Is it only me that had the C&C Generals Nuke Cannon tagline going off in their heads saying BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN in a deliberate voice and a heavy Chinese accent?
“I am big!”
This day is to be remembered.
This diagram shows the LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) for various technologies - i.e. how much does one kWh of electricity cost if you divide the total number of generated kWh by the total cost of the power plant.
“utility-scale solar” means large-scale flat-area solar parks
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
I doubt it; It’s not only about technology costs but also about advantages like decentralization. If you can generate your own electricity in your own back-yard, you’re much more independent than if you’re dependent on large-scale fusion power. Because that will necessarily be very large-scale and centralized because nobody can set up a fusion reactor in their own back yard.
Solar is technically fusion though
Solar is Fusion as a Service or FaaS technology.
Just a reminder that even if you have a fusion generator that reaches over unity, untill you can fit that in the space and weight of a car or truck engine, you still need a lot of oil, and you still need a lot of rare earth minerals for batteries.
Either that or a whole new transit / economic trade paradigm.
Not saying that it would not be great to be able to retire coal oil and gas power plants from the grid as a theoretical over unity fusion power source someday becomes a thing…
But I am saying its not a cure-all.
you still need a lot of oil, and you still need a lot of rare earth minerals for batteries.
If the power is free, you can synthesize hydrogen or even hydrocarbons from captured CO2.
Seems obvious to pick a new transit paradigm for personal cars, obviously trucks can stay.
Also in the current era, coal plants already have a good replacement: nuclear. At least for bigger countries, but most are shutting down rather than improving. This might be (hopefully) starting to change though in recent times.
Also I don’t know what fusion power is, I shall be on wikipedia now. Good day sir.
If China has managed to do something that scientists genuinely thought was impossible why are there several nuclear fusion research facilities all over the planet? If it’s impossible that seems like a bad use of resources.
I think maybe that scientists thought it was entirely possible, and that’s why they were trying to do it.
Scientist: “Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.”
Newspaper: “Scientist confirms that scientific discoveries are meaningless.”
Journalist reads “limit” and clickbaits it, typical
There are a bunch of things to research on fusion. Maybe they just thought this specific thing was out of reach, but were still trying to do other things.
Like the PvsNP computer science problem. Most computer scientists believe its impossible to make a polynomial algorithm that solves the traveling salesman problem, so most dont even try. But we dont know for certain that its actually impossible.
I really hate how so many of these articles feel like they need to dumb it down with this “artificial sun” imagery. It feels so condescending. I’d rather learn more about the latest progress with nuclear fusion
Most Americans read at or below a 6th grade level
So we hear. But the world is not America and this is a British newspaper.
articles such as this one usually are optimized for their audience, you just aren’t the audience. that’s ok. I’m rarely the audience either :) a quick search should give you what you’re looking for https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040
Cool, thanks. So much more readable
It isnt optimized. Its gibberish written just to give some weight to the headline. People do bad jobs at science popularization too.
article didn’t say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?
While a plasma is far from an ideal gas:
pV=nRT
p is the pressure, T the temperature, when you increase the pressure while keeping everything else the same, you increase the temperature aswell. The density here is the colloquial term for pressure.
Plasma is made from basicly over charging a gas with electrons the gas getting all pissy about having those electrons and starts dumping them. something do with elements wanting stability. In that process you get alot of heat out put. Now f you make it more dense I would conclude simply, you now have more ionized atoms in the plasma stream, meaning your plasma will be hotter if the stream will be the same size or if the plasma stream is shrunk but has the same number of ionized gas atoms, you have the same heat out put but in a smaller stream.
You’re having a space characters infestation, you should do something about that.
?
Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?
There is no current actual improvement other than the possibilities. By cooling the plasma edge and using clean wall materials, they broke a theoretical density barrier that could potentially bring steady-state fusion closer to reality.
That’s all it is. We’re no closer to steady fusion, but now we know we can push past the Greenwald limit.
Thanks. Seems like a positive step
I generally agree that science reporting treats everyone like children, but I really don’t have a problem with this analogy. Stars are the only naturally occurring fusion we have to observe and compare it to. To me that makes sense.
Sure… but the metaphor glosses over the fact that they haven’t really told us anything of interest. It SOUNDS good, but there’s no way to tell how significant it actually is.
Fusion breakthroughs have sounded good since the 90s, but we’re still the proverbial 10 years away from anything useful.
Meanwhile USA is stealing Venezuelan oil. Good job everbody. 👍
Well. At least it will guarantee the USA’s eventual fall from power.
Can you imagine the tech bros and anti-intectuals groveling to rejoin the scientific community?
Unfortunately science is not a morality structure.
Tanks, jets and rockets don’t run on electric. Can’t do a big war without some good old crude oil.
But drones can. Little propeller drones are killing Russian invaders by the thousands
Trump and other dictators are vain (uh, reviving an outdated class of naval ship and naming it after yourself sound familiar?) so they’ll prefer bombers, tanks, and rockets over some little robots with little propellers. They disdain things that look weak regardless of their usefulness.
Pitch that to Trump and his team and see if they will run their next kidnapping op by propeller drone only.
I’m not a fan of China (government)… at all. But when I check all the technological breakthrough they are getting in these last years while the US was inflating his fucking ai-bubble. Objectively, they are getting so far ahead is not even funny. At least Europe is on a good track themself.
China is now the world leader in science by most metrics (largest proportion of the top 1% most cited papers, most publications to prestigious journals, etc). It makes sense, with their high population and their government willing to fund research. I’m guessing their culture is much less anti-intellectual than the West too, especially the US.
Nothing they’ve done in recent years is ground breaking.
Room temperature superconductors? Fake.
Self-driving bus using painted lanes for navigation? We have trains and trams for that.
Thorium reactor? Germany had one in the 80s, shut it down because it was expensive, there’s around 20 different projects happening in Europe and North America to make it more efficient.
The fusion reactor from the article? They maybe potentially hypothetically achieved one breakthrough of the dozens still needed to make fusion viable.
Etc., etc.
At leas we won’t have to repect their patent…
Whoever develops fusion will be in the history books forever. I think that’s what they’re going for.
The overwhelming majority of their so called breakthroughs are just media fluff pieces though. Their sources are more and more often AI generated studies and their supposed advancements aren‘t going anywhere a lot of the time. By the time people start asking questions and want to know more details they have already prepared another story for you to be impressed by. It‘s shock and awe.
I’ve been seeing articles like these for the past at least 10 years, it is always “New China brrakthrough, can make drinkable water from enriched uranium” or some shit. It is never scalable, sustainable, or usable, and is never really widely, used or adopted. It is always technology, pharmaceutics, construction, or energy related.
They like to fake their image to the world and have been trying for very long. The only thing they succeeded at larger scale is oppresion, tracking of people, and selling knockoffs. Of course, mass manufacturing cannot be omitted.
I’m no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.
Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don’t play well with others.
But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.
While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.
A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it’s the right one, amazing things can happen.
Party’s don’t have to be part of democracy though. Nonpartisan democracy might more achievable for China than the west currently as the size of their single party continues to grow. Though I kinda doubt there is a lot of appetite for it. I’m a firm believer in democracy but it’s hard to look at the hyper polarization of today’s parties as beneficial in any way. Especially in the simple two party American system.
tax billionaires out of existence and the polarization will solve itself in short order
One thing I’ve been impressed with China for is moving towards greener technologies. They’re a leader in solar, their EV’s are apparently very good (not that I can get one here to verify that), and they’re pretty dogged in their pursuit of nuclear energy.
Meanwhile USA is apparently still in “let’s overturn regimes and take over other countries for the oil companies” mode
Hey, Americans are hard working too. Some work 3 jobs just to make ends meet.
The US government threatens other countries with tariffs and sanctions to give American companies unfair advantage. Is that not using unclouth methods?
Americans are hardworking too, but the American government is not actively working to support those hardworking Americans, which is the difference… the average American is working their ass off to earn less than ever to add wealth to the small percentage of ultra wealthy in power here. There are sanctions, tarriffs, and subsidies here, but the vast majority of them benefit the top of the pyramid, while leaving the majority to struggle.
The US government does everything in its power to make the wealthy even more wealthy. But hey, worker empowerment is communism.
You should consider effects of scale.
With the size of China it’s simply easier to do “targeted investments”.
They are almost big enough for autarky with modern technologies and conveniences.
What frustrates me is that China is indeed leading so much technological development on energy, but the amount of coal being burnt is just not budging… Please, China. Make the transition already.
That’s because 90% of these articles about their technological breakthroughs are bullsht.
It’s a bit two sided I believe. The energy demand is increasing, so there’s indeed more coal being burnt.
But at the same time, the share of clean energy sources compared to coal is also getting bigger and bigger.
So it’s not all bad. Mostly seems the demand for energy is growing too fast to decently transition, let’s hope they can catch up and get rid of coal as soon as possible.
Yeah, I hope that the renewables will continue exponentially… I agree that the growing share of renewables in the mix is awesome, but in the end what matters is each ton of CO2 emitted. And we’re not going in the right direction :(
Yea they are probably quite ahead in about %80 of critical tech. Not only that but they also seem to be investing quite alot in sustainable tech, public transport tech, medicine etc. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if center of attraction for science shifts from US to China in near future.
It already has. The West doesn’t like to advertise that though.
Given all the cuts to science, deportation of scientists, and blocking student researchersin the past year alone, I’d claim the US deserves half the credit for China’s impending science ascendancy
We’re not losing the competition, we’re throwing a tantrum and scattering the game pieces …… somehow thinking that’s the same as winning
*yeah, not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
If all those stories from China from the last decade are true then science has already moved to China long ago. But it hasn‘t. Really makes you think, doesn‘t it?
Not sure, even like ten years ago when I was doing my PhD lots of students in prominent US universities like Carnegie Mellon were going to China to intern in HEP colliders.
Thats the thing that truly pisses me off about the US govt right now.
Ok, China is doing all these things and we’re losing our advantage? Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
But noooo we do the polar opposite and also drive scientists out of the country because they can get funding elsewhere.
Hey, at least they’ve got evangelism down to a science. I’m sure militant devotion to [the parts they like from] the Bible will pay back dividends down the road. Who needs the disciplined and organized pursuit of modern science in earnest when some old book written by long-dead humans claiming to speak for a supreme being says it has all the answers (many of which involve smite-based solutions)?
Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
Oh they are. For AI. Instead of scrambling to Fusion, they’re putting the money into generating nudes of celebrities.
and kids. Look at grok
You don’t have to like the government, but they’re the sole reason China is slowly starting to take the lead in science and engineering. These are the fruits of marxism-leninism, whether you like it or not.
China is not Marxist-leninist lmao. They have a market economy.
State capitalism is not the same as Marxism.
Chinese government is much better than the US government
Sure, if you like to compare corrupt, totalitarian states, have fun. Don’t forget russia.
People of the world including Europe, South America, middle East and Asia feel safer from Russia and China than America.
Forgetting Ukraine?
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
That would be attacking EU citizens. Bullies don’t like difficult targets.
Nah they all fucking suck.
- a European
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
and it is a former USSR territory
So is half the EU. What’s this got to do with anything?
Greenland is more Europe than Ukraine because Greenland has been part of Denmark for over 1000 years but Ukraine is new. But It’s more likely that America will conquer Greenland than Russia conquers Ukraine.
I don’t care. They are all threatening us and I hope their leaders die very soon.
If you look at broad based EU markets vs the S&P over the last year they grew about twice the rate.
Higher density, yes, but at the cost of lower temperatures. So not as good. Nice but old new. With painfullll advertisement.
Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels.
The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal : Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040 )in a study titled ‘Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST’.When your result breaks the laws of physics, you need to check your measurements and maths just to be sure. Better yet, have others do it for you.
This isn’t a physics breaking finding. It’s breaking the Greenwald density limit in tokamaks. Some other types of fusions reactors can go above this limit by 2-5 times.
In this case they’re getting past that limit in the Chinese reactor. We had/have a limited understanding of exactly why this limit exists so hopefully these guy’s research can help us figure out a way to get past the limit and achieve higher energy production.
Gotta love science reporters. “Thought to be impossible.”
“A 747 jet took off from New York’s Kennedy airport this morning, accomplishing a feat once thought to be impossible.”
Ah yes, technically correct
“On this planet we obey the laws of physics!”
Well, I guess this puts it right about 30 years out now.
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https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
Tldr : almost no waste. What little waste there is, is much lower radiation, and even that radiation has a half life of around a decade.
without leaving behind hazardous waste
By volume blanket reprocessing and neutron activated vessel components create more hazardous waste than fission could dream of (not including the nightmare of on site fuel reprocessing for breeders that are similarly pie in the sky)
