I know very little about fusion.
Did the reactor produce more energy then was put into it? I just don't understand enough about the field to figure that out by reading the article.
Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
161–170 of 240 posts
Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
$1 trillion is not a lot of money for the US. the Congressional Budget Office estimates that interest spending on US public debt will hit $915 billion in 2028[1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-on-a-course-to-spend-more-o...
That’s a very misleading figure as inflation both directly reduces the actual debt payment nessisary, and makes comparisons between spending 2003 – 2011 vs 2028 difficult to compare.
except inflation is directly related to the amount of new debt issued, because thats the only source of M1 money supply. If the US Treasury didn't borrow from the Federal Reserve and instead printed its own currency, this would be different.
Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#163Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do scientists use farenheit? Genuine question
Some. Not the physicists or astronomers, but some Americans who work with data from non-scientists regularly stay with the units in the data. Some engineers, those who are dealing with older equipment, stick with the units used when the equipment was built. US pilots and aerospace generally still talk in knots and feet of altitude.
I fly a '76 Cherokee pretty regularly and its ASI is in both knots and miles per hour, with MPH actually being the more prevalent unit.
Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#165The main challenge in working with these high temperature plasmas is confinement. In order to achieve nuclear fusion matter needs to be heated to immense temperature, so that the kinetic energy of nuclei colliding can overcome the electrostatic force of the protons pushing each other away and "fuse" into larger nuclei (held together by the "strong force"), converting a fraction of the reaction mass into a relatively…
> If the plasma "escapes" the confinement and contacts anything (ie. the walls of the Tokamak) it rapidly cools down to temperatures below where fusion can happen. Sounds relieving. I used to think that «if the plasma "escapes" the confinement and contacts anything (ie. the walls of the Tokamak) it rapidly…» disintegrates everything around or, when the power is huge enough, causes an apocalypse…
TFA claims the stored energy is 300kj, which is roughly equivalent to the energy you get out of eating one apple.
Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
When they look at a weather report in the US. Otherwise no.
You forgot about oven temperatures as well.
Touche.
My aussie friend who was a scientist said when he was in the us for about 15 years that he still used c for temp in lab but F for weather and it took him a while to realize that he had flipped and the 2 things had basically no relationship in his head.
Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fusion is notoriously underfunded. More money means you can buy better gear, hire more workers, complete projects faster and run multiple parallel sites to complete various goals at the same time. Of course there is some point where adding more funding will not advance the speed as much anymore but I doubt were even close to that point at the moment.
Why is it so underfunded? The first country to build one will be taking a big step to reducing their dependence on other countries for energy. I can understand big oil exporters not wanting to push it too much (although it's unlikely to come into fruition for the current generation of politians), but for others isn't it a no brainer?
Because we already have a functioning fusion reactor.
Utility-scale PV now costs only $43/MWh. Investing in developing fusion reactors makes very little economic sense compared with capturing the output of the fusion reactor we already have.
The research should still be done, of course. It can have benefits to a future interstellar civilization - but until we're interstellar, PV is far, far more compelling.
Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#168Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#169Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do scientists use farenheit? Genuine question
Some. Not the physicists or astronomers, but some Americans who work with data from non-scientists regularly stay with the units in the data. Some engineers, those who are dealing with older equipment, stick with the units used when the equipment was built. US pilots and aerospace generally still talk in knots and feet of altitude.
Mountain climbers in the US typically also use feet for elevation. Compasses sold in the US also have different markings for measuring the Universal Transverse Mercator grid(1:24,000 and 1:50,000 in the US) and rulers(inches, feet). 1:24,000 is used on USGS 7.5-minute maps, and I believe 1:50,000 originates from an older map series, both of which have topographical lines marked in feet instead of meters. Altimeters sold in the US also customarily use feet although the digital ones can be switched to Meters.