Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day agoPractical 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.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Lol any year now!
www.solarenspace.com
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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”
Squizzy@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
Cowbee_Admirer@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Ten years ago Swanson’s law for solar photovoltaics was well established, not comparable.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“It’s only sunny during the day” is a line uttered ad nauseum by people who didn’t see lithium batteries falling through the same price drop.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 hours ago
Dude, 10 years ago was 2015… We’ve had consumer grade solar since the 90s at least
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.
Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)
I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You’re so dense you could fuse hydrogen.
RubberElectrons@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What a low quality joke.
LeFantome@programming.dev 13 hours ago
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.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
How about: figuratively tilting at windmills would have generated more net energy than fusion research.