Great Balls of Fire - China sets new world record for Fusion, 100 MILLION C

[rcmaehl]

Source:

Phys
Express

 

Summary:
We steadily making progress towards nuclear fusion with the latest experiment being 6 times hotter than the sun. Only slightly hotter and we will be extremely close to truly clean energy.

Media:

 

Quotes/Excerpts:

Quote

China’s ‘artificial sun’ has broken yet another record after it exceeded temperatures of 100 MILLION degrees Celsius. Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor in Hefei broke a new record in fusion technology as it reached temperatures six times higher than the sun. Nuclear fusion is a staggering technical innovation. Atomic nuclei begin to fuse together releasing huge amounts of energy but without the massive amount of deadly radiation which our existing nuclear fission reactors create. However, for a sustainable nuclear fusion energy source, temperatures will need to reach seven times as hot as the sun. "The benefit is simple in that it is very large-scale base load [continuous] energy production, with zero greenhouse gas emissions and no long-life radioactive waste. Nevertheless, the race to build a fusion reactor is hotting up, with numerous companies now devoting resources towards developing a successful method. Experts predict it will become a reality within 30 years – and much quicker than that if Agni’s efforts prove successful.

 

My Thoughts:

Looks like GeneralFusion will need to step up it's A-Game. I believe that we'll have Nuclear Fusion within my lifetime, if not soon after.

 

[TVwazhere]

Just now, rcmaehl said:

We steadily making progress towards nuclear fusion with the latest experiment being 6 times hotter than the sun.

We just need more GTX480's and 7980XE's!

[Curufinwe_wins]

Wait what??? They are trying to do D-L fusion?

 

 

 

Oh llol! So fyi @rcmaehl the quote (about fusion from seawater and lithium) from that Express article... is wrong. So incredibly ludicrously wrong.  No one is doing H-L, D-L, or T-L fusion.... in part because lithium has some quirks of it's own. However, lithium is a good source of tritium under certain irradiation characteristics. They, like most others, are looking at hydrogen plasmas for the end goal of D-T fusion (arguably the easiest fusion method).

 

This is nice, and important, but please calm enthusiasm everyone as this is mainly heating plasma even higher for downstream confinement and etc experimentation. Nothing to directly do with a new milestone in the fusion process itself.

[SupremeGOAT]

china making fake suns and moons... lol well ill be...

[mr moose]

Good news, I like hearing this.  I am confident that pushing harder with new tech will save the planet and humanity faster than withdrawing from it.

[Curufinwe_wins]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Good news, I like hearing this.  I am confident that pushing harder with new tech will save the planet and humanity faster than withdrawing from it.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the day that the majority of world nations realize we've had the technology to save the planet in this fashion for 70 years and we've made up argument after argument about not using it. 50% of the earth's energy flux already comes from radionuclide warming inside the planet...

[TheRandomness]

Shouldn't it be a great donut of fire?

[rcmaehl]

9 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Oh llol! So fyi @rcmaehl the quote (avout fusion from seawater and lithium) from that Express article... is wrong. So incredibly ludicrously wrong.  No one is doing H-L, D-L, or T-L fusion.... in part because lithium has some quirks of it's own. However, lithium is a good source of tritium under certain irradiation characteristics. They, like most others are looking at hydrogen plasmas for the end goal of D-T fusion (arguably the easiest fusion method).

Edited out that specific part. I'd quote the phys article but phys made their's a bit harder to digest for most readers.

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, TheRandomness said:

Shouldn't it be a great donut of fire?

*incoming copyrightstrike from Furmark

[rcmaehl]

1 minute ago, GoldenLag said:

*incoming copyrightstrike from Furmark

TACTICAL DMCA INCOMING!
 

(This message should be read while while rapidly scrolling up and down to simulate shaking text)

[TVwazhere]

4 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

(This message should be read while while rapidly scrolling up and down to simulate shaking text)

Somebody make this a gif. I'm not at my PC at home so I cant

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Edited out that specific part. I'd quote the phys article but phys made their's a bit harder to digest for most readers.

I'm pretty much your average reader and I had more problems with this line:

 

Quote

 Nevertheless, the race to build a fusion reactor is hotting up

As far as I know "hotting" is not a word used in thermal reference,  but a colloquial term for stealing a car in the UK.

 

So unless energy researchers around the world are stealing cars in an effort to fund their research, I'd like to know how that word came to be legitimate.

[mr moose]

13 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Personally, I'm still waiting for the day that the majority of world nations realize we've had the technology to save the planet in this fashion for 70 years and we've made up argument after argument about not using it. 50% of the earth's energy flux already comes from radionuclide warming inside the planet...

I thought there was no argument, they just put their resources into fission due to already funding the weapons side of it. 

 

EDIT: I mean did they know in the 30's that fusion was viable and that it didn't produce the same radioactive waste?

[Bananasplit_00]

Well while we wait for fusion, how about we build some thorium reactors? We have loads of that and should be much cleaner than uranium too

[Amazonsucks]

1 hour ago, rcmaehl said:

Source:

Phys
Express

 

Summary:
We steadily making progress towards nuclear fusion with the latest experiment being 6 times hotter than the sun. Only slightly hotter and we will be extremely close to truly clean energy.

Media:

 

Quotes/Excerpts:

 

My Thoughts:

Looks like GeneralFusion will need to step up it's A-Game. I believe that we'll have Nuclear Fusion within my lifetime, if not soon after.

 

My thought is that this is either old old news or just outright fake news because tokamaks and stellerators have broken the 100 million degree mark long before. 

 

http://aries.ucsd.edu/FPA/ARC02/fpn02-61.shtml

 

Thr Japanese hit 300 million back in 2002 for exmple.

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

I thought there was no argument, they just put their resources into fission due to already funding the weapons side of it. 

 

EDIT: I mean did they know in the 30's that fusion was viable and that it didn't produce the same radioactive waste?

Technically speaking D-T fusion produces neutrons, which will irradiate your reactor vessel and thus produce radioactive waste (one big current issue is with the tungsten diverters actually). But high-level radioactive waste is quite simply a non-technical issue at this point. It's a tiny amount of material, it is easy to store safely (from a technical perspective), and we could literally drop the amount we have by 80-90% simply by doing fuel recycling (which France and some other countries do, but the US chooses not to because it is more expensive than storing the waste indefinitely, lol).

 

(Nuclear Plants anyways... from fossil fuels it is a big issue that is hard to solve because they are directly throwing tons of radiation straight into the atmosphere)

 

We could, with actual effort/investment, have been 100% nuclear 30 years ago. Fission definitely, and fusion maybe. Even past throwing money at simulations and stuff to solve the plasma issues, there are material issues that have no solutions for now, and tbh might never have real solutions, just 'good enough effective mitigation'. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't try... but it isn't necessarily a problem that can be / could have been solved with more money.

 

1 hour ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

Well while we wait for fusion, how about we build some thorium reactors? We have loads of that and should be much cleaner than uranium too

Not necessarily... but long discussions about the thing. Point is, we've tried it. It works... 'fine enough', but the methods that make 'thorium reactors' much better also make uranium reactors much better, and the reason it hasn't been done is mainly proliferation and materials related. Though yes, in general, continuous refueling reactor designs are dramatically cleaner than conventional fission plants, which themselves are dramatically more environmentally friendly than every other source of energy other than concentrated solar power (think solar power via reflectors, not via solar panels).

[Muffin_man17]

Meanwhile here in America we are working on clean coal...

 

Anyhow congrats China, looking forward to getting to see Nuclear Fusion drives in my lifetime  One can hope.

[Amazonsucks]

2 minutes ago, Muffin_man17 said:

Meanwhile here in America we are working on clean coal...

 

Anyhow congrats China, looking forward to getting to see Nuclear Fusion drives in my lifetime  One can hope.

Wut? The USA, Japan and Europe have been doing fusion research for decades.

[Muffin_man17]

33 minutes ago, Amazonsucks said:

Wut? The USA, Japan and Europe have been doing fusion research for decades.

Exactly, meanwhile China is smashing records

[mr moose]

43 minutes ago, Muffin_man17 said:

Meanwhile here in America we are working on clean coal...

 

Anyhow congrats China, looking forward to getting to see Nuclear Fusion drives in my lifetime  One can hope.

I know right, I don't have a problem with delaying the shutdown of coal while alternatives are built, because economies and people are worth something too.  but propping up and building new coal plants (which apparently is happening everywhere anyway) is worthy of a stern sideways glare.

[Amazonsucks]

33 minutes ago, Muffin_man17 said:

Exactly, meanwhile China is smashing records

Not really. The Japanese hit 300 million almost two decades ago. Their highest temp recorded was 520 million degrees, 5.2x this "record".

 

China is also the worlds biggest polluter so idk why you think theyre somehow ahead of the USA, Japan or Europe. Unless youre just exposed to too much propaganda.

 

China is smashing records for creating the most polluted cities on Earth.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China

 

500 million people without access to safe drinking water has to be some kind of record.

[Amazonsucks]

20 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I know right, I don't have a problem with delaying the shutdown of coal while alternatives are built, because economies and people are worth something too.  but propping up and building new coal plants (which apparently is happening everywhere anyway) is worthy of a stern sideways glare.

Yes and everyone should be looking at the worlds largest polluter with the worlds most polluted air and cities: CHINA.

 

Because they are building hundreds of coal power plants as we speak.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45640706

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/26/satellite-images-show-runaway-expansion-of-coal-power-in-china

 

And thanks to the terrible Paris Accord, China has a license to pollute even more

[Taf the Ghost]

5 minutes ago, mr moose said:

I know right, I don't have a problem with delaying the shutdown of coal while alternatives are built, because economies and people are worth something too.  but propping up and building new coal plants (which apparently is happening everywhere anyway) is worthy of a stern sideways glare.

Coal will be an energy source with us for at least another 100+ years. Too cheap, too easy, too easy to control the baseload power. And most of those power plants are going up in China. (Coal also ends up being a whole lot safer than other technologies, ironically enough, at the site location. Not so much for most of those downwind.)

 

The real problem goes back to decisions made in the 1970s to mostly end a lot of nuclear research because the tech worked too well. Especially if they'd switched over to Thorium-based reactors. Energy Politics is beyond dirty.

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, Amazonsucks said:

Yes and everyone should be looking at the worlds largest polluter with the worlds most polluted air and cities: CHINA.

 

What's your point?

 

glass houses and throwing stones.

 

5 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Coal will be an energy source with us for at least another 100+ years. Too cheap, too easy, too easy to control the baseload power. And most of those power plants are going up in China. (Coal also ends up being a whole lot safer than other technologies, ironically enough, at the site location. Not so much for most of those downwind.)

 

The real problem goes back to decisions made in the 1970s to mostly end a lot of nuclear research because the tech worked too well. Especially if they'd switched over to Thorium-based reactors. Energy Politics is beyond dirty.

I don't think it will last that long.  Mind you if the people who run coal plants now don't make safer greener techs their upgrade path, then they'll have no one but themselves to blame when the industry finally gets shut down.

 

 

[Amazonsucks]

2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

 

What's your point?

 

glass houses and throwing stones.

 

I don't think it will last that long.  Mind you if the people who run coal plants now don't make safer greener techs their upgrade path, then they'll have no one but themselves to blame when the industry finally gets shut down.

 

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2017/10/24/yes-the-u-s-leads-all-countries-in-reducing-carbon-emissions/

 

Even though the USA is reducing carbon emissions more than any other country? How is that throwing stones in a glass house?