:bloomer:
This doesn't look like it's around the corner either. Hopefully the EROEI will be much better then ITER's.
ITER say it will take 50MW for 500MW and that is just starting up the reactor. Not all the embodied energy in building it and future reactors that seem to take a lifetime to build. Just starting the reactor. That is a EROEI of less then 10. It's a money pit for contractors. Nuclear fission has a mean EROEI of 14 with some saying as high as 75 with centrifuge enrichment. What's more exciting from China is their innovations in fission like the DHR-400, a simple nuclear reactor like those in universities which will be heating Haiyang city by the end of the year.
Meanwhile in the west we are left to take out "green loans" for insulation and heat pumps for housing we can't afford. It's no wonder people have put so much effort into denying climate change, I think they are the only ones to comprehend how miserable emissions cuts will be in the west.
I want some nerd to make a calculus of how much carbon would be cut in the US by just running new bus lines.
Anyways, even if fusion is not the answer, it's cool they did it. Like, all that money is probably just a fraction of what is wasted in, say, some years of Hollywood. At least this feels like a humanity milestone
Would it be that much of a milestone if we can already get more energy out of a breeder reactor or a well placed wind farm or even solar panels?
Sure, but it's not about something being useful, is about actually having done it. Like going to the fucking moon or Mars. It's stupid, and there are a shitton of priorities, but it feels good to have collectively done it
The reality is that the breakeven point isn't the end goal, and it never was, but the fusion ignition point only achieved this year is a significant place along the development path of something that has great potential to be many dozens if not hundreds of times more effective and efficient than a breeder reactor or a renewable energy farm. I think your mistake is thinking that the current realistically early phase research is the end point, rather than a stepping stone moving forwards. While yes, fusion research started in the 50s, most of it was very iterative and fringe, so there weren't a lot of significant breakthroughs until really the last 20 or so years, with most mainstream funding and research only coming online in the 2010s.
This is still the early days of research actually being viable, so it would be unwise to say that there is no point. Science often takes decades to pay off. You're essentially looking at the equivalent of 1952's solar panels after 75 years of photovoltaic research and saying "What's the point!? They're so expensive and inefficient and they probably don't even break even with the energy required to build them, we can get so much more renewable energy from natural biomass or even biofuels than with these photovoltaics, we should be focusing on wood gasifiers which produce so much more energy!"
These things take time, but hopefully they'll be worth the wait.
Considering the carbon produced in extraction of resources to build and power the vehicles, along with building and maintaining all the supporting infrastructure, though, it might actually be quite a bit.
yeah but regardless fusion is necessary research for the future of humanity. we might get some decent fusion in our lifetimes but i doubt it will power most things even then, purely just because it might take them decades to build the infrastructure. fission is really the goat that we need right now.
but shitting on new tech as outlandish is weird, people would say computers were garbage back in the 50s too. the tech here is promising and worth billions, even trillions of research, purely because it will secure the energy needs of humanity should it become efficient. which is kinda the big deal. same thing happened with computers and other tech. sure it sucks when inefficient but man is it great when it is
People believing fusion is close is one of the best bits on this site
China achieving fusion before 2030 by some miracle is the only 'good ending' left for humanity. Fuck yeah I'm on the hopium train.
idk, I'm afraid it would give capitalism legs and we'll end up in a dystopic nightmare. let capitalism's contradictions end it here.
i love how the head scientist was just like 'gatling guns are cool so we made a laser gatling gun that shoots temperatures equal to the sun' :mao-aggro-shining:
