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To those interested in discussion outside of HN, there is a discord community [0] with professional, academic, and hobby fusion afficionados. [0] https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg
It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.
> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion 59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.
Anyway, 59MJ isn't terrible if you can run it at 60Hz. Of course, I agree that the reality is a bit far away.
This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.
> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion 59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.
Ideally this energy output would be sustained for days within ITER.
JET is not designed to do this, as it has a copper magnet system, which means if you try to sustain such a plasma (confined with around 5 T magnet and around 2 MA plasma current) for longer than a few seconds, you would melt the magnet.
Edit: ITER would operate at 5-10 T, and around 15-20 MA plasma current.
To those interested in discussion outside of HN, there is a discord community [0] with professional, academic, and hobby fusion afficionados. [0] https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg
Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.
Not at all. There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.
Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)
This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.
This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?