Researchers were able to produce 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules used to power the experiment.
Now we must wait to see if this is an aberration and can be done at scale. I'm ready for the world to change :party-parrot-science:
Government workers got the goods, fuck you capitalism, great 'innovation' you have :fidel-salute:
i hope China yoinks it. free energy :lets-fucking-go:
If third world had access to this, there would be far less need for foreign currency reserves.
i wrote this further upthread before reading yours. great minds think alike.
my prediction purely based on a book i’m working on: Chinese will crack the commercial reactors first and create highly modular reactors to sell to any nation that wants them. this will finally kill the U.S. dollar.
and china will start mining He3 from lunar regolith. you only need to send a few tons back a year to fuel a few large countries or many small ones.
I can't help but think that the US will do everything in its power not to let this benefit workers. Best case scenario: they let some fucking for profit company copyright the technology like they did with mRNA vaccines.
Yeah, I was reading the headline like :CommiePOGGERS: but then I saw 'US' and then I became more :thinking-about-it:
Of course. That's the purpose of government research in the US. R&D is extremely expensive with uncertain results. Better to let the government spend public money on all the hard parts then give it to private corporations who can ruthlessly exploit it for maximum profit.
It was wild taking my biological sciences ethics class and they said pretty much explicitly that that’s the US’s strategy and that it’s a good thing. And I was like “Hey maybe the profit motive being involved in science research is bad, actually” and most people in the class looked at me like I’d grown 3 heads.
They also didn’t appreciate when I said “No actually you having a PhD does not make your labor inherently more valuable and in fact a lot of the work would get done without you but none would get done without the people actually doing your experiments.” Academics are such pretentious fucking narcissistic babies I hate them so much
Have to recommend Jeff Schmidt’s Disciplined Minds if you haven’t read it. I’m not even involved in STEM but I’m interested in science and live in an area with a lot of highly paid scientists who are absolutely unbearable human beings. That book helped me understand why they’re such fucking pieces of shit.
The US energy sector is a for-profit enterprise and they'll do whatever gets them the most money. They don't build fision power plants because the capital costs are so huge that, by the time it pays itself off, they could've used the profits of an oil-based plant to build another oil based plant, and the CEO in charge when the project started has retired.
The capital startup costs of a tokomak-style fusion reactor are almost certain to be even higher than those for a fission power plant, so even though it's a great technology, it's still dead in the water under the capitalist system.
But this is apparently inertial confinement fusion, which everybody said has no chance of getting there first, so I have no fucking clue what the economics of that are.
Just clarifying that the net gain in energy in this experiment isn't in reference to the actual total amount of energy the facility used to achieve ignition. What they mean is that the fusion reaction produced more energy than the amount of energy the laser imparted onto the fuel. Inefficiencies in producing the laser beam and any energy the laser failed to impart onto the fuel are unaccounted for.
That said, this experiment isn't meant to account for those inefficiencies because it's not supposed to be a practical reactor design. Rather, it's just a test bed for finding out if it's actually possible to achieve a net gain over the energy imparted onto the fuel, and it looks like it achieved exactly that. So while we're still a ways off from applying it to commercial power generation, it's a very exciting breakthrough nonetheless!
inside you there are two wolves:
:bloomer: if real, it is a huge tool for fighting climate change that even capitalists should support
:doomer: if real, capitalists will find ways to enclose it
:desolate: if real, will have some even worse unforeseen climate consequences
The only possible issues I could foresee are from mining rare earth materials, which we do already and is already horrendous but less bad than climate change because its still stuck to a local area. Desalination plants might also be in the supply chain for fuel and they arent the best for the environment either, but thats still a local issue especially when considering how little fuel you need to maintain the reaction.
On the one hand I hope you're right but on the other, have we ever really seen all the consequences ahead of time? Like who in the hell saw microplastics coming?
Like who in the hell saw microplastics coming?
People in the 70s when plastics first became a thing used everywhere :yea:
have we ever really seen all the consequences ahead of time?
Yup. You can always find someone a century or eight ago who laid this all out in terrifying detail. Some guy made an offhand reference to the greenhouse gas effect in the 1880s, a guy in the 1920s ran the math and said it was going to eventually be a problem, and in the 1970s Exxon did a study, proved it was apocalyptic, and then spent the next fifty years doing everything in their power to cover it up.
Lead in gasoline? They knew it was toxic the day leaded gasoline was invented, they just couldn't prove how toxic it was. So for like seventy years the lead companies would say "Well its' not that bad" and the researchers would say "it's bad we just can't quanitfy exactly how bad" and the issue would get put off for a few years and by the time it was finally banned we had the Boomers.
Lots of shit like this. Penicillin resistant bacteria? It's been a thing at least my whole life. Some doctors in my family were describing exactly what ended up happening with Covid decades ago and basically everyone in the medical profession understood that globalization and cheap air travel would eventually result in novel pandemics society would be completely unable to cope with. It was obvious it would happen. The question was when and how bad?
Communists have been screaming about fascism in the US since 1945, most of us just didn't listen.
Rubber (rubber blight), Helium (helium is a product of radioactive decay and takes like millions of years to regenerate), a bunch of rare minerals, and a couple of other things all face serious, catastrophic shortages. All rubber trees are clones and one blight disease could wipe out natural rubber production. Helium use goes up but there will never be a new natural source of helium on earth on any human time scale.
There are so, so, so many foreseeable disasters with apocalyptic outcomes that are simply a matter of "When?"
Lead in gasoline? They knew it was toxic the day leaded gasoline was invented, they just couldn’t prove how toxic it was. So for like seventy years the lead companies would say “Well its’ not that bad” and the researchers would say “it’s bad we just can’t quanitfy exactly how bad” and the issue would get put off for a few years and by the time it was finally banned we had the Boomers.
You can't just bring this up and not mention Clair Patterson and his tireless efforts to expose the dangers of the widespread use of lead. He's largely the reason why they couldn't hide it anymore.
The only possible issues I could foresee
This belies either a lack of imagination or a lack of chronic depression. Imagine a world where fusion powered laser battleships are used to defend oil rigs from greenpeace activists.
Its possible oil can be phased out but yeah its more likely we'll have oil while having fusion battleships and submarines because this tech is gonna be pretty large scaled, not small like able to fit in a car, for a long time
so if not a small car, maybe we could make bigger cars, and maybe hook them up to an electrical grid. maybe even have special metal lanes for them to improve traffic :train-shining:
hmm yeah true :thinking-about-it:
in fact we can do that now with nuclear energy
Fusion does produce radioactive "waste", not to the degree that fission does and the half life is only like 15 years (tritium). Now, it's not actual waste because tritium is also a fuel source for deutarium-tritium fusion lol. The actual waste product is just helium, there are radioactive isotopes if helium but they all decay very very rapidly. Fusion apparently creates lots of secondary radioactive waste, as in waste produced not by the actual process like fission but somehow by the generation of power - I don't know exactly how but it does get brought up by scientists.
Deuterium is super common, you can get it here just in the atmosphere. Interestingly, tritium could be relatively abundant on the moon - meaning there could be a commercial reason to do frequent moon visits or even colonize. So, if you like sci fi there you go. Right now they get the tritium from some process involving lithium, so I guess we'll see which capital decides is more profitable. Would be nice to have world socialism and we decide based on which causes the least harm...
Fusion apparently creates lots of secondary radioactive waste, as in waste produced not by the actual process like fission but somehow by the generation of power
It's my understanding that nuclei in the walls of the reaction chamber absorb many of the high energy neutrons produced by the reaction, transmuting atoms into radioactive isotopes within the previously inert material. This process is called neutron activation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_activation
Even fission doesnt really produce 'waste', its still useful we're just idiots and don't build anything to use it with because we have an addiction for building nuclear missiles. And yeah, the waste from fusion is actually even more useful than what you get from fission.
Chinese at least do useful things with fission 'waste'
if helium but they all decay very very rapidly
the longest-lived being 6He with a half-life of 806.7 milliseconds.
Building enough fusion reactors to power the entire world but only using them to power machines that rip carbon out of the minerals in the ground and provide the energy to form the chemical bonds to produce synthetic oil that we'd then burn to power everything else would be a pretty funny bit
Bloomberg literally just now interviewing Christie Todd Whitman, and creaming their pants that she admitted there's room for the private sector. Can't even wait for the ink to dry before trying to insert themselves in the conversation.
Military Industrial Complex gonna be on this shit like :posadas:
Seriously, I want to believe this would actually be used to help the people of the world but I've learned not to expect good things when they would make sense
I'm just hoping there arent too many rare materials we're gonna have to kill brown people over. Though odds are any materials used in this are coming from China who is too big to fight
Xi turns out to be a big fan of the series, decides to invade Alaska for the bit
We already have fusion bombs. Worst they can do with this is power aircraft carriers and shit
My first thought on hearing this, but not for the creation of gundams, but the scenario of Gundam 00 in which the major world nations built solar arrays in space and then used apace elevators to being an endless supply of energy to earth ... which was then used in much the same manner IMF works now to put third world countries under the thumb of the US.
I feel like I need to buy Gunpla to make sure that anime like this can be funded
I'm really enjoying this show so far. Also just finished the OG Mobile Suit Gundam from 79. That was really good.
I really need to give the older stuff another chance. My problem is, Gundam Wing was one of my first forays into anime and it kinda set the bar visually. The aesthetics of the older stuff turns me off and pulls me out of the story. I gotta bite the bullet one of these days though. I hear good things
everything after the 1979 original is really good looking. if you watch the compilation movies they should get you up to speed for zeta, and they don't look that bad
We are going to get the hell world of Gundam Universal Century, but no cool robots
Okay but that would actually be a good thing- much less pollution and the military would have to put in a lot more man hours to building and maintaining much more complex equipment, harming their readiness- which is why it won't happen
Yea that's also keeping me going. I swear if I die before the likes of bezos or god forbid Kissinger I'll be so mad
"And if you put some buckyballs in the fusion reactor, it actually makes a bigger explosion than a nuke :quokka-smile: !"
aww yeah love me some buckyballs, too bad they banned the good ones because a few thousand stupid kids ate them and went to the ER.
We still get to watch the fash implode while gloating about how they've won forever, that's pretty funny
Super magical science where if you shoot the right atoms in the right way with a giant laser, you get more energy out of it than you put in. Which means if you put in a fuckton of energy in you can get x amount more out, which is fantastic.
Fun thing with this science is the amount of fuel required is very small. A cup of the right sort of water could power a home for hundreds of years.
You essentially create a very tiny sun that is much hotter than any sun.
You essentially create a very tiny sun that is much hotter than any sun
is this used to boil water to spin a rotor still?
Yeah it generates heat which goes through a vent to turn a whatever, but thats actually the excess energy produced through heat. A lot of it is absorbed and immediately put back into the grid because the plasma carries an electric current itself and you can just store it back in.
:sicko-speeeeen: lmao its always gonna be making something spin innit
plasma directly imparting current that is some suitably sci-fi shit tho hell yeah
2050 for first ITER operations, if I remember correctly. And ITER isn't supposed to be a commercial reactor.
Great thing about absurdly abundant energy - it makes carbon recapture somewhat viable.
Somehow it will end up under the control of current energy ghouls. Or Jeff Bezos.
Dammnit we don't have a Lex 2000 graphic for Bezos. :lord-bezos-amused:
I read a book where the there was a dystopian Amazon hellscape and the twist was at the end there was cold fusion, but it was kept secret because it would potentially disrupt the Amazon business.
"The government invented cold fusion in 19XX0s but Exxon covered it up and killed everyone who independently invented it" has been a meme for at least decades.
It’s a useful idea/meme/copypasta/conspiracy because the truth at the heart of it is that those in power want to keep in power.
This had better be real and not just lies like the Alzheimer’s treatment was.
I remember getting furious at this story. Still am pretty angry. My grandmother died of Alzheimers. Fucking horrendous disease.
Or that one organic semiconductor scandal where a guy just lied and made up results and since people were absolutely desperate to hear of a breakthrough and also the guy was polite about it no one called him out for several years even though he would literally just copy graphs between papers or ask people "Hey what should I do to make this look more legit?" when asked about a problem with his made up data.
what were the margins of error on those numbers, i'm not getting excited until i know :live-slug-reaction:
we'll know the specifics when they release the paper. this is sort of a 'holy shit' moment where some scientists did something spectacular and couldnt keep it quiet. more info tomorrow and paper will be released later
Shower thought: maybe with advances in fusion we could replicate the fusing of heavy elements from more abundant lighter elements and thus build the resources like tritium and create an infinite energy loop.
that is sort of the idea, yes.
the energy will be so abundant that we can do wild shit like making dwindling resources like helium as a byproduct of our energy production cycles.
I really hope this pans out, we, as a species, could really use some good news.
Chief scientist for this project:
“While our team is very excited about this result, because it is a hard won science/engineering achievement, I don’t see it as being useful for a clean energy source. The learning from our result may, however, be relevant,” Hurricane tells CNBC.
“I am very concerned, in general, about fusion being hyped as a solution for climate change,” he says. “My personal opinion is that fusion energy is still a future technology, so it would be foolish for people bet the planet on fusion addressing the immediate climate concerns.”
This is also inertial confinement fusion, which is far less likely to end up usable for sustained power generation than magnetic confinement. These researchers are mostly in it for weapons shit, unfortunately.
We've had fusion bombs for ages. "But we've already got the bombs" is probably one of the reasons the nuclear funding dried up honestly.
true but they are all fission catalyzed fusion weapons. the holy grail is pure fusion weapons.
imagine this: pure fusion weapons would basically create an entirely new type of warfare. something using an advanced conventional explosive to create enough pressure to detonate pressurized fusion fuel without the fission explosion first. no uranium enrichment needed. likely fusion fuel could be made from water and a bit of lithium.
opens up nuclear weapons to basically every nation with even the smallest national research/engineering capabilities. because the bomb design will get out.
oh and if they finally crack the design now you have nuclear weapons capable of detonating with any yield you want as well as being built incredibly compact. no fallout only a single neutron burst means they will likely be used frequently since collateral damage is limited to the weapon's blast radius.
of course, the application is to strap down a spy to a table and use the comically large laser to slowly cut the table in half as it slowly moves up towards the spy's groin
dont worry we already have military applications for the lasers that we use in this...
