Comment on Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times

luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  They boiled 10 kettles of water with this energy.

  Ultimately, if everything is optimized, its probably only limited by the number of kettles available.

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  • 0110010001100010@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Could we somehow capture the steam from all the kettles to turn a turbine? I see zero problems with this plan.

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    • c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Coal or nuclear, it’s all steam baby

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      • ThePancake@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I know this is probably tongue in cheek, but I genuinely thought the same until recently. There’s a company called Helion which is developing a really cool fusion process that doesn’t use steam as an energy transfer mechanism. Obviously it has its own set of drawbacks and roadblocks, but still really cool tech in the making.

        Here’s the video I saw going into detail on it if anyone’s interested:

        youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38?si=iBpHfDxhRgHHRtN2

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      • atocci@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        We're gonna spin those turbines so good

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    • doofy77@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The UK will become an energy powerhouse.

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• uphillbothways@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Limitless only for the same visit. 1 customer per reaction.
  No repeat visits or sharing allowed!

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• krellor@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Since everyone else gave a joke answer I'll take a stab in the dark and say the upper limits would be the availability of hydrogen and physical limitations in transforming heat output into electricity. The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels. After that, it would be how well you can scale up turbines to efficiently convert heat to electricity.

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  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The hydrogen is the most common element but 96% of it is currently produced from fossil fuels.

    I’m not expert either, but I don’t think most of that 96% of hydrogen is a candidate for the fusion we’re doing today. NIF (like the OP article) uses Deuterium (Hydrogen with 1 neutron) and Tritium (Hydrogen with 2 neutrons) is what is squashed together to produce energy. The more neutrons make the fusion “easier” to produce energy.

    Naturally occurring Deuterium isn’t crazy hard to find. Its in sea water, but you have to go through A LOT of sea water to pull out the rare atoms of Deuterium. Naturally occurring Tritium is much more rare with having to find very small amounts in ground water.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      For reference and because I was curious enough to look for it, Deuterium is 0.0156% of the hydrogen in ocean water.

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    • Promethiel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      In a perfect world, NASA was always funded like Humanity depended on it since after WW2, and by 2010 a unified global space organization supplanted the need for any militaries because we’re too busy building fission plants on the moon to bind with that sweet HE3 to power the Space Mobile Homes affordable for all because of course we researched fusion without profit motive until it worked.

      Kinda my preferred alt-world, now someone please fire up all of the world’s particle accelerators on high at once, that’ll get us there right?

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  • Zeth0s@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you have fusion energy, creating H2 from water via electrolysis is a joke. You can do it at home. It only requires a lot of energy. But with energy from fusion it will become super easy, barely an inconvenient

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    • BehindTheBarrier@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Well. Assuming the cost of splitting water is lower than the energy produced from the same amount of hydrogen.

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      • Zeth0s@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It is muuuuuuuuuuch lower

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    • Sphks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      In the news, 5.000 years later : “Scientists warned that our mass extraction of hydrogen may produce global salinization, but no one wants to reduce its energy consumption.”

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  • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Electrolysis has up to 70% efficiency and needs sulfuric acid. The superheated thing has about 90% efficiency.

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• atocci@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  2 energies and no more

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• LordKitsuna@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Image

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• willis936@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  There is 1.4E21 kg of water on Earth. 0.03% of hydrogen is deuterium, a suitable fusion fuel. H2O has an atomic mass of 18 and O has an atomic mass of 16, so Earth has 4.7E16 kg of deuterium readily centrifuged out of ocean water.

  D-D fusion converts about 2% of mass to energy. E=mc^2. So we have 8.4E31 Joules of fusion fuel ready for us on Earth. We used 2400 TWh of energy last year. If we used this amount indefinitely then we would have 9.8 trillion years of fuel.

  Bonus: deuterium depletion would have virtually no environmental effect.

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  • luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is the answer we all needed.

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• Big_Boss_77@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The flamingo population must remain constant for ignition to function.

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• Zarxrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s nearly limitless because they used nearly 200 lasers. If they built a new one with the full 200 lasers, who knows what could happen.

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  • luthis@lemmy.nz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Like, they used 198 lasers, or they used 98% of each of the 200 lasers?

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• dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You know how the sun radiates an incredible amount of power through millions and millions of tonnes of material undergoing nuclear fusion every minute, and the sun is expected to last for millions of years?

  Well, not that much. But it’s still a lot!

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• RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You would have enough power to play a game of Civ II to completion.

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• MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  One limit less.

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• rem26_art@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Only on Tuesdays between the times of 04:04 and 04:27 UTC

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  • Sabata11792@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ah, my childhood ISP is still luring around.

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  • MxM111@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    UTC? Absurd!

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• blind3rdeye@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s near limitless in the sense that the fuel for it will not run out. … But to be honest, the ‘unlimited energy’ thing is mostly marketing hype. If we were worried about fuel running out, then solar would be the obvious go-to. That’s even less likely to run out than fusion power, and it has the advantage that we can already build it. And fusion, like solar and everything else, still requires land and resources to build the power plants. There are hopes that fusion power plants might be be more space efficient or something, but that obviously isn’t the case currently. Currently the situation is that people have been working on this for generations and the big breakthrough is that we can now momentarily break-even with power on a small scale with state of the art equipment. So I think it’s a bit too soon to claim it will have any advantages over solar. Right now it is not viable at all, and any future advantages are just speculation.

  That said, fusion power is technology worth pursuing. It’s not complete garbage green-washing (unlike “carbon capture and storage”, which really is complete garbage), but the idea that fusion it’s some holy-grail of unlimited power is … well … basically just good marketing to keep the research funds flowing.

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• SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The limits are only your imagination.

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• meco03211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You have to sign up for a two year initial contract. After that there’s tons of limits.

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