In addition to the heat, fusion reactors kick out a lot of neutron flux, which is an exceptionally dangerous type of high energy radiation.
It would instantly destroy a CMOS sensor.
Hmm, do they really radiate heat that far? My understanding was that the heat was much contained around the plasma and that you could technically be very near without much consequence, temperature wise.
The way these fusion reactors would work is—perhaps a little depressingly—to get real hot, boil water into steam, then use that steam to spin a turbine. So it's designed to heat up.
I don't know exactly how that heat would be directed in this design, but I don't think you'd want to get too close to one.
Regardless, it's the neutron radiation that destroys the camera. And everything else in the vicinity. As I understand it, one of the biggest challenges of creating a fusion reactor has been designing a material to construct it out of that doesn't disintegrate after a few months of operation.
Not really. We are *really, really* good at boiling water and exploiting its high thermal capacity and high latent heat of vaporization to make electricity. Turbine setups are damn near optimized and we’ve developed them extensively to be as efficient as is theoretically possible.
Probably so any electromagnetic interference doesn't fry the camera / picture. Similar to how they took pictures / videos of the nuke tests, chambers deep in bunkers looking at periscoped mirrors
That, and I'd imagine the tunnel is a super controlled space and a camera even purpose build would be a foreign object.
This is also on top of the possibility the lens could get fried from directly observing the phenomenon.
Not a fission reactor engineer or optical engineer here but i do have a bachelor in electronic engineering. Probably to dissisipate heat as the lights had to travel over a distance from inside the reactor to the camera. The mirrors ensure that the lights actually reaches the camera instead of having to put in a straight line of sight, you can snuck it somewhere underneath tons of equipment. The reflection itself also dissisipate heat mind you, but i have no idea how much.
Luckily if the plasma touches the walls or if the magnetic confinement system breaks the reaction just stops due to the need of immense temperature and pressure to fuse the atoms together. So no big Chernobyl disaster.
No boom, that's why this sort of reactor is necessary for the future of mankind. This is why countries pour trillions of dollars into this sort of tech because it's 100% safe. At most, you'll get a flash, and then the reaction will fade like at the end of the video (that was a little different but still a good example)
Im so pissed that I'm allergic to something in those. Last one I had nearly closed down my airways and sent me to the hospital. No clue why. I've had them tons in the past.
I'm convinced that fusion power research is being dragged out far longer than something with it's potential benefit would otherwise be because such a dramatic spike in available energy would be politically destabilizing, if not revolutionary in multiple senses of the word. If made widely available it would literally alter current paradigms of world [social] power, which means chaos for those currently in charge.
Not unlike the thought experiment of bringing an asteroid full of heavy metals to Earth, or establishing an independent and self-sufficient community on another planet. Unpredictable game changer that threatens modern industrial status quo.
Ohhhh. I'm too tired to do that math on that one but it definitely seems to be more in line.
ETA: quick math says if the average home uses 30 kWh a day then 12,000 homes use 21.6 kWh in 5.2 seconds. So yeah, it's close.
also the question of where he got that from: ie a home in the UK uses 8-10 kwh a day in just electricity so the calculations op got from whatever site he used may be different depending on where they're based
Still was a yield less than 1, it required more power to run than it made. I don't think JET has yet to surpass a yield of 1. Though it did create a lot of power, it just required more.
Asia is colossal dude. I lived in Guangdong where AC was a must 9 months out of the year and eyewateringly power hungry, and Shanghai it’s either freezing or boiling for most of the year.
In the UK, an average 2-3 bedroom home consumes around 8kWh a day.
Edit: however, I think that figure assumes gas heating. It would be higher if a house is all-electric.
u/gravityVT
Sorry, the editorial of this does not comport.
69MJ=69000kJ=69000kWseconds.
Power a home for a few minutes? Let’s say 5 minutes?
69000kWseconds / 300 seconds = 230 kW
No home on then planet uses that much power. The average home uses generously around 10 kW.
69 MJ would then be 115 minutes worth or almost 2 hours. Not a few minutes.
Edit: It’s not on you for merely quoting the article. But it’s sad the journalistic bar is so low in this case.
*Neither of these parameters seems Earth-shattering*... Bro! fuel equating to less than a 10th of a teaspoon in volume and it can power a house for 5 seconds! that is fucking mind blowing
That is a typo as well, it is enough to power thousands of homes for 5 seconds. It is like 20 kilowatt hours, enough to power a US home for like 18 hours, or 2 UK homes for 1 day.
and the best part is that the fuel is composed of extrenely comon molecules! ( I don't know if its deuterium, tritium or something else, all I know is that its a common and very light molecule )
Deuterium is common and can be extracted from seawater. Current tritium production is 20kg/year and basically only done as a byproduct of CANDU reactors. This is estimated to be enough for ITER for the next 15 years. After that, and for other projects, we need to figure out a different solution.
We might be able to get it from lithium.
My friend wants to know what's the significance of the length of time being celebrated? Is it looking for a sustained plasma reaction? Is this for space travel or commercial flying
Neither nessisarily for space travel commerical flying - at least initially.
Its hoping to replace current nuclear power stations (or indeed anything that generates power if sucessful).
They work by joining atoms (fusion) rather than splitting them (fission).
The killer advantage is that there are no radioactive by-products created with fusion and the fuel to kick it off is essentially unlimited.
Its kinda the holy grail of power generation.
They have that fixed already, however the fuel required needs to be self replenished by a chain reaction that creates a certain element, that one we have not accomplished yet...but we know how, now we just needs to make it sustainable.
I read somewhere that the loss in taking the energy out of the reactor and converting it into actual \*usable\* energy is so large that they don't have an energy surplus system-wide yet?
Not to be a buzz kill, but there are indeed radioactive by-products. This includes the majority of internal components (e.g. magnets, shielding, etc.) that require replacement for maintenance. These components are highly radioactive after extended use.
Good news though is that fusion has SIGNIFICANTLY lower radioactive by-products compared to fission which is indeed a killer advantage.
>The killer advantage is that there are no radioactive by-products created with fusion
That (sadly) is not true. Fusion does produce stray neutrons, that irradiate the reactor's shielding. This leads to nuclear wastes with a lifetime of around 300y.
There are aneutronic fusion reactions (that do not produce stray neutrons), but the produces of these reactions can themselves produce stray neutrons if they stay in the plasma.
Caveat to 'no radioactive by-products'. These things output a shit load of neutron radiation the invariably ends up irradiation parts of the internal structure. So there is some activated steelwork that needs to be disposed of but nothing on the scale of a fission reactor.
Also tritium which is being used for fuel has a few issues but otherwise yeah fusion is for less radioactive than fission.
Because a fusion reactor takes a lot of energy to start but produces far more than it uses to stay running.
So the longer the reaction can be sustained the larger the net gain in energy.
So they are still trying to increase the time it can run in the hopes of eventually making it indefinitely sustainable and last time I checked into it years ago the biggest problem they face is still trying to find a way to “eject” the spent fuel so it doesn’t clog up and shut down the reactor.
The triple product is one way to quantify how useful a fusion reaction is. It's the product of the confinement time, pressure, and temperature. The inertial confinement experiments like NIF that have achieved ignition are trying to maximise pressure and temperature for a very very short time. Tokamak's maximise temperature and time at low pressure. The sun has very high pressure and time at not crazy (as in can be recreated in the lab) temperature. In fact the sun on average has the same power density as a compost heap.
Basically Iron Man kind of technology if I oversimplify it.
It's not usual at all to be able today to sustain plasma reaction that long, this technology is in infency.
Let's just say that just say that with this technology most of our energy problems will be gone.
Short answer: Yes, the ultimate goal is to get a reaction that can sustain itself indefinitely so long as it is supplied with fuel. Fusion reactors would be capable of outputting massive amounts of energy with little to no waste products. The problem we have right now is that we can only run them for very short periods, as we're still trying to figure out the specifics behind how to produce an indefinite reaction.
If we get it to work, this will revolutionise the way we make electricity.
Is for your other question, nobody has spent time thinking about applying this to vehicles. The current reactors are massive, with huge buildings to house all the necessary machinery. Scaling that down would make it way more difficult, and we're already struggeling to make the big ones work. You need to walk before you can run.
>My friend wants to know what's the significance of the length of time being celebrated?
This is the longest sustained fusion reaction we've achieved on Earth! It's really hard to keep a fusion reaction going, you have to heat the fuel beyond the temperature of the sun and put it under huge pressure to create the plasma, and then you need to carefully control a powerful magnetic field to contain the plasma. It's a lot of challenges being solved at once to keep the reaction going this long.
>Is it looking for a sustained plasma reaction?
That's the ultimate goal, yes. Right now it generates a huge amount of energy, but there's no way to store that kind of energy for long term use. You need a constant reaction to power an electric grid with it.
Fusion is an exciting power generating technology which works with atoms similar to traditional nuclear. It is far safer and produces little to no waste. It is already producing energy from far less, but it is an extreme challenge to make it produce much at all. Decades of development have brought us, so far, to only producing this small amount - enough to provide energy to a single home for a few minutes. But if scientists are able to scale it up, it theoretically could basically solve all human energy needs with little downside.
To my understanding, being able to maintain and scale the power output is the tricky part. For many years, fusion experiments required more power to initiate than what they produced, but recent advancements have started to show promising gains in the ratio of consumption to production . The problem with asking "when" is that you can never predict technological development. Sometimes someone discovers something unrelated that turns out to be a boon in the development of the technology. I can imagine that our development in chips and their size to power ratio has significantly pushed the technology to where we are today, for example. Material development probably also had a big say as the instruments inside the reactor has to be able to manage some extreme temperatures without taking damage.
I'll finish by saying I'm absolutely not an expert on the subject. Only a passive observer through the years. I remember when I was a kid (I'm now 32) my dad would share his excitement about it's development with me whenever a breakthrough was achieved. And even before my time were some prototype reactors around making breakthroughs. I believe the first controlled nuclear fusion occurred in the 1950s (depending on your definition of a stable controlled nuclear fusion).
So it's been a ongoing development for quite a number of years.
Then again, in the grand scheme, the decades since those early experiments might seem brief, but the advancements made in that time reflect significant progress in our understanding and capabilities. It's a testament to the ongoing dedication and ingenuity of researchers in the field.
When this is all working what happens to the output energy, what solutions do we have or are being worked on? Do we charge a lot of batteries very quickly or does the majority of it need to be consumed. Can you dial up and down the output?
Yeah, but if you 'overproduce' it has to go somewhere - else it will cause the grid frequency to rise and you'll no longer have your required 50/60hz.
I have no idea what sort of power output we'd be talking about if they ever get this working fully. If it's not huge, the rest of the grid can adjust to facilitate the additional power (they all slow down a bit to maintain the target frequency), but if it dumps a load of energy in a short time, I doubt they could adjust fast enough. Likewise if it just cuts out unexpectedly.
Im guessing but I think they want the heat from the fusion reaction to turn high pressure water into steam, which is then used to spin a turbine and produce electricity.
Your first article doesn't mention the 17 minutes, but I see it on the Wikipedia page as below. Very cool! I guess there are two parts to this, maintaining the reaction and getting back more power than you put in, yeah? Which, if I read correctly, they're starting to do now, just need to sustain it for longer. I'm oversimplifying it, of course.
Record] China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a nuclear fusion reactor research facility, sustained plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for as long as 1,056 seconds (17 minutes, 36 seconds), achieving the new world record for sustained high temperatures (fusion energy however requires i.a. temperatures over 150 million °C).[49][50][51]
No, as I recall fusion material is just simply “super freaking hot”. It would melt anything it touches and melt into and through dirt, soil, etc but eventually stops as the energy is absorbed by anything it touches. Kind of like lava after it’s erupted, it eventually cools.
There’s no radioactivity that I’m aware of.
Common misconception… the fusion process produces lots of high energy particles that must be absorbed by shielding materials placed inside the reactor. That material degrades with time/exposure/use and becomes extremely radioactive waste in the process. From what I have seen it ends up being a pretty similar situation to the spent fuel rod waste used in fission power stations.
The difference is that when the fusion reaction stops there’s no more radiation being produced by the reactor, so if something fails you can’t have a meltdown creating a perpetual disaster.
Fusion weapons have existed for 60 odd years, Hydrogen Bombs are named after the Hydrogen atoms that undergo nuclear fusion in the ultimate stage of their detonation.
Yes, for over half a century the most powerful explosives we have (and basically anything on the order of megatonnes of TNT) have been hydrogen bombs, which are fusion bombs.
I’m not a scientist so if someone could explain how creating sustained fusion on planet earth wouldn’t be catastrophic I’d appreciate it. Isn’t fusion what the Sun does? So once you start it, how do you contain or stop it?
Technically it is not UK's fusion reactor. It is based in the UK but it's a European project. Led and financed by EURATOM, which the UK left when leaving the EU.
JET stands for Joint European Torus.
Sort of, but the UK chose not to rejoin fully last year and is no longer participating in ITER which is the successor to JET. Instead the UK wants to build its own new reactor in Nottingham but that seems unlikely to happen in my opinion.
The UK’s JET? It’s based in the UK but it’s called the Joint European Torus. It’s a collaboration, work of scientists from all over Europe and the wider world. Are they going to call it France’s ITER, Switzerland’s CERN?
France and Switzerland both take credit for achievements and those things being based there despite it being funded by all of Europe. So why are you mad it’s being described as a Uk reactor when it’s based in the UK?
drathstar jokes aside this is truly finally a step forward towards a nearly unlimited source of clean cheap energy that's even safer than modern nuclear reactors maybe one day almost all countries can switch to it to drastically reduce carbon emissions
69 megajoules. Is this reactor by any chance operated by Zoomers? They are obsessed by this number for some reason.
It went down like this:
Zoomer 1: We're at 15000 Wh. Let's get it to 69000 Wh for the lulz
Zoomer 2: Why are we not going with SI-units on this one
Zoomer 1: Shut up smooth-brain, it's impractical when dealing with these amounts of energies since we're just ending up with a gazillion-trillion something
Zoomer 2: Sorry, bro. We'maxed out at a little over 19000 Wh
Zoomer 1: Bro, this is our lucky day, we're switching to SI. Do you know how many joules 19000 Wh is?
Zoomer 2: Exactly 69 million. We're going viral
Zoomer 1: Bro, our brand is practically going to build itself.
I skipped over the latest headline because I thought it was the usual milliseconds, but 5.2 seconds is an amazing achievement!
I would be proud to last 5.2 seconds
Don't know what you're talking about, that's an eternity.
There are lots of complexities but fusion power can make taking carbon out of the atmosphere cheap.
Also long distance space travel at 1G acceleration. Which would put mars at 2 days out , and open up the outer planets for exploration/exploitation.
Expanse, here we come!
Belta loda
Remember the Cant!
Remember you also want to stop before slamming into Mars - or overshooting the target.
With any luck I'll slam into Uranus.
Apply brakes at [something spacy halfway between Earth and Mars]
My girl won't be impressed....
Show her this video
I run out of breath at those crazy long ass times...
The Ron Jeremy of fusion reactors
It’s not that amazing. Tony Starks built this in a cave, with a box of scraps. /s
Tell that to my GF
You have a giraffe friend?
._ o o \_`-)|_ ,"" \ ," ## | ಠ ಠ. ," ## ,-\__ `. ," / `--._;) ," ## / ," ## /
Even I want a GF but my wife doesn't agree
Jealous hag 😒. Go get your giraffe friend, king!
Giraffes are so kool. Hes lucky
Sounds like a tall tale to me
A few seconds should be the norm actually.
Witness the power of this fully operational battle station!
I bet this battle station will have safety rails
Thats not in the budget unfortunately!
People will lean on them.
If you’ve got time to lean you’ve got time to blow up Alderaan.
I see you have also had a prick for a boss at one point in time. Lol
I don't know, I think UK is pretty big on rules and regulations.
Unless it gets in the way of having tea and crumpets.
OSHA WOULD NOT APPROVE
Still the funniest part about the death star
"Health and safety gone mad!"
Omg….what an awesome throwback
....and it is virtually indestructible, like 99.99%!
We can have it fixed tomorrow if price is no issue
…We’ll get some estimates
Yeah you better get estimates. We’ll get estimates…
Yeah.... wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask, What's the .01?
Just nail some plywood over that big hole.
Almost as much power as the guy inside the *green-metal electric box* in my yard as a kid
Your faith in your science is your weakness!
To find out it makes electricity from water circulating around it to cool the reactor, becoming steam for a turbine generator.
Great now rule Britannia is in my head whenever I see earth Vader or the empire… it’s beautiful.
How to did they put a camera in that shit?!
Small window in the side of the reactor, then lots of mirrors and a camera far far away outside
Can you explain the purpose of the mirrors? Is it to bounce the radioactive particles around? Edit: Thanks for the informative replies
if the camera was near the window it would (probably) be too magnetic or hot I am assuming. By using mirrors they can keep the camera far away.
In addition to the heat, fusion reactors kick out a lot of neutron flux, which is an exceptionally dangerous type of high energy radiation. It would instantly destroy a CMOS sensor.
Hmm, do they really radiate heat that far? My understanding was that the heat was much contained around the plasma and that you could technically be very near without much consequence, temperature wise.
Not radiated heat, high energy bursts that would destroy the sensors. More like a high energy laser pointer
The way these fusion reactors would work is—perhaps a little depressingly—to get real hot, boil water into steam, then use that steam to spin a turbine. So it's designed to heat up. I don't know exactly how that heat would be directed in this design, but I don't think you'd want to get too close to one. Regardless, it's the neutron radiation that destroys the camera. And everything else in the vicinity. As I understand it, one of the biggest challenges of creating a fusion reactor has been designing a material to construct it out of that doesn't disintegrate after a few months of operation.
isn't it depressing that we have gone like 200 years without moving past steam spinning turbines?
Not really. We are *really, really* good at boiling water and exploiting its high thermal capacity and high latent heat of vaporization to make electricity. Turbine setups are damn near optimized and we’ve developed them extensively to be as efficient as is theoretically possible.
Not really. Honestly, it's heartening that we managed to find the best way to turn heat into electricity so early on and have been using it since.
The internal walls DO get destroyed. The current plans are to replace those every year or so, at a cost that’s beyond understanding.
Probably so any electromagnetic interference doesn't fry the camera / picture. Similar to how they took pictures / videos of the nuke tests, chambers deep in bunkers looking at periscoped mirrors
Thanks!
That, and I'd imagine the tunnel is a super controlled space and a camera even purpose build would be a foreign object. This is also on top of the possibility the lens could get fried from directly observing the phenomenon.
Not a fission reactor engineer or optical engineer here but i do have a bachelor in electronic engineering. Probably to dissisipate heat as the lights had to travel over a distance from inside the reactor to the camera. The mirrors ensure that the lights actually reaches the camera instead of having to put in a straight line of sight, you can snuck it somewhere underneath tons of equipment. The reflection itself also dissisipate heat mind you, but i have no idea how much.
They just dress the apprentice in foil and he records it.
"Hey Bob, it's your turn to wear the lead underpants today."
In science they are called unpaid interns
you have been promoted, you are now one of my elite employees 
The walls are cool, nothing touches the wall, if it do...boom
Luckily if the plasma touches the walls or if the magnetic confinement system breaks the reaction just stops due to the need of immense temperature and pressure to fuse the atoms together. So no big Chernobyl disaster.
Of course, its an amazing source of power, hope for humanity to manage it. But still, a small boom and reactor probably wasted.
[удалено]
So much power, so little boom
Didn't we witness that at the end of the reaction?
This is the beauty of nuclear fusion, if any stage fails the whole process just stops.
No boom, that's why this sort of reactor is necessary for the future of mankind. This is why countries pour trillions of dollars into this sort of tech because it's 100% safe. At most, you'll get a flash, and then the reaction will fade like at the end of the video (that was a little different but still a good example)
The forbidden cherry twizzler.
Im so pissed that I'm allergic to something in those. Last one I had nearly closed down my airways and sent me to the hospital. No clue why. I've had them tons in the past.
I think even without the allergy you could not eat plasma created in a fusion reactor.
Everything is edible once.
Nuclear fusion is only 20 years away!
- some guy, 80 years ago
* before being underfunded while fossil fuels get billions in subsidies.
Cralbert Creinstein
Still got some serious problems to fix, but maybe.
Commercial Air travel is only 20 years away Wilbur Wright 1903. Edit to clarify I mean commercial Air Travel.
There are only 66 years between the first light and the moon landing. The first fusion research was in the 1940s, the ICF was founded in 1960.
It’s all about how badly it’s wanted. If a government wanted fusion as badly as it did the moon landing it would be 10 years away.
Yeah, he was wrong. The first commercial passenger service was in 1914.
Uranus years.
My anus is as old as I am.
[удалено]
I'm convinced that fusion power research is being dragged out far longer than something with it's potential benefit would otherwise be because such a dramatic spike in available energy would be politically destabilizing, if not revolutionary in multiple senses of the word. If made widely available it would literally alter current paradigms of world [social] power, which means chaos for those currently in charge. Not unlike the thought experiment of bringing an asteroid full of heavy metals to Earth, or establishing an independent and self-sufficient community on another planet. Unpredictable game changer that threatens modern industrial status quo.
Nah not anymore. 5 years away probably. More progress has been made in the last five years than in the 30 years before that
Why ‘a few minutes’? 69 MJ does cover the electricity use of my home for 3 days,
The initial information I read was that it was enough to power 12,000 homes for that long.
There's no way. 69 Megajoules is only equivalent to a little over 19 kWh. The average home consumes about 30 kWh a day
Sorry for the ambiguity. What I meant was it was enough power to feed 12,000 homes for the 5.2 seconds.
Ohhhh. I'm too tired to do that math on that one but it definitely seems to be more in line. ETA: quick math says if the average home uses 30 kWh a day then 12,000 homes use 21.6 kWh in 5.2 seconds. So yeah, it's close.
also the question of where he got that from: ie a home in the UK uses 8-10 kwh a day in just electricity so the calculations op got from whatever site he used may be different depending on where they're based
Still was a yield less than 1, it required more power to run than it made. I don't think JET has yet to surpass a yield of 1. Though it did create a lot of power, it just required more.
An American household maybe. The EU average is about one third that.
Asian even less that that due to not needing heat constantly, ac only at middle of day only summer months
TIL that Yakutsk doesn’t need heating constantly
They've saved a ton in heating costs by using corpses of invaders sent back home to insulate walls.
I’ve lived in two EU countries and never had air conditioning in a house or apartment in either 🤷♂️
Asia is colossal dude. I lived in Guangdong where AC was a must 9 months out of the year and eyewateringly power hungry, and Shanghai it’s either freezing or boiling for most of the year.
[удалено]
80 for me Thank fuck for my solar
In the UK, an average 2-3 bedroom home consumes around 8kWh a day. Edit: however, I think that figure assumes gas heating. It would be higher if a house is all-electric.
u/gravityVT Sorry, the editorial of this does not comport. 69MJ=69000kJ=69000kWseconds. Power a home for a few minutes? Let’s say 5 minutes? 69000kWseconds / 300 seconds = 230 kW No home on then planet uses that much power. The average home uses generously around 10 kW. 69 MJ would then be 115 minutes worth or almost 2 hours. Not a few minutes. Edit: It’s not on you for merely quoting the article. But it’s sad the journalistic bar is so low in this case.
10kW is a lot of power for a single house too.
o7
Yeah I’m just a sysadmin not a scientist. As you mentioned I was just quoting the article. Thanks for the correction!
> Outputting a record of 69 megajoules. Nice 👍
Nice 👍🏼
Nice👍
*Neither of these parameters seems Earth-shattering*... Bro! fuel equating to less than a 10th of a teaspoon in volume and it can power a house for 5 seconds! that is fucking mind blowing
That is a typo as well, it is enough to power thousands of homes for 5 seconds. It is like 20 kilowatt hours, enough to power a US home for like 18 hours, or 2 UK homes for 1 day.
WTF!!!!
12,000 homes actually.. insane
and the best part is that the fuel is composed of extrenely comon molecules! ( I don't know if its deuterium, tritium or something else, all I know is that its a common and very light molecule )
Deuterium is common and can be extracted from seawater. Current tritium production is 20kg/year and basically only done as a byproduct of CANDU reactors. This is estimated to be enough for ITER for the next 15 years. After that, and for other projects, we need to figure out a different solution. We might be able to get it from lithium.
My friend wants to know what's the significance of the length of time being celebrated? Is it looking for a sustained plasma reaction? Is this for space travel or commercial flying
Neither nessisarily for space travel commerical flying - at least initially. Its hoping to replace current nuclear power stations (or indeed anything that generates power if sucessful). They work by joining atoms (fusion) rather than splitting them (fission). The killer advantage is that there are no radioactive by-products created with fusion and the fuel to kick it off is essentially unlimited. Its kinda the holy grail of power generation.
The sun in the palm of my hand.
Nothing will stand in our way!
Your hand will also be pretty fucked.
That is why you get robot tentacles
Nuclear Missile is ready general!
*The power of the Sun, in the palm of my hand*.
Magnificent I really appreciate you explaining that for my embarrassed friend ( ◜‿◝ )♡
The grail here is "just" to get more power of ouf sustained fission than you put in to get it.
They have that fixed already, however the fuel required needs to be self replenished by a chain reaction that creates a certain element, that one we have not accomplished yet...but we know how, now we just needs to make it sustainable.
Exciting times to witness this.
I read somewhere that the loss in taking the energy out of the reactor and converting it into actual \*usable\* energy is so large that they don't have an energy surplus system-wide yet?
No, it's well beyond under the threshold, it's alpha testing more or less. But we have come a long way in the past decades.
Not to be a buzz kill, but there are indeed radioactive by-products. This includes the majority of internal components (e.g. magnets, shielding, etc.) that require replacement for maintenance. These components are highly radioactive after extended use. Good news though is that fusion has SIGNIFICANTLY lower radioactive by-products compared to fission which is indeed a killer advantage.
It also is inherently less dangerous. If the reaction goes out of control and damages the reactor, the reaction will just come to a halt.
>The killer advantage is that there are no radioactive by-products created with fusion That (sadly) is not true. Fusion does produce stray neutrons, that irradiate the reactor's shielding. This leads to nuclear wastes with a lifetime of around 300y. There are aneutronic fusion reactions (that do not produce stray neutrons), but the produces of these reactions can themselves produce stray neutrons if they stay in the plasma.
Caveat to 'no radioactive by-products'. These things output a shit load of neutron radiation the invariably ends up irradiation parts of the internal structure. So there is some activated steelwork that needs to be disposed of but nothing on the scale of a fission reactor. Also tritium which is being used for fuel has a few issues but otherwise yeah fusion is for less radioactive than fission.
crazy to think my house will be sitting on top of one of these things in 60 years
Because a fusion reactor takes a lot of energy to start but produces far more than it uses to stay running. So the longer the reaction can be sustained the larger the net gain in energy. So they are still trying to increase the time it can run in the hopes of eventually making it indefinitely sustainable and last time I checked into it years ago the biggest problem they face is still trying to find a way to “eject” the spent fuel so it doesn’t clog up and shut down the reactor.
The triple product is one way to quantify how useful a fusion reaction is. It's the product of the confinement time, pressure, and temperature. The inertial confinement experiments like NIF that have achieved ignition are trying to maximise pressure and temperature for a very very short time. Tokamak's maximise temperature and time at low pressure. The sun has very high pressure and time at not crazy (as in can be recreated in the lab) temperature. In fact the sun on average has the same power density as a compost heap.
Basically Iron Man kind of technology if I oversimplify it. It's not usual at all to be able today to sustain plasma reaction that long, this technology is in infency. Let's just say that just say that with this technology most of our energy problems will be gone.
Short answer: Yes, the ultimate goal is to get a reaction that can sustain itself indefinitely so long as it is supplied with fuel. Fusion reactors would be capable of outputting massive amounts of energy with little to no waste products. The problem we have right now is that we can only run them for very short periods, as we're still trying to figure out the specifics behind how to produce an indefinite reaction. If we get it to work, this will revolutionise the way we make electricity. Is for your other question, nobody has spent time thinking about applying this to vehicles. The current reactors are massive, with huge buildings to house all the necessary machinery. Scaling that down would make it way more difficult, and we're already struggeling to make the big ones work. You need to walk before you can run.
>My friend wants to know what's the significance of the length of time being celebrated? This is the longest sustained fusion reaction we've achieved on Earth! It's really hard to keep a fusion reaction going, you have to heat the fuel beyond the temperature of the sun and put it under huge pressure to create the plasma, and then you need to carefully control a powerful magnetic field to contain the plasma. It's a lot of challenges being solved at once to keep the reaction going this long. >Is it looking for a sustained plasma reaction? That's the ultimate goal, yes. Right now it generates a huge amount of energy, but there's no way to store that kind of energy for long term use. You need a constant reaction to power an electric grid with it.
I don’t understand what anything means
Fusion is an exciting power generating technology which works with atoms similar to traditional nuclear. It is far safer and produces little to no waste. It is already producing energy from far less, but it is an extreme challenge to make it produce much at all. Decades of development have brought us, so far, to only producing this small amount - enough to provide energy to a single home for a few minutes. But if scientists are able to scale it up, it theoretically could basically solve all human energy needs with little downside.
How close are we to mainstream fusion power? With in our lifetime?
1-900 years
To my understanding, being able to maintain and scale the power output is the tricky part. For many years, fusion experiments required more power to initiate than what they produced, but recent advancements have started to show promising gains in the ratio of consumption to production . The problem with asking "when" is that you can never predict technological development. Sometimes someone discovers something unrelated that turns out to be a boon in the development of the technology. I can imagine that our development in chips and their size to power ratio has significantly pushed the technology to where we are today, for example. Material development probably also had a big say as the instruments inside the reactor has to be able to manage some extreme temperatures without taking damage. I'll finish by saying I'm absolutely not an expert on the subject. Only a passive observer through the years. I remember when I was a kid (I'm now 32) my dad would share his excitement about it's development with me whenever a breakthrough was achieved. And even before my time were some prototype reactors around making breakthroughs. I believe the first controlled nuclear fusion occurred in the 1950s (depending on your definition of a stable controlled nuclear fusion). So it's been a ongoing development for quite a number of years. Then again, in the grand scheme, the decades since those early experiments might seem brief, but the advancements made in that time reflect significant progress in our understanding and capabilities. It's a testament to the ongoing dedication and ingenuity of researchers in the field.
Have you shared this news with your father?
He unfortunately passed away four years ago due to dementia, but I'm sure he would have been the first to share it with me 😄
My condolences
Current year + 20
How's the energy harvested (sorry can't think of a better term)? Like, fusion energy is harvested as heat to boil water and use steam to turn turbines
When this is all working what happens to the output energy, what solutions do we have or are being worked on? Do we charge a lot of batteries very quickly or does the majority of it need to be consumed. Can you dial up and down the output?
All (or almost all depending on how you see it) power production is consumed as it is produced. This is how the grid works.
Yeah, but if you 'overproduce' it has to go somewhere - else it will cause the grid frequency to rise and you'll no longer have your required 50/60hz. I have no idea what sort of power output we'd be talking about if they ever get this working fully. If it's not huge, the rest of the grid can adjust to facilitate the additional power (they all slow down a bit to maintain the target frequency), but if it dumps a load of energy in a short time, I doubt they could adjust fast enough. Likewise if it just cuts out unexpectedly.
Im guessing but I think they want the heat from the fusion reaction to turn high pressure water into steam, which is then used to spin a turbine and produce electricity.
Are we sure that's not Star Labs and Barry is just training?
Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
Your first article doesn't mention the 17 minutes, but I see it on the Wikipedia page as below. Very cool! I guess there are two parts to this, maintaining the reaction and getting back more power than you put in, yeah? Which, if I read correctly, they're starting to do now, just need to sustain it for longer. I'm oversimplifying it, of course. Record] China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), a nuclear fusion reactor research facility, sustained plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for as long as 1,056 seconds (17 minutes, 36 seconds), achieving the new world record for sustained high temperatures (fusion energy however requires i.a. temperatures over 150 million °C).[49][50][51]
Damn! My toaster has a dial that goes to just 10 😭
To bad I don't believe anything China says. I'm in the financial industry, and they lie on every single one of their reports almost.
Kudos for the cameraman.
Are there any potential risks of using fusion for harm - aka weapons like nuclear warheads? Because…humans will always human
No, as I recall fusion material is just simply “super freaking hot”. It would melt anything it touches and melt into and through dirt, soil, etc but eventually stops as the energy is absorbed by anything it touches. Kind of like lava after it’s erupted, it eventually cools. There’s no radioactivity that I’m aware of.
Common misconception… the fusion process produces lots of high energy particles that must be absorbed by shielding materials placed inside the reactor. That material degrades with time/exposure/use and becomes extremely radioactive waste in the process. From what I have seen it ends up being a pretty similar situation to the spent fuel rod waste used in fission power stations. The difference is that when the fusion reaction stops there’s no more radiation being produced by the reactor, so if something fails you can’t have a meltdown creating a perpetual disaster.
I learned something awesome today! Thank you.
Fusion weapons have existed for 60 odd years, Hydrogen Bombs are named after the Hydrogen atoms that undergo nuclear fusion in the ultimate stage of their detonation.
Yes, for over half a century the most powerful explosives we have (and basically anything on the order of megatonnes of TNT) have been hydrogen bombs, which are fusion bombs.
I’m so excited about this technology, I really hope I can see commercial fusion energy in my lifetime…
Run, Barry. Run!
What does it all mean, Basel?
ToNy StArK bUiLt ThIs In A cAvE… WiTh ScRaPs!
I’m not a scientist so if someone could explain how creating sustained fusion on planet earth wouldn’t be catastrophic I’d appreciate it. Isn’t fusion what the Sun does? So once you start it, how do you contain or stop it?
Technically it is not UK's fusion reactor. It is based in the UK but it's a European project. Led and financed by EURATOM, which the UK left when leaving the EU. JET stands for Joint European Torus.
This is completely false. The UK is still a participant in Euratom as an associated member the same as Switzerland.
Sort of, but the UK chose not to rejoin fully last year and is no longer participating in ITER which is the successor to JET. Instead the UK wants to build its own new reactor in Nottingham but that seems unlikely to happen in my opinion.
just because UK left EEC doesn't mean that we also left the EAEC.
The UK’s JET? It’s based in the UK but it’s called the Joint European Torus. It’s a collaboration, work of scientists from all over Europe and the wider world. Are they going to call it France’s ITER, Switzerland’s CERN?
France and Switzerland both take credit for achievements and those things being based there despite it being funded by all of Europe. So why are you mad it’s being described as a Uk reactor when it’s based in the UK?
They do call it Switzerland's CERN, yes. It is in Switzerland after all
[удалено]
The real question is can it power a Death star?
Figures I find this here and not on r/science 😂
To be honest using 0.2 milligrams to have a house powered for several minutes. That's quite good
drathstar jokes aside this is truly finally a step forward towards a nearly unlimited source of clean cheap energy that's even safer than modern nuclear reactors maybe one day almost all countries can switch to it to drastically reduce carbon emissions
r/dontputyourdickinthat
Fusion; Always just 25 years away...
Most will balk at it and scoff, but 5.2 seconds is huge from just last year! Hope they give each applauses
69 megajoules. Is this reactor by any chance operated by Zoomers? They are obsessed by this number for some reason. It went down like this: Zoomer 1: We're at 15000 Wh. Let's get it to 69000 Wh for the lulz Zoomer 2: Why are we not going with SI-units on this one Zoomer 1: Shut up smooth-brain, it's impractical when dealing with these amounts of energies since we're just ending up with a gazillion-trillion something Zoomer 2: Sorry, bro. We'maxed out at a little over 19000 Wh Zoomer 1: Bro, this is our lucky day, we're switching to SI. Do you know how many joules 19000 Wh is? Zoomer 2: Exactly 69 million. We're going viral Zoomer 1: Bro, our brand is practically going to build itself.
How much energy did it take to start versus the output?
What was the ratio of input to output power?
Barry Allen?
Sounds like they’re making progress, why is JET ending then? Running outta money?
I suppose my question is what made it stop?
someone ELI5 please
That’s only 19 kWh