Is… is that good?
Edit: it is!
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
3 points (100.0% liked)
science
14673 readers
267 users here now
just science related topics. please contribute
note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry
Rule 1) Be kind.
lemmy.world rules: https://mastodon.world/about
I don't screen everything, lrn2scroll
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
How are they even containing that heat as this is obviously warm enough to melt everything in existence (as far as I know)?
ELI5 would be huge magnets. If there is something that melts everything humanity ever created and knows of, keep it away from everything. But it is a real problem, instability in the plasma leads to the need for better materials.
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 😂
Hotter than yo mama …. Wait a minute
Just barely though...
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.
Breakthroughs will bring in investment and then things can accelerate if it ends up viable.
Almost as hot as the temperature my wife leaves the shower at.
I can't wait for the billionaires to increase our power bills for this.
Yes yes I know it would be cheaper, but billionaires are going to charge more money even though it's costing them less.
Cheaper in the long run perhaps - but how expensive is it to build?
Atomic energy is only "cheap" since the cost for the power plants is heavily paid for by tax money. For the cost of one power station you could cover a huge amount of land with solar panels.
100 million degrees C
Sounds hot.
Sounds hot.
You should see it in a bikini.
I'd like to know more. How do you actually harness the energy produced by temperatures that high? Is the end goal to figure out how to sustain the reaction at lower temperatures or do we actually have ways to generate electricity from those temperatures without losing most of it to waste?
Can't wait for fusion reactors to not be thing for another 50 years at the very least.
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
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.
Unfortunately the amount of helium made in fusion is so small as to be useless for anything humans need. Fusion is just that efficient.
So no chipmunk voices? 😢
Soooo, we will all start sounding like Alvin and the Chipmunks soon?
Can’t be good for our global warming problem, amirite?
Lol ironic isn't it, considering easy access to fusion power would basically solve the climate crisis.
If you had a bunch of fusion plants running AC units could you reverse global warming?
Ignoring actual practicality.... I guess you could run a heat exchanger and dump all the energy into a tiny object then shoot it into space
Not the timezones!
One step closer to getting the T-51s working.
Only 2,543,456,495,596 steps to go
This ia a reference to max signed int32 right?
No, the fact the technology has been 5 years away since the 80's
Oh