13 ms·
China Is About to Fire Up Its HL-2M Tokamak
- jonplackett 7y agoIf China figured out Fusion first, would they keep secret how to do it or is scientific knowledge like this shared?
- randrews 7y agoIf they planned to keep it secret, why tell anyone that they're about to start the thing up?
- stjohnswarts 7y agoPrestige is very important to the Chinese government and keeping its people until its jackboot.
- m3kw9 7y agoIt will probably just delay others from finding out for a short period
- adventured 7y agoIt wouldn't make any difference. The US can ultimately get at any technology in China just the same as China can get to any technology in the US. It wouldn't remain secret for very long no matter what they did. In fact long before they officially figured out fusion first, the US would realize what they were on to and react; just as China would the other direction.
- chmod775 7y agoChina is a member of the ITER project.
- remarkEon 7y agoI don’t know this matters. If China did make a breakthrough here it undoubtedly would be classified as a military technology. They may advertise to the world that they did it, for ego points, but I have a very hard time dreaming up a scenario where they’d actively share it.
- chmod775 7y agoFirst off, you are overestimating the extent to which the Chinese government 'screens' the publications and communications of its scientists greatly. A lot of papers have been published during development of this particular reactor for instance. Research tends to be so international these days that the chances of any country keeping significant breakthroughs to themselves are pretty slim. Scientists from countless nations are working on ITER and pooling their knowledge. The only way to keep these things under wraps is if you were running it as some kind of top secret project from the start and poured billions into it. And then you'd still be operating at a disadvantage because you can't bring in outside expertise. Considering the scale needed for serious Tokamaks (and not just small research models) and also the history of the field, I have a hard time imagining a scenario where such a thing would be kept under wraps. Fusion research is really an international community. There's not much "they" to point your finger at.
- remarkEon 7y agoI’m not overestimating anything. I agree with other comments in this thread about the geopolitical choices China would have to make if they actually did make fusion work. I think you’re underestimating what kind of groundbreaking technology this is and how quickly CCP would figure out a way to leverage it - international research involvement be damned. Free(ish) energy is the kind of thing that fundamentally rebalances the global order. US control of shipping lanes, or consistent access to oil is what has made the US the super power it is. China inventing Fusion would make all of that obsolete.
- monocasa 7y agoGeopolitically, China is trying to prove that it's capable of ground breaking technology originating in China. It makes no sense for them to hide it; they're going to be singing from the rooftops that they were first if they achieve that. It'd be like if we went to the moon, but kept it under wraps. Like, why bother?
- microcolonel 7y agoOr they might just pretend, shuffle the waste out through tunnels; they already have a LOT of tunnels.
- rowanG077 7y agoGoing to the moon is not comparable to obtaining fusion. The entire reason to go to the moon is political dominance. The goal of fusion is not political dominance it's nigh limitless clean energy. China would be stupid to share such a huge advantage with the rest of the world. It simply doesn't way up to the political gain.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- threeseed 7y agoThe technology would eventually be stolen just like we have seen China successfully steal so much Western technologies.
- scarmig 7y agoSure, but why not take advantage of a 3-5 years head start? If China were close to a surplus-energy generating Tokamak, the smart thing to do would be vague about it while pumping out a lot of disinformation to confuse Western intelligence agencies about the most productive path forward for research.
- godelski 7y ago
- Merrill 7y agoThey would patent it and license the patents to corporations in other countries.
- loceng 7y agoWould anyone feel obligated to license and not just copy the tech?
- Merrill 7y agoChina would no doubt take legal action to insist that other organizations and countries respect their intellectual property, license it, and pay royalties. By the time all the agreements with China to respect IP are in place, China will be producing more patents annually than any other country.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago> China would no doubt take legal action to insist that other organizations and countries respect their intellectual property, license it, and pay royalties. HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA. Sorry, let me re-group and be serious...... HAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAA WHAT A JOKE. HAHJAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA
- bigodbiel 7y agotheoretically yes, China has bluntly stolen western tech and appropriated it. But still the western "order" is based on such agreements, and if its upholders (the west) decides to forgo it, all hell breaks loose.
- mullingitover 7y agoThe US was a brazen pirate right up until the point when it became profitable to abide by international patent and copyright treaties. We don't like it when other countries do what we did, but I personally can't fault them.
- tanilama 7y agoIt won't matter, this is too critical, like nuclear bomb. Other players will rush to get the solution in their hands, by all means at all cost.
- elfexec 7y agoFusion would be a national security level tech - like FTL travel or general AI. Heck, it would be beyond national security level. Nobody would share that without some geopolitical considerations. To put it in perspective, the US is fighting china over relatively mundane nonsense like 5G, semiconductors, etc. Fusion would be many orders of magnitude more important than any tech we have today. The US exploited the control of oil to conquer and rule over the entire world. Every nation on earth is a vassal on some level ( even china and russia ) to the US because we discovered and exploited oil first and pretty much ended up controlling most of it around the world. The international world order is an american world order because of oil. If madagascar or north korea discovered fusion, they would control the commanding heights and they wouldn't share such a secret without getting something in return. If that is the case for madagascar/north korea, major nations like china, japan, france, germany, russia, india, turkey, nigeria, brazil, venezuela, etc who don't want to be under american domination would be even more incentivized to keep it for themselves. What is the value of limitless free and environmentally friendly energy? Priceless. It's the type of tech which alters human trajectory and the world order. Not only is fusion priceless in and of itself, it's priceless in terms of it's derivative effects. Discovery of fusion can lead to general AI and vice versa. In other words, ain't nobody sharing fusion tech - at least not without significant strings attached.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoThere's no way China would give it the technology to us. We'd have to steal it through subterfuge just like the Russians stole nuclear plans in the 50s
- Rapzid 7y agoIt would be shared or stolen(liberated?). The benefit to the world is too great to keep something like that secret for long. Plus, global warming.
- m3kw9 7y agoI think I know why there isn’t more advanced life out there: as we do bigger and bigger experiments, the chance of making a mistake that can end planets increases as we are more technologically advanced..
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoDo you even know what a tokamak is?
- andrepd 7y agoFunny you should mention that, because fusion plants are pretty much inherently safe from that point of view. From wiki: >Runaway reactions cannot occur in a fusion reactor. The plasma is burnt at optimal conditions, and any significant change will simply quench the reactions. The reaction process is so delicate that this level of safety is inherent.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoHmmm. Now where have I heard that kind of talk before? Oh yeah. "Safe, clean, too cheap to meter."
- noobermin 7y agoSome fusion products might cause activation of the walls of a device. Beyond that, they're nowhere near as dangerous as say nuclear fission reactors.
- Despegar 7y agoChina is also firing up more coal plants. https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-tougher-times-china-falls-back-on-coal-11577115096 https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-tougher-times-china-falls-ba...
- simion314 7y agoWhat is your point? They should stop consuming energy until someone gifts them some magical tech? From the article we see they are trying better alternatives and if this would be a success maybe we could have enough energy to undo all the CO2 the industrial countries put in the atmosphere.
- noobermin 7y agoThis is a science experiment AFAICT, not a proposed electrical energy generator. No fusion device is close to that.
- cameronbrown 7y agoAnd more nuclear plants..? What's your point.
- noobermin 7y agoCan someone more in the know tell us where the HL-2M stacks up compared to other tokamaks and related magnetic confinement devices?
- threeseed 7y agoThis is the key question as there are quite a few Tokamaks around. Tokamak Energy has had an operational one for a while now. But they are quite some time away from having one that can generate surplus power. Question is whether China is up to this point yet. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuSlFJbBUIj1zfJLRnGXSow https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuSlFJbBUIj1zfJLRnGXSow
- pinewurst 7y agoYes, since 1958 with the Soviet T-1.
- tiborsaas 7y agoI looked into this when the news came out and found this article (2007) with many details: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P_1356_CD_web/datasets/executive_summary.html https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P_1356_CD_web... "Judging from several key performance parameters, HL-2M will be the most advanced Tokamak in China, and also one of the leading devices worldwide, comparable to those in the U.S. and Europe," https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674d34676a4d34457a6333566d54/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674d34676a4d34457a6333566d54/...
- stoicShell 7y agoHere's to one more step on the road to a Kardashiev type 1 civilization. If we harness the power of fusion, we basically remove the biggest roadblock to a space-faring, galaxy-spanning civilization. And we'd solve so many pressing problems right here within a few decades.
- fnord77 7y agoin the book "Flight to the Stars: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Interstellar Flight" by James Strong, the author theorizes the max-v of a generational ship would be about 15% the speed of light. It would take 450 years to get to the next closest star. Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away. Not so sanguine about it solving near-term problems, either. We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population. The benefits of cheap power will also be hoarded
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago> Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away. Yeah, but they'd exist, which they don't right now. > We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population. The "wealth" of today's billionaires exists almost entirely on paper. Even if Michael Dell has a huge house and a private jet and you don't, he doesn't spend most of his billions on himself. He uses it to own shares in his company. And the company uses it to make computers. We have more wealth in the hands of corporations than at any time before in history, and there are some serious issues with that, but it isn't that they're somehow hoarding resources. Apple having a mountain of cash in an offshore subsidiary isn't why you can't afford housing -- that money is just somebody else's debt, not an actual consumption of resources. And if you can make fusion work, it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if some people make a lot of money from it because the only way people will buy it is if it's better than the existing alternatives, which would imply that it's better than the existing alternatives. Which means you get cheaper electricity or less climate change or both. All they get is a pile of green paper they're probably never even going to spend all of.
- nopinsight 7y agoRelated: Either China or the US has the largest overall PPP-adjusted R&D budget in the world. (The US data here is 2016 while China’s is 2018 so it’s hard to tell exactly.) China’s investment is about the same % of its GDP as France’s. Others in the top five are the EU, Japan, and Germany, followed closely by South Korea. South Korea invests the most as a percentage of GDP. All of the “Asian Tigers”, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, appear to have been invested heavily in R&D as a % of GDP (European level or higher) for a long time, and they were the only ones in Asia crossing from third-world to first-world status after Japan, which did the same before that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_researc... Few places managed to join the developed nation status in the last half century. Chile is arguably the only other example.
- sgillen 7y agoThat is interesting. Do have any idea if that figure includes research done by/for the military? I could not determine that from the Wiki page and it seems like if it does not that could push the US ahead.
- nopinsight 7y agoI don’t know about that either. One area where China clearly has an advantage is massive investment in time and budget and respect for education and scholarship that pervades its culture, from individual, family, friends, up to the highest level of society. I once rode in a taxi in Singapore and had a chat. The Chinese-speaking taxi driver expressed sincere admiration after simply learning that I had a master’s degree, to my surprise.
- bsder 7y ago> One area where China clearly has an advantage is massive investment in time and budget and respect for education and scholarship that pervades its culture, from individual, family, friends, up to the highest level of society. My experience is that Chinese have a respect for the record that claims you are educated. Actual education or achievement is irrelevant. My favorite example of this is a Chinese friend who cashed out of a startup for $22 million but is still a failure because he didn't get a college degree.
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoI hope they succeed. We desperately need to adopt nuclear energy world wide. The success of such a project would pressure western governments into adopting the technology to stay competitive. Especially when the cost of a kilowatt hour plummets. I sure dislike authoritarianism, but on this one I think everyone's interest are aligned. Anyone who isn't misinformed or sentimental will support modern nuclear. I'm amazed there isn't more unity here in the comment section; this is an objectively good thing for humanity. The advancement of science.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoYeah, at this point I've given up on the USA as an innovator in the nuclear field. China seems to be much less luddite in this field and AI, maybe they'll let us buy it off them as we become second or third in the field (and in science in general).
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoI'm curious, when you say AI, what do you mean? To me AI is machine learning. And the US is leading in that area, the forefront of which seems to be self driving technology. Are there specific examples of cutting edge machine learning where China excels? My understanding is they have IMPLEMENTED machine learning in an authoritarian type of way. But this implementation isn't innovative. There's no underlying tech improvement. Just the application of existing technology in a terrible way. We have the same face tracking, gait tracking tech. We just don't apply it en mass because of pesky human rights and such.
- stjohnswarts 7y agohttps://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/12/16/how-china-is-dominating-artificial-intelligence/#5186dd412b2f https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/12/16/how-ch... . The Chinese government is making a concerted effort to spend mega-bucks on AI, whereas the US government is just letting it happen organically and have no real plan.
- faissaloo 7y agoIf China gets fusion energy first they will obtain unimaginable power, hell the same applies to the US. While stopping climate change would be great I also fear for what we might put in its place.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoyou fear for what we might put in place of climate change? I'm not sure what you're getting at with this??
- faissaloo 7y agoWhat I'm getting at is giving a tyranical, abusive, genocidal country world domination vs suffering the effects of pollution and ecological collapse isn't a choice I want to make
- trasz 7y agoBut we’re not talking about the US here.
- faissaloo 7y agoIt doesn't matter which tyranical regime it is, it's still bad news.
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments and ignoring our requests to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- faissaloo 7y ago
- jacquesm 7y agoTo all of you worried that it will work and that China will take the lead: it doesn't matter. What matters is that once someone shows it can be done there will be a race on to copy the feat and that race won't be too long without other winners. The same thing has happened with every other key technology that might give a nation a head start in the military domain, and this definitely is one like that. Simply knowing that something is possible is often enough to remove the political and mental roadblocks required to see it through.
- anakaine 7y agoThanks for the reality check.
- yummypaint 7y agoIm always happy to see more funding for magnetic fusion research. Maybe this will put more pressure on US politicians to at least not renege on our existing commitments (ITER). For reference, here is how we have funded it so far: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
- imglorp 7y agoIf Earth spent a tiny fraction of the annual fossil subsidy, which is in the $US Trillions, on this stuff we'd have it knocked out in no time.
- willis936 7y agoThere seems to be some confusion in the comments. This is a science machine that does not aim to set any records. It’s more akin to DIII-D/ASDEX catchup and provide a decent platform for plasma physics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379619308622 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037961...
- jacquesm 7y agoThat's mostly because the article linked is not exactly subtle, complete with pictures of coronal mass ejections and other hyperbole. But there is some innovation going on here and I'm pretty curious if it will work as designed without a lot of do-over.
- knzhou 7y agoYeah, this drives me crazy. You get this kind of response whenever anybody funds a new tokamak, or particle accelerator, or free electron laser, or petawatt laser, or whatever. There's over a hundred of these things, they aren't on the scale of the LHC.
- LessDmesg 7y agoAre you a collaborationist paid off by Chinese communist parties to leave pro-Beijing comments?
- sballin 7y agoFusion grad student here. HL-2M is very similar to the US DIII-D reactor in size, magnetic field strength, and plasma current. HL-2M will have 11 MW of heating power in its first stage compared to 23 MW on DIII-D according to Wikipedia, though this will likely be upgraded. But consider the fact that DIII-D was built in 1986. JET, currently operating in the UK, is the tokamak closest to producing more fusion power than absorbed heating power. It would be a nice surprise if it achieved this in its upcoming research program using deuterium-tritium fuel. But to reliably pass this milestone and get closer to producing electricity, we need to build tokamaks bigger, like ITER, or with a stronger magnetic field, like SPARC. Neither one will produce electricity, but they will allow us to study the potentially different plasma environment and materials issues at high fusion power. Electricity-producing tokamaks are in the extremely early conceptual design phase (DEMO, ARC) and will require much more research on tritium breeding and materials that can withstand insane levels of heating and irradiation. HL-2M specs (paywalled): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2015.06.106 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fusengdes.2015.06.106
- Havoc 7y agoGreat comment. Nice to see a 20 second summary of where we (humanity) is on this currently