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:
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?
People in the 70s when plastics first became a thing used everywhere :yea:
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?"
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.
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
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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...
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'
the longest-lived being 6He with a half-life of 806.7 milliseconds.