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Clean energy could be 'closer than ever' after a nuclear fusion machine smashed a record

https://qz.com/nuclear-fusion-clean-energy-jet-record-energy-1851242131

JET's final nuclear fusion experiment produced a record-breaking 69 megajoules of heat. Nice.

Clean energy could be 'closer than ever' after a nuclear fusion machine smashed a record::JET's final nuclear fusion experiment produced a record-breaking 69 megajoules of heat. Nice.

46 comments

jordanlund

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https://www.newsweek.com/energy-nuclear-fusion-test-jet-world-record-1868146

"By my estimate this is enough energy to make over 600 cups of tea," professor Stuart Mangles—a physicist from Imperial College London, England—said in a statement.

rambling_lunatic

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The most English measurement.

TheGrandNagus

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The British version of Americans measuring things in football fields

CaptainMcMonkey

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Wait, how big IS a football field?

very_well_lost

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About 50 bald eagle wingspans.

hydration9806

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It's 20.7 Ford F150s long

lemmytellyousomething

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"closer than ever"

We are now closer than ever at anything that hasn't happened yet and will happen in the future.

ItsAFake

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We're closer than you think.

rottingleaf

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Obviously we are, because we do not think much of something which hasn't already happened.

positiveWHAT

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Are you guys in a flying circus?

riodoro1

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“Smashed”

Yeah, I’m not reading this.

Anyolduser

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I did it for you!

This heat output is about 20% higher than the previous record and twenty times higher than the net positive reaction that made headlines recently.

It's worth noting that the "twenty times higher" isn't the takeaway here as two different fusion methods were used. The article describes a significant, incremental milestone - not a ridiculously large leap forward.

The lab that conducted this experiment will be closing down soon, so this achievement is seen as the JET lab's swan song.

Rubanski

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Don't you want to know how fusion slammed the nonbelievers?

Daft_ish

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Nuclear fusion, this one weird trick.

RubberElectrons

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Excellent news. Small steps to hopefully thread the needle with. Don't be discouraging, people, we need success and vigor.

itslilith

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We need renewables now, not viable fusion two decades from now.

7heo

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Why not both? 😅

itslilith

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Sure, I'm on board with that. But unfortunately all to often hype around fusion is a red herring by the fossil fuel industry :c

7heo

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It's safer for their finances to have the public entertain a pipe dream, rather than a reality check.

RubberElectrons

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Sorry, that's false. Is it potentially being co-opted as a distraction by those industries? Yes, in fact probably because of how scummy fossil fuel industries are.

That doesn't mean anyone is under the illusion that this is a replacement for renewables now. Grow up.

This is still, long term, research ave development which needs to be done.

7heo

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I think the point itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone was trying to make is that we see news of countries abandoning renewables everywhere, recently, and that the fossil fuel industry is probably partly at play there. And then, they use such red herrings to stop the public from worrying. I can totally see this happening, to be honest.

RubberElectrons

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Why not state it the way you did? Succinctly, I'd have said "we need the current renewables effort to continue, along with this great longer-term research". Bam, done.

Not "we need renewables now, not fusion in 30yrs" with the accompanying clown sounds.

itslilith

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may I ask why you're so hostile?

As for my point:

Fusion is still a long way from being scalable and commercially viable, and every year we continue burning coal drives us closer to extinction. So we need to work with what we have now, and fast. When we get viable fusion in the future, great, we'll have secured energy stability even more and maybe made it cheaper (that's a maybe). But at the moment, we need to invest into renewables more. Orders of magnitude more.

I'm just tired of click-baity articles like this. Fusion's been 10-20 years away for more than half a century now, and while I don't doubt that we're making progress towards it, it won't be ready in time to be the replacement for coal we are hoping for.

RubberElectrons

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It's gonna be both. Only a simpleton would be worried others think that way.

cyd

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Needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Actually capturing the heat for electricity, and getting more electricity out of it than required to run the reactor itself, remain massive open questions that this generation of research reactors does not even begin to tackle.

saruwatarikooji

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IIRC, this is a big deal because they are achieving more energy out than they put in.

If I've been reading these correctly they are achieving it with tiny amounts of fuel and slowly working up as they achieve success. I'm seeing these as proof of concept and fantastic steps in the right direction.

cyd

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In this context, the "energy that they put in" only counts the heating of the plasma. It does not include the energy needed to run the rest of the reactor, like the magnets that trap the plasma. If you count those other energy needs, about an order of magnitude improvement is still required. Possibly more, if we have to extract the energy (an incredibly hard problem that's barely been scratched so far).

So yeah, it's nice to see the progress, but the road ahead is still a very long one.

Cocodapuf

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I feel like the big scary problem is capturing the heat. The proposed method I've seen involves a beryllium "blanket" that captures the heat to send it off to a boiler. The problem is beryllium is quite expensive and quite limited in availability. And in fact we may only have enough beryllium (in the world) for a dozen or so reactors. But it's worse, because these blankets absorb high energy neutrons, and become radioactive over time. And that means two problems, you need to replace the blanket and you need to dispose of radioactive waste.

When you put all that together, I just think "shouldn't we stick with fission power?"

QuadratureSurfer

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Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the problem that Uranium has a half-life of a couple hundred million years, while the half life of beryllium is less than a second?

Only Beryllium-10 has a long half-life for beta decay. Adding another neutron drops that back down to a few seconds and additional neutrons drop it back to a fraction of a second. So as long as that specific type of Beryllium isn't used, it would be fine, right?

Edit: https://www.thoughtco.com/beryllium-isotopes-603868

Cocodapuf

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Those quick half-lives decay right away, losing a neutron, right? So that Berillium-11 just decays back into Berillium-10.

The problem is that the blanket is constantly absorbing neutrons from the fusion reactions, that's it's job. So despite using simple berillium 5 to build your blanket, you end up with these heavy isotopes over time, and because the heavier ones quickly decay into lighter ones, you basically end up with a whole lot of berillium-10.

holycrap

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It doesn't look like they're generating electricity with that energy yet, so while you are correct the person you responded to is also correct in that we still need to prove we can harness it efficiently enough.

I think they'll get there, it just boils down to investment and time.

terminhell

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Nice

wewbull

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69 MJ is 19.17 kWh. About 86p of electricity at today's wholesale price in the UK (£45/MWh: today is fairly average).

The research they are doing is great, but there's so much engineering to be done to turn fusion into something practical; something capable of running streams of pulses, not just single ones.

This was the last experiment for this reactor running it outside of design limits.

RubberElectrons

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Yes. That's already being worked on, in forms other than just the tokamak as well.

RememberTheApollo

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If only it were leaps and bounds closer and not just a few inches.

assassinatedbyCIA

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‘Closer than ever’

So perpetually 49 years away rather than 50 years.

LaggyKar

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So another site that makes it look like the article ends in order to inject some completely unrelated clickbait video in the middle

Cocodapuf

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Tokamaks... sigh.

When it finally works, you will have invented the most expensive form of energy we've ever imagined. Congratulations.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm excited for fusion. Fusion has some amazing potential as a power source and propulsion for space ships. But outside of that application, I don't know... I'm pissemistic. I do not think it will be the global energy revolution so many people seem to think it will be. It will not be unlimited cheap energy, not be a longshot.

umbrella

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its gonna be unlimited expensive energy, which is a start.

except we needed a start 20 years ago, not now lol

Cocodapuf

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Is it unlimited though? I mean sure, the fuel is abundant, we have hydrogen. But the other support materials are quite limited, berillium, helium, nuclear engineers. I don't think we have enough of all of that for an energy revolution.

RubberElectrons

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There are several other topologies with promise. But even a tokamak can use its first wall latent heat to turn the archaic steam turbine.

While I also have low expectations for plasma density in tokamaks, they're able to keep plasma at fusion temperatures for minutes at a time.

DeathsEmbrace

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Permanently Deleted

Jimmyeatsausage

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And if there's one thing we've all learned, it's that if it's cheap to make, the trillionaire owners won't overcharge for it.

Yes, I think we'll have trillionaires first.

BeatTakeshi

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Why is the project ended? Is there a next prototype?

dee_dubs

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It's ending because it's old. JET has been running since the 80s. It's successor is ITER, which ran into some delays, but is expected to be finished sometime next year.

ianovic69

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Permanently Deleted

trackcharlie

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We could have a functioning cold fusion reactor tomorrow and it'll never see public use because the pieces of trash that run the oil industry still have an iron grip on all the politicians worldwide.