In A Nutshell just published a primer on nuclear fusion yesterday! It's my favorite ELI5 style science channel.
China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
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Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an incremental step on a long road. To be sure, the ultimate goal is to understand how to control the plasma well enough to support indefinitely long pulses. But incremental improvements add up, or rather they compound like interest.
What is the plan to extract energy from these things? Same old heat exchanger > supercritical steam > steam turbine > alternator? Or is there some way of getting electricity out of the plasma directly?
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#53Incremental progress, yay!
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#54Just a quick note that this report comes from people.cn, a mouthpiece media of the CCP. Perhaps more coverage from other sources would make this more persuasive.
A mouthpiece media of the CCP!
So if the NYT reports on the results of an amazing research from the JPL, you'll not believe it, right?
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#55It'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.
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Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an incremental step on a long road. To be sure, the ultimate goal is to understand how to control the plasma well enough to support indefinitely long pulses. But incremental improvements add up, or rather they compound like interest.
What is the plan to extract energy from these things? Same old heat exchanger > supercritical steam > steam turbine > alternator? Or is there some way of getting electricity out of the plasma directly?
Yep, steam turbines. For more exotic fusion scenarios that don't produce neutrons, Direct Conversion is a possibility, but that's even more pie-in-the-sky at this point.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#57It'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...
That is an unfortunate place to be in. Generally the question is what is said vs what is not said which can often provide the extra color commentary about how surprising the breakthrough actually is.
So for example, they have a "file" photo rather than the current apparatus. One of the challenges everyone is working on is "apparatus erosion" in which containment causes parts of the assembly to become, well, more plasma.
Then there is energy output, not a lot of details about how much energy they were getting out vs how much they were putting in. Running for 60 seconds should make possible a number of fairly accurate measurements of their efficiency. This is important because it is "easy" to make non-net energy plasmas that last for a long time, it is "hard" to create a plasma that providing the necessary environment for fusion to occur. Here is a great description of "H mode" confinement : https://www.euro-fusion.org/glossary/h-mode-h-regime/ which discusses that it is suceptible to ELM's (or bursts of plasma out of the side that eat away at your tokamak :-)
As a result of what they do not say, and do not show, I think the term "breakthrough" is probably a bit over used here, more like "progress along the path of building a tokamak unit." And progress is good, you learn new things with each step.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#58Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#59Just a quick note that this report comes from people.cn, a mouthpiece media of the CCP. Perhaps more coverage from other sources would make this more persuasive.
A mouthpiece media of the CCP ! So if the NYT reports on the results of an amazing research from the JPL, you'll not believe it, right?
Uh, the situations are not analogous.
People.cn is the website of the [People's Daily][1], which is a longstanding, official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Not figuratively or in the sense of having a slant or something, but it's literally the Party's official newspaper.
It's tempting to equate it to Voice of America, but even VoR is managed quite differently. There's not a direct equivalent in the US press, because the systems work differently.
Re: China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough
#60It'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...
To be fair, fraud in Western research is prevalent as well.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-cancer-idUSBRE82R1...