Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave!
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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With a box of scraps!
We're not Tony Stark, sir.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
That is one technology that I don't care if China steals secrets to make it happen faster.
No need!
The data gathered by EAST will support the development of other reactors, both in China and internationally. China is part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program, which involves dozens of countries, including the U.S., U.K. Japan, South Korea and Russia.
If we were a smarter society, we’d end our stupid cold war with them and cooperate.
If they were a more humane society, we likely would.
More humane like Nazi-America, or more humane like Warcrimes-Russia? Description unclear, please clarify.
More humane like the best of us wish to be and the majority of us never will be
To clarify, what you're doing is "what-aboutism". Asking China to be more humane is not a comment on anything but China being more humane.
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Post-scarcity society def scares capitalists.
im pretty sure almost unilaterally, every country would like the solution to near infinite energy regardless. its extremely vital if as a species, ever want to start a colony outside of earth.
the only people against it would be those in the pocket of other forms of energy monetary wise.
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While neat, this is not self-sustaining
it's taking more energy to power it than you're getting out of it. (You can build a fusion device on your garage if you're so inclined, though obviously this is much neater than that!)
One viewpoint is that we'll never get clean energy from these devices, not because they won't work, but because you get a lot of neutrons out of these devices. And what do we do with neutrons? We either bash them into lead and heat stuff up (boring and not a lot of energy), or we use them to breed fissile material, which is a lot more energetically favorable. So basically, the economically sound thing to do is to use your fusion reactor to power your relatively conventional fission reactor. Which is still way better than fossil fuels IMHO, so that's something.
It seems like it's probably too late.
Even if we crack fusion power today, I can't see it being deployed cheaply enough and quickly enough to compete with solar/wind+batteries. By the time we could get production fusion plants up and ready to feed power into the grid, it'd be 2050 and nobody would be interested in buying electricity from it.
Even in a world already powered 100% by renewables, fusion is attractive for high energy applications. For a current example see training of LLMs. However there are Industries with immense power requirements like Aluminium smelting that could use fusion power as well.
So far humans have found applications for all energy they were able to produce.
Fusion would provide orders of magnitude more power than solar. There's a limit on how much we can practically get from solar, fusion would allow us to exceed that.
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I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.
Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.
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Helion has an interesting take on fusion reactors that generate power using electro magnetism and Copenhagen Atomics are trying to create Thorium reactors. I hope they will work better than the boiling they use in tocamac reactors
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what an incredible achievement. rome wasn't built in a day and real.science takes time and effort. so much effort by these scientists!
I'm so used to hearing that this technology is 10 years away, or whatever the old adage was, that i can't believe we've been seeing actual progress on this front in the last few years. Maybe it will actually happen eventually!
Well, there's been incremental progress all along. I remember reading about milliseconds being a big accomplishment at some point.
Also, it's pretty heavily dependent on the exact plasma in question. One hot enough to do lots of fusion will probably be different, so this isn't the finish line. Relevant XKCD.
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Someone needs to bash these scicomm journalists over the head until they stop using the words "artificial sun"
Also, where's the study? Is it even peer reviewed?
Meanwhile in America
Living in the UK I suspect you have the same problem we have. Plenty of people capable of doing all the impressive shit China is doing (science, infastructure, whatever) and all of them being starved of funding as all the money dissapears into gigantic blackholes of backroom deals where huge amounts of money are spent on vague things that never seem to materialize or even be adequately explained; but whatever they are they sure do generate enormous profits for the cronies of whoevers currently in power.
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Forget artificial suns, let me tell you right now how to make an artificial moon:
- Be a robot.
- Pull down pants.
- Bend over.
- Point robo-crack towards recipient
- Artificial Moon.
I feel like little fusion has kind of missed the boat. It's been "just a few decades away" since I was in school, and that's a good while ago now.
We can already get limitless clean energy from the real sun.
Can't wait for my Trumper boss to bring this up at work again as "Did you hear China secretly replaced the sun?"
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I'm noticing in these comments that the tech bros that want to solve climate change by magical technological advances instead of using what we have had an interesting effect: some people on the other side have grown tired of the real technological advances that would actually help.
Good job scientists!
Meh, net gain is the point, long cycles well be useful for production. Useful, eventually. Cart before the horse, otherwise.
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