Any announcements like this coming from China should be taken with a huge grain of salt the size of… China.
Yep. They‘re putting out what they call huge breakthroughs on a weekly basis for months and make headlines. By the time they have been put into perspective or straight out debunked and torn to shreds by the global scientific community, they already squeezed out another wild claim to overshadow criticism. Rinse and repeat. There is a reason the overwhelming majority of AI generated slob studies come from China. They want fast results and know the press won‘t really read them and instead just quote whatever they claim.
It’s wild that y’all feel so comfortable being so openly Sinophobic.
They put a lot of funding into scientific research, and surprise surprise they get results. Maybe we should emulate their success, instead of continuing to waste our budget on war.
Skepticism of positive press (aka propaganda) from a country notorious for cracking down on negative press (i.e. any mention of Tiananmen Square) is not a phobia. It’s completely justified.
Not a word about how much energy went into the process and how much was harvested…
I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave.
Not a word about how much energy went into the process and how much was harvested…
A 17 minute runtime in a Tokamak an incremental step on the path to success. You’re in the kitchen looking over the shoulder of the chef saying the steak he’s just put in the pan isn’t cooked enough yet. He knows, but you can’t have the steak on your plate cooked to perfection until he does this current step he’s on.
I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave.
In 1964 you could build an honest to goodness fusion reactor copying the Farnsworth Fusor, yet that would never be on a path to a sustained fusion reaction with a net energy gain. The work in the article is.
I love when online commenters who didn’t even read the article are smarter than the scientists it’s about
Producing energy is not the goal of this facility which is why they don’t report on it. The useful output is in refining control and heating methods so that when power producing facilities are built, they can operate continuously. On that front, 17 minutes is very impressive. At the speeds at which the particles in a fusion plasma move, that time frame is essentially an eternity.
It’s the goal of the technology, though, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s a hard problem to solve.
Great. Now put a magnifying glass in front of it and point it at the white house
What we need to do is find some way to make a giant fusion reactor and put it in the sky and get energy from it that way.
But that’s just a pipe dream…
What we need is robust decentralized multimodal energy production fit for the local area where it is installed and contributing to a well maintained distributed grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage so that incidental costs are minimized and uptime is effectively 100%. Energy is a tool and its generation is a category of tools, whining about people developing a better screwdriver rather than only using hammers is counterproductive when we’re trying to build a house for as many people as possible that doesn’t fucking kill everyone.
I’m whining about China spending very little on current green energy technology while building more and more coal plants and taking advantage of these sort of PR stories.
I can’t help it, I’m one of those people who whines about climate change.
‘spending very little’???
They produced more new green energy than the total capacity of green energy for the rest of the world combined in 2024.
Yeah, and then that artificial sun can give us power at night
It’s too bad there isn’t some sort of way we could store electricity in some sort of containment.
Then we could do stuff like take electrically-powered devices with us wherever we went! Think of how handy that would be!
Yeah! We could use such technology to trap this “artificial sun” instead, and then have a steady stable output throughout the night for things that use a bunch of electricity but run constantly, like water filtration plants and material processing facilities.
Great idea! But I guess more research is needed to make this work for the things that use the MOST electricity, instead of small portable devices that use a fraction of the electricity
I don’t know, what you’re saying sounds like a complete impossibility and there definitely aren’t multiple options currently in use. So we better put all our hopes on a technology that has not proven viable in decades despite being always “right around the corner.”
Yeah, too bad humans can only focus on one thing at a time.
It’s always best to abandon projects that are difficult, even if minute progress is being done on them. Like, could you imagine if someone made a machine that can fly? That’s just silly, after all only birds have flown for thousands of years.
And while we’re cutting spending I suppose, why not shut down the LHC too? Barely any progress made there in decades too.
I love you, you’ve played squids game but better than he can. Bravo.
Can you please quote me making such suggestions? Because I looked through our entire conversation and haven’t seen me suggest those things.
Oh squiddy
I never said you made an explicit suggestion, but if you think you’ve made an implied one, go ahead and point out what they might be 🙃
Impressive. :)
I’m tempted, but won’t try to guess how operation endurances will progress - it would be an poorly informed guess by a rando. Better to wait what they write about it in journals.
