5 ms·

What is the significance of this?

• groby_b 4y ago
  Second sentence from The Fine Article: "While the duration and temperature alone aren’t records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor – as long as the technique used can be scaled up."
  • terrorOf 4y ago
    AFAIK, China has record for temperature and duration however it is known as China heated up electron rather than heating up ion which is more proper.
    • tinco 4y ago
      I hadn't realized that was a different kind of record (150M degrees for over 1000 seconds). I suppose the ions have more mass than the electrons so that temperature is harder to maintain, but I have no idea about the physics of having them not heat up at the same rate. BTW I had to vouch for your comment to reply because you have a history of making short and sometimes brusque comments and HN has punished you for it. If you would make slightly longer comments in the future more people will engage with you and it will be more fun for you.
  • zxcvbn4038 4y ago
    What? No reactor in every home? Those house of the future films lied to me in every way.
    • stevage 4y ago
      That's what solar plus battery is for.
  • uwuemu 4y ago
    Good luck trying to "scale up" (at least in the near future). Tokamaks are only getting to be "scaled up" now, after pretty much decades, and basically only thanks to ITER (factor of ten plasma volume compared to the second largest tokamak). And ITER is a megaproject comparable (both in budget and time) with the SLS program. Maybe even more expensive (depending on if you believe the official number, 22bn EUR, or the unofficial estimate, 40bn EUR) and DEFINITELY more complex with far more cutting edge science (plasma physics, material science...), technology, and engineering required. If ITER succeeds (proves that fusion in a magnetic confinement device can be used to produce net electricity and it's "just" a matter of scaling things up that is holding fusion back), then sure, investors are going to line up, even for alternative designs. Fusion will be all the rage. But until then, I doubt anyone is scaling anything fusion-related up. Well and if ITER fails, then we are all fucked, and we can turn the fusion "are we there yet" clock back 50 years.
    • samhain 4y ago
      Have you taken a look at MITs SPARC reactor? I’m always skeptical of comments that only reference ITER, since it’s very old news at this point, and there have been a plethora of innovation beyond ITER in just the last few years. The REBCO tape, and being able to get 10x magnetic field strength compared to ITER in a 3x smaller diameter seems like fairly significant progress to me.
      • idontpost 4y ago
        > I’m always skeptical of comments that only reference ITER, since it’s very old news at this point, and there have been a plethora of innovation beyond ITER in just the last few years. Seeing as ITER doesn't even exist yet, I fail to understand how it can be old news or how we can innovate beyond it.
    • klabb3 4y ago
      Isn't total cost per reactor more constraining than cost per Wh for these mega projects? Say you spend $10B on a reactor that produces essentially free energy. You're still limited by plant lifetime, maintenance and crucially transportation of that energy – just breaking even would be a challenge in many locations. Thus, we have to have many plants distributed, similar to today's fission, at somewhere in the 500MW range per reactor (give or take an OOM). In short, we have diminishing returns for giant reactors, and instead need to have plants that can be mass produced, fast.
• npunt 4y ago
  It's just the new hotness
  • random314 4y ago
    Alright, take the upvote!