This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This news is two years old and is from the garbage pile that is timesofindia. It doesn't deserve to be posted in a tech community.
So you can build unlimited data centers
CIA wondering how theyre going to murder South Koreas scientists next.
"100 million degrees centigrade" sounds like they are trying to over compensate for the lack of a great leader like Kim Jong Un
Right?!? Silly, functioning democracy could have had a kingdom.
Meanwhile, the US sits in the corner playing with their feces
Can't we get just one article that doesn't have comments about the U.S.? The article has nothing to do with the country.
National Ignition Facility?
if you can be anything... be the best.
How many Courics is that? Damn
Wow it's pretty cool that it can maintain magnetic confinement with that giant window cut out of the containment vessel.
I'm not sure that lab coats and hard hats will protect against the x-ray black-body radiation though.
So... Probably just 10 or 15 years right....? Right .. ?
The AI generated image is such an eye sore.
I was going to write something about Gordon Freeman and Resonance cascade failure. And then I saw that it was AI generated, and that explains a lot.
At least they disclosed that it's ai.
at least we can be pretty sure the text isn't LLM generated - it's so clunky and hard to read 😬
Currently we still don't know whether it's possible to generate more power than you need to maintain the fusion.
ITER is the European project that should test that. It still is an experimental reactor and won't generate power.
Several other reactors are currently being built, but only recently they started building ones that in theory could run for a longer time than a few minutes.
But nobody knows if it will be useful.
There's one company that claims they've done it at lab scale and are building it out at a power plant scale now.
Well they have two commercial plants coming online and expecting to produce power sometime in 2030. So they better figure it out!
Isn't the Times of India not reputable? I seem to recall some shady shit from them, including I think Russian sponsored anti vaccine propaganda aimed at poor countries.
artificial sun
You can just say fusion reactor
This development by the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) is another move towards achieving clean fusion energy, whose ability to generate unlimited amounts of electricity with little to no carbon emission is promising.
The article, like so many others concerning nuclear technology, refused to address the unit cost of energy.
Why is building a large, complex, and temperamental fusion engine more economical than churning out an equivalent number of wind turbines or solar panels? The article doesn't say
Artificial sun sounds fun tho. Let us have our God damn fucking whimsy. The world is bleak enough.
Because there's currently only one place that should theoretically be able to create one that works at scale to become energy positive, thanks to a novel way of making the electromagnets used to contain the plasma under enough pressure. As per usual, a beneficial reactor tech is still "five years out". We do keep inching closer though.
For the same reason someone would have asked "why is building a large, complex and hard to produce solar panel more economical than churning out an equivalent number of coal plants?" decades ago.
It's improving the tech, which could eventually far and away outpaced every other energy producer. Maybe not now, but in the future. Some are just gung-ho about trying to produce a bunch when they're not quite ready.
Yeah, fusion reactors are nothing new, as for why it's because they are not self sustaining and release less radiation, the problem with renewable energy is the availability and instability, that's why most countries don't allow more than a certain percentage of renewable energy into the grid.
The obvious advantages would be less land use, great for smaller nations, and on demand power without the need to build back-up batteries.
Plus those are the immediate benefits who knows what we could do with that level of power generation. Maybe we could even make better space craft if the technology advances enough
You still need to boil water and turn a turbine with fusion, don’t you? Not something that works well in a space craft. Could the plasma be used in propulsion directly somehow?
I'm just imagining a steampunk spacecraft running on fusion now tbh
That would be wild. Something for a vidya game for someone with more artistic talent and free time than me
You can just say fusion reactor
The Times of India is a rag that literally accepts bribes for positive coverage; sensationalist garbage is their bread and butter.
But it gets worse: this story is over two years out-of-date.
The KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) announced on the 20th that during the '2023 KSTAR Plasma Campaign' conducted from December of last year to February of this year [2024], it achieved a 48-second operation of ultra-high-temperature plasma at an ion temperature of 100 million degrees and a record 102-second operation in high-confinement mode (H-mode).
This happened back in 2024. Here's a paper.
A single solar panel is basically useless. You need a huge field of them per small city, and by the time you do have your huge fields of wind and solar, you then need giant grid batteries, and you still often fall short, which means that to be safe you need to double or triple your solar and wind build out.
Which is why most solar and wind projects are backed up with methane burning generators.
Nuclear on the other hand, takes up a tiny fraction of the space and outputs orders of magnitude more power, safer and cleaner than any other form of energy.
South Korea doesn't have a lot of land mass for solar, they do however have competent engineers and scientists.
Fun fact, most of the fearmongering around nuclear has been paid for by oil companies, starting with Hermann J. Muller working for the Rockefeller Foundation, to Robert O. Anderson, CEO of ARCO giving $200K to a man to start an anti-nuclear environmentalist organization called Friends of the Earth. The Rockefeller Foundation directly funded Greenpeace up until just a few years ago.
As for Fusion, yeah, we can sustain a reaction by feeding energy in, and sometimes, we can observe more energy out than in, but we have absolutely zero ways to capture that energy.
Solar actually overtook nuclear as least-killy-per-gigawatt about a year (maybe even two, now) ago, although obviously killing people isn't the only bad thing a system of power generation can do.
Water+heat = steam = power
Technological progress.
Need sun for solar, so won’t work well for space when you get further out, and no wind in space.
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.
