48 seconds. I predict a glut of helium. balloons for everyone
Is… is that good?
Edit: it is!
From what absolutely little I know, yes. Sustaining the reaction at such high temps for long is, as of now, difficult.
Yeah, I decided to actually bother and read the article. That’s why I made my edit. This sounds like a very important technical milestone for the development of fusion reactors. Hooray!
when talking about fusion, just think the conditions of stars/the sun. In order to function correctly, it has to be ridiculously hot.
The race for fusion is how to maintain it, and eventually have a net positive transaction of energy out, to energy in ratio.
just think the conditions of stars/the sun
Hotter than the sun. The sun has an enormous gravity pushing things along. To compensate we use more heat.
I thought we used magnetrons and such, and the excessive heat was due to current inefficiency and control of the fusion process in containing the heat and it building up higher and higher.
Stupid guy here, being ridiculously hot is the whole point right? Isn’t a fusion reactor just an extremely complex steam engine?
The difficult bit is to keep the fuel fusing. At the temperatures and pressures that are needed to get atoms to fuse together the whole lot wants to blow itself apart. Being able to reliability sustain the reaction for any length of time is a big achievement.
Once we can get it to keep going, then yes, we can use the excess heat for power, although it’ll probably involve turbines rather than an old school steam engine type setup.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
The fusion of light elements up to a certain nucleus size releases energy. However, fusion only occurs at very high temperatures and pressures. The goal is to 1) create the conditions for nuclear fusion (which they did), 2) have the fusion reaction produce energy that sustains those conditions (they did for 48 seconds), and ideally a tiny bit more, 3) gather residual energy that isn’t critical to the reaction itself, which is the part that looks like a steam engine.
Sorry im not any sort of scientist here but i thought energy could not be created or destroyed so to get a net-positive energy out we would need to keep feeding in fuel, is this correct?
And if so, how?
energy is not created nor destroyed, however something can change forms, which gives off energy.
how stars work in fusion is that their high pressure and high temperatures allow for the fusion of particles. hydrogren (1 protonl fuses with another to produce helium (2 protons). in a stars life, that cycle continues. elements fuse till it hits iron (the end point of fusion). which then a stars life.is considered dead and eventually black hole stuff starts to happen due to density of star.
the power is actually not “infinite” its limited by the fuel supply available (hydrogren), but the net energy in to energy out is positive if the fuel source exists.
Hotter than the surface of the sun by a factor of ~18000.
Hotter than the suns core by a factor of ~7.
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/temperatures-across-our-solar-system/#hds-sidebar-nav-1
People talk about Icarus flying too close to the sun. Motherfuckers are recreating it in labs 😂
In case the reference is lost, there’s a famous Muslim proverb: if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain. A flipped version of this proverb has somehow also become commonly known, perhaps surpassing the correct version (in my culture at least): if Muhammad won’t go to the mountain, then the mountain will come to Muhammad.
I just want to know what kind of thermometer they put into the plasma to measure the temperature. It must have been made of ice or something to not burn up.
People talk about Icarus flying too close to the sun. Motherfuckers are recreating it in labs
This!
That’s definitely some next-gen level magic being scienced/engineered.
I’d love to see an operating fusion reactor in my lifetime. Real sci-fi technology
Currently reading news and communicating with people around the world from the privacy of my toilet using my hand terminal. It can also understand what I am saying and excecute my spoken commands (to some extent at least). That’s some Sci fi shit right there. Pun intended
It’s seriously insane growing up on star trek and then seeing it come to life.
Still holding out for flying cars.
And warp drive!
I don’t want flying cars because I don’t want 95% of the people around me to be driving regular cars. Can’t even use a turn signal and now they have carte blanche to drive over houses and shit?
The answer is mass transit. Mag-rail, not personal aviation.
I think VR + generative AI is a clear pathway to Star Trek’s holodecks. Imagine being able to just say “I want to play a game I’ve never played before, in an Amazonian rainforest”, and then the AI renders the game and environment for you in VR. We’re genuinely very close to that reality.
Probably going to happen. Proxima Fusion is eyeing early 2030s for a commercial prototype and those aren’t venture capital techbros, it’s a Max Planck institute spin-out. About as hard science as you can get. Wendelstein 7X has shown that the approach works, the thing exceeded all expectations (that is: It behaves exactly as computer models said it would) and scales up without nasty surprises (much unlike tokamaks) so they’re done with the tech fundamentals now it’s about engineering something cost competitive, think requirements such as replacement parts the reactor will regularly need not exceeding electricity market prices.
I am quite positive I’ll see reliable, sustained fusion reactions in my lifetime.
I’m also pretty positive it’ll be useless as an energy source. Still could be useful for other things though.
I’m also pretty positive it’ll be useless as an energy source.
Why? Honestly curious.
I don’t think we’ll get to the point where the energy that comes out will be higher enough than the energy put in to justify its use compared to other energy sources.
48 seconds at those temperatures is no joke, that is pretty amazing. I didn’t see the article elaborate on what the current limiting factors are for pushing beyond 48 seconds. Like I wonder if it’s a hard wall, a new engineering challenge, a tweak needed, etc. this is the reactor that set the last record so they are doing something really right.
Last one I read about is just constantly and very quickly (far quicker than human abilities) adjust the magnetic field around the plasma in order to keep it stable and in place. They’ve been (or at least one team was) using AI to go over data and control and predict the field adjustments, because only reacting after the plasma starts to move hasn’t been quick enough.
Yes, that’d be TAE technologies.
The algorithm was called the optometrist, it was paired with a human operator to more quickly converge on the correct settings for stable plasma by having the machine randomly tweak various meta-parameters, while the human would generally decide whether the current settings were “better” or “worse” than the previous pulse.
I wonder if there isn’t a stable chamber shape that promotes turbulence in a controlled manner in order to prevent it getting out of hand? A little bit like the dimples on a golf ball create micro pockets of turbulence promoting laminar flow.
(The article touches on this bit a little) I was watching something about fusion the other day and it seems that it is super tricky to keep the magnetic field balanced in a way that keeps the plasma in a proper toroid. Not only does it need to keep the correct strength, it has to fight against random turbulence. This is critical to start the reaction, but also to maintain it.
Also, they gave some other physical limitations in the article as well:
To extend their plasma’s burning time from the previous record-breaking run, the scientists tweaked aspects of their reactor’s design, including replacing carbon with tungsten to improve the efficiency of the tokamak’s “divertors,” which extract heat and ash from the reactor.
Basically, it’s the container that has limitations as containing a pseudo-sun probably isn’t easy.
According to another commenter the heat generated is 7 times that of the core of the sun. Considering we use the sun in sci fi to destroy anything that can’t be destroyed by other means, controlling that level of heat seems like a real challenge
Yeah. Actually using that heat is the next challenge, I suppose. If I am not mistaken (and I am often mistaken), they are not actually using the reaction to power the reactor yet.
It’s all math, basically. If they measure more energy coming out than they put in, it’s considered a win.
They most likely ran out if liquid helium as the world is running out of the stuff at an alarming rate
They use liquid helium to cool the super magnets…
This is such a ridiculous comment. I can literally go on Amazon and buy some helium right now. You really think if that’s possible, a cutting edge research lab would run out of the stuff?
Sure, it’s limited and getting scarcer, but no one’s running out yet.
Hot damn! Limitless fusion power is only thirty years away!
Like it has been for the past 30 years (which, I assume, was the joke here.)
If fusion research was funded adequately we’d probably have it by now, but I don’t know if it’s the energy lobby or what that means that it’s chronically underfunded. An actually working fusion reactor design would bring about such an upheaval in the energy markets that I wouldn’t be surprised if plutocrats had a hand in making sure the research receives orders of magnitude less money than it should.
Existing energy conglomerates (ie, oil and gas) probably send their army of lobbyists around the world to spread FUD about fusion. Thus minimal funding. 🪦
Maybe. We all (here) wish fusion power was funded better and understand how useful it could be for humanity if we can make it happen, but ….
- yesterday I read about the Stellerator using 3D printed parts
- in this thread, someone commented on using ai to drive containment
- I’m sure teams must be using the latest materials.
It’s quite possible that we would have always needed the rest of the world to catch up
It’s not limitless, you still need fuel. Especially tritium doesn’t really occur naturally because of its extremely short half-life, current plans for ITER involve breeding tritium from lithium in the fusion reactor. The closest to limitless power we have is PV.
A reactor that produces enough of its own fuel… It’s starting to sound like a perpetual motion machine.
