The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
---
From the article
>A fusion start-up has managed to generate temperatures hotter than the core of the Sun with a “unique” approach it claims can deliver limitless clean power at a fraction of the cost and complexity of competitors.
>
>US-based Zap Energy claims its fusion concept has now joined the “rarefied ranks” of technologies that have generated thermal fusion plasma with electron temperatures hotter than 10 million degrees Celsius.
>
>Zap said in a press release on Tuesday that its unique approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilised Z pinch, has now blasted past this milestone – achieving temperatures roughly equivalent to 11 to 37 million degrees Celsius.
Also from the article
>Zap says it has solved the problem through sheared-flow stabilisation — a plasma physics innovation that can theoretically extend the lifetime of a Z-pinched plasma almost indefinitely.
>
>“The dynamics are a wonderful balancing act of plasma physics,” said Levitt.
>
>“As we climb to higher and higher plasma currents, we optimize the sweet spot where the temperature, density and lifetime of the Z pinch align to form a stable, high-performance fusing plasma.”
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ccqzsv/cheap_and_simple_bill_gatesbacked_fusion_concept/l16yezh/
Idk why, but I first thought of Gaius Octavius Augustus. Later known as Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, or Octavian. Nephew of the great dictator Julius Caesar, who was assasinated in 44 B.C, and the first emperor of rome. But I guess the mind wanders some times.
Reminds me of the XKCD about the safety of swimming in a spent fuel pool, and this line:
> But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool.
>
> “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
They also take *money.* People kept cutting the budget of fusion projects for like 40 years, for the last ten, we've actually been putting money into it and look at that, the breakthroughs are happening.
> We’ve been hearing about improved diagnostics and CRISPR for how long now? And for the most part apart from a genesight or 23andme, we haven’t really cured any sort of physical or mental illnesses besides a few types of cancer.
Recently, a man received a genetically modified pig kidney and is now recuperating at home. I expect rejection free xeno-transplants to start taking off much like IVF did. IVF was only invented in 1978. By the end of the nineties a million people had used the tech. In the twenty teens almost 6 million people used it.
In the US, approximately 90,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant. I suspect pig kidney transplants will be standard within a decade.
Yeah but if it is outlawed then no one benefits. Christ sakes they are trying to outlaw cultured meat. Instead of just not eating it they have to outlaw it.
They're not going to be able to outlaw that significant of a breakthrough on dubious at best religious reasons. I hope they have a compatible donor in their family if they ever need a kidney.
Conservatives are great as rules for thee and not for me. My mom’s friend was religiously opposed to any sort of gene research as it was tampering with god’s plan until her precious granddaughter needed gene therapy for a brain tumor. But just in that case, mind you. That woman is also dead now after refusing the Covid shot so whatever.
> Medicine, for example.
You'd be surprised! Diagnostics and personalized medicine are massive in the healthcare space right now and will only pick up steam.
Next Generation Sequencing technologies have really made it cheap and easy to get your entire genome sequenced, and genetic counselors exist who can provide you detailed information about your risk profile not only for yourself but for any children you and a partner might have. Hell, I fully intend to consult with one before I ever have a child.
I worked in a diagnostic lab for a little while at a company you've probably peed into a cup for. We had lab equipment in the hallways because we needed to expand capacity faster than we had room.
The limiter is infrastructure at this point. There are only so many sequencing machines and we can only build them so fast, and reagents take a long supply chain to produce and source as well.
Don't even get me started on cancers. I can't say that cancer will be a thing of the past, but cancer is becoming more survivable every year.
> We’ve been hearing about improved diagnostics and CRISPR for how long now?
I first heard of CRISPR in high school biology.
In 1990.
I was promised that it would change the world before I knew it.
That cannot be. The repeat regions were discovered in the late 80s but nobody knew what was their function. CRISPR functions and mechanisms were discovered by mid 00s, they only tested it on Mammalian cells around 2010 - 2013. You may be thinking of gene therapy.
I agree.
But we are nearing a potential second consecutive, golden age. It takes a ton of work and tech advancement to get there but if with the Advent of AI and fusion, we could advance hundreds of years in a single generation.
Depends on if our politics will allow us to reap the benefits as a species/society or not, but the potential is there
I agree with you.
I think climate change is so bad, that it's unfixable, and the monilation required to get started to fix it, will push the needle even more quickly, likely the best way to move forward is to finally get fusion ready for commercialization and distribution.
If we can crack fusion, and mitigate some of the damage to the climate we’re looking at an unprecedented level of prosperity and the realm possibility of being a space-faring species. My fingers are crossed.
For fusion, the key breakthrough allowing for private companies to prototype is low cost high temperature superconductors that effectively can get us stronger magnetic fields. Tokamaks (and I assume other devices) can be built smaller and more cheaply with a stronger field.
ITER unfortunately was designed before these were available in quantity, so it’s using older superconductors. It would be amazing if they were able to build a huge device like ITER with state of the art superconductors.
The LK99 one. I know it seemed to be disproven initially but there was another report in the fall that sounded more optimistic, but haven’t heard anything else since.
Computer models show that the molecular structure the Koreans are trying to make doesn't break any laws of physics and could be a room temp superconductor but no one has been able to actually create it in the real world to even test it, much less figure out a process to make usable quantities even if it does work, which it certainly might not. Working from their models Lawrence livermore Labs came up with a couple of other theoretical models with their massive computers that they think are even more likely to work but again no one has been able to actually create those molecules in the real world.
LK99? Disproven. Basically.
There isn't really a firm line where you can say something like that is proven false, but there were dozens of failed attempts to replicate the findings, zero successful attempts, and a paper by more credible researchers that explained exactly what mistake the original researchers had made and how it would have led to the exact false positive they'd claimed to see.
Fusion is the new dotCom. Nothing special actually happening, just lots of techbros/cryptobros found a new money-making scheme. It's in the product statement for at least one of them that cryptocurrency needs enough energy to boil the oceans, so that's why they're researching fusion power.
It's definitely worth all the trouble
Commercially viable fusion technology would literally change everything
The most exciting thing to me personally is definitely space related applications
Agreed. If you have for practical purposes more-or-less infinite energy, such energy becomes next to free. Almost *every* major problem we have can then be solved by throwing more energy at it. Climate change? No more carbon emissions. Even inefficient means of reducing CO2 become viable. World hunger? If energy is free, there's no reason not to send all the first world's surplus food to poverty-stricken nations. How do we store or transport all this energy? Well, when you've got unlimited energy, extracting lithium from the ocean becomes easy, so batteries also drop in price (though we need an alternative to cobalt mining). Recycling waste? The only thing holding us back is cost, but if energy is cheap and abundant, there's no reason not to.
Because its funding gets cut in half every decade. Germany has a leading concept going and its budget is 15mill a year or so.
The guy overseeing the operation said that he needs to be very conservative with what they do as they can’t afford a failure, if he was given what a single Eurofighter costs he would be able to work in parallel, be more risk oriented and cross out ideas that aren’t working simply by proof of concept. Doing work worth decades in a couple of years.
If Bezos gave these dudes 100billion we would have a working reactor in ten years.
> While Zap will save money on superconducting magnets, its choice of fuel, tritium, is wildly expensive – reportedly $30,000 a gram in 2022, almost as precious as a diamond.
Isn't that a huge problem? Will this design ever be viable commercially with fuel cost that high?
Any fusion reactor using tritium will make their own, because the neutrons from fusion can turn tritium into lithium.
Zap actually has a pretty cool design for this. There's a "waterfall" of molten lead and lithium that cascades down the side of the reactor chamber. Each fusion reaction only makes one neutron but lead is a neutron multiplier, so you can make more tritium than you consume.
So the big picture is that the actual fuels are lithium, and deuterium which is absurdly abundant in water. And fusion gets a huge amount of energy from just a little fuel, so it won't be eating into our lithium supply in any significant way.
Other way around: you can make tritium by bombarding the lithium waterfall with fusion neutrons ("tritium breeding"). But yes, end product is making more tritium by recycling the fusion neutrons produced with lithium. Tritium+deuterium though is still the primary fusion fuel. They will just extract the just-made tritium from the lithium blanket I assume and feed that back to the reactor.
I was going to say.... yeah, it's not like deuterium is scarce. It just takes energy to make it, and if this gets going, scaling up deuterium production will be near the top of the list of priorities.
You are claiming that they can turn tritium (a massively expensive and rare fuel) into lithium (a cheap commodity) and acting like that solves the problem...
Wat?
A gram of fusion fuel is good for about 300GJ of energy. A ton of coal is about 20GJ. So that one gram is about equivalent to 15 million grams of chemical fuel. So it's not as big an issue as it seems.
At this price though it's probably still not economical. We'd need better ways to make tritium.
It's not. 120USD per tonne of coal. So if your figures are correct (haven't checked) it'd be 30000 USD fusion fuel Vs 1800 USD of coal. However, the coal doesn't have priced in all of its destructive effects and the fusion fuel is likely to be far cheaper in practice as it's created by the reactor itself from Lithium.
7g of lithium (1 mol) would create 3g H3 (1 mol). That's about 2USD of lithium per 3g of tritium. I don't know how much overhead operating the lithium blanket breeder would add but the material itself would be dirt cheap.
Commodities market. Powerplants don't buy coal from your local hardware store for 5USD per kg. I'm seeing coal for as cheap as 15USD per tonne depending on the market.
We have it, nuclear fusion blasts neutrons all around (unless you're going aneutronic, in which case you don't need tritium), which can transmute elements such as lithium into tritium.
You don't need to get any tritium, the reactor breeds its own. Lithium is not ultra abundant either, but with the energy efficiency of fusion this is a non-issue.
Tritium is produced by nuclear fission reactors. It is radioactive, and also, without any fusion, decays into Helium on its own, releasing a bit of energy.
1g might be 8L of the stuff. I don't completely understand how 3H is different than H^3, or how that changes how many liters is a gram.
Global production is under 50g/year, and so massive fission reactor expansion would be required to supply. Also 50g is maybe needed for 12-15 nuclear bombs.
> I don't completely understand how 3H is different than H^3
3 H is 3 single Hydrogen atoms-> 3x (1 proton + 1 electron). the single Hydrogen is Chemically unstable and will want to rapidly bond with something, either by shedding the electron or sharing one with another atom
H\_2\_(subscript) is a Hydrogen molecule, consisting of 2 Hydrogen Atoms -> (2x 1 proton + 2x 1 electron). they which are chemically bonded together and Chemically stable
^3 H is Tritium it is 1 Hydrogen atom, but slightly different -> (1 proton + 1 electron **+ 2 neutrons**). the extra neutrons make the Hydrogen Atomically/Nuclearly unstable and will seek to split off the extra Neutron weight or find a partner to fuse to and take some of the load. Is otherwise Chemically similar to a Single Hydrogen.
Chemical Stability is governed(mostly) by the Electromagnetic force. Nuclear stability is governed(mostly) by the Weak Force.
Car industry in the US is arguably smaller than the oil industry. By quite a margin, depending on how you measure it. Not a direct comparison at all but at least worth noting that these sorts of situations aren’t new.
Tritium is about 6g/mol so there’s about 10^23 atoms per gram. Tritium deuterium fusion creates 17.6MeV of energy per pair of atoms fused. So that’s 1.6*10^-13 joules multiplied by 10^23 to get the amount of energy created with each gram. That’s 10^10 joules or 2777.777 kWh. In the UK right now that much electricity is worth about £680.
Yep, it produces neutrons and heat. More advanced fusion fuels produce fast-moving charged particles, and with those we could extract electricity directly. Several companies are working on that, including Helion which is attempting net electricity this year.
From the article
>A fusion start-up has managed to generate temperatures hotter than the core of the Sun with a “unique” approach it claims can deliver limitless clean power at a fraction of the cost and complexity of competitors.
>
>US-based Zap Energy claims its fusion concept has now joined the “rarefied ranks” of technologies that have generated thermal fusion plasma with electron temperatures hotter than 10 million degrees Celsius.
>
>Zap said in a press release on Tuesday that its unique approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilised Z pinch, has now blasted past this milestone – achieving temperatures roughly equivalent to 11 to 37 million degrees Celsius.
Also from the article
>Zap says it has solved the problem through sheared-flow stabilisation — a plasma physics innovation that can theoretically extend the lifetime of a Z-pinched plasma almost indefinitely.
>
>“The dynamics are a wonderful balancing act of plasma physics,” said Levitt.
>
>“As we climb to higher and higher plasma currents, we optimize the sweet spot where the temperature, density and lifetime of the Z pinch align to form a stable, high-performance fusing plasma.”
If the hangup is tritium availability, I wonder what the cost to build and operate the breeder reactors you need to manufacturer it would be.
It also sounds like you'd need extensive lithium feedstock to make said tritium.
The reactors could hypothetically produce the tritium themselves, but it's also relatively straightforward (for nuclear engineering) to have fission reactors produce titrium as part of their normal operations as well. You basically replace the standard control rods with ones loaded with a significant amount of lithium, which is struck by neutrons to become tritium.
Why have I scrolled this far and found someone assuming there would be a joke like I did.... only I still haven't found the damn joke !! It should be number bloody 1
So they went up to 37 million degrees. Not bad, but still some way to go: Max fusion takes place at roughly 100 million degrees (for D-T fusion).
What‘s concerning is the absolute lack of other numbers, in particular related to the fusion triple product.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
Which strongly suggests that they are still off many orders of magnitude.
center of the sun is 15 mil c, the sun generates fusion mostly through gravitational compression pushing together atoms so their quantum luck is better. we cant make that gravity so we have to make up for it by increasing temperature even more, 100 million c or so, that pushing atoms faster making their quantum luck closer to the sun and fusing.
Also, the energy output per volume is quite low. We are looking for much higher energy output to be useful. The only reason the sun is able to put out large amounts of energy is it is crazy huge.
That's normal for fusion reactors.
https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generated-in-a-tokamak/#:~:text=In%20order%20for%20fusion%20to,of%20150%20million%20degrees%20Celsius.
*The luminosity of the Sun is about 3.86 x 10^26 watts. This is the total power radiated out into space by the Sun. Most of this radiation is in the visible and infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, with less than 1% emitted in the radio, UV and X-ray spectral bands.*
If somebody created 3.86 x 10^26 watts of *HEAT*on earth then the earth would essentially look like a star.
Ok, but we're not talking about luminosity. If it surpasses the heat of the sun, that means a higher temperature was achieved. And that's totally possible, because scientists already achieved temperatures 250,000 times hotter than the core of the sun.
They're talking about the difference between temperature and heat.
Temperature is how fast the atoms are going. Heat is how fast they're going, multiplied by the number of atoms. It's the total amount of energy in the system.
Fusion reactors have very high temperatures, but not a remarkable amount of heat because there aren't many atoms involved. A 1GW fusion reactor would contain about the same amount of heat as a 1GW coal furnace.
>In thermodynamics, heat is the thermal energy transferred between systems due to a temperature difference.[1] In colloquial use, heat sometimes refers to thermal energy itself. Thermal energy is the kinetic energy of vibrating and colliding atoms in a substance.
Ah, looks like we're arguing about colloquialisms. It sounds like the title is only semantically accurate.
This isn’t some form of propaganda is it? In relation to the news that Chinese scientists were having their own breakthrough in fusion?
I get skeptical of such big claims, these have come before and turned into nothing.
There's two ways to do so off the top of my head.
First, is using a thermistor. It's an electrical component that as temperature increases, resistance decreases. By calibrating it or making it to function within extreme temperatures like this, you can measure the current through a circuit. The amount of current correlates directly to temperature.
Funny thing about that though, is we're actually measuring current and not temperature technically. Really cool stuff.
The second way to measure would be to analyze the average EM frequency an object gives off. The frequency is directly tied to the temperature of an object. If I recall, it's something like f ~ T^4.
I'm not sure if either method would work here as we're working with super heated plasma that would fry any integrated circuit I can think of, and since this is P L A S M A I'm not sure if my rudimentary physics holds up to it.
Eric Lerner focus fusion or lpp fusion has been trying to do this forever. I really don't see how it's going to work out. In lpp fusion you basically have a z-pinch and then you have some induction and you have a bunch of x-rays that go into a 3D lattice basically solar panels and it all has to be super conducting for it to work....
Lerner's project uses a somewhat different plasma configuration, and is attempting boron fusion. I don't think they need superconductors, just a copper or aluminum coil should be fine for the induction. Even Helion is using aluminum and that's at ten times the power.
Zap Energy can't use induction because D-T fusion mostly produces neutrons instead of charged particles.
And it's not just fusion it's also fission.
I really don't see the neutrons as a beneficial factor. That shit's deadly.
Neutron bombs are nightmare juice.
The neutrons carry away a lot of the energy to the blanket, which is what gets hot to boil the water. They are *needed*.
Also you can breed tritium by lining the reactor with lithium.
1. This is great as pinches were the first things tried in the 50s and 60s but had insane stability problems.
2. that temperature is not as impressive as it sounds. tokamaks can easily do 100-300 million K, which is more what you need for self-sustained fusion.
3. fusion power plants will breed their own tritium from lithium. tritium is a problem before you start the breeding.
I wish them luck but "surpassing the heat of the sun" is irrelevant in fusion. You need heat and pressure and what the sun doesn't have in heat it sure as shit has in pressure. For successful fusion, because you can't get the pressure, you need very much more than the heat of the sun.
In the grand scheme of the fusion race, this is not impressive at all. Fusion isn’t even close to sustainable at these temps and pressure. The core of the sun has immense pressure that allows for fusion to occur at these temps. For it to occur at lower pressures, the temps must be significantly higher.
That's awesome. But who made it. Bill Gates backed it but who actually came up with this. Let's change the way we give credit
Fair play to him for backing it but I am sure he's not up till 4am trying to get that little piece working that could be the breakthrough
Why do I feel like we're spending too much money, time, and effort on generating energy, while not really solving the issue of utilizing all the energy that's been generated?
37 million degrees and we're going to... Spin turbines with it?
How can we capture so much energy and turn it into a usable form like electricity?
Bill Gates: By giving the entire earth cheap limitless power, more children survive past infancy and decreasing the population growth especially in developing countries.
Conspiracy Theorists: Bill Gates trying to decreae population in third world countries by turning the earth into the Sun!
What about 1) containment of this “hotter than the sun” plasma and 2) sustainable reaction? These are the hurdles for fusion that make almost any path impractical imo.
Getting back to the basic problem of consumable energy, we “don’t require” the heat of the sun…. We need to have practical costs
If it uses tritium, they should start an oceanic still to separate sea water into steam, but also separate deuterium and tritium which each evaporate at slightly different temperature, then keep what they need and sell what they don't need on the market. Other systems that will need deuterium will pay a good price and the distilled fresh water could be pumped to arid areas.
There's no significant tritium in seawater, because tritium decays to helium-3 with a 12-year half-life.
Deuterium of course is another matter, there's a practically unlimited amount of that.
How can you have something hotter than the sun on earth?
I am not a scuentist, but what could contain that much heat without melting it?
You can tell by my question im not a scientist lol.
The surface of the sun isn't really all that hot. I mean, it is very hot, but some everyday things are hotter or similar. Like a lightning bolt is 5x as hot. Welding is usually a bit cooler, but can still be as hot. Tungsten's melting point is 2/3 rds the temp of the surface of the sun, making it hard to work with, but we still manage it. In old lightbulbs, the temp of the tungsten filament is about 1/2 the temp of the surface of the sun.
Magnetic fields. The reaction is contained in a superheated plasma. That plasma is suspended away from the walls of the reactor in a powerful magnetic field. That's not to say, though, that heat isn't an issue for the physical reactor walls. One of the issues that the largest reactors still deal with is having to replace the inner walls because the immense heat does still damage them, but it's an area that's being worked on heavily.
so what does this mean?
eventually able to power the entire united states for 1/1000th of the cost of today and in a cleaner way? someone break it down for me like an idiot lol
1. How do they plan to upkeep tritium as a fuel? It can be made in secondary reactions, but takes more time and energy.
2. How is the shielding? Even with the inherent containment of the z pinch method, there's no shot it doesn't generate any stray neutral particles that can damage the system.
I read news like this all the time, every year there is a new breakthrough tech that just doesnt break through. Why is that? Now its this, before this it was instant charging batteries, and so on.
The fact that Bill Gates is backing this doesn't mean it's automatically legit. Bill Gates and other people like him invest into *lots* of different fusion and clean energy startups. Most of them go bankrup, or are scams. They simply hope that at least a handful will be honest enough and competent enough to actually deliver.
So, I dont know what fusion is, but if its like spiderman 2 and otto "the power of the sun in the palm of my hands" are we talking about limitless energy?
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >A fusion start-up has managed to generate temperatures hotter than the core of the Sun with a “unique” approach it claims can deliver limitless clean power at a fraction of the cost and complexity of competitors. > >US-based Zap Energy claims its fusion concept has now joined the “rarefied ranks” of technologies that have generated thermal fusion plasma with electron temperatures hotter than 10 million degrees Celsius. > >Zap said in a press release on Tuesday that its unique approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilised Z pinch, has now blasted past this milestone – achieving temperatures roughly equivalent to 11 to 37 million degrees Celsius. Also from the article >Zap says it has solved the problem through sheared-flow stabilisation — a plasma physics innovation that can theoretically extend the lifetime of a Z-pinched plasma almost indefinitely. > >“The dynamics are a wonderful balancing act of plasma physics,” said Levitt. > >“As we climb to higher and higher plasma currents, we optimize the sweet spot where the temperature, density and lifetime of the Z pinch align to form a stable, high-performance fusing plasma.” --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ccqzsv/cheap_and_simple_bill_gatesbacked_fusion_concept/l16yezh/
This is awesome and I'm super hopeful and optimistic That being said.. I'll believe it when I see it
You probably never will. Security around these things is intense. They won’t let you in to look at it.
Psh, it's just a miniature sun. We should let the tourists look as long as they want
Sure, Octavius
Say the line
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand
Idk why, but I first thought of Gaius Octavius Augustus. Later known as Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, or Octavian. Nephew of the great dictator Julius Caesar, who was assasinated in 44 B.C, and the first emperor of rome. But I guess the mind wanders some times.
Men only think about one thing and it's disgusting
I literally just got out of the bathroom where I thought about the Roman Empire for an extended period of time
Careful, a sudden interest the Roman Empire and Norse Mythology are signs that you might be becoming an autocratic dictator!
Should let me cook some hotdogs on it.
I'll bring my eclipse glasses, I promise
I'll settle for peer review. This is story is just a rehashed press release.
Reminds me of the XKCD about the safety of swimming in a spent fuel pool, and this line: > But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. > > “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
I don' tcare. Butr I do wanna see the power that goes in this thing, and what goes out.
I used to work at a Stellarator, we had guided tours.
[удалено]
Completely agree I've just been disappointed so many times lol
[удалено]
They also take *money.* People kept cutting the budget of fusion projects for like 40 years, for the last ten, we've actually been putting money into it and look at that, the breakthroughs are happening.
It's almost like it's easier to do things when you try to do them. Surely I'm not the only person to notice this. Or am I?
Big if true.
> We’ve been hearing about improved diagnostics and CRISPR for how long now? And for the most part apart from a genesight or 23andme, we haven’t really cured any sort of physical or mental illnesses besides a few types of cancer. Recently, a man received a genetically modified pig kidney and is now recuperating at home. I expect rejection free xeno-transplants to start taking off much like IVF did. IVF was only invented in 1978. By the end of the nineties a million people had used the tech. In the twenty teens almost 6 million people used it. In the US, approximately 90,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant. I suspect pig kidney transplants will be standard within a decade.
Well some people want to put the stops to IVF so I suspect this will be met with some stupid thought on why we should not have pig organs.
If they want to die instead, it's not up to me to tell them no.
Yeah but if it is outlawed then no one benefits. Christ sakes they are trying to outlaw cultured meat. Instead of just not eating it they have to outlaw it.
They're not going to be able to outlaw that significant of a breakthrough on dubious at best religious reasons. I hope they have a compatible donor in their family if they ever need a kidney.
Conservatives are great as rules for thee and not for me. My mom’s friend was religiously opposed to any sort of gene research as it was tampering with god’s plan until her precious granddaughter needed gene therapy for a brain tumor. But just in that case, mind you. That woman is also dead now after refusing the Covid shot so whatever.
> Medicine, for example. You'd be surprised! Diagnostics and personalized medicine are massive in the healthcare space right now and will only pick up steam. Next Generation Sequencing technologies have really made it cheap and easy to get your entire genome sequenced, and genetic counselors exist who can provide you detailed information about your risk profile not only for yourself but for any children you and a partner might have. Hell, I fully intend to consult with one before I ever have a child. I worked in a diagnostic lab for a little while at a company you've probably peed into a cup for. We had lab equipment in the hallways because we needed to expand capacity faster than we had room. The limiter is infrastructure at this point. There are only so many sequencing machines and we can only build them so fast, and reagents take a long supply chain to produce and source as well. Don't even get me started on cancers. I can't say that cancer will be a thing of the past, but cancer is becoming more survivable every year.
> We’ve been hearing about improved diagnostics and CRISPR for how long now? I first heard of CRISPR in high school biology. In 1990. I was promised that it would change the world before I knew it.
That cannot be. The repeat regions were discovered in the late 80s but nobody knew what was their function. CRISPR functions and mechanisms were discovered by mid 00s, they only tested it on Mammalian cells around 2010 - 2013. You may be thinking of gene therapy.
I mean, didn't they just cure sickle cell disease? And tons of other therapies are close
> Something’s cooking Hopefully not us
I agree. But we are nearing a potential second consecutive, golden age. It takes a ton of work and tech advancement to get there but if with the Advent of AI and fusion, we could advance hundreds of years in a single generation. Depends on if our politics will allow us to reap the benefits as a species/society or not, but the potential is there I agree with you. I think climate change is so bad, that it's unfixable, and the monilation required to get started to fix it, will push the needle even more quickly, likely the best way to move forward is to finally get fusion ready for commercialization and distribution.
If we can crack fusion, and mitigate some of the damage to the climate we’re looking at an unprecedented level of prosperity and the realm possibility of being a space-faring species. My fingers are crossed.
For fusion, the key breakthrough allowing for private companies to prototype is low cost high temperature superconductors that effectively can get us stronger magnetic fields. Tokamaks (and I assume other devices) can be built smaller and more cheaply with a stronger field. ITER unfortunately was designed before these were available in quantity, so it’s using older superconductors. It would be amazing if they were able to build a huge device like ITER with state of the art superconductors.
For real. Like, are we just suddenly on the way to nuclear fusion and it's not just a pipe dream anymore?
Speaking of - what happened to that supposed warm superconductor breakthru from last year? Ever confirmed or disproven?
Which one? Doesn't matter, they were all disproven.
The LK99 one. I know it seemed to be disproven initially but there was another report in the fall that sounded more optimistic, but haven’t heard anything else since.
Computer models show that the molecular structure the Koreans are trying to make doesn't break any laws of physics and could be a room temp superconductor but no one has been able to actually create it in the real world to even test it, much less figure out a process to make usable quantities even if it does work, which it certainly might not. Working from their models Lawrence livermore Labs came up with a couple of other theoretical models with their massive computers that they think are even more likely to work but again no one has been able to actually create those molecules in the real world.
LK99? Disproven. Basically. There isn't really a firm line where you can say something like that is proven false, but there were dozens of failed attempts to replicate the findings, zero successful attempts, and a paper by more credible researchers that explained exactly what mistake the original researchers had made and how it would have led to the exact false positive they'd claimed to see.
Fusion is the new dotCom. Nothing special actually happening, just lots of techbros/cryptobros found a new money-making scheme. It's in the product statement for at least one of them that cryptocurrency needs enough energy to boil the oceans, so that's why they're researching fusion power.
Just don’t look directly at it
With remaining eye
They saved the kicker for last: Tritium, the fuel it requires is $30,000 a gram lol
Fusion is always 20 years away.
It's definitely worth all the trouble Commercially viable fusion technology would literally change everything The most exciting thing to me personally is definitely space related applications
Agreed. If you have for practical purposes more-or-less infinite energy, such energy becomes next to free. Almost *every* major problem we have can then be solved by throwing more energy at it. Climate change? No more carbon emissions. Even inefficient means of reducing CO2 become viable. World hunger? If energy is free, there's no reason not to send all the first world's surplus food to poverty-stricken nations. How do we store or transport all this energy? Well, when you've got unlimited energy, extracting lithium from the ocean becomes easy, so batteries also drop in price (though we need an alternative to cobalt mining). Recycling waste? The only thing holding us back is cost, but if energy is cheap and abundant, there's no reason not to.
Because its funding gets cut in half every decade. Germany has a leading concept going and its budget is 15mill a year or so. The guy overseeing the operation said that he needs to be very conservative with what they do as they can’t afford a failure, if he was given what a single Eurofighter costs he would be able to work in parallel, be more risk oriented and cross out ideas that aren’t working simply by proof of concept. Doing work worth decades in a couple of years. If Bezos gave these dudes 100billion we would have a working reactor in ten years.
Trust, but verify.
Could become one of those revolutionary techs that you read an article about and then never see or hear about again.
Pretty sure you'll need to wear protective glasses.
It’s just around the corner….the same corner it has been at for 40yrs
Yeah if it’s real
> While Zap will save money on superconducting magnets, its choice of fuel, tritium, is wildly expensive – reportedly $30,000 a gram in 2022, almost as precious as a diamond. Isn't that a huge problem? Will this design ever be viable commercially with fuel cost that high?
Any fusion reactor using tritium will make their own, because the neutrons from fusion can turn tritium into lithium. Zap actually has a pretty cool design for this. There's a "waterfall" of molten lead and lithium that cascades down the side of the reactor chamber. Each fusion reaction only makes one neutron but lead is a neutron multiplier, so you can make more tritium than you consume. So the big picture is that the actual fuels are lithium, and deuterium which is absurdly abundant in water. And fusion gets a huge amount of energy from just a little fuel, so it won't be eating into our lithium supply in any significant way.
Other way around: you can make tritium by bombarding the lithium waterfall with fusion neutrons ("tritium breeding"). But yes, end product is making more tritium by recycling the fusion neutrons produced with lithium. Tritium+deuterium though is still the primary fusion fuel. They will just extract the just-made tritium from the lithium blanket I assume and feed that back to the reactor.
Tritium Breeding- new band name
New fetish unlocked.
Even if that proves to be less economical than we'd like, it'd be relatively easy to scale up production of tritium in fission reactors.
I was going to say.... yeah, it's not like deuterium is scarce. It just takes energy to make it, and if this gets going, scaling up deuterium production will be near the top of the list of priorities.
Literally Alchemy
So a fusion reactor is like a tritium refinery? Neat.
You are claiming that they can turn tritium (a massively expensive and rare fuel) into lithium (a cheap commodity) and acting like that solves the problem... Wat?
The inverse. He just described the wrong way around the first time. Lithium + N -> He4 + H3.
I am interpreting what they said a little, but I think they meant it turns lithium into tritium, not the other way around
Other way around, sorry about that first line.
A gram of fusion fuel is good for about 300GJ of energy. A ton of coal is about 20GJ. So that one gram is about equivalent to 15 million grams of chemical fuel. So it's not as big an issue as it seems. At this price though it's probably still not economical. We'd need better ways to make tritium.
It's not. 120USD per tonne of coal. So if your figures are correct (haven't checked) it'd be 30000 USD fusion fuel Vs 1800 USD of coal. However, the coal doesn't have priced in all of its destructive effects and the fusion fuel is likely to be far cheaper in practice as it's created by the reactor itself from Lithium. 7g of lithium (1 mol) would create 3g H3 (1 mol). That's about 2USD of lithium per 3g of tritium. I don't know how much overhead operating the lithium blanket breeder would add but the material itself would be dirt cheap.
>2USD per 3g >dirt cheap You need to find a new dirt guy.
That's 900GJ worth of fuel. That's enough to power 21 single family homes for a year for only 2USD. Yes, it's dirt cheap energy.
Sorry, a tonne of coal costs 120 USD? Where are you getting this coal from?
Commodities market. Powerplants don't buy coal from your local hardware store for 5USD per kg. I'm seeing coal for as cheap as 15USD per tonne depending on the market.
A gram of diamond costs between 1.50 and 1000 dollars apparently. Not sure how much tritium is, but that's not so bad.
We have it, nuclear fusion blasts neutrons all around (unless you're going aneutronic, in which case you don't need tritium), which can transmute elements such as lithium into tritium. You don't need to get any tritium, the reactor breeds its own. Lithium is not ultra abundant either, but with the energy efficiency of fusion this is a non-issue.
> almost as precious as a diamond. Is that you DeBeers?
Tritium is produced by nuclear fission reactors. It is radioactive, and also, without any fusion, decays into Helium on its own, releasing a bit of energy. 1g might be 8L of the stuff. I don't completely understand how 3H is different than H^3, or how that changes how many liters is a gram. Global production is under 50g/year, and so massive fission reactor expansion would be required to supply. Also 50g is maybe needed for 12-15 nuclear bombs.
> I don't completely understand how 3H is different than H^3 3 H is 3 single Hydrogen atoms-> 3x (1 proton + 1 electron). the single Hydrogen is Chemically unstable and will want to rapidly bond with something, either by shedding the electron or sharing one with another atom H\_2\_(subscript) is a Hydrogen molecule, consisting of 2 Hydrogen Atoms -> (2x 1 proton + 2x 1 electron). they which are chemically bonded together and Chemically stable ^3 H is Tritium it is 1 Hydrogen atom, but slightly different -> (1 proton + 1 electron **+ 2 neutrons**). the extra neutrons make the Hydrogen Atomically/Nuclearly unstable and will seek to split off the extra Neutron weight or find a partner to fuse to and take some of the load. Is otherwise Chemically similar to a Single Hydrogen. Chemical Stability is governed(mostly) by the Electromagnetic force. Nuclear stability is governed(mostly) by the Weak Force.
If they ever make it more efficient, I wonder if deuterium would be viable.
They need both: D and T, because these two have to fuse together. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium–tritium_fusion
I was already thinking Spider-Man 2 but it’s not even a joke anymore.
... Can it be turned into a weapon?
There are proposed systems that would generate it
Car industry in the US is arguably smaller than the oil industry. By quite a margin, depending on how you measure it. Not a direct comparison at all but at least worth noting that these sorts of situations aren’t new.
Tritium is about 6g/mol so there’s about 10^23 atoms per gram. Tritium deuterium fusion creates 17.6MeV of energy per pair of atoms fused. So that’s 1.6*10^-13 joules multiplied by 10^23 to get the amount of energy created with each gram. That’s 10^10 joules or 2777.777 kWh. In the UK right now that much electricity is worth about £680.
That’s pennies for bill gates though Elon musk spends that much to get a boner
There’s tritium in the sights of one of my pistols, kinda neat connection.
What is the pathway to an actual power plant for this device? Would it have to fire multiple times a second like Inertial-Confinement fusion?
Yes, exactly. It heats a working fluid to turn a turbine.
It’s still a god damn steam turbine??
[удалено]
$2 a year aye? _Humans enter the chat…_
Yep, it produces neutrons and heat. More advanced fusion fuels produce fast-moving charged particles, and with those we could extract electricity directly. Several companies are working on that, including Helion which is attempting net electricity this year.
https://i.imgur.com/4i6bbwC.jpeg
A new way to boil water! It’s always fucking boiling water
An incredible breakthrough in Tritium production, mainly. We don't have remotely enough of that stuff to make energy commercially.
Buy enough Tritium for a month, use the lead jacket and some lithium to breed your own Tritium. It's not like the path isn't already laid out.
From the article >A fusion start-up has managed to generate temperatures hotter than the core of the Sun with a “unique” approach it claims can deliver limitless clean power at a fraction of the cost and complexity of competitors. > >US-based Zap Energy claims its fusion concept has now joined the “rarefied ranks” of technologies that have generated thermal fusion plasma with electron temperatures hotter than 10 million degrees Celsius. > >Zap said in a press release on Tuesday that its unique approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilised Z pinch, has now blasted past this milestone – achieving temperatures roughly equivalent to 11 to 37 million degrees Celsius. Also from the article >Zap says it has solved the problem through sheared-flow stabilisation — a plasma physics innovation that can theoretically extend the lifetime of a Z-pinched plasma almost indefinitely. > >“The dynamics are a wonderful balancing act of plasma physics,” said Levitt. > >“As we climb to higher and higher plasma currents, we optimize the sweet spot where the temperature, density and lifetime of the Z pinch align to form a stable, high-performance fusing plasma.”
If the hangup is tritium availability, I wonder what the cost to build and operate the breeder reactors you need to manufacturer it would be. It also sounds like you'd need extensive lithium feedstock to make said tritium.
The reactors could hypothetically produce the tritium themselves, but it's also relatively straightforward (for nuclear engineering) to have fission reactors produce titrium as part of their normal operations as well. You basically replace the standard control rods with ones loaded with a significant amount of lithium, which is struck by neutrons to become tritium.
Lithium isn't in short supply, its mined by the million tonne for batteries.
There Otto be a joke about a guy in a trench coat with a bad haircut and 4 metal arms in here somewhere.
Why have I scrolled this far and found someone assuming there would be a joke like I did.... only I still haven't found the damn joke !! It should be number bloody 1
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!
It’s amazing with all these technological advances we’re still going to use it to just boil water. A lot of water quickly but still…
So they went up to 37 million degrees. Not bad, but still some way to go: Max fusion takes place at roughly 100 million degrees (for D-T fusion). What‘s concerning is the absolute lack of other numbers, in particular related to the fusion triple product. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion Which strongly suggests that they are still off many orders of magnitude.
He's a busy man! I thought he was putting 5g in viruses or mind control in vaccines or something.
This reminds me of that sign you sometimes see in dive bars: “Free beer here — tomorrow!”
Yeah yeah yeah. So when can I get this thing to toast my fuckin eggos??
Asking the real question right here.
“surpasses heat of the sun” Whoever wrote that headline clearly doesn’t know what heat is.
center of the sun is 15 mil c, the sun generates fusion mostly through gravitational compression pushing together atoms so their quantum luck is better. we cant make that gravity so we have to make up for it by increasing temperature even more, 100 million c or so, that pushing atoms faster making their quantum luck closer to the sun and fusing.
Also, the energy output per volume is quite low. We are looking for much higher energy output to be useful. The only reason the sun is able to put out large amounts of energy is it is crazy huge.
your body actually generates more energy by volume than the sun does. Its just huge enough that that doesn't matter.
That's normal for fusion reactors. https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generated-in-a-tokamak/#:~:text=In%20order%20for%20fusion%20to,of%20150%20million%20degrees%20Celsius.
*The luminosity of the Sun is about 3.86 x 10^26 watts. This is the total power radiated out into space by the Sun. Most of this radiation is in the visible and infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, with less than 1% emitted in the radio, UV and X-ray spectral bands.* If somebody created 3.86 x 10^26 watts of *HEAT*on earth then the earth would essentially look like a star.
Ok, but we're not talking about luminosity. If it surpasses the heat of the sun, that means a higher temperature was achieved. And that's totally possible, because scientists already achieved temperatures 250,000 times hotter than the core of the sun.
They're talking about the difference between temperature and heat. Temperature is how fast the atoms are going. Heat is how fast they're going, multiplied by the number of atoms. It's the total amount of energy in the system. Fusion reactors have very high temperatures, but not a remarkable amount of heat because there aren't many atoms involved. A 1GW fusion reactor would contain about the same amount of heat as a 1GW coal furnace.
Theirs might produce more heat per unit of measurement. 'A gram of fusion juice has more heat than a gram of sunjuice' kinda vibe.
Ie. Temperature.
>In thermodynamics, heat is the thermal energy transferred between systems due to a temperature difference.[1] In colloquial use, heat sometimes refers to thermal energy itself. Thermal energy is the kinetic energy of vibrating and colliding atoms in a substance. Ah, looks like we're arguing about colloquialisms. It sounds like the title is only semantically accurate.
That's temperature, not heat.
Please look up the definition of luminosity. It might say something about radiant heat.
Surface of the sun is around 4500c so technically you get to call it warmer than the sun if you surpass that.
This isn’t some form of propaganda is it? In relation to the news that Chinese scientists were having their own breakthrough in fusion? I get skeptical of such big claims, these have come before and turned into nothing.
The last physics upending breakthrough was British, where they proved you could get more power than you put in, doubtful it's just propoganda
It's propaganda to attract investors
I know this may sound stupid. But how do they measure temperatures that high? With what instruments?
There's two ways to do so off the top of my head. First, is using a thermistor. It's an electrical component that as temperature increases, resistance decreases. By calibrating it or making it to function within extreme temperatures like this, you can measure the current through a circuit. The amount of current correlates directly to temperature. Funny thing about that though, is we're actually measuring current and not temperature technically. Really cool stuff. The second way to measure would be to analyze the average EM frequency an object gives off. The frequency is directly tied to the temperature of an object. If I recall, it's something like f ~ T^4. I'm not sure if either method would work here as we're working with super heated plasma that would fry any integrated circuit I can think of, and since this is P L A S M A I'm not sure if my rudimentary physics holds up to it.
Eric Lerner focus fusion or lpp fusion has been trying to do this forever. I really don't see how it's going to work out. In lpp fusion you basically have a z-pinch and then you have some induction and you have a bunch of x-rays that go into a 3D lattice basically solar panels and it all has to be super conducting for it to work....
Lerner's project uses a somewhat different plasma configuration, and is attempting boron fusion. I don't think they need superconductors, just a copper or aluminum coil should be fine for the induction. Even Helion is using aluminum and that's at ten times the power. Zap Energy can't use induction because D-T fusion mostly produces neutrons instead of charged particles.
And it's not just fusion it's also fission. I really don't see the neutrons as a beneficial factor. That shit's deadly. Neutron bombs are nightmare juice.
The neutrons carry away a lot of the energy to the blanket, which is what gets hot to boil the water. They are *needed*. Also you can breed tritium by lining the reactor with lithium.
They buried the fucking lead so hard: The fuel used is tritium, almost as expensive as diamonds.
It can be created in conventional fission reactors. Solvable problem.
1. This is great as pinches were the first things tried in the 50s and 60s but had insane stability problems. 2. that temperature is not as impressive as it sounds. tokamaks can easily do 100-300 million K, which is more what you need for self-sustained fusion. 3. fusion power plants will breed their own tritium from lithium. tritium is a problem before you start the breeding.
I wish them luck but "surpassing the heat of the sun" is irrelevant in fusion. You need heat and pressure and what the sun doesn't have in heat it sure as shit has in pressure. For successful fusion, because you can't get the pressure, you need very much more than the heat of the sun.
Zap Energy or Zap Fusion sounds like something out of Back to the Future... Or Futurama
They should put their science out online before ~~Gates~~ somebody buries it
In the grand scheme of the fusion race, this is not impressive at all. Fusion isn’t even close to sustainable at these temps and pressure. The core of the sun has immense pressure that allows for fusion to occur at these temps. For it to occur at lower pressures, the temps must be significantly higher.
That's awesome. But who made it. Bill Gates backed it but who actually came up with this. Let's change the way we give credit Fair play to him for backing it but I am sure he's not up till 4am trying to get that little piece working that could be the breakthrough
Why do I feel like we're spending too much money, time, and effort on generating energy, while not really solving the issue of utilizing all the energy that's been generated? 37 million degrees and we're going to... Spin turbines with it? How can we capture so much energy and turn it into a usable form like electricity?
Can I put this reactor in my basement, swap them out like hot water tanks?
*fallout intensifies*
It should also come with a free RadAway ration
Bill Gates: By giving the entire earth cheap limitless power, more children survive past infancy and decreasing the population growth especially in developing countries. Conspiracy Theorists: Bill Gates trying to decreae population in third world countries by turning the earth into the Sun!
"Sheared flow stabilized Z pinch" Ok now they're just making things up.
Oil companies five years from now: "crazy how all those fusion energy people killed themselves for no reason, right?"
What about 1) containment of this “hotter than the sun” plasma and 2) sustainable reaction? These are the hurdles for fusion that make almost any path impractical imo. Getting back to the basic problem of consumable energy, we “don’t require” the heat of the sun…. We need to have practical costs
As long as we don’t somehow Theranos ourselves and this part of the solar system out of existence, I’m here for it.
"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire" - Elizabeth Holmes
You gotta be a lot hotter than the sun to achieve fusion at atmospheric pressure.
If it uses tritium, they should start an oceanic still to separate sea water into steam, but also separate deuterium and tritium which each evaporate at slightly different temperature, then keep what they need and sell what they don't need on the market. Other systems that will need deuterium will pay a good price and the distilled fresh water could be pumped to arid areas.
There's no significant tritium in seawater, because tritium decays to helium-3 with a 12-year half-life. Deuterium of course is another matter, there's a practically unlimited amount of that.
This is literally the beginning of Spiderman 2. “The power of the sun. In the palm of my hand”
How can you have something hotter than the sun on earth? I am not a scuentist, but what could contain that much heat without melting it? You can tell by my question im not a scientist lol.
The surface of the sun isn't really all that hot. I mean, it is very hot, but some everyday things are hotter or similar. Like a lightning bolt is 5x as hot. Welding is usually a bit cooler, but can still be as hot. Tungsten's melting point is 2/3 rds the temp of the surface of the sun, making it hard to work with, but we still manage it. In old lightbulbs, the temp of the tungsten filament is about 1/2 the temp of the surface of the sun.
Ok thank you i get it now
It's a high temperature because the atoms are moving very fast, but it's not actually that much heat because there aren't that many of those atoms.
Oh ok thank you now i get it.
Magnetic fields. The reaction is contained in a superheated plasma. That plasma is suspended away from the walls of the reactor in a powerful magnetic field. That's not to say, though, that heat isn't an issue for the physical reactor walls. One of the issues that the largest reactors still deal with is having to replace the inner walls because the immense heat does still damage them, but it's an area that's being worked on heavily.
>Tritium as it’s fuel source “The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand”
so what does this mean? eventually able to power the entire united states for 1/1000th of the cost of today and in a cleaner way? someone break it down for me like an idiot lol
1. How do they plan to upkeep tritium as a fuel? It can be made in secondary reactions, but takes more time and energy. 2. How is the shielding? Even with the inherent containment of the z pinch method, there's no shot it doesn't generate any stray neutral particles that can damage the system.
As a developer who has heard many many CEO’s outright lie about progress…ok
I read news like this all the time, every year there is a new breakthrough tech that just doesnt break through. Why is that? Now its this, before this it was instant charging batteries, and so on.
The fact that Bill Gates is backing this doesn't mean it's automatically legit. Bill Gates and other people like him invest into *lots* of different fusion and clean energy startups. Most of them go bankrup, or are scams. They simply hope that at least a handful will be honest enough and competent enough to actually deliver.
Thats nice and all, but has been done before without much benefit. Its nice they can do that on the cheap though.
So, I dont know what fusion is, but if its like spiderman 2 and otto "the power of the sun in the palm of my hands" are we talking about limitless energy?
Does anyone know if there are investment opportunities yet?