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 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.
:cryptocurrency:
what the US will actually use it for
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.