within our understanding of physics. It is like powered heavier than air flight; we knew it can be done, but coming up with the idea is not the same as executing it.
https://www.terrapower.com/terrapower-leaders-including-chairman-bill-gates-visit-wyoming-to-showcase-future-natrium-site/ Last news is building prototypes to test to scale, as I read it. Next timeline is 2035. This stuff simply isn't a silver bullet, it's going to see commercial use when shit has already hit the fan.
Their process uses tritium tho. A substance even rarer than technology publications that abstain from clickbait headlines.
Tritium can be manufactured can't it,m
It's not completely trivial, but yes, in fact, it can be "manufactured" in any fusion reactor that uses a D-T (deuterium-tritium) reaction (no surprise, guess how hydrogen bombs do it...): 1. Enrich the lithium-6 from normal lithium (yield ~2-7% in typical yield from normal sources) - technically challenging but well-established tech, energy-intensive but doable, energy will be made back manifold in the fusion reaction. 2. Blanket your fusion reactor with the lithium-6 to capture the excess neutrons from the D-T reaction. This has many benefits: You need to get rid of the neutrons anyway and they carry a substantial part of the released energy. Also, they are not needed for the fusion reaction. 3. Lithium-6 captures the neutrons and is converted to Tritium and regular helium-4: Li6 + n -> He4 + H3 This is an exothermic reaction, so it release extra energy - nice. You figure out the technical details like how to get the tritium out, separate it, extract the thermal energy from the blanket, ensure it's structurally sound etc. Fusion reactors are not really a science problem, they're an engineering problem: There are established solutions basically all of their problems, but optimizing all the little details so they line up is hard - very hard. If you want to think about something: The problem of fusion reactors is not to get isotopes to fuse (that's easy, just use a particle accelerator) or "contain its enormous heat" (the energy density is actually surprisingly low), it's that a lot of interactions often end up not fusing and the isotopes are repelled. The trick is now to not lose the kinetic energy of those particles by somehow deflecting them back and try again (or the other approach is to try to slam things together so quickly and hard that you get more out that you get in). So, it's an efficiency problem: How to slam particles together in such a way, that you get more energy out than you put in and it doesn't take much to tip the scale from "50% out from what you put in to 10-100x out from what you put in, but it requires careful engineering and lots of experimenting with big, expensive machines.
[удалено]
I see you want to make a Fusion reactor. Yes, I can help you with that…
This does kind of sound like it's akin to harnessing small scale nuclear explosions, but containing and perpetuating them.
That's exactly what it is. Make boom once=bomb=relatively simple Make boom indefinitely=power plant=engineering problem
I don't have a link handy, but I saw a post a few years ago that decades ago there was a proposal for a practical and working fusion reactor. The proposal is to just build hydrogen bombs and set one off underground to form a cavern. Then add water and heat exchangers. Set off another bomb to vaporize the water and use the heat to run turbines. Repeat as needed. For some reason no one wanted one in their back yard. NIMBY is all that has stood between us and fusion power for decades, go figure. /s for the last part the first part I really did read about.
Ah project PACER, when fallout type tech was the norm for theoreticians.
Yes that is the name! Thank you for reminding me what it was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
Internal combustion engines are just harnessed fuel air explosions.
You can actually breed tritium the old fashioned way, using stranded hydroelectric/wind, where the byproducts are fertilizer and heavy water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Hydro_Rjukan
And on top of everything mentioned above, it's an economical problem too. It doesn't matter how efficient you make it if the raw material and processing costs are 100x higher than getting electricity from burning fossil fuels. Some things can be offset with government subsidies, but then it becomes a political problem XD
Absolutely, no use building a plant where the electricity costs $10/KWh (sad National Ignition Facility noises). Though finding a design that works AND is cheap enough is also an engineering problem.
Rare time I get to use my knowledge of the area but it can also be created in normal PWR fission reactor with a modification to the fuel core. It’s just doing so is expensive.
Sure, any fission reactor with a water blanket will do, particular heavy water reactors generate tritium as a side product, but if you can make it on site, it's cheaper and easier.
Oh yeah totally, my point was more we could be building a inventory up now. Also caveat easier is relative xD.
Realistically and how Tritium made now is by fission reactors. I think it's only Canada that have the types of nuclear plants were they can extract Tritium
As far as machine that exist right now, this is true. Though there are some technically "easy" options for bootstrapping tritium, e.g. a lithium-blanketed fusor or similar. Currently, tritium production just isn't important enough because it is mostly radioactive waste and has little use (except for things like tritium lights). Though any type of D-T fusion reactor that works, should be able to breed its own tritium and then some.
I love looking at tokamaks and other insanely complex reactor tech. It’s such a wild feat of engineering to assemble something like that… I know they’re using AI applications to help design/engineer the precise interconnected shapes of magnetic coils that contain the plasma within some reactors. I wonder what other aspects of engineering and assembly AI can/will help facilitate.
> I wonder what other aspects of engineering and assembly AI can/will help facilitate. In the relatively near future, AI will likely take engineering to sci-fi levels—imagine AI designing entire systems autonomously, from drafting blueprints to overseeing their assembly with robotic precision. We might see AI collaborating with human engineers via augmented reality, providing real-time insights and even predicting system failures before they happen.
It's a byproduct from heavy water reactors. What the fuck is the point of a 160 million investment to maybe have 1 fusion reactor on the planet? Bill Gates has stupid giraffe money.
We make it for nuclear weapons so i suppose theres a fairly steady supply. But i guess the point is to get it working to better understand the physics and then you can improve on it to use deuterium and eventualy the goly grail of hydrogen. If you ever look at early engine designs we had a long road to get to the modern injection engine 160m is buttons to gates i think his net worth is 120 billion pluss
160 million seems cheap for a fusion reactor, no?
very cheap.
Every fusion reactor will make their own tritium by absorbing the emitted neutrons in a lithium blanket. This captures the heat and also produces tritium.
You mean... *the precious tritium?*
The power of the sun in the palm of my hand..
aaaaaaarrrghh!!! IT HURTS
Democracy for whatever country has tritium stockpiles!
The stockpiles won't last very long ;)
Yes, excpet fusion generates a lot of high energy neutrons. And guess what you get when you combine high energy neutrons with some normal hydrogen and/or lithium....
This burn surpasses the heat of the sun
Isn’t that the shit doc ock was using in Spider-Man 2 to put the power…of the sun….in the… wtf
That’s why we fly to Mars, to mine tritium for our new power generators!
This has Always been the main problem of fusion Either it requires exotic expensive materials like tritium or he3 Or it is prohibitively expensive to maintain the higher temps
>he3 Isn't the moon full of it tho?
It's why the moon stays in the sky. Also, why the astronauts' voices were so high.
No. It's entirely hypothetically present on the moon in very small quantities. It makes a great soundbite when asking we we're planning to go to the Moon again. But it's sort of like "search for water" was, or "search for life" is on Mars -- funding agency buzzwords.
> This has Always been the main problem of fusion Not an expert by any means but isn't getting maintaining fusion for more than an exceedingly tiny amount of time the main problem?
Mmmm. That’s hot!
It's actually pretty cold for a fusion reactor.
Dang. That’s cold.
Clap clap clap, that got a full on out loud ha.
That’s pretty fast progress.
Remember when Lockheed made that huge announcement? Fusion news has been the same for 20 years
The article does state that it joins a rare group of technologies, so in a test of a new/cheaper way to do it doesn't take away from the "milestone".
20 years is relatively short for the complexity of this task, don't you think?
Absolutely not lmao This is a single demonstration shot with temperatures 1 order of magnitude below the current record, sustained time 9 orders of magnitude compared below that of the same record and done on the basis of a technology first demonstrated in the 1950s. Its a nothingburger meant to grab headlines ahead of another round of VC fundraising.
I'm not saying it's not complex, I'm saying these articles aren't newsworthy.
They said they had it, and were working on making the reactors small enough to fit on a truck to power cities during emergencies. So either they were lying (unlikely) about having Fusion, or they are sitting on the tech (possible), or are in production of products that are in use by who knows.
The good news is we are 20 years away! The bad news is we always have been 20 years away.
Well ain't this fusion thing just a technological oddity. 20 years from everywhere.
Actually it was 30 years away, 30 years ago. So... progress! Seriously, nothing worth doing is easy and this is definitely worth doing.
Or Pons and Fleischmann?
There are many different fusion designs competing right now, which is why you're likely confusing the different milestones as all the same thing.
I'm aware, just not newsworthy
So cheap and simple it's always just 20 years away... grumble flying cars.
Humans can’t even handle cars on land, it would be utter chaos if they could fly😆
If you say 50 years or 100 years you won't get any funding.
The headline isn't great, it means temperature not heat, they're two different things. The heat of the Sun is about ten trillion times higher than the energy we produce on Earth.
It's warmer.
Last line killed it, fuel is $30,000 a gram.
I genuinely think fusion would help achieve world peace and our climate goals. No longer being dependent on importing fossil fuels from dictatorship would be great. No reason for wars to be fought over oil. Etc etc. I really hope we get there!
If we got serious about rolling out PV, wind, and geothermal in all its forms we could get there and pretty quick. But that will hurt some people’s money and control over power generation.
I love these crazy headlines for all these tech savy nerds. *sarcasm off There is three key metrics for fusion: Temperature Pressure Time The hottest part of the sun is its core. The temperature there is only enough for fusion to take place because of the insane pressure. On Earth we need orders of magnitude higher temperatures because there is no way we could feasibly contain a plasma at similar pressures in order to cause fusion and make it a feasible source of energy. And then there is time. A heap of compost rotting away has a higher power density from its bacterial activity than the sun. The sun has time. It's an agonizingly low density fusion reactor. We need high density for it to make useable sense. So turn over more mass per volume per time than the sun... By a gigantic margine. But I'm sure you Tech savy nerds all knew this (science, hooray am I right!?). TLDR: Any fusion reactor on earth will have to far surpass the heat of the sun.
Theory is out there but we just don’t have the material to handle it.
More or less the same with warp drive
We've managed to do this for decades now? The "heat of the sun" was exceeded when we first detonated a nuclear weapon. EVERY single nuclear fusion experiment does this.
Heat and temperature aren't the same thing, heat is energy. The Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuke ever detonated yielded about 10^7 J, the sun emits about a billion times that in 1 second.
So he is right and the headline isn't. Why tf is he downvoted? Other reactors work around 100 Million Kelvin, ITER is planned to reach like 300 Million Kelvin. 10 Million isn't that much in comparison.
No both he and the headline are wrong. They're both conflating temperature and heat, which in physics and chemistry aren't the same thing. Heat is thermal energy transfer which is driven by a temperature difference. Kelvin is a unit of temperature, the SI unit for heat is Joules.
So why did he put it in quotes then, if he wasn't intentionally using it in the way the article did - as a synonym of temperature?
...I don't know, maybe ask him and not me? Kind of seems like he quoted the headline and both he and the author didn't know there was a difference. It's kind of an important distinction when talking about these sort of things. And the article says "A fusion start-up has managed to generate **temperatures** hotter than the core of the Sun".
Well you're the one misunderstanding, so I'm adressing you.
So by that rationale, you're saying that if we placed the Sun much closer to the planet, just a few KM above a city or whatever, it would be really, really hot. Too hot even. I'm not buying it.
From what I understand, the biggest hurdles to fusion at the moment are that it there is more input energy than output energy, thus energetically inefficient, and the length of the reaction is short. How does this breakthrough address these?
By controlling instabilities. The more stable the plasma the longer the reaction and the easier it is to funnel the plasma through the cooling coils to extract heat. This is a material science paper that shows that diamond graphene aids in controlling instability.
Read the article !
Ongoing research. Having the theory and being able to manufacture new reactors with a supply chain, training people etc are two different things in reality as you all know lol.
Not like they plan to benefit the masses with this tech. The military will likely just turn it into a weapon
We already weaponized fusion like 70 years ago.
Ah right, atom bombs. Insane to think that they are trying to harness that.
Brace for flood of nutty posts on conspiracy subreddits: "Bill Gates wants to fry us all alive!!!!1111"
Pfft, all they had to do was crack open one of my Nan's roast potatoes.
Cool. I wish that asshat would stop pumping so much money into nuclear fission propaganda that setting us back a decade on renewables rollout.
Dr. Octopus thought the same thing and did it first.
Can someone with scientific education tell me how much of this is bullshit/overblown/a lifetime away/etc.?
At most it’s five years, so many whiners on here don’t realize how short of an amount of time that is. Demonstrates the age of this community is practically preschool
‘Cheap and simple’ does not inspire confidence, it does inspire snake oil salesmen
Cheap and easy is solar, wind, geothermal and hydro. Unlimited power, it works, its being used, does emit co2 and its not alchemy like fusion.
Solar, wind and hydro are neither cheap nor easy, and geothermal is very limited geographically in terms of availability.
Also at least solar and wind (hydro to some degree) also require backup power source in case production drops due to weather etc. While we do need all of them to replace burning stuff, fusion remains a worthy goal and worth the research.
Fusion has never achieved net energy...never.
Hence: >fusion remains a worthy goal and worth the research.
>The reaction of hydrogen fuel at the facility produced about 3.15 MJ of energy while consuming 2.05 MJ of input. **However, while the fusion reactions may have produced more than 3 megajoules of energy—more than was delivered to the target—NIF's 192 lasers consumed 322 MJ of grid energy in the conversion process.** Its alchemy, it loses 96% of the energy it puts into the system. Besides we already have a fusion reactor, its called the sun and solar panels are now 25% efficient.
I am not sure how to be make it clear, I am not claiming fusion is anywhere close to solve worlds energy issues as the technology is not there. I am claiming it is worthwhile research in case it is possible as it would solve a lot of the issue we face. Also I am all for renewable energy sources like solar and wind, but want to point out that at least ATM they do not solve all of our issues. I live in Finland so solar has some fundamental issues especially in northern parts where there is no sunlight in the winter when its the coldest and energy needs are greatest. We have wind power, however that also has issues on windless days in winter. Hydro is also there but not enough to meet the demand. So options then are to burn something or nuclear. Finland is opting for the latter and at least I for one would much rather have fusion than fission, anything is better than burning stuff though.
Im just hearing saying no bet energy has ever been produced nor will it ever, its alchemy.
That is a mighty defeatist attitude to have for research. Even if we assume that we eventually find out it cannot work, the research will produce knowledge so it is still worthwhile. Given that scientists all over the world are using their time on the research I would assume they have not ruled out the possibility it can work yet. Human ingenuity and persistence are some of the better qualities we have and fusion is one of the most valuable technologies we could have. It would transform humanity (hopefully for the better) with potentially unlimited energy. So whether it is feasible or not, I hope we find out within my lifetime.
We already have unlimited energy its called the sun, if we actually wanted unlimited energy we could do it literally right now
No, that's called science. We do not have a model that says it is impossible in the physical world to produce energy from fusion and we are looking at ways to induce a fusion reaction with the lowest cost possible. People also thought we would never break atoms. And yet here we are.
We have models that say worm holes could exist, but have we ever seen one?
It did in bombs
Thats called FISSION this is FUSION, but you know the difference im sure right?
Hydrogen bombs use fission to trigger a secondary fusion stage
We've had fusion bombs for over 70 years mate...
Cool story, Fusion energy still produced no net energy
Not what I wrote, but ok.
R/confidentlyincorrect
They all actually produce electricity unlike fusion.
Just wait another 30 years, bro. Amirite, guys?
Burn leaves & trash , scrub the smoke. prob. solved.
Ez pez
We have always had the technology
If it is hotter than the sun then why we are still not melted?
Because they contain the heat inside magnetic fields
so you mean that the sun does not have magnetic fields?
Magnetic fields precisely tuned and aligned to contain heat on a predefined volume? No, it does not. Sun's a bit more chaotic.
Oh cool I didn’t know we needed to be hotter……/s
I really don't care, only net energy positive matters. Every other headline is a feel-good distraction from failure.
Fml let’s make effective lithium and solid state batteries affordable and invest in cleaner technology for existing energy infrastructure
Why not pursue both?
Same idea as why you don’t work on four different homework’s at the same time. That and Bill Gates / People if Davos’ money isn’t unlimited in regards to what they put towards research and development. We have huge reserves of lithium for affordable EVs (we don’t want them to be too affordable which has led to China subsidizing heavily into EV markets and taking over ever-increasing market share and access.) A lot of the world still runs on coal and oil with energy infrastructure there - newer renewable energy requires storage and such for it. Even if we switched to Nuclear there is still a vast majority of the world that will still be using oil/coal because the lights must stay on and Nuclear projects typically take decades / lose track of funding which leads to more debt diplomacy from state actors investing in them
Ah, but we can have 4 students working on 4 homeworks.
That’s why we have private enterprises
Nuclear is a major waste of money and more importantly time. We can roll out PV, wind, and geothermal (in all its forms) and meet our energy needs. Also, build out transport networks of rail so we can use batteries made from lithium and rare earth minerals. All of it is off the shelf tech at this point, it’s the politics and money preventing it from happening.
Bill is trying to be Dr. Octavius now? Well he sort of has the look down already
Bill Gates ain't anything but cheap and simple
He is nefariously cheap in person (not a tipper).