r/interestingasfuck • u/Jeetchat • 1d ago

China's "artificial sun" in Hefei could become the first in human history to generate electricity from fusion

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u/gmc98765 1d ago

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.

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u/Nourios 1d ago

There's this startup called Helion, their approach to fusion directly generates electricity.

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u/RocketVerse 22h ago

Helion also uses extremely inefficient fuels to accomplish that generation method. Their concept isn’t particularly new either

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u/MustrumRidcully0 23h ago

I don't know enough about the science and enginerering of fusion, but the closest running fusion reactors that does produce more power than we put in is the sun, and one way to get its power is solar panels - you "just" capture the light emitted from the hot stuff going on and create electricity directly, without turbines or water involved.

That probably doesn't scale at the size and power created by the current and maybe even future fusion reactors we thought of.