What could possibly go wrong, really.
China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
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Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#12An edit-compile-run cycle of 4 years. Must be tedious.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#13As per every fusion breakthrough I've read about ever:
"Sure hope so! Not quite ready to short fossil fuels yet though."
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#14Weird, as far as I can tell this result was essentially achieved in February; at least that's when the register reported on it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/06/china_shows_how_fusi...
EAST seems to be connected to ITER, and is testing confinement methods like those planned for ITER. Here is an ITER press release about EAST hitting that 32 s H-mode confinement: https://www.iter.org/newsline/291/1783
And here is a later article about EAST receiving an upgrade and shooting for those 100 seconds in 2014: https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#15For someone more knowledgeable about the state of fusion research: is this really a "breakthrough" or just another incremental step? It seems they only kept it stable for about twice as long as they did four year ago and that's not much of a breakthrough even if we did break the arbitrary one minute limit (or maybe its not arbitrary and becomes harder to keep stable approaching a minute for some reason?) At this poin…
Seems like an important and expected increase in capability. Bit late though, original plan seems to have been 2014: https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#16It's unfortunate that it's like this, but I automatically do not believe any scientific breakthroughs that come from China. There has simply been too much fraud for me to believe anything they say. http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinic...
Utah had cold fusion, anyone remember that? Fusion research is tricky to evaluate (and false positive results are common).
A default position of skepticism works in both cases.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#17Extraordinary breakthroughs require extraordinary evidence.
I am waiting for such evidence now.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#18What could possibly go wrong, really.
Not as much as could go wrong with a fission reaction.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#19Anyone remember that really old game Outpost? It ran on Windows 3.1; used a CD recording of The Planets as its soundtrack. That's the first time I've heard of Tokamak reactors. What these are trying to achieve is pretty amazing. I hope one day, one of these reactors will be able to sustain a greater output than input. It has the potential to move the planet into a completely different energy age. Imagine if we could…
I remember that game! Mini black hole starts gobbling up planet Earth. :) And the voxels.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#20It's unfortunate that it's like this, but I automatically do not believe any scientific breakthroughs that come from China. There has simply been too much fraud for me to believe anything they say. http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinic...
In a few decades, when most of the new inventions will start coming from China, this attitude is going to be very difficult to maintain.