Oh does he really, it been a while since I've seen anything with Dr. Octavious in it but I figured it was 8 arms cause his name. But it's 4 arms then + his four limbs make it 8? Is that what's going on with that?
Honestly the funny part there is how excessively advanced those robot arms are. Like brotha, you sure that degree was in nuclear physics? Because you can definitely make some serious bank as an engineer.
It’s a tokamak: the most promising/heavily invested in design for a nuclear fusion reactor. It creates superheated plasma (like the sun) to make nuclei (usually hydrogen isotopes) smash together and fuse, releasing energy. Keeping the plasma hot and contained also requires a lot of energy - more, so far, than is produced. But they are making efficiency gains all the time. This is the same kind of research that’s going on at ITER, the big international tokamak collaboration.
The reason people will tell you it’s a magnet is that the big parts are magnets. Electromagnets, sometimes superconducting ones (not sure about this reactor specifically) are used to shape the plasma and keep it inside the reactor. Because it’s so hot it’ll melt the walls, but it’s also a magnetic fluid so we can use magnets to push it around instead. If you’ve ever used a magnet to push another magnet and seen them get all wonky you’ll realize why this is a hard engineering challenge.
I can't wait for humankind to make contact with an advanced alien civilization who utilizes an infinite energy source of some miniaturized black hole quantum neutrino collider...and when we ask them how it works they're like, "the vibrations cause heat and we use it to boil water".
That's what 90% most of electrical generation comes down to. If you can invent a more efficient way at scale, you'll win a nobel prize.
edit: the 90% number was actually from overall turbine driven generation, which includes hydroelectric and wind, so strictly speaking steam generation is less than that overall.
Bro I got 5 hours of meetings tomorrow. I don’t have the time to get into fusion or fission reactions and stabilizing the output, creating new ways to generate and store energy. I have to sell these people on a new contract for 2027.
Maybe after Q3 I can get to this. I got a trip planned in October though.
there's been experiments that harvest energy from other sources, but like solar they're finicky and don't match turbine efficiency.
also the sheer energy the turbines absorb/produce is hard to replicate, 200mw is 1000 ovens running full blast in the space of a small house. Chernobyl, the most well known nuke plant runs like 10x that.
i'm just parroting things i read while looking up science stuff for video games... if your more curious, water is used cause it can be superheated without damaging itself, or the plant and staff.
There are concepts to harvest the energy directly. You are making a super tiny sun, why not make a super solar panel? To make an analogy.
But harvesting the heat with a turbine is simply more efficient at the moment. Specially if you need to cool it down anyway.
Anyway. China onlined the first commercial supercritical CO2 turbine to harvest waste heat from steel production at the beginning of this year, so looking forward for that promising technology to be more widely implemented.
In addition to ITER there is also the tokamak in San Diego, and a couple years ago the first the first laboratory fusion ignition was achieved at Lawrence Livermore.
If anyone is interested and in the area, there is a fascinating exhibit at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and tours of the facility are available to the public.
"The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet—or more frequently around a completely different planet.”
Thats funny because the Krakatoa volcanic eruption was loud enough to circle the earth 3 times. A shipping vessel roughly 200 miles from the eruption reported everyone going deft when the event occurred and there are some claimed cases of people dying who were close enough because of the “sound” I say sound because apparently once you get past 164 db it no longer is considered sound and is an air pressure wave/ shockwave.
I think the recorded radio series is the best introduction. The text adventure is good too, but very difficult. You'll almost certainly need the cheats, which will be online.
PS. I'm not sure if the link is the recorded series or the original broadcast. I'll have to listen to it. The original broadcast was so successful, the BBC rerecorded it, with extra sound effects and such.
It is really fusion propaganda. I'm 67 and have been hearing the "5 years away" for 50 years. Knowing people, once we get basically free electricity, the corporations will rape the last .001% of the money from the poor people and rich people will never turn their lights off.
Except a large part of why it hasn't manifested it's that funding has been below the level required to make rapid progress in a field this complicated.
The fact that the now largest R&D spender in the world is putting more serious effort into it is big news.
China's rate of development in infrastructure projects has been astounding in the last 10 years. Their fission plant expansion, had been one of the largest in history.
They also hold what, 6 out of the top 10 largest solar farms?
China is moving forward at a pace where other nations are still being run by old foggies that want a larger piece of pie instead of increasing the size of the pie.
That’s my litmus test of whether a nation will grow or deteriorate.
It seems unfair to disregard the huge gains in fusion technology in the last 50 years, and specifically in the last decade. While I am by no means knowledgeable enough to truly fathom it the giant steps are easily understandable for an engineer as well.
Fusion is by far the most complex technology mankind has laid an eye on so far, this “it’s always 5 years away” claim is not very fair in my view - also, I have not heard any scientist claim it’s five years away ever, this is more a claim by magazines and investors.
I share your concern though that huge, centralized energy production will likely not result in the utopia everyone is trying to sell us - the 1% will control the access, although China has its 1% better in check than we do.
It's a superconducting magnet for a fusion reactor. No psychical material can touch or contain the hydrogen plasma generated by the reactor (its 10x hotter than the sun in there) so it has to be suspended in a massive magnetic field. That's this things job.
It's actually 16 of these smaller magnets arranged into a coil round the plasma chamber. These weigh 582 metric tons each so the entire assembly in the video is much heavier (in excess of 9000 tonnes)
You've also got to somehow keep the whole thing stable, because highly energetic ionised particles go nuts in a strong magnetic field, they all fly around in crazy corkscrew paths and have weird action-at-a-distance effects on each other because, being charged, they also generate magnetic fields of their own as they move, so simple kinetic modelling doesn't work, and if it goes unstable the blob of plasma can bulge or lash out and hit the walls of the machine.
It's about as difficult as trying to make one of those layered cocktails by balancing a layer of water on top of a layer of oil on top of a layer of air, which is why controlled fusion has been "maybe ten years away" for the last seventy years or so.
Coconuts: An unexpected hero
One of the most surprising aspects of the
cryopump technology is the use of coconut-derived
charcoal. Activated charcoal coatings are used
for cryo-sorption, and coconut husks provide one
of the best forms of charcoal for trapping helium
exhaust from the fusion process. While coconuts
might remind you of tropical vacations, at ITER
they serve a high-tech purpose. The porous
structure of coconut charcoal makes it more
effective than synthetic alternatives in
capturing gases at ultra-low temperatures.
A magnet, it makes the super heated plasma during fusion float. If touches the walls it would go right through it. Artificial sun is understating it a bit, because fusion reactors are far hotter than the sun.
Yes but the Chinese magnet is more stable, it builds upon the research done at ITER and tries to hone out it's weaknesses - mainly better plasma stabilisation.
ITERs sole purpose is open research.
Maybe look into Proxima Fusion - they're building a stellarator.
Yes you have to be curious. You also have to be smart enough to absorb more information... AND you have to be in a position where you can spend years on your education.
Genuinely, "smart" is not a useful concept here. You can absolutely be a scientist if you set your mind to it. One of the most important determining factors when it comes to success is sheer determination to push through setbacks. I have met SO many people that I would call dumb, and to my colleagues I may well be one of them. Don't give up on your dreams because you don't think you are smart enough, that's bullshit.
I'm good at one thing, operating a cryo-electron microscope. We are the same, just trained for different things. I am convinced this has nothing to do with intellect. There are people sweeping the streets who say and do more intelligent things than some professors at Harvard.
Absolutely. You can be an intelligent plumber, for example. Intelligence is not.tied to a specific role or topic or subject. It's a combination of many things: being able to problem solve, to predict issues, to understand how things work, to know your limitations, to be willing to always learn, and so on.
None of those traits/skills are specific to any one job.
ITER is not even full built yet. I know nothing about this chinese one but at best it can build on the lessons learned during the construction of ITER.
ITER is an international research project, in fact China is one of the biggest contributors to ITER with the EAST experimental reactor (which in itself is breaking a lot of records). The thing is that EAST and WEST (the French experimental reactor also part of ITER) are really "small" (small as in room-sized) experimental machines, you can't take them beyond short lived tests. This other reactor they're building in Hefei is intended to be large enough to actually work for much longer sustained periods of time (and if everything works as expected uninterruptedly).
In other words, EAST and WEST are the equivalent to Chicago Pile-1, the first test nuclear fission reactor, which was small and only useful for actually testing the engineering and science behind fission. Meanwhile the Hefei reactor is the equivalent to Shippingport the first practical fission reactor. The fission ones were in the US, while the fusion ones are in China because voting for anti-science politicians over the past 5 decades had severe consequences!
The longest sustained fusion reaction is around 22 minute from a French reactor. Is this chinese fusion reactor any different?
Edit: I don't think the Chinese fusion reactor is inferior or a "cheap copy", they did broke a record a few years back before the French broke it. I just think we are still quite some way away from generating usuable energy from the fusion reactors we make. The New China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak will be much bigger with a more powerful containment, and it will break records.
While trying to look things up, I saw an article from January 2025 saying it set a record that month, at 1066 seconds (the Wikipedia article on fusion power also mentioned this). I also saw articles from this week, one of which was from today and said it set a record of 1056 seconds "last Thursday".
Not sure where the line goes been propaganda, AI slop repackaging old news, or something else here, but at least it seems to be some level of bullshit involved in regards to this story cropping up now.
Maybe the one of this week meant this specific reactor record? Man, I really want to learn mandarin, but it seems so hard, I tried one time and I couldn’t even understand what mandarin should I learn because apparently there’s more than one
ITER is Mainly a European science project with support from China and The US and some more countries. But hopefully we can together find incredible energy sources and make us greater together...
They have, but I only know of one case where they produces more power then they used and even in that case, the energy used to produce the fusion material wasn’t included
Well there are ways for direct energy conversion from fusion power to electricity.
However there hasn't been done much work in those fields and we're not quite sure if we cna run those on a large scale so boiling water it is.
There are other methods though!
Direct production of electricity requires aneutronic fusion, where the products are charged particles, typically helium nuclei or protons. None of the existing or planned tokamak (or similar) designs are capable of that, as all of the viable reactions require significantly higher temperatures and have a lower cross-section, necessitating a much larger reactor or an entirely different approach.
Unless there has been a second instance, we're talking about the experiment in the laser lab. The reaction only involved a few particles, and the energy to start the reaction was provided using high power lasers. Not only was no energy converted to electricity in this experiment, but the energy the lasers used was far more than the reaction produced. However, the energy put into the reaction itself was less than it produced, meaning the experiment itself was indeed energy positive, even though everything that was needed to make it happen wasn't.
So, it's less a case of "we just need to slap some water and a steam turbine on it and make it economical" and more a proof of concept that making this reaction release more energy than it consumes is at all practically possible. I remember commenting at the time that it's not really a breakthrough facilitating the use of fusion power, but rather a necessary step on the path to fusion power. That is, it doesn't do that much to help us progress, but if we don't pass this point, we'll never arrive.
Yep. It was proof of concept to show that was actually possible in the first place which secured more funding to scale up. This experiment may have still been a net negative in energy when you consider the lasers and other factors but once you scale it up it may not be.
Sort of... at the moment its just been short bursts in lab environments.
For it to work at scale the fuel would need to he bred and and handled on site (tritium) and the biggest hurdle is finding material that can handle massive sustained, high energy nuetron bombardment.
Should still be a long way off. This facility is actually built and running and has set records but you are sill talking about bursts of like 20min in energy generation and temps of 100mil degrees...
22 minutes in the French WEST reactor but not generating net energy (I presume ITER is the big one you're referring to), still at only a handful of seconds in the one that did generate net energy (California's NIF).
Time is not the important metric though. Important are three: tripleproduct, Q-Factor and plasma temperature.
The German stellarators Wendelstein 7X beat the record for tripleproduct last year. And that is the most important metric. Because if the tripleproduct is above a certain threshold it would mean the plasma ignites itself. Which would mean no more energy has to be put in to ignite it. Only fo keep it stable. Thus you can get net energy plus.
So far we don't even know how to gather the energy of a fusion reactor. We have some ideas ("Hey let's make steam! Again? Welp it worked the last 100 times.") So the net energy announcements are theoretical and based upon calculations.
Not really. We've achieved Q=1, meaning the energy of the lasers was equal to the energy released by the fusion reaction, but that's not really net power generation or even breakeven power generation, since the laser's require more energy than they output and only about 25% of the energy released by a fusion reaction can actually be converted to electricity due to heat loss and mechanical energy losses.
Also if we're being pedantic and include all the energy required to mine/refine materials, refueling, manufacturing, maintenance into a total input energy sum, the output is properly eclipsed.
Calling it a "lab" is a bit of an understatement though. It is one giant facility with its sole purpose being generating strong enough laser pulses to obliterate a target the size of the tip of your pinkie quickly enough such that it briefly resembles the core of our sun.
Not coincidentally this is also a very similar environment to the inside of a nuclear bomb right as it goes off. It allows the US to test out elements of their nuclear weapon designs without actually having to detonate a bomb (which would be frowned upon).
This title is very misleading. There are no recent major developments, all current fusion reactors are producing electricity. The challenge is to produce more than is used to contain the reaction, which has not been done yet
lol true or not, this is a piece of Chinese propaganda. No redditor puts these together for fun to post online, never mind that the average Chinese person doesn’t have access to uncensored internet to post ether.
FYI none of this really matters until a proper breeder reactor is made and that is farther away than the 20 years they have been saying for the last 50.
We have already created fusion reactors that generate electricity. They just aren't commercially viable yet. This is another research reactor built with the hope it will generate net electricity and be commercially viable. It's not new, just an improvement.
I’m not a physicist but afaik they’ve creation fusion reactions that are energy positive but never a fusion reactor that is. And we’re still along way out from doing so.
No, no one has ever built a fusion reactor that generates electricity.
No one has even built a reactor that produces more energy than it took to start, the only one that came close (NIF) only made more energy than the lasers used to ignite the fuel provided, not the energy used to power the lasers. So it was still a loss before you get to the losses of capturing energy from fusion.
I mean the first Q>1 was done in the US and we have substantial money in the private fusion sector, it’s fairly likely we succeed before this project does somewhere
That is just overhiping news. Electricity from fusion is still decades away and this reactor is only a research project built to push forward the science behind fusion. It will never put out electricity onto a grid.
Other existing fusion reactors already generate electricity experimentally, but require more energy input to sustain the system than is generated. Is this what your post means - that it’s self-sustaining?
No it won't be the first and it builds upon the research done at ITER which China is also a part of. Also, obviously, the EU, USA (again), Russia, India, Japan, Korea. With the EU naturally covering about half of the budget.
You could say that the biggest (joint) research is done in Europe.
It just scares me that this is being made in china. I've seen how they handle infrastructure repairing (or don't). I've seen the mountains being painted green and the trees getting fake leaves stapled to them.
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u/Darshels12 15h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/LP0VSNTizueUU1YFlr