Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Only 75 more years to go!
Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.
US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
Lol any year now!
ha hahahahaahaaaa… oh boy… you techno utopians are funny. Maybe build a Space Elevator out of 3D printed AI Bitcoins and run a fusion reactor at the Lagrange point? Privately! On the Moon! To colonize Mars and mine the asteroids! Become a multi star species!
OK, time will tell. How about I save you the wait: nothing will happen. At all.
you techno utopians are funny.
I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.
It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.
Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”
To be fair there was and is huge push back against EVs, the US is setting itself back a couple centuries just to not admit it is viable.
I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago
Ten years ago Swanson’s law for solar photovoltaics was well established, not comparable.
Dude, 10 years ago was 2015… We’ve had consumer grade solar since the 90s at least
It is pretty easy to point out how long we have been researching fusion. That said, few of the skeptics will highlight just what an explosion of private capital we have seen in recent years and how different that is to previous decades. They will not show you the previous times in history when we have seen similar patterns.
Sure this capital is speculative. And most of them will have picked the wrong winner. But history tells us that this is what it looks like before a technology succeeds. Not 30 years before. More like 10. Which means saying 5 is ambitious but not exactly crazy.
Fusion does not belong in your list. First, some of them exist. You can buy a 3D printer with bitcoins. Of those that don’t, none has more than perhaps one resource unconstrained backer. Not a lot of people think we are colonizing Mars anytime soon. Fusion has billions of dollars of private capital chasing it as this point.
The situation may be closer to Quantum Computing than your examples. And I would say there are more physical unknowns in quantum computing. Because we do not have a quantum computer we can see in the sky everyday.
Your list looks funny in another way. Did you know that a company just launched a solar power satellite to do AI in orbit. It is up there and operational. They want to build a solar powered AI data-center in space. Whether you back such and idea or not, you cannot say something is impossible that has already been done.
And sometimes things work out differently than intended. For example, the technology developed or fusion stelerators is being use for drilling. One use may be to drill geothermal power vents. Who knows, maybe fusion power research will inadvertently make geothermal so cheap that fusion reactors no longer make economic sense.
How about: figuratively tilting at windmills would have generated more net energy than fusion research.
Dude stfu. I build diagnostics that go into these systems among others, it’s moving along a lot faster than your dumbass knows.
Remember this comment, fuckhead.
spacesatan@leminal.space 1 day ago
Image If China’s economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
A graph is not proof of fusion energy. Yelling at clouds would probably generate more net energy than all fusion research has to date.
It’s a dead end. It will never ever work. A combination of civilizational die-back and concomitant reduced energy use and a hodge-podge of renewable sources is the likely future for humanity.
And that’s my optimistic take.
My more realistic take is that we are running out of cheap easy energy. The kind of monstrously massive contraption filled with high-tech exotic materials that is a fusion reactor is exactly the kind of thing we will NOT be able to build anymore in the future.
It’s the same impasse that kills all the space fantasies (like people who think Avatar is just around the corner). If we HAD the resources to build fusion reactors or mine asteroids, we don’t HAVE a resource problem!
And if we have such a resource crunch that we think fusion/space is the only solution, we don’t have the resources to do it.
The future is horses, not Star Trek.
Get used to it.
spacesatan@leminal.space 9 hours ago
Oh shit somebody who can accurately be called a doomer. This feels like the time I ran into an actual naz-bol in the wild. It’s like spotting an overhyped cryptid, I thought they were more of a rhetorical device than actually real.