13 ms·
HH70, the first high-temperature superconducting Tokamak achieves first plasma
- ab5tract 2y agoAnd here’s why it’s irrelevant and inconsequential…
- mnau 2y agoPlease do go on? I won't say irrelevant, but when compared to SPARC project, it seems kind of underpowered? HH70: major radius: 0.75 m, magnetic field 0.6 T SPARK: major radius: 1.85 m, magnetic field 12.2 T HH70 has the advantage of actually existing and working, but to my completely layman eyes, it doesn't seem that using high temperature superconducting magnets brought expected increase in parameters.
- K0balt 2y agoI think this is a reference to the normal pattern in the tortuously slow development of practical fusion power. Despite all of the significant milestones, fusion remains about 20 years down the road, for the last 50 years.
- mnau 2y agoConsidering the funding for past 50 years has been below "fusion never" level, I think they made a great progress. See fusion budget vs expected timelines: https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-plan-sjH5r https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-...
- K0balt 2y agoWow, I never imagined that fusion funding was that paltry. Considering the insane things that have to be built to make it work, it is very impressive what has actually gotten done.
- mnau 2y agoTo be fair, that's budget for magnetic confinement fusion. US has always been more interested in inertial fusion (i.e. shoot it with lasers). Likely because of synergy with military application of lasers. The thing it, inertial confinement seems to be a dead end and has been for quite a while. At least rest of the world has decided to fund magnetic confinement (plus few oddballs with z-pinch), so I assume it's more promising approach.
- ilaksh 2y agoIt seems that the investment in fusion is incredibly tiny relative to the potential payoff and compared to other trivial or even destructive pursuits?
- ab5tract 2y ago[flagged]
- willis936 2y agoThe real hair-raising thing is that HH70 is out of the blue. Three years is a very short period of time to put together a company, supply chain, and working HTS tokamak of any scale. The plasma performance metrics are nearly irrelevant. They've knocked down a lot of difficult questions and paved the way for bigger machines on short timescales. I'm not sure what the next out-of-the-blue headline will be in 3 years, but there's a good chance it will be "burning plasma". The West runs a real risk of being left way behind here.
- mnau 2y ago> e real hair-raising thing is that HH70 is out of the blue. I wish them best of luck and China speed. It doesn't matter who develops the technology, in either case it's a win for humanity. 7 out of 8 billion people are not in the "west".
- dang 2y agoIf you have a substantive point, please make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ab5tract 2y ago[flagged]
- convolvatron 2y ago"HH70 has independent intellectual property rights, with a localization rate exceeding 96%." what...does that mean?
- datameta 2y agoNot relying on licenced IP? 96% in-house? That's my guess but I'm just a dude on HN. Also, this is kinda like SpaceX getting a Falcon 9 to orbit the first time but in fusion land.
- bandyaboot 2y agoIt’s a bit difficult to parse the analogy since you’re comparing something that has never been done (and is a notoriously difficult technology to crack) to something that had been done by many others, many times. But, even so, and despite the lack of specific information about the test/achievement, I have a feeling you’re over selling this by quite a bit. If you want to compare to spacex, I’d say it’s more like the first time they demonstrated that they could control a re-entering booster stage with grid fins—a notable step to booster reuse.
- margalabargala 2y agoThe analogy is apt. Many, many, many fusion reactors have achieved first plasma. This is comparable to a rocket achieving orbit. This company's ultimate goal is commercial fusion power, which has never been done. SpaceX's goal is landing people on Mars, which has never been done. The milestones being discussed are just stepping stones.
- bandyaboot 2y agoYeah that makes sense when you explain it like that.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> SpaceX's goal is landing people on Mars, which has never been done Cheap, frequent flights on reüsable rockets would seem to be space’s commercial fusion power threshold. Colonising Mars is like fusion SMRs at a fraction of solar’s cost.
- ilaksh 2y agoDumb question, but is the basic idea that you need to harvest more heat energy from the plasma than is needed to maintain the magnetic field? Also, very dumb question but the plasma means that fusion is actually occuring, right? And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever? Or any other fusion device, how does it actually collect or output energy from the fusion. And how much do they make, and how far off is that from matching the input power? Maybe it was some protons escaping from the plasma and hearing something external or something.
- virtue3 2y agoI dont believe magnetic containment would contain heat, so just run a liquid through the reactor and use it to heat up water to make steam and drive a turbine. Nuclear plants do this.
- ilaksh 2y agoWell it's a torus right? So you put a turbine in the middle? I don't think I've heard that explanation before. Or maybe it can go in the outside. I guess it's like, you need a huge amount of electricity to make the magnetic field strong enough, right? So the question is, how do you collect enough heat without melting key components?
- baq 2y agoNo unless you want your turbine to be neutron activated. (You don't.) You would pump water through the reactor and use a heat exchanger to a secondary water loop which powers the turbine. Maybe you can do without the secondary loop altogether, not sure; this ITER document suggests only one loop, but it's super vague: https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork
- lazide 2y agoNo one has figured out how to actually do this yet. Which is why it is vague. The radiation levels and difficulty maintaining the magnetic confinement make this essentially impossible right now. Another reason why fusion is always 50 years away. It’s really hard (outside of a nuclear bomb or star, anyway).
- baq 2y agoIf this isn't a Sputnik and/or an Apollo 11-level wake up call to the western leaders I don't know what has any chance of working.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wredue 2y agoWith currently half the western population pushing a significant anti-science agenda (even greater than half if you consider that there’s also not insignificant anti-science ideals in various left wing groups as well, albeit not usually to the point of ripping kids out of education), that seems like a nearly impossible proposition unless there’s a significant political awakening.
- imoverclocked 2y agoI'm not sure why you are being downvoted. The original question is political in nature and polls run by both major sides of the political spectrum in the USA support your argument.
- robocat 2y agoAnything political or feeding the flames is not encouraged on HN. Especially if it appears bipartisan, personally. And many of us are in other countries so the whole subject is usually annoying.
- baq 2y agoThe space race has shown that America hates losing more than it hates science. We're kind of early but e.g. the race back to the Moon is on. If there's a credible threat of losing a race to fusion power I'm pretty sure US politicians would be able to sell that threat to the public in a single afternoon.
- bequanna 2y agoWhy? Assuming this is real and not exaggerated propaganda, does China think IP theft is a one way street?
- londons_explore 2y agoWhen talking about the price of energy produced by fusion, various estimates put it at 'probably about the same as nuclear fission, maybe a bit higher, but it won't have the proliferation risk/contamination risk of fission'. However, because the tech was '50 years away', it never made sense for private sector investors, so most investment was from governments. However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?
- sofixa 2y ago> However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? Cheaper per watts generated, which aren't constant. Cheaper for a constant output? Reliable to actually power a full grid through downturns such as storms, winters, etc? No, not really. There are exactly zero currently available widely usable grid scale (being able to have enough capacity to power the grid for up to days at a time) solutions. Pumped up hydro is the only one coming close, but it's expensive and it requires specific geography. Just saying "batteries" or "supply and demand by load shedding" doesn't magically solve this problem.
- imoverclocked 2y ago> with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear ... does it even make sense for governments to go down this route? If this works without the sun shining then, yes, it makes sense. It is always good to have multiple sources of energy even if only as a form of redundancy. Our world depends on power.
- Tade0 2y ago> If this works without the sun shining HVDC lines are already mature enough that the cheapest route is to just wrap the Earth with them to form a planetary grid. The sun always shines somewhere.
- themgt 2y agoInsane factoid (post from Feb 27, 2022) ... this was funded by a Chinese gaming company and built in 2 years for relative pennies??: MiHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, has led a $65m funding round in Shanghai based Energy Singularity which is a company involved in nuclear fusion technology, tokamak devices and operational control systems. The company plans to build its own Tokamak device by 2024. https://x.com/ZhugeEX/status/1497957735337443331 https://x.com/ZhugeEX/status/1497957735337443331
- beefnugs 2y agoThe old saying about absolute power corrupting absolutely clearly has parallels in all other fields: Absolute money corrupts vision and focus. Tesla: "We did it. We have become profitable and created a real product people want. Now we can laser focus on making it better and more reliable and cheaper for everyone!" "haha nope! lets put it all into crypto and humanoid robots and impregnating as many CEOs as possible, let that bet ride bayyybeeee!!!!"
- thepasswordis 2y agoAlso Tesla: drive the price of EVs down to parity with ICE cars while delivering a superior product, built out the nations charging infrastructure (and got everybody to switch to NACS), and oh yeah: made self driving available to everybody for next to nothing.
- vlovich123 2y ago“Self driving”
- 2four2 2y ago> for next to nothing Their cars are certainly out of my price range. Plus, openpilot has been doing it for free for years.
- hyuuu 2y agoyou should try driving with openpilot and compare it with FSD to see if they're equal since you are making this comparison
- upmind 2y agoFor someone who doesn't know much about physics, what significance does this have?
- physicistphil 2y agoTokamak energy did this back in 2015[1,2] (the article is wrong) [1]: https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us/#trackrecord https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us/#trackrecord [2]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2017.0438 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...
- computerdork 2y agoAm no physicist, but was wondering about that. Thought this was all done before by different fusion companies?
- baking 2y agoST40 does not use HTS magnets. The magnets are made from copper and LN2 cooled. The company is demoing HTS magnets but has not used them in a working tokamak.
- physicistphil 2y agoST25 HTS did as far as I can tell — unless TE are lying, but that seems improbable.
- scotty79 2y agoST25 was a "desktop tokamak" measuring 25cm in diameter.
- noobermin 2y agoThe point is the high temperature superconducting magnets. Creating a tokamak plasma is not novel.
- __experiment__ 2y agoI'm brave enough to remember LK99 does anyone know how this differ from outside temperature?
- TheDudeMan 2y agoHumorously, they don't give a temperature, but they do mention "high-temperature superconducting" 14 times.
- Choco31415 2y agoHigh temperature superconductors don't have to work at room temperature. As it doesn't require liquid nitrogen cooling, it's a lot easier to maintain and run.
- willis936 2y agoIf they're hitting 25T on a bore larger than a few cm then they're using supercritical 8K helium to cool ReBCO superconductors OR they have a super secret new superconducting material that the rest of the world doesn't know about and hasn't been used in other practical application (exceedingly unlikely, drunk uncle conspiracy theory tier).
- Havoc 2y agoSilly question but say fusion works and we use massive amounts of it. Wouldn’t that increase global temps?
- wffurr 2y agoNo. Whatever amount of waste heat is released into the atmosphere would be so small compared to insolation that it would be impossible to measure. If it displaced all remaining coal and natural gas burning, temperatures would stabilize.
- ranger207 2y agoNo. Assuming it's using steam generators like most powerplants (gas, nuclear, and coal), then the only heat released to the atmosphere would be the inevitable entropic losses. This is the same amount of heat lost by nuclear powerplants (although you could argue nuke plants release decay heat that fusion plants wouldn't but that's negligible). Gas and coal plants release that heat as well, but then also release greenhouse gases that heat things up further
- fellowmartian 2y agoThe author wasn’t asking about production entropic losses, but whether using massive amount of energy will heat up the planet, and it definitely will. This is why it’s a technosignature. Heat dissipation is the ultimate limit on growth on a planet, but we’re talking about trillions of people living in luxury.
- fsh 2y agoYes, but the direct heating effect is quite small compared to the effect of greenhouse gases. The world primary energy consumption is around 19 TW, whereas radiative forcing (difference to pre-industrial values) is estimated to be around 1 PW.
- Havoc 2y agoAh that’s helpful. Numbers give a sense of scale. Thanks