Not a word about how much energy went into the process and how much was harvested…
I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave.
Not a word about how much energy went into the process and how much was harvested…
A 17 minute runtime in a Tokamak an incremental step on the path to success. You’re in the kitchen looking over the shoulder of the chef saying the steak he’s just put in the pan isn’t cooked enough yet. He knows, but you can’t have the steak on your plate cooked to perfection until he does this current step he’s on.
I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave.
In 1964 you could build an honest to goodness fusion reactor copying the Farnsworth Fusor, yet that would never be on a path to a sustained fusion reaction with a net energy gain. The work in the article is.
I love when online commenters who didn’t even read the article are smarter than the scientists it’s about
Producing energy is not the goal of this facility which is why they don’t report on it. The useful output is in refining control and heating methods so that when power producing facilities are built, they can operate continuously. On that front, 17 minutes is very impressive. At the speeds at which the particles in a fusion plasma move, that time frame is essentially an eternity.
Yeah well I guess I’m done being nice to people who think this way. We didn’t use to belittle science like this, we weren’t so afraid of it. We used to respect people for striving to learn more, not belittle them. I’m tired of listening to people belittle scientists because of their own issues.
I took that comment as criticizing dumbed-down science reporting and/or being suspicious of reported breakthroughs from China.
I don’t get why people still doubt China on tech progress. “Hur dur they’re commies so they had to have faked it! There’s just no incentive for them to be smart and driven because America, number one btw, has all the money.”
Like yeah, the country we’ve exported nearly all of our tech and manufacturing to for 40 years definitely has no idea how anything works, guys. Keep doubting.
Any announcements like this coming from China should be taken with a huge grain of salt the size of… China.
Yep. They‘re putting out what they call huge breakthroughs on a weekly basis for months and make headlines. By the time they have been put into perspective or straight out debunked and torn to shreds by the global scientific community, they already squeezed out another wild claim to overshadow criticism. Rinse and repeat. There is a reason the overwhelming majority of AI generated slob studies come from China. They want fast results and know the press won‘t really read them and instead just quote whatever they claim.
Skepticism of positive press (aka propaganda) from a country notorious for cracking down on negative press (i.e. any mention of Tiananmen Square) is not a phobia. It’s completely justified.
Great. Now put a magnifying glass in front of it and point it at the white house
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were capitalist motivation that is holding back the actual research. Those that fund it want to have exclusive rights to research akin to the nuclear rat race all over again. It would likely be a benefit to humanity if it were open-sourced but I’m sure that those countries/orgs that own these projects think otherwise.
I can’t remember the company name, but they were using an inertial fusion reactor and were hyped for producing positive energy from their test. Someone posted that it wasn’t going anywhere because it was actually just a cover for military tests on possible fusion bombs. I didn’t look too hard, but they did have funding from the military.
It would likely be a benefit to humanity if it were open-sourced but I’m sure that those countries/orgs that own these projects think otherwise.
Let’s be real here.
It would likely be a benefit to humanity if it were open-sourced but I’m sure that those countries/orgs that own these projects desire and work towards otherwise.
Valid point, but worth also mentioning an anecdote I read years ago (can’t remember from whom, perhaps Kurzweil?): when they were told the Human Genome Project had mapped 1% they were excited, saying it “had nearly finished”, and then had to keep justifying the statement by explaining the exponential nature of such work to the majority of people who couldn’t view it in any way other than as measured linearly per-result. Supposedly the project was completed only a few years later.
(Craig Ventor tried to copyright the human genome, prompting the rest of the genomics scientific community to race to beat him, so I’d claim that the HGP definitely had politics involved.)
watch it rot in nationalist silos
“ITER includes China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States. Members share costs and experimental results.”
That’s quite the wide “nationalist silos”, no?
Look, I agree that more open = more better, but I think you made it sound a bit as if it’s just France (implied) that’s gaining from this, where it’s really an international effort.
ITER isn’t “international” in any meaningful sense. It’s a bloated Frankenstein of geopolitical vanity projects, where nations bicker over scraps of influence while pretending to collaborate. Sharing costs? Sure, but they’re also sharing inefficiencies, delays, and mountains of red tape. France hosting isn’t just a coincidence—it’s a calculated power play.
Your defense of ITER as a global effort is laughable. Experimental results are locked behind bureaucratic walls, inaccessible to the very people who could accelerate progress. Fusion isn’t advancing; it’s stagnating under nationalist egos.
This is why it’s always decades away. However, I doubt China is being as cavalier about it.
Oh, I’m under no delusions that any player in the energy market is altruistic. I just bet they are devoting more resources to it. They are already making big moves on lots of stages concurrently.
But just like China rips off tech all the time, I imagine if China cracks it, it won’t be long till it’s copied.
This reminds me of an article in a mainstream newspaper I read about BYD, that claimed beating China might be more important than winning the war on climate change. Can’t we be happy about technological progress, no matter where it comes from? Nationalism is regressive.
What we need to do is find some way to make a giant fusion reactor and put it in the sky and get energy from it that way.
But that’s just a pipe dream…
It’s too bad there isn’t some sort of way we could store electricity in some sort of containment.
Then we could do stuff like take electrically-powered devices with us wherever we went! Think of how handy that would be!
Yeah! We could use such technology to trap this “artificial sun” instead, and then have a steady stable output throughout the night for things that use a bunch of electricity but run constantly, like water filtration plants and material processing facilities.
Great idea! But I guess more research is needed to make this work for the things that use the MOST electricity, instead of small portable devices that use a fraction of the electricity
Batteries will never be enough for full down time store. Anyone who’s saying otherwise is selling you batteries.
Just try to do some paper napkin math how much lithium batteries can store and how much we’d need to just satisfy current demand, not even talking about the near future.
The only battery technology that has promise is good ol’ hydro but it’s only accessible to a few places around the world and in no way sustainable.
What we need is robust decentralized multimodal energy production fit for the local area where it is installed and contributing to a well maintained distributed grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage so that incidental costs are minimized and uptime is effectively 100%. Energy is a tool and its generation is a category of tools, whining about people developing a better screwdriver rather than only using hammers is counterproductive when we’re trying to build a house for as many people as possible that doesn’t fucking kill everyone.
I’m whining about China spending very little on current green energy technology while building more and more coal plants and taking advantage of these sort of PR stories.
I can’t help it, I’m one of those people who whines about climate change.
‘spending very little’???
They produced more new green energy than the total capacity of green energy for the rest of the world combined in 2024.
The USA and Lockheed Martin have been making PR stories about fusion for over a decade, while increasing emissions.
I really hope at least one of these is not bullshit.
