Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes

• Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well, the first ones didn’t fly at all, they usually just killed the inventor.

  That’s basically where we are today with fusion, they don’t work at all yet. Luckily it’s not killing people.

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• DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.

  So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…

  I’ll let you fill in the blank.

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  • cubism_pitta@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    LLNL has achieved positive power output with their experiments. llnl.gov/…/shot-ages-fusion-ignition-breakthrough…

    No fusion reactor today is actually going to generate power in the useful sense.

    These are more about understanding how Fusion works so that a reactor that is purpose built to generate power can be developed in the future.

    Unlike the movies real development is the culmination of MANY small steps.

    Today we are holding reactions for 20 minutes. 20 years ago getting a reaction to self sustain in the first place seemed impossible.

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    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Predicted fusion energy and energy actually harvested and converted to usable electricity are not the same thing. Your article is about “fusion energy” not experimentally verified electrical output.

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      • tburkhol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.

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  • glimse@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s almost as if fusion is a significantly more difficult problem to solve than powered flight

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  • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, but you’re asking how much cargo it can take while we’re barely off the ground. Research reactors aren’t set up to generate power, they’re instrumented to see if stuff is even working.

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  • Evil_incarnate@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Not equivalent. Let’s measure the aircraft performance by its ability to carry passengers between capital cities.

    It’s baby steps and we need to encourage more investment. Not dismiss the Wright brothers for being unable to fly from New York to London after ten years of development.

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  • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A fusion reactor has already output more power than its inputs 3 years ago. Running a reactor for an extended period of time is still a useful exercise as you need to ensure they can handle operation for long enough to actually be a useful power source.

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    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Generating massive amounts of heat and harvesting that and converting it to power are two (or three) different problems.

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      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Agreed. But just to go along with the flight analogy proposed earlier, it took hundreds of years from Da Vinci’s flying machine designs to get to one that actually worked.

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  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ll let you fill in the blank

    Code switch for: “I don’t have a point so why don’t you make it for me”

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    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Verified electrical output, the answer is verified electrical power generated.

      …as in we should measure lower generation experiments by how much power they generated.

      Isn’t that obvious?

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      • hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        They weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.

        Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.

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