what an incredible achievement. rome wasn't built in a day and real.science takes time and effort. so much effort by these scientists!
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I'm so used to hearing that this technology is 10 years away, or whatever the old adage was, that i can't believe we've been seeing actual progress on this front in the last few years. Maybe it will actually happen eventually!
Well, there's been incremental progress all along. I remember reading about milliseconds being a big accomplishment at some point.
Also, it's pretty heavily dependent on the exact plasma in question. One hot enough to do lots of fusion will probably be different, so this isn't the finish line. Relevant XKCD.
It just took someone without a profit motive
I'm studying Physics at the moment and Prof. gave us a printout of a textbook last week stating that the internal of the sun generates approximately 150 W / m³ on average. That's about as much as a compost pile, so, not very much. The sun only generates enormous amounts of power because it's so huge. In other words, reproducing fusion on Earth might actually not be very efficient.
Different kind of fusion. Don't forget hydrogen bombs have been around for decades, right? They're just not very controlled and harnessable.
To the sun's credit, it's 4.5 billion years in and it's still got plenty of juice left to go.
Look up the etymology of the word "sophomore".
Yeah that is not how that works
The sun is enormous, yeah, but fusion only really happens at the core. A very tiny fraction of the sun is doing the fusion, the rest jlgets heated up, makes gravity and such, bit doesn't really do anything of interest energy wise.
Fusion creates a shit tonne more energy than 150w/cm3. Heck, you've never seen what a nuke does
No, OP is right - or rather, OP's physics professor. There's different kinds of fusion, though, and nobody's suggesting we do the exact same kind here on Earth (we basically can't).
Fusion creates a shit tonne more energy than 150w/cm3. Heck, you’ve never seen what a nuke does
That's power density (Watts). Multiply by 10 billion years to get energy density.
Found this article
https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.htm
And it looks like it's saying that the energy produced by nuclear fusion (which happens in the relatively small core) divided by the entire mass of the sun, gives you that low number.
Terrestrial fusion power plants are aiming to be sun cores, so that all the hydrogen they put in gets fused, and not just a few atoms here and there.
It's low in the core too, just not quite that low.
How does nobody else here know that we're talking about artificially fusing some blend of deuterium or tritium? The sun fuses ordinary hydrogen at this point in it's evolution - that's why it's a nice slow 10 billion year burn.
Why do people assume that scientists don’t sanity check themselves? Genuine question, no offense to the OC here.
Cause maybe they assume scientists are hyping things up like VCs for AI.
In a dishonest world, the honest would be mistrusted more.
"guys, I know we've been working on this for decades, but I've been going over this first-year textbook, and I have some bad news..."
Good job scientists!
I feel like little fusion has kind of missed the boat. It's been "just a few decades away" since I was in school, and that's a good while ago now.
We can already get limitless clean energy from the real sun.
A) solar energy isn't clean, and it's the exact opposite of environmentally friendly; it's just that current power sources are so much worse it looks good by comparison.
B) fusion cannot ever be profitable. The fuel for it is the most common on the planet, if not the universe, requires no special refining, and can't be made artificially scarce. A post fusion world is a post energy industry world. It's the practical end of what currently owns the US and other countries.
This has drastically reduced funding for it and has blocked advancement for decades. This project among others in China have no profit motive, they are trying to accomplish a goal without caring how they can become rich off it. If fusion energy is possible, it'll be done in China.
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We should do both
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There is no two.
Here's why it's been so long:
Meanwhile in America
Literally has tons of the same kind or reactor, and Europe is working on one that might actually do practical things.
Living in the UK I suspect you have the same problem we have. Plenty of people capable of doing all the impressive shit China is doing (science, infastructure, whatever) and all of them being starved of funding as all the money dissapears into gigantic blackholes of backroom deals where huge amounts of money are spent on vague things that never seem to materialize or even be adequately explained; but whatever they are they sure do generate enormous profits for the cronies of whoevers currently in power.
Well at least here we can pretty easily see where the money goes by looking at the billions of dollars given to Israel and the military.
My country is in this comment and i don’t like it
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Someone needs to bash these scicomm journalists over the head until they stop using the words "artificial sun"
Also, where's the study? Is it even peer reviewed?
Forget artificial suns, let me tell you right now how to make an artificial moon:
- Be a robot.
- Pull down pants.
- Bend over.
- Point robo-crack towards recipient
- Artificial Moon.
Meh, net gain is the point, long cycles well be useful for production. Useful, eventually. Cart before the horse, otherwise.
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