if china develops a fusion reactor before the west capitalism is fuckin over lmao
Free energy + desalination + indoor farming = enough food to feed every climate refugee.
I really hope Xi pushes the communism button around 2050. Communism is what we need to avoid climate-change induced WWIII, because capitalism sure isn't fixing shit.
libs dying in their shitty SpaceXtm space colonies while we're rebuilding the world
imagine thinking going to mars is an idea. like, genuinely tell me. Because i thought THE NUMBER ONE THING THAT IS OF ISSUE IS WEIGHT.
That would enable Africa to be completely independent, right? We could also stop desertification like that, probably.
Hold your horses, Africa still has to pay the West back for all of the education, infrastructure, industry, cultural uplifting, and genocide they graciously offered the simple people of Africa.
hate to break it to you but xi won't be president for the next 30 years.
he doesn't necessarily have to die but when he's 97 he will probably have retired.
How so? It's not like we exported all of the manufacturing to the place that will have all the free energy. That'd be the one thing we didn't want to happen.
This experiment is actually part of ITER, but an international effort achieving breakeven fusion would still be cool as hell
almost everything fusion related is ITER though due to the international treaties in place
please mr president i just want a crumb of state capacity directed at anything other than profits and imperial violence, please...
energy so cheap that you dont need foreign imports for energy. just give this to every third world nation and capitalism is ruined. im talking a near infinite supply of energy, and the resources to repair the reactor would be relatively common, enough to keep us going for millions of years
this is why nuclear research and nuclear development is so important. humanity cannot sustain civilization and industry forever without it. we will eventually run out of good hydrocarbons, good lithium, and so on. and it takes more energy to create these things than it does to burn it. so without nuclear research, widespread industrial civilization cannot exist forever.
the important thing about fusion is if we get it running, we can put some energy in and get more out of it, which will allow us to create things like lithium without an energy deficit. no other technology allows this level of flexibility. we're relying on energy from natural processes that formed lithium, hydrocarbons, etc. over the course of thousands or millions of years. but we'd be getting abundant energy quickly. and if we have hundreds of thousands of years to sit around and research, we might even come up with something better without a time crunch that other technologies give us.
simple explanation (very unperfect): https://youtu.be/mZsaaturR6E
longer explanation that is a bit better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPS-epGPJmg
yep. pouring resources into it is very sensible if you think long term. but no, we like to think for the next quarter, the next 2-4 years.
I don't really feel like we should sustain industry and civilization in the forms we're familiar with. They need to be replaced.
Daily reminder that capitalism never innovated and innovation is a product of public funding.
So how is America going to complete against these sorts of advancements? The "free market" requires the government to innovate and America just doesn't seem like it's willing to invest the money
It literally can’t. Our incentive structures are all fucked up
What was that thing about capitalism sowing the seeds of its own destruction? I'm actually feeling optimistic today, it's wild
“the main impediment to capital is capital” - a theme that repeats over and over in history
Worth noting is that ITER is an international project that has a a fair few US scientists and some governmental support: https://www.ornl.gov/content/us-iter
That said, it could have TONS more. What is we funded it like the F-35?
Yeah I wonder about that whenever news about fusion power comes up. The whole thing about fusion power being perpetually 20+ years off seems to be predicated on how much funding it gets. It would be pretty messed up if, this whole friggin time, we could have already been using fusion to replace fossil fuels if that money had been going to the DOE for research instead of the Pentagon (and equivalent agencies worldwide).
"What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers"
NASA was created after the US got spooked by Sputnik and that's the only instance I can think of off hand, but that was in the 1960s where the public had expectations for the state to do things. The state now just throws money at cops and military because the rest of it has been hollowed out.
I think we could see the US crap out some shitty half-privatized monstrosity of a program headed by various fail-sons and fail-daughters of the ruling class, but mostly we'll probably see the ruling class pump funding into the CIA and other spy orgs to try to sabotage it while, as you said, throwing money at cops to suppress people at home.
That sounds more like it. Some kind of public facing front for scientific development led by Howard Schultz's kids or something but it just becomes a pointless non-profit where they scam money around for 5 years and then dissolve quietly after accomplishing nothing.
they're going to get shocked maybe try to move some funding there, but then they'll get paid by someone who's paid by someone who's paid by someone who's paid by someone who's paid by Chevron to never do it. Isn't the free market fun!
I think I saw this in a Spiderman once, so this is clearly stolen tech from the US, checkmate China
Yeah I don't like where this is going, this is how you get Doctor Octopus.
What the hell material can even contain something 120 million degrees? Surely that’s enough to melt basically anything.
Don’t tell me they’re using magnets those sick fucks
donut magnet
It’s worse than I could possibly have imagined. Thank you for alerting me to this
Don’t let the cops hear bout this. Or actually, tell them all about the million degree donuts
:sicko-beaming:
I mean potentially? It doesn’t really fit into the current paradigm of rocketry, strapping bigass boosters to a tube, and even if they did have all that electricity what would it be used to power? I think it could be a step towards making the moon and Mars more convinient to reach but a fusion reactor alone won’t get anywhere.
It’s 100% a step along the way, but the relationship between emf and gravity has to become more defined before we get Star Trek irl.
nuclear lightbulb engines are sexy. and i love seeing radiators on spacecraft in movies... it's so rare but awesome when you do (i think the Martian and maybe Avatar had spacecraft with radiators visible?)
Lenin walks around the world The Sun sets like a scar. Between the darkness and the dawn, There rises a red star.
How close are we to something sustainable? I just googled that sun's core is 15 million celsius, so 120 million for 101 seconds doesn't seem half bad
This is a huge step towards doing it sustainably. Only a few years ago, it was impossible to reach temperatures like this for more than a fraction of a second, and now we're rapidly approaching two minutes. It's likely that in just a few years, it will be possible to do for hours at a time, if not indefinitely.
Less than a year ago, the record was on KSTAR, and that was 20 seconds. A year before it was 8.
That's correct, ITER is designed to be a research reactor, and will spend the first few years of its life being regularly serviced and doing lots of interesting science, then sealed up and run more consistently on hydrogen at first, then on a 50:50 mixture of tritium and deuterium. The interesting thing about ITER is that it's expected to have a Q ratio (or breakeven ratio) of 10 or more, meaning that 10 times as much energy should be made as should be used.
China also has plans for the CFETR, likely their next Tokamak, which will be slightly smaller in scale and energy output compared to ITER initially to do slightly different research and validation, but then be upgraded to more than double the energy output of ITER, and should have a Q ratio of between 12 and 15. Projects like STEP in the UK and CFETR are paving the way for the DEMO class reactors, which will be jointly designed and built in most of the ITER countries and will produce a continuous 2 gigawatts, assuming they don't completely leapfrog DEMO.
God that’s so fucking cool. Where can I read more about iter?
Shit, I'm not really sure. Most of the info I know about it came from talking with a friend in the nuclear physics department at my university, and from double-checking info against ITER.org
