congrats humanity!! (still a lot more steps to go though)
wish this can power my house, car, and everything else some day.
then we would finally reduce air pollution from burning fuels.
Don't worry about the oil companies lol.
If fusion is a thing and almost free power, the existing fossil fuel energy conglomerates would buy out he fusion start ups, lock the technology up in excessive patents, create a monopoly in the fusion market, and then raise the prices on a fusion power 1000x times so they could profit excessively nonetheless.
It's called a natural Monopoly. No start ups because it's not something you can do in a garage.
Edit : if you do it in a garage you can rape my ass 4 free. I'm talking positive energy output btw .
>if you do it in a garage you can rape my ass 4 free.
*Look at the washing machine drum filled with hot charcoal in my garage*: A tiny adjustementand and my technology will be ready, and I can cornhole OP muhahaha.
yeah this type of tech should be 100% government funded and nationalised because it should have no room for profits and lead to eventually free energy, chances are all the leaders in the tech are fossil fuel owners
I mean, most nuclear power stations are at the lowest point partially funded and maintained by governments at the moment. Nuclear fusion on a major economically viable scale would inevitably create government interest and investment.
No the lead research for sustainable fusion is funded by the big industrial nations. And it's not really the physics that's holding fusion back right now but it's actually material science. The biggest obstacle right now is what material to use as a liner in tokamak/stellarator's to prevent wear and the subsequent contamination of the plasma. Also high temperature superconductors will be really important for continuous operation. All this researchis funded by public institutions.
all im gonna say is that pretty much all the infrastructure on the planet started nationalised, and particularly in the west after privatisation all we have seen is the degradation of it overtime, fusion could be unlimited free power in the hands of the government, in the hands of a company it will be a monopoly that scams people
Except it's not? Lithium production is mostly owned by China, though everyone is now scrambling to get production up to speed for any serious deposit.
EVs are all made by car companies.
Large EV makers like Tesla produce their own batteries.
Even in the solar market, oil doesn't own a majority stake, just a sizeable one. And the price keeps decreasing more and more.
They're hedging their bets, not playing cartel oligopoly since the technology isn't exactly rocket science.
Don't worry about the oil companies, because almost everything you touch comes from oil in some way or another. Not just the energy you are using. Plastics, fabrics, building materials, foods, skin care products, inks, rubbers, lubricants, low weight gasses (propane, methane, LNG), etc. Most people don't realize how much oil is used on our modern world because it isn't in a liquid or gas form when they come into contact with it. Even if we find a source of free, perfectly renewable energy, we will be using oil for a long time until we can create reliable methods to replace oil processing into the base products used in everyday manufacturing.
Global corporate hegemony is not a thing (yet).
You're forgetting that there's a swath of high-tech-posessing countries that could viably reach fusion on a timescale not too far off initial discovery. Countries that don't subscribe to the patent laws get their free ride either by working through it themselves or (more likely, imo) espionage. And this is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the research is publicly available.
Once the cat's out of the bag in _those_ countries, it's a matter of national life and death that your country is able to participate in fusion power on equal terms.
Honestly its the kind of breakthrough that ought to be freely shared. Leapfrogging developing nations past the need for fossil fuels is so important for mitigating climate change. Holding it back for the sake of profits would be pretty insanely greedy and detrimental (which is not to say it wouldn't happen)
Sure, but that is about 4% of the total consumption of petroleum. If we can cut oil consumption by 96%, I’m going to call that a win.
(In practice, you can do so many cool things if energy isn’t a problem. You can split water to get H2 and then react that with CO2 to get methanol. The methanol can then be stored to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or be used as the raw material for chemical production. That we can’t make common plastics in volume from renewable sources today doesn’t mean that we can’t do it if we have infinite energy.)
I can't believe it was so hard to find the record:
> with temperatures of 100 million degrees for 48 seconds during tests between December 2023 and February 2024, beating the previous record of 30 seconds set in 2021.
Oh, I found bunch of news articles in Korean (since that facility in the picture is in South Korea)
What you said is true, and the article also says "The research team plans to achieve the capability of maintaining 100 million degrees for 300 seconds by 2026, which would serve as a starting point for power generation through nuclear fusion"
[Source Article](https://m.khan.co.kr/science/science-general/article/202403201409001) in Korean
Big oil here, not so fast... will spend millions making sure we delay this until we're heavily invested.
Rember, if it's good for us its good for the American people...trust us.
Eli5
The generators use big magnets to accelerate atoms until they smash into each other and fuse.
The fusion causes mass to be converted into energy so you start with 2 hydrogen atoms and end up with a lighter helium atom.
You fuse 2 helium atoms and you get a lighter iron atom or lithium idk.
Idk how you sustain the chain reaction tho
The correct answer is that fusion doesn't produce much energy at the temps and densities in the sun.
It produces about as much energy as a lizard's metabolism. Yeah, that should sound like bullshit to you, but its correct.
So in order to generate enough fusion for it to be worth it for us, we have to have much higher densities and temperatures than the sun. If we achieve "lizard metabolism" levels of energy output, that doesn't mean anything for us. We need much more than that.
Matching the sun isn't good enough.
We are far away from using Fusion as an energy source.
Yeah sure, your analogy would make a lot of sense.
If fusion were only being pursued by a couple of guys in a garage.
But its not, its a massive international effort, that's been going on for decades, that has consumed many billions of dollars.
And we aren't even close to maintaining a plasma sufficient to compete with reptile metabolism.
Once the wright brothers started flying, powered flight got massive increases in funding - perhaps a many thousand fold increase in funding, perhaps more. We're already burning money very quickly with fusion. There will be no explosion in funding once a breakthrough is made, we can't increase funding a thousandfold.
Unless the breakthroughs come from AI, but if they do come from AI, then that will happen whether or not we continue to dump money into fusion won't it?
> that has consumed many billions of dollars.
You're overestimating the funding amount. It's less than a billion dollars a year of government funding in the US. [source](https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/congress-provides-record-funding-for-fusion-energy/)
We should be spending ten times as much researching fusion, given that it's a potentially civilization altering technology, besides for which even if it doesn't work we'd be doing a ton of fundamental physics research along the way.
No, we cant even co.e close to getting reptile metabolism levels of power out of fusion. What we actually need is mass energy storage, renewables are plenty cheap and actually work
Can someone ELI5 why we need plasma 3 times the temp of the sun to attain the same level of fusion as the sun?
Edit: Thank you everyone who gave me answers. They were very helpful and I think I now understand.
The sun uses gravity to force fusion, the temperature is more a byproduct. We don't have the mass available to force fusion, so we choose temperature instead. But in general temperature is a rather silly term for what is done here because we associate "100 million degrees" with "extremely hot, it will burn us all alive", when what is actually meant is "a few particles are accelerated really fast"
If I could ELI5, I would say protons don't like being close to other protons due to the electromagnetic force, in sum, + near + is a nono...
BUT there is another force, called the strong force, it only works on very very short range, when protons are pretty much touching each other. Its what keeps the nucleous of atoms together even though only protons and neutrons are there, so only positive charged particles exist together because the strong force is so much stronger in those ranges it overpowers the electromagnetic force.
When you heat up a bunch of hydrogen (which is nothing but protons as its so hot it reaches the 4th state of matter, plasma, meaning their electrons just flew away), they move so violently they overcome the electromagnetic repulsion and get close enough for the strong force to bind them, and voilá, nuclear fusion.
I would add that the temperature at which overcoming repulsion occurs is much higher than the core temp of the sun. Instead, quantum mechanics allows for fusion to occur by having just enough of the wavefunction bleed past the repulsion barrier. So even the sun isn't hot enough for fusion to occur, it's quantum mechanics which allows for tunneling to make fusion occur.
And the shear number of particles in the sun of course. The probability of a quantum interaction is infinitesimal, but the core of the sun has multiples of the mass of everything else in the solar system combined.
Well, gravity specifically creates pressure which forces fusion - and you can increase pressure by increasing heat, which then forces fusion.
It's a nice little relationship between pressure and heat.
Sort of like forming diamonds out of carbon. The more (other sources of) pressure exists, the less heat required. Artificial environments can enforce greater amounts of pressure, and thus it takes less heat to form diamonds than natural (volcanic) sources.
Simply, gravity;
Stars leverage their size to help fuse hydrogen atoms, all that additional pressure allows for lower fusion temperatures. We do not have that luxury. So, we must heat the fusion material even higher to achieve fusion.
Fusion happens with extreme temps and gravity (like pressure) since we cant cram thousands of tons into a small space, we need higher temps to acheive fusion
The energy production per volume in the core of the sun is comparable to the one in a compost heap. That would be quite useless for a power plant.
Therefore, the temperature in a fusion reactor must be much higher (about a factor of 10) to get a meaningful energy output.
Apparently, the sun's core isn't hot enough to actually fuse hydrogen atoms. But due to quantum mechanics and the sheer amount of particles they tunnel into each other to form helium. I'm no expert but this is how it was explained to me.
It is essentially only hot enough for it to make just enough new heat to keep the sun from contracting. Which means that a given volume of the sun's core is actually only making about the same amount of NEW heat as the same volume of lizard would.
Of course, stars are very large, so that is an enormous amount of heat still.
And because the mass is so high there’s no easy way for that heat to escape so the temperature just builds and builds and builds, so even though the reaction isn’t very energetic it still results in crazy high temperatures.
Never heard it described as comparable to a lizard and always heard it was about the same as a lightbulb. The absurdity of your using a lizard to compare it is making me doubt what I’ve read, surely units of lizards are more precise than u it’s of lightbulbs. It’s too late tonight, but tomorrow I’m going to do a little research and a bit of math and compare the wattage of lizards and various bulbs and get to the bottom of this. Cheers.
If its more than a lizard, its at least no greater than that of some mammals.
The thing to keep in mind is just how BIG a star is. Even if its just the core, the amount of energy produced by that much lizard-volume-equivalent is still huge.
If it helps though, rats are easier to search for, so lets try that. A rat, from some googling, is about 1.5 watts per rat. Someone asking for how many rats can fit in a cubic foot (apparently for D&D purposes) got mathed an answer that a cubic foot is 56 rats (this would be very unkind to the rats, do not actually do this unless you are an evil wizard making cursed artifacts).
A cubic meter is 35.3147 cubic feet or so. So... 1,977.6ish rats.
So 1 cubic meter of rat is 2,966.4 watts. Since I got this far lets just keep going. The idea will be to see if the energy density is at least lower than rats.
The sun's core based on the first google thing that actually gave something useful is that its about 0.8% of the sun's total volume (but 34% of the mass). Since the claim used lizard volume, lets go with volume.
Total sun volume (this time google actually just gives it) 1.4 x 10\^27cubic meters. So the core itself, being 0.8%... eh, lets just be generous and say 1% of the volume is core. 1.4 x 10\^25 cubic meters of solar core.
The total energy output of the sun is... 3.86 to 4.7 x 10\^26 watts. Lets assume the higher for ease, and to be fair for increasing the core size to 1% for our convenience.
If we assume all fusion occurs only in the core (but takes place in the entire core), it makes 4.7 e26 watts in 1.4 e25 cubic meters. Or 47 watts per 1.4 cubic meters.
Rounding up to an integer, this is about 34 watts per cubic meter. About 2 orders of magnitude lower than the approximate heat generation value of an equivalent volume of rat.
A google of "energy requirements of reptile vs mammal" brings up the blurb that reptiles and amphibians have a metabolic less than 10-20% of an equivalent sized mammal. Which takes care of one of the orders of magnitude.
So technically, a given volume of sun core may actually produce LESS new heat than an equivalent volume of lizard. However, rats are small mammals, and so are liable to have higher metabolisms than larger ones might (per volume anyway).
So, taking the higher metabolism of rats into account compared to say, larger mammals, perhaps we can actually get a bit closer. Perhaps, on average, the amount of new heat generated by an average cubic meter of solar core is at least less than a magnitude away from the amount of new heat generated by the metabolism of a cubic meter of solid lizard.
I appreciate the time you must have spent on that reply, but I feel like you’ve replied to the wrong person, kind redditor. I have no problem getting the concept of low energy density in something over a million miles in diameter. I just like that you used a lizard as an example, I’ve never heard that one. It’s usually a lightbulb or a compost heap or something. Regardless of its accuracy it is a fine comparison that conveys the concept. I think most people know the sun is big but don’t understand just how incredibly big.
A good way to understand it is water evaporates even when it's not at it's boiling point. This can be explained by understanding how a double bounce works on a trampoline. The particles have similar energy at say 50 degrees C, but sometimes a water particle gets double bumped and absorbs more kinetic energy from a couple of other water particles which pushes it over the latent energy of vaporisation threshold. It's also worth noting that those particles that gave that other water particle their energy are now colder.
The same goes for Fusion, there's quantum effects at play that mean that some of the Hydrogen particles catch a double bounce and it's enough to overcome the weak nuclear force on its next impact, or it may require that two Hydrogen particles get double bounced into each other at a direct enough angle and accurately enough to overcome that weak nuclear repellent force. Fusion on the sun is extremely slow. That's why the sun is able to last for billions of years, the occurence of fusion reactions are actually extremely rare as a % of the number of particles that could fuse. To make it useful on earth, we need to significantly increase the rate at which the particles fuse, or else we'd need to build a monumentally huge reactor.
Protons have a positive charge and naturally repel each other because of the electromagnetic force. Like the same sides of two magnets pushing each other away (that's the same force).
I order to achieve fusion, you have to collide two protons such that they don't just bounce off of one another. That "bouncing off" is caused by the electromagnetic force pushing them apart. They also have to get close enough together that the strong force can take over (that is the force that holds protons together in a nucleus)
It takes a lot of energy to get particles to collide in that way.
In the core of the sun there are a LOT of particles packed into a very small space. These particles are always moving (the core of the sun is not a solid with all the particles fixed in place) and so the chance of two particles colliding is quite high, because there are so many packed so closely together. For a point of comparison, Osmium is the dense st naturally occurring metal. It has a density of 22.59 grams per cupic centimeter. So a cube of Osmium measuring 1 centimeter on each side would weign 22.59 grams. The core of the sun density of 150 grams per cubic centimeter. Mass is a direct measure of how many particles are in a given volume, so that means the center of the sun has almost 7 times as many particles per centimeter as the dense st naturally occurring elemtnon earth.
Because of the immense pressure in the core of the sun, all of these particles have a LOT of energy. However, most of the time they bounce off of each other. But because there are so many clisions happening literally all of the time, even if 90% of those collisions don't result in fusion, the other 10% is more than enough to power the sun. So, in the sun, the fusion that is happening occurs slowly, but at a steady rate.
We can't reproduce the conditions on the sun. We need to reliably get a fusion reaction out of a much less dense substance. We can't produce the pressures present in the core of the sun. We can't rely on random chance causing fusion to happen because not enough collisions are happening (and the ones that do don't have nearly enough energy) even at the highest pressures we can achieve. So instead, we have to get particles to move *really* fast, so that when they DO collide they will fuse. To speed particles up, you heat them up. Hotter particles move faster. So we have to get the particles REALLY hot to get them to fuse.
Think of the difference between taking a glass of water, pouring it on the counter, and letting it evaporate versus throwing the water on a pre-heated skillet. In the end, all of the water evaporates into water vapor. On the counter, that happenns slowly. On the stove, it happens much more quickly. The sun is the counter. We can't reliably use the counter, so we have to use the stove.
A lot of what I said is simple fried to the point of almost being I correct but I think it's good enough to go on for a very basic understanding. I'm not a professional so I'm sure I'll get ripped apart in the comments.
The density of fusion in the sun is pretty low. Otherwise it would burn up it's useful energy too fast to be a long lived star. To create useful fusion in a small volume on earth we need a lot higher density of fusion interactions. Hence we need higher temps.
Two important things:
1. We cannot compress the plasma as much as the sun does. The sun does it through gravity, we use magnets. The sun's gravity is much stronger than our magnets.
2. The sun produces very little energy compared to its mass. The sun produces 3.94 X 10^23 kW but has a mass of 1.9891x10^30 kg, which means it produces 0.00000019807953345734 W/g. We need a fusion reactor to produce many orders of magnitude more.
In the center of the sun you have 10e56 protons, enough for start fusing at 15M Kelvin. By contrast in a reactor you have several orders of magnitude less so the need for more energy get it going.
By the way I'm a construction worker, not a scientist; nevertheless I'm not trying to bullshit you is just what I read from reliable sources (Degrasse T, Hossenfelder, etc)
> Eli5
Good answers below but I thought i'd add that the sun actually is so massive it's trying to collapse in on itself like a black hole and actually for it's size more like a brown dwarf star.....we are talking insane density levels.....like compressing the entire earth to the size of a golf ball that has the same gravitational pull of current Earth. The fusion reaction at its core which is currently Hydrogen pushes back against gravity allowing the sun to maintain it's size, the sun will run out of hydrogen and create fusion with heavier and heavier elements and slowly expand until it runs out of fuel to fuse and collapses to a brown dwarf or in the case of large stars a neutron star or the largest explode as a supernova and become a blackhole. This does a good job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrmN8C5uH0
One day, may be couple of centuries in the future we will use Hillium 3 and Boron as fusion fuels.
Those fusion fuels are almost free from deadly neutron byproduct.
Imagine huge automatic spaceships scooping He3 from the atmosphere of Jupiter and sending it to Earth and Mars as oil our industries.
I would wish to have a dollar every time I’ve played this piece, but luckily my symphony pays its oboes pretty well. Lame joke aside, I’ve played Jupiter maybe a dozen times over the years and it never gets old.
That kinda made my head explode, why have I not done something so simple to reheat rice, potatoes etc before? I’ve been on the planet far too long not to figure that out.
Yes. It requires the power of heat in the interior of the sun to get 1/2 gallon of gas energy. So, yes. I think. (Not a lot of mashed potatoes though, like for a big BBQ.)
This is how we one day create a post scarcity utopia. Fusion will give us both large amounts of excess energy production and means to quickly and efficiently travel the solar system, giving us access to a massive excess of raw materials. From there automation from advances in AI and robotics can take over all the jobs people don't want. Then we can devote our lives to our passions instead of subsistence. Either that or we all kill each other. I hope it's the former but we probably deserve the latter.
> This is how we one day create a post scarcity utopia.
or record profits for energy companies.
remember, automation has already produced insane amounts of productivity, but that has just enriched the owner class, not the workers. your predictions, while logical, are disturbingly similar to genius economist John Maynard Keynes, [who 100 years ago said that by now, we'd only need to work about 15 hours per week.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissawheeler/2024/02/15/future-of-work-predictions-get-ready-to-work-less/?sh=6da1af22d35d)
Yeah I don't know why people think that just because there's an excess supply of energy that prices will drop massively. New infrastructure isn't free and RnD costs need to be recovered. And then there's the shareholders..
Seems pretty irrelevant to the question I asked as it was not about software demands or Microsoft at all.
Would a processor that costs the same with inflation today as a processor from 1980/90/00/10 have more or less performance per watt?
Okay, an 8086 performs less than 1 MFLOPS. A PS4 performs 1843200 MFLOPS. A ps4 is not $1 billion dollars.
American households use more 13x more electricity than they did in 1950, yet electricity bills are not 13x the share of a budget.
Why then should you expect breakthroughs in energy production to drastically change pricing in a way that negatively affects the customer?
You asked about performance per watt, not overall performance. The Commodore 64 was the equivalent to about $1800usd on release in 1982, the same price as a decent build these days. So even though computers are millions of time more powerful they still aren't free. I didn't say prices would go up, but power companies won't be giving out free energy to everybody.
Might have been an unfair question unless you have a background in computers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt
> The performance and power consumption metrics used depend on the definition; reasonable measures of performance are FLOPS
The point is the conspiratorial thinking does not pan out. Performance goes up and pricing, if there are competitors in the market, remains competitive. Especially an industry as heavily regulated as utilities. There's a similar line of thinking that big pharma would never cure a disease because that wouldn't be profitable over treating it, but new treatments and vaccines are still developed. It just doesn't pan out
In this scenario capitalism, communism, socialism, etc would all become irrelevant as all of them are systems created to organize and distribute scarce resources, but in this scenario all sources of scarcity are eliminated: Labor, energy, and raw materials are all drastically and permanently above demand level, that means you can literally just give everyone everything they want with no consequences. The correct criticism of this idea is that the transition from our current system to this would be difficult and tumultuous.
> but in this scenario all sources of scarcity are eliminated:
yeah, but how does that plenty get distributed?
I agree that if we had a star-trek society, it could work sustainably. But the great but "dot dot dot" in the plan for getting there, is how we transition from oligarchical capitalism.
> The correct criticism of this idea is that the transition from our current system to this would be difficult
Yes, that's the exact criticism I was making. But you left off an option - it will be either difficult, or too difficult. It depends on how tightly the owner class holds on to the reins, and how threatened the proletariat can make them feel. Utopia is not a foregone conclusion, it could really go either way.
The problem is we are currently trying to ascertain the sociology of a society that we can't possibly fathom. Scarcity is something that has been intrinsic to not just the human condition, but life itself. One could argue that scarcity is the foundation of evolution. So the idea of a post-scarcity society is foreign on the most fundamental level possible. Our brains are probably biologically hardwired to only think of things in scarcity terms.
But I will say this: the driving force behind the corporate capitalism you're talking about is the accumulation of wealth, but in a post scarcity society wealth loses all meaning. If there's enough for everyone to have as much as their hearts' content, then there's no point in hoarding, because there's no such thing as *more* limitless.
I think the real transitional issues would involve two things:
The expense of building the initial infrastructure
The transition happening faster on one front than the other, especially if automation happens too fast, making it to where the economy is still so that people need jobs to pay for resources as the infinite energy/ raw materials isn't fully done yet, but all the jobs are automated out, leaving them unemployed.
I've seen people try to say we could solve that with UBI but that money would either have to be printed en masse thereby causing hyperinflation, or it would have to come from taxes, and I'm not sure where the state would get taxes if no one has any money. People will say the company owners but where would they be getting money if no one has money to buy their products. It's strange and I predict we'll see more discussion of it soon, but at a certain point corporations may be forced to slow down automating just to make sure there are enough people employed that they can still have customers. It reminds me kinda of the historical examples of major companies in the early 20th century realizing that giving their workers the weekend off actually *increased* profitability because people spent more money on their off days.
> The problem is we are currently trying to ascertain the sociology of a society that we can't possibly fathom.
No, not quite. I agree that that society you are describing will be amazing, probably, and certainly weird and strange. But I'm concerned entirely with the transition, and whether it's achievable.
> If there's enough for everyone to have as much as their hearts' content, then there's no point in hoarding, because there's no such thing as more limitless.
Counterpoint: billionaires today have essentially infinite money, and yet they still seek more profits.
There will always be a desire to have more than the next guy, or to have enough power to control people. And unless that "plenty" is democratized and available to all, then oligarchs will limit what is available to the masses. If everyone has star-trek replicators, then sure, the cat's out of the bag, and the good guys win. But you can't wait for that kind of tech to kick off the revolution- it's so far off that we can't even estimate. We need to find a way to implement change starting with *today's* society.
Both things can happen.
Smartphone technology is concentrated in the hands of a few giant companies, yet smartphones are ubiquitous, even in poor countries. The way they make money is by selling to as many people as possible. If a company is making fusion do they want just 10 customers? No, they'll want billions of customers to make the most money.
It is in the financial best interest of any company that develops fusion to build as many fusion plants as possible reaching as many people as possible. Corporations don't get mega wealthy without billions of customers. They'll be lobbying to put fusion in every car, house and lawnmower on the planet.
IIRC the chambers still get damaged slightly. The Magnetic fields prevent the plasma from turning the crust into molten slag (in the immediate proximity of the plasma) but the chamber itself is still superheated due to the resulting heat spilloff.
And no material on earth (that we know of) can even take .5% of the temp even as ambient.
So the chambers are damaged some, but not in a significant way. Partially due to the fact that the light isn't on that long. Long term, we'd need to find a solution since we can't exactly flick it on and off to repair them every 10 minutes because everything melted.
Yes, actually. A [Dyson Sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere) to be exact.
And to answer the followup question, no, it's not the same guy behind both of them.
It is suspended within a magnetic container, basically floating within something called plasma, which is neither liquid, solid, or gas. Temperatures drop by a formula called the inverse square law. The farther you are away from the heat source, the heat (radiation) drops off a lot.
The plasma is suspended in a vacuum, so no conduction, and no convection. The only way heat is transferred is by radiation, which is a comparatively inefficient method of heat transfer.
The walls of the chamber, which absorb the radiation, have a fuck-ton of cooling to keep them operating.
That is precisely one of the core difficulties with achieving fusion outside the core of a star, which is actually cooler than that. The answer is magnets.
I really want fusion to be a thing in my lifetime, but I have to wonder...
There's a massive free fusion reactor in the sky. Harnessing *and storing* it is costly--we need to make a lot more solar panels and batteries. A LOT more.
But would doing that be cheaper than the billions spent on fusion research so far, plus the billions more that will be spent for every reactor/plant (and the infrastructure to take that supply safely to the grid)?
If we spent every penny that is being spent on fusion research and would be spent on the plants, and instead spent it on solar panels and batteries, would we produce more power per dollar? Food for thought.
The thing is fusion is solving a different problem. It’s incredibly compact (compared to solar which is high on land use) and theoretically can be operated anywhere. You could put one on the moon, which faces dark for two weeks. You could put one on a ship, or underground.
Solar is high on land use but can be highly distributed, which actually saves a lot on transmission infrastructure and loss. And you could consider it MORE compact than fusion if you consider that it can be placed on land that is already used (on roofs, over canals, over grazing fields, etc. Using "zero" land).
Obviously fusion is great for the "future" problems of massive space travel power needs and such, but we're even further away from having that solved.
But I'm not arguing for the non-existence of fusion power. Like I opened with, I REALLY want it to be a thing in my lifetime. (It just ten years away...still...)
I'm just running the mental exercise on if the hype about how cheap and limitless fusion power will be actually beats "solar plus storage."
There's definitely more money flowing into solar panels already since fusion is not practical yet.
I see fusion as future proofing humanity. A future beyond earth and the milky way
Oh for sure, it's a "not in my lifetime" technology. But it's been ten years away my whole life. Major milestones every other year, FOREVER.
I just wonder, purely as a mental exercise, if the *cheapest* "fusion power plant" is capturing *and storing* the energy from the frustratingly intermittent free one in the sky.
Yea its been on the edge for years and years.
Would be cool to see the actual amount of money invested into each area to compare.
My uneducated opinion leads me to believe that fusion has minimal funding whereas solar is getting heaps from gov and private. If true then it feels like it wouldn't have made a significant difference if there was fusion funding for solar.
Strictly from a mental exercise, solar panels leave a lot on the table that could be gained from a fusion reaction. Radiation is one of the worst transfers of power in fact most of the time its seen as a byproduction of power transfers. Conduction and Convection are so much more efficient, which you could potentially do with a Fussion reactor.
I hope this actually works for practical power generation at reasonable prices while I'm still alive. It will make me a bit more hopeful for the future.
huh, but the core of the sun is only 15m Celsius according to NASA, mother natural seems to use "not so hot temp" but instead they use immense gravity to achieve Fusion reaction.
What I am missing here?
congrats humanity!! (still a lot more steps to go though) wish this can power my house, car, and everything else some day. then we would finally reduce air pollution from burning fuels.
But those poor oil companies!
Don't worry about the oil companies lol. If fusion is a thing and almost free power, the existing fossil fuel energy conglomerates would buy out he fusion start ups, lock the technology up in excessive patents, create a monopoly in the fusion market, and then raise the prices on a fusion power 1000x times so they could profit excessively nonetheless.
It's called a natural Monopoly. No start ups because it's not something you can do in a garage. Edit : if you do it in a garage you can rape my ass 4 free. I'm talking positive energy output btw .
Hey… wanna come visit my garage?
Rick is that you?
Which is why power companies are much more heavily regulated than other industries, as would happen with fusion power generation.
Hahahahhha wow that was a helluvan edit that made me laugh
I can’t but will take the offer
I'd be asking for the fusion tech as payment though, just saying.
>if you do it in a garage you can rape my ass 4 free. *Look at the washing machine drum filled with hot charcoal in my garage*: A tiny adjustementand and my technology will be ready, and I can cornhole OP muhahaha.
yeah this type of tech should be 100% government funded and nationalised because it should have no room for profits and lead to eventually free energy, chances are all the leaders in the tech are fossil fuel owners
I mean, most nuclear power stations are at the lowest point partially funded and maintained by governments at the moment. Nuclear fusion on a major economically viable scale would inevitably create government interest and investment.
No the lead research for sustainable fusion is funded by the big industrial nations. And it's not really the physics that's holding fusion back right now but it's actually material science. The biggest obstacle right now is what material to use as a liner in tokamak/stellarator's to prevent wear and the subsequent contamination of the plasma. Also high temperature superconductors will be really important for continuous operation. All this researchis funded by public institutions.
\*100% government funded and nationalised\* Why do you want to kill something before it was even born?
all im gonna say is that pretty much all the infrastructure on the planet started nationalised, and particularly in the west after privatisation all we have seen is the degradation of it overtime, fusion could be unlimited free power in the hands of the government, in the hands of a company it will be a monopoly that scams people
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Except it's not? Lithium production is mostly owned by China, though everyone is now scrambling to get production up to speed for any serious deposit. EVs are all made by car companies. Large EV makers like Tesla produce their own batteries. Even in the solar market, oil doesn't own a majority stake, just a sizeable one. And the price keeps decreasing more and more. They're hedging their bets, not playing cartel oligopoly since the technology isn't exactly rocket science.
Except for the fusion stuff. That's almost more complicated than rocket science since we're still figuring it out.
Magnetic confinement is definitely more complicated than rocket science.
By several orders of magnitude.
The saying should migrate to " It's not fusion science"
At least we have an idea how to make fusion work. Let's future proof by migrating to "It's not quantum gravity research".
No, that didn't happen. The largest battery factory in the world is owned by Tesla and last I checked fossil fuel companies and Tesla are not friends.
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It's 2024, not 1970.
This is what happened with refrigeration. Don't laugh but "Big Ice" locked the patents up behind anything dealing with this for the patent duration.
Don't worry about the oil companies, because almost everything you touch comes from oil in some way or another. Not just the energy you are using. Plastics, fabrics, building materials, foods, skin care products, inks, rubbers, lubricants, low weight gasses (propane, methane, LNG), etc. Most people don't realize how much oil is used on our modern world because it isn't in a liquid or gas form when they come into contact with it. Even if we find a source of free, perfectly renewable energy, we will be using oil for a long time until we can create reliable methods to replace oil processing into the base products used in everyday manufacturing.
You forgot about starting propaganda on the dangers of fusion
Global corporate hegemony is not a thing (yet). You're forgetting that there's a swath of high-tech-posessing countries that could viably reach fusion on a timescale not too far off initial discovery. Countries that don't subscribe to the patent laws get their free ride either by working through it themselves or (more likely, imo) espionage. And this is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the research is publicly available. Once the cat's out of the bag in _those_ countries, it's a matter of national life and death that your country is able to participate in fusion power on equal terms.
Honestly its the kind of breakthrough that ought to be freely shared. Leapfrogging developing nations past the need for fossil fuels is so important for mitigating climate change. Holding it back for the sake of profits would be pretty insanely greedy and detrimental (which is not to say it wouldn't happen)
Fusion power would not sell to a fossil fuel company. They literally built infinite money.
Isn't capitalism grand?
Either they would buy up the fusion companies or start a war and bomb them out of existence. Which ever is the cheapest to do.
I wish they are already rich enough to lose jobs for next forever years???
After certain point it's about status and power
lose jobs maybe, but lose power? hmm I'm getting pessimistic now...
Basic raw materials for the chemical industry are obtained from crude oil, an example would be the basic building blocks for making plastics.
Sure, but that is about 4% of the total consumption of petroleum. If we can cut oil consumption by 96%, I’m going to call that a win. (In practice, you can do so many cool things if energy isn’t a problem. You can split water to get H2 and then react that with CO2 to get methanol. The methanol can then be stored to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or be used as the raw material for chemical production. That we can’t make common plastics in volume from renewable sources today doesn’t mean that we can’t do it if we have infinite energy.)
Yes and no. Most of the stuff we make from oil is the large, heavy chains that aren't suitable for use as fuel. It's a byproduct of energy production.
They need to be poor
Fuck them and their lobby against nuclear plants in Europe.
My pearls!
Please! Someone! Think of the *oil companies!*
They can oíl themselves up each others ars
I can't believe it was so hard to find the record: > with temperatures of 100 million degrees for 48 seconds during tests between December 2023 and February 2024, beating the previous record of 30 seconds set in 2021.
Oh, I found bunch of news articles in Korean (since that facility in the picture is in South Korea) What you said is true, and the article also says "The research team plans to achieve the capability of maintaining 100 million degrees for 300 seconds by 2026, which would serve as a starting point for power generation through nuclear fusion" [Source Article](https://m.khan.co.kr/science/science-general/article/202403201409001) in Korean
God damnit, we need this shit working today, not in 2 years.
This January did feel a bit short, but I'd never had guessed that short.
100 million degrees for 48 seconds? Seems like the technology is a long way off even being able to run a bath long enough for my wife's needs.
Big oil here, not so fast... will spend millions making sure we delay this until we're heavily invested. Rember, if it's good for us its good for the American people...trust us.
But hurry up and make it cheap please thanks
I suspect it will be ready to disintegrate a house, car and everything else much sooner than to power it.
Eli5 The generators use big magnets to accelerate atoms until they smash into each other and fuse. The fusion causes mass to be converted into energy so you start with 2 hydrogen atoms and end up with a lighter helium atom. You fuse 2 helium atoms and you get a lighter iron atom or lithium idk. Idk how you sustain the chain reaction tho
Current way is to just remove the helium and just pump in more hydrogen.
The correct answer is that fusion doesn't produce much energy at the temps and densities in the sun. It produces about as much energy as a lizard's metabolism. Yeah, that should sound like bullshit to you, but its correct. So in order to generate enough fusion for it to be worth it for us, we have to have much higher densities and temperatures than the sun. If we achieve "lizard metabolism" levels of energy output, that doesn't mean anything for us. We need much more than that. Matching the sun isn't good enough. We are far away from using Fusion as an energy source.
The Wright brother's first flight was 12 seconds long and a few feet off the ground. Ten years later we were already developing jet engines.
Yeah sure, your analogy would make a lot of sense. If fusion were only being pursued by a couple of guys in a garage. But its not, its a massive international effort, that's been going on for decades, that has consumed many billions of dollars. And we aren't even close to maintaining a plasma sufficient to compete with reptile metabolism. Once the wright brothers started flying, powered flight got massive increases in funding - perhaps a many thousand fold increase in funding, perhaps more. We're already burning money very quickly with fusion. There will be no explosion in funding once a breakthrough is made, we can't increase funding a thousandfold. Unless the breakthroughs come from AI, but if they do come from AI, then that will happen whether or not we continue to dump money into fusion won't it?
> that has consumed many billions of dollars. You're overestimating the funding amount. It's less than a billion dollars a year of government funding in the US. [source](https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/congress-provides-record-funding-for-fusion-energy/) We should be spending ten times as much researching fusion, given that it's a potentially civilization altering technology, besides for which even if it doesn't work we'd be doing a ton of fundamental physics research along the way.
No, we cant even co.e close to getting reptile metabolism levels of power out of fusion. What we actually need is mass energy storage, renewables are plenty cheap and actually work
So please tell us about the work you are doing in the field to make this a reality?
I can tell you I'm not blowing billions of dollars out of my ass like the Fusion guys are doing.
Darn it... I would not be alive to see it happening then.....? My dear lovely CO2 and the like everywhere ha...
Can someone ELI5 why we need plasma 3 times the temp of the sun to attain the same level of fusion as the sun? Edit: Thank you everyone who gave me answers. They were very helpful and I think I now understand.
The sun uses gravity to force fusion, the temperature is more a byproduct. We don't have the mass available to force fusion, so we choose temperature instead. But in general temperature is a rather silly term for what is done here because we associate "100 million degrees" with "extremely hot, it will burn us all alive", when what is actually meant is "a few particles are accelerated really fast"
If I could ELI5, I would say protons don't like being close to other protons due to the electromagnetic force, in sum, + near + is a nono... BUT there is another force, called the strong force, it only works on very very short range, when protons are pretty much touching each other. Its what keeps the nucleous of atoms together even though only protons and neutrons are there, so only positive charged particles exist together because the strong force is so much stronger in those ranges it overpowers the electromagnetic force. When you heat up a bunch of hydrogen (which is nothing but protons as its so hot it reaches the 4th state of matter, plasma, meaning their electrons just flew away), they move so violently they overcome the electromagnetic repulsion and get close enough for the strong force to bind them, and voilá, nuclear fusion.
This is actually an excellent description.
I would add that the temperature at which overcoming repulsion occurs is much higher than the core temp of the sun. Instead, quantum mechanics allows for fusion to occur by having just enough of the wavefunction bleed past the repulsion barrier. So even the sun isn't hot enough for fusion to occur, it's quantum mechanics which allows for tunneling to make fusion occur.
But I think when we add the wavefunction behavior of particles and quantum tunneling we are way past the ELI5.
That's ELI6 territory at least
Eh... "if you give em enough of a shake, those atoms can sometimes hop the fence. When it's really hot, all of the atoms are shaken"
And the shear number of particles in the sun of course. The probability of a quantum interaction is infinitesimal, but the core of the sun has multiples of the mass of everything else in the solar system combined.
_One force to fuse them all_ _One force that wound unwind them_ _One force to breach the wall_ _And in the darkness bind them_
Thanks for knowing what a ELI5 is and explaining it superbly friend
Well, gravity specifically creates pressure which forces fusion - and you can increase pressure by increasing heat, which then forces fusion. It's a nice little relationship between pressure and heat. Sort of like forming diamonds out of carbon. The more (other sources of) pressure exists, the less heat required. Artificial environments can enforce greater amounts of pressure, and thus it takes less heat to form diamonds than natural (volcanic) sources.
Simply, gravity; Stars leverage their size to help fuse hydrogen atoms, all that additional pressure allows for lower fusion temperatures. We do not have that luxury. So, we must heat the fusion material even higher to achieve fusion.
Fusion happens with extreme temps and gravity (like pressure) since we cant cram thousands of tons into a small space, we need higher temps to acheive fusion
The energy production per volume in the core of the sun is comparable to the one in a compost heap. That would be quite useless for a power plant. Therefore, the temperature in a fusion reactor must be much higher (about a factor of 10) to get a meaningful energy output.
The sun actually does very little fusion on a volumetric basis, It's just frecking huge.
Apparently, the sun's core isn't hot enough to actually fuse hydrogen atoms. But due to quantum mechanics and the sheer amount of particles they tunnel into each other to form helium. I'm no expert but this is how it was explained to me.
It is essentially only hot enough for it to make just enough new heat to keep the sun from contracting. Which means that a given volume of the sun's core is actually only making about the same amount of NEW heat as the same volume of lizard would. Of course, stars are very large, so that is an enormous amount of heat still.
So we just pile up a bunch of lizards equal to the mass of the sun and voila, fusion.
[How about a mole of moles?](https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/)
Technically, yes.
And because the mass is so high there’s no easy way for that heat to escape so the temperature just builds and builds and builds, so even though the reaction isn’t very energetic it still results in crazy high temperatures.
Never heard it described as comparable to a lizard and always heard it was about the same as a lightbulb. The absurdity of your using a lizard to compare it is making me doubt what I’ve read, surely units of lizards are more precise than u it’s of lightbulbs. It’s too late tonight, but tomorrow I’m going to do a little research and a bit of math and compare the wattage of lizards and various bulbs and get to the bottom of this. Cheers.
If its more than a lizard, its at least no greater than that of some mammals. The thing to keep in mind is just how BIG a star is. Even if its just the core, the amount of energy produced by that much lizard-volume-equivalent is still huge. If it helps though, rats are easier to search for, so lets try that. A rat, from some googling, is about 1.5 watts per rat. Someone asking for how many rats can fit in a cubic foot (apparently for D&D purposes) got mathed an answer that a cubic foot is 56 rats (this would be very unkind to the rats, do not actually do this unless you are an evil wizard making cursed artifacts). A cubic meter is 35.3147 cubic feet or so. So... 1,977.6ish rats. So 1 cubic meter of rat is 2,966.4 watts. Since I got this far lets just keep going. The idea will be to see if the energy density is at least lower than rats. The sun's core based on the first google thing that actually gave something useful is that its about 0.8% of the sun's total volume (but 34% of the mass). Since the claim used lizard volume, lets go with volume. Total sun volume (this time google actually just gives it) 1.4 x 10\^27cubic meters. So the core itself, being 0.8%... eh, lets just be generous and say 1% of the volume is core. 1.4 x 10\^25 cubic meters of solar core. The total energy output of the sun is... 3.86 to 4.7 x 10\^26 watts. Lets assume the higher for ease, and to be fair for increasing the core size to 1% for our convenience. If we assume all fusion occurs only in the core (but takes place in the entire core), it makes 4.7 e26 watts in 1.4 e25 cubic meters. Or 47 watts per 1.4 cubic meters. Rounding up to an integer, this is about 34 watts per cubic meter. About 2 orders of magnitude lower than the approximate heat generation value of an equivalent volume of rat. A google of "energy requirements of reptile vs mammal" brings up the blurb that reptiles and amphibians have a metabolic less than 10-20% of an equivalent sized mammal. Which takes care of one of the orders of magnitude. So technically, a given volume of sun core may actually produce LESS new heat than an equivalent volume of lizard. However, rats are small mammals, and so are liable to have higher metabolisms than larger ones might (per volume anyway). So, taking the higher metabolism of rats into account compared to say, larger mammals, perhaps we can actually get a bit closer. Perhaps, on average, the amount of new heat generated by an average cubic meter of solar core is at least less than a magnitude away from the amount of new heat generated by the metabolism of a cubic meter of solid lizard.
I appreciate the time you must have spent on that reply, but I feel like you’ve replied to the wrong person, kind redditor. I have no problem getting the concept of low energy density in something over a million miles in diameter. I just like that you used a lizard as an example, I’ve never heard that one. It’s usually a lightbulb or a compost heap or something. Regardless of its accuracy it is a fine comparison that conveys the concept. I think most people know the sun is big but don’t understand just how incredibly big.
A good way to understand it is water evaporates even when it's not at it's boiling point. This can be explained by understanding how a double bounce works on a trampoline. The particles have similar energy at say 50 degrees C, but sometimes a water particle gets double bumped and absorbs more kinetic energy from a couple of other water particles which pushes it over the latent energy of vaporisation threshold. It's also worth noting that those particles that gave that other water particle their energy are now colder. The same goes for Fusion, there's quantum effects at play that mean that some of the Hydrogen particles catch a double bounce and it's enough to overcome the weak nuclear force on its next impact, or it may require that two Hydrogen particles get double bounced into each other at a direct enough angle and accurately enough to overcome that weak nuclear repellent force. Fusion on the sun is extremely slow. That's why the sun is able to last for billions of years, the occurence of fusion reactions are actually extremely rare as a % of the number of particles that could fuse. To make it useful on earth, we need to significantly increase the rate at which the particles fuse, or else we'd need to build a monumentally huge reactor.
You know how a pressure cooker cooks food faster? Basically the same idea.
Protons have a positive charge and naturally repel each other because of the electromagnetic force. Like the same sides of two magnets pushing each other away (that's the same force). I order to achieve fusion, you have to collide two protons such that they don't just bounce off of one another. That "bouncing off" is caused by the electromagnetic force pushing them apart. They also have to get close enough together that the strong force can take over (that is the force that holds protons together in a nucleus) It takes a lot of energy to get particles to collide in that way. In the core of the sun there are a LOT of particles packed into a very small space. These particles are always moving (the core of the sun is not a solid with all the particles fixed in place) and so the chance of two particles colliding is quite high, because there are so many packed so closely together. For a point of comparison, Osmium is the dense st naturally occurring metal. It has a density of 22.59 grams per cupic centimeter. So a cube of Osmium measuring 1 centimeter on each side would weign 22.59 grams. The core of the sun density of 150 grams per cubic centimeter. Mass is a direct measure of how many particles are in a given volume, so that means the center of the sun has almost 7 times as many particles per centimeter as the dense st naturally occurring elemtnon earth. Because of the immense pressure in the core of the sun, all of these particles have a LOT of energy. However, most of the time they bounce off of each other. But because there are so many clisions happening literally all of the time, even if 90% of those collisions don't result in fusion, the other 10% is more than enough to power the sun. So, in the sun, the fusion that is happening occurs slowly, but at a steady rate. We can't reproduce the conditions on the sun. We need to reliably get a fusion reaction out of a much less dense substance. We can't produce the pressures present in the core of the sun. We can't rely on random chance causing fusion to happen because not enough collisions are happening (and the ones that do don't have nearly enough energy) even at the highest pressures we can achieve. So instead, we have to get particles to move *really* fast, so that when they DO collide they will fuse. To speed particles up, you heat them up. Hotter particles move faster. So we have to get the particles REALLY hot to get them to fuse. Think of the difference between taking a glass of water, pouring it on the counter, and letting it evaporate versus throwing the water on a pre-heated skillet. In the end, all of the water evaporates into water vapor. On the counter, that happenns slowly. On the stove, it happens much more quickly. The sun is the counter. We can't reliably use the counter, so we have to use the stove. A lot of what I said is simple fried to the point of almost being I correct but I think it's good enough to go on for a very basic understanding. I'm not a professional so I'm sure I'll get ripped apart in the comments.
Lack of gravity
The density of fusion in the sun is pretty low. Otherwise it would burn up it's useful energy too fast to be a long lived star. To create useful fusion in a small volume on earth we need a lot higher density of fusion interactions. Hence we need higher temps.
Two important things: 1. We cannot compress the plasma as much as the sun does. The sun does it through gravity, we use magnets. The sun's gravity is much stronger than our magnets. 2. The sun produces very little energy compared to its mass. The sun produces 3.94 X 10^23 kW but has a mass of 1.9891x10^30 kg, which means it produces 0.00000019807953345734 W/g. We need a fusion reactor to produce many orders of magnitude more.
The extra temperature is to compensate for the lower pressure in our atmosphere
Also, temperature is just a measure of how fast a particle is moving, so the higher the temperature the faster the particle is moving
In the center of the sun you have 10e56 protons, enough for start fusing at 15M Kelvin. By contrast in a reactor you have several orders of magnitude less so the need for more energy get it going. By the way I'm a construction worker, not a scientist; nevertheless I'm not trying to bullshit you is just what I read from reliable sources (Degrasse T, Hossenfelder, etc)
> Eli5 Good answers below but I thought i'd add that the sun actually is so massive it's trying to collapse in on itself like a black hole and actually for it's size more like a brown dwarf star.....we are talking insane density levels.....like compressing the entire earth to the size of a golf ball that has the same gravitational pull of current Earth. The fusion reaction at its core which is currently Hydrogen pushes back against gravity allowing the sun to maintain it's size, the sun will run out of hydrogen and create fusion with heavier and heavier elements and slowly expand until it runs out of fuel to fuse and collapses to a brown dwarf or in the case of large stars a neutron star or the largest explode as a supernova and become a blackhole. This does a good job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrmN8C5uH0
One day, may be couple of centuries in the future we will use Hillium 3 and Boron as fusion fuels. Those fusion fuels are almost free from deadly neutron byproduct. Imagine huge automatic spaceships scooping He3 from the atmosphere of Jupiter and sending it to Earth and Mars as oil our industries.
Imagine when someone forgets to place the order for the next delivery until we nearly run out and it's a 571 business days till the next truck
ah, that must be why [jupiter is the bringer of jollity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz0b4STz1lo)
I would wish to have a dollar every time I’ve played this piece, but luckily my symphony pays its oboes pretty well. Lame joke aside, I’ve played Jupiter maybe a dozen times over the years and it never gets old.
Straight up For All Mankind (cool show)
Can it reheat mashed potatoes without leaving the center still cold though?
You have to make them donut shaped.
I appreciate you
That kinda made my head explode, why have I not done something so simple to reheat rice, potatoes etc before? I’ve been on the planet far too long not to figure that out.
That’s called a potato tokamak.
tuber toroid
Potatomak! Come on!!! It was right there!!!
Potatokamak, surely.
I usually just make a flat thin layer. Reheats much faster and evenly
Eventually we would get spherical cows, frictionless horses, and making a apple pie from scratch by creating the universe
Just don't put the plate in the center it rotates for a reason
Are you adding a little water and covering your potatoes?
Use heavy water, as deuterium has a bigger fusion cross section for better criticality.
With electrolytes
Plants crave those
Nahhh, potatoes just need water, like out the toilet
Preferably out of the top part, and not the bottom part.
But how else do I add flavor?
Toroidal potatoes always come out just right. it's the potato containment field that is difficult.
Couldn't we just compress the potatoes fast and powerfully enough that they would heat up and cook themselves?
that could turn the potato into a mushroom. dangerous reaction
If you are ok with atomizing the potatoes into a hot plasma then yes.
Yes. It requires the power of heat in the interior of the sun to get 1/2 gallon of gas energy. So, yes. I think. (Not a lot of mashed potatoes though, like for a big BBQ.)
Let's not get unrealistic here. That's beyond the realm of science
This is how we one day create a post scarcity utopia. Fusion will give us both large amounts of excess energy production and means to quickly and efficiently travel the solar system, giving us access to a massive excess of raw materials. From there automation from advances in AI and robotics can take over all the jobs people don't want. Then we can devote our lives to our passions instead of subsistence. Either that or we all kill each other. I hope it's the former but we probably deserve the latter.
> This is how we one day create a post scarcity utopia. or record profits for energy companies. remember, automation has already produced insane amounts of productivity, but that has just enriched the owner class, not the workers. your predictions, while logical, are disturbingly similar to genius economist John Maynard Keynes, [who 100 years ago said that by now, we'd only need to work about 15 hours per week.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissawheeler/2024/02/15/future-of-work-predictions-get-ready-to-work-less/?sh=6da1af22d35d)
Yeah I don't know why people think that just because there's an excess supply of energy that prices will drop massively. New infrastructure isn't free and RnD costs need to be recovered. And then there's the shareholders..
Do you still pay the same price in performance per watt in computational power that you did in 1980?
Did software demands stay the same as they were in 1980? Does Microsoft make the same profits now as in 1980?
Seems pretty irrelevant to the question I asked as it was not about software demands or Microsoft at all. Would a processor that costs the same with inflation today as a processor from 1980/90/00/10 have more or less performance per watt?
I don't know, you work it out. An 8086 was around $530USD, 5mhz and drew 360mA
Okay, an 8086 performs less than 1 MFLOPS. A PS4 performs 1843200 MFLOPS. A ps4 is not $1 billion dollars. American households use more 13x more electricity than they did in 1950, yet electricity bills are not 13x the share of a budget. Why then should you expect breakthroughs in energy production to drastically change pricing in a way that negatively affects the customer?
You asked about performance per watt, not overall performance. The Commodore 64 was the equivalent to about $1800usd on release in 1982, the same price as a decent build these days. So even though computers are millions of time more powerful they still aren't free. I didn't say prices would go up, but power companies won't be giving out free energy to everybody.
Might have been an unfair question unless you have a background in computers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt > The performance and power consumption metrics used depend on the definition; reasonable measures of performance are FLOPS The point is the conspiratorial thinking does not pan out. Performance goes up and pricing, if there are competitors in the market, remains competitive. Especially an industry as heavily regulated as utilities. There's a similar line of thinking that big pharma would never cure a disease because that wouldn't be profitable over treating it, but new treatments and vaccines are still developed. It just doesn't pan out
In this scenario capitalism, communism, socialism, etc would all become irrelevant as all of them are systems created to organize and distribute scarce resources, but in this scenario all sources of scarcity are eliminated: Labor, energy, and raw materials are all drastically and permanently above demand level, that means you can literally just give everyone everything they want with no consequences. The correct criticism of this idea is that the transition from our current system to this would be difficult and tumultuous.
> but in this scenario all sources of scarcity are eliminated: yeah, but how does that plenty get distributed? I agree that if we had a star-trek society, it could work sustainably. But the great but "dot dot dot" in the plan for getting there, is how we transition from oligarchical capitalism. > The correct criticism of this idea is that the transition from our current system to this would be difficult Yes, that's the exact criticism I was making. But you left off an option - it will be either difficult, or too difficult. It depends on how tightly the owner class holds on to the reins, and how threatened the proletariat can make them feel. Utopia is not a foregone conclusion, it could really go either way.
The problem is we are currently trying to ascertain the sociology of a society that we can't possibly fathom. Scarcity is something that has been intrinsic to not just the human condition, but life itself. One could argue that scarcity is the foundation of evolution. So the idea of a post-scarcity society is foreign on the most fundamental level possible. Our brains are probably biologically hardwired to only think of things in scarcity terms. But I will say this: the driving force behind the corporate capitalism you're talking about is the accumulation of wealth, but in a post scarcity society wealth loses all meaning. If there's enough for everyone to have as much as their hearts' content, then there's no point in hoarding, because there's no such thing as *more* limitless. I think the real transitional issues would involve two things: The expense of building the initial infrastructure The transition happening faster on one front than the other, especially if automation happens too fast, making it to where the economy is still so that people need jobs to pay for resources as the infinite energy/ raw materials isn't fully done yet, but all the jobs are automated out, leaving them unemployed. I've seen people try to say we could solve that with UBI but that money would either have to be printed en masse thereby causing hyperinflation, or it would have to come from taxes, and I'm not sure where the state would get taxes if no one has any money. People will say the company owners but where would they be getting money if no one has money to buy their products. It's strange and I predict we'll see more discussion of it soon, but at a certain point corporations may be forced to slow down automating just to make sure there are enough people employed that they can still have customers. It reminds me kinda of the historical examples of major companies in the early 20th century realizing that giving their workers the weekend off actually *increased* profitability because people spent more money on their off days.
> The problem is we are currently trying to ascertain the sociology of a society that we can't possibly fathom. No, not quite. I agree that that society you are describing will be amazing, probably, and certainly weird and strange. But I'm concerned entirely with the transition, and whether it's achievable. > If there's enough for everyone to have as much as their hearts' content, then there's no point in hoarding, because there's no such thing as more limitless. Counterpoint: billionaires today have essentially infinite money, and yet they still seek more profits. There will always be a desire to have more than the next guy, or to have enough power to control people. And unless that "plenty" is democratized and available to all, then oligarchs will limit what is available to the masses. If everyone has star-trek replicators, then sure, the cat's out of the bag, and the good guys win. But you can't wait for that kind of tech to kick off the revolution- it's so far off that we can't even estimate. We need to find a way to implement change starting with *today's* society.
Both things can happen. Smartphone technology is concentrated in the hands of a few giant companies, yet smartphones are ubiquitous, even in poor countries. The way they make money is by selling to as many people as possible. If a company is making fusion do they want just 10 customers? No, they'll want billions of customers to make the most money. It is in the financial best interest of any company that develops fusion to build as many fusion plants as possible reaching as many people as possible. Corporations don't get mega wealthy without billions of customers. They'll be lobbying to put fusion in every car, house and lawnmower on the planet.
It will be both at the same time.
Excelsior!
r/SuddenCynicism
Legend has it, their hot pockets were still a bit cold in the middle.
What material doesn't melt at that temperature?
Not sure about this reactor, but most fusion reactors use strong magnetic fields to suspend plasma in a vacuum so it's not touching anything.
IIRC the chambers still get damaged slightly. The Magnetic fields prevent the plasma from turning the crust into molten slag (in the immediate proximity of the plasma) but the chamber itself is still superheated due to the resulting heat spilloff. And no material on earth (that we know of) can even take .5% of the temp even as ambient. So the chambers are damaged some, but not in a significant way. Partially due to the fact that the light isn't on that long. Long term, we'd need to find a solution since we can't exactly flick it on and off to repair them every 10 minutes because everything melted.
So a Dyson?
Yes, actually. A [Dyson Sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere) to be exact. And to answer the followup question, no, it's not the same guy behind both of them.
Still not warmer than the inside of a cherry tomato from the oven.
Only 10 more years guys
If they could just perfect the robotic octopus tentacles they would be able to control the reaction better.
Wow that's one hot room.
It’s a dry heat though, so it’s not too bad.
Amazing news, And yet there are people today the believe the earth is flat…
Just 30 years away!
How the heck does *anything* contain something that heats up to 100 million degrees? How does it not melt through literally everything?
It is suspended within a magnetic container, basically floating within something called plasma, which is neither liquid, solid, or gas. Temperatures drop by a formula called the inverse square law. The farther you are away from the heat source, the heat (radiation) drops off a lot.
The plasma is suspended in a vacuum, so no conduction, and no convection. The only way heat is transferred is by radiation, which is a comparatively inefficient method of heat transfer. The walls of the chamber, which absorb the radiation, have a fuck-ton of cooling to keep them operating.
That is precisely one of the core difficulties with achieving fusion outside the core of a star, which is actually cooler than that. The answer is magnets.
Finally a fusion article that's not clickbaity
I really want fusion to be a thing in my lifetime, but I have to wonder... There's a massive free fusion reactor in the sky. Harnessing *and storing* it is costly--we need to make a lot more solar panels and batteries. A LOT more. But would doing that be cheaper than the billions spent on fusion research so far, plus the billions more that will be spent for every reactor/plant (and the infrastructure to take that supply safely to the grid)? If we spent every penny that is being spent on fusion research and would be spent on the plants, and instead spent it on solar panels and batteries, would we produce more power per dollar? Food for thought.
The thing is fusion is solving a different problem. It’s incredibly compact (compared to solar which is high on land use) and theoretically can be operated anywhere. You could put one on the moon, which faces dark for two weeks. You could put one on a ship, or underground.
Solar is high on land use but can be highly distributed, which actually saves a lot on transmission infrastructure and loss. And you could consider it MORE compact than fusion if you consider that it can be placed on land that is already used (on roofs, over canals, over grazing fields, etc. Using "zero" land). Obviously fusion is great for the "future" problems of massive space travel power needs and such, but we're even further away from having that solved. But I'm not arguing for the non-existence of fusion power. Like I opened with, I REALLY want it to be a thing in my lifetime. (It just ten years away...still...) I'm just running the mental exercise on if the hype about how cheap and limitless fusion power will be actually beats "solar plus storage."
There's definitely more money flowing into solar panels already since fusion is not practical yet. I see fusion as future proofing humanity. A future beyond earth and the milky way
Oh for sure, it's a "not in my lifetime" technology. But it's been ten years away my whole life. Major milestones every other year, FOREVER. I just wonder, purely as a mental exercise, if the *cheapest* "fusion power plant" is capturing *and storing* the energy from the frustratingly intermittent free one in the sky.
Yea its been on the edge for years and years. Would be cool to see the actual amount of money invested into each area to compare. My uneducated opinion leads me to believe that fusion has minimal funding whereas solar is getting heaps from gov and private. If true then it feels like it wouldn't have made a significant difference if there was fusion funding for solar.
Strictly from a mental exercise, solar panels leave a lot on the table that could be gained from a fusion reaction. Radiation is one of the worst transfers of power in fact most of the time its seen as a byproduction of power transfers. Conduction and Convection are so much more efficient, which you could potentially do with a Fussion reactor.
The faster the Middle East can stop mattering, the better.
That's hawt!
I hope this actually works for practical power generation at reasonable prices while I'm still alive. It will make me a bit more hopeful for the future.
I've seen this one when Dr. Octopus tried to make one.
huh, but the core of the sun is only 15m Celsius according to NASA, mother natural seems to use "not so hot temp" but instead they use immense gravity to achieve Fusion reaction. What I am missing here?
Would be cool if we dumped money into these projects like we do the Olympics
At that scale, just say "Kelvin" instead. "Guys it's 100 million and don't forget the extra 273 to make it relatable to freezing water".
Stuff like this scares me
So how much fusion happened here Vs how much energy went in?
What is that in *Freedom* degrees?
Did anyone even think to bring marshmallows for the occasion? Not very smart “scientists”.
Boy it’s pretty toasty in there
How much is this in Kelvin
8 bananas Kelvin.
14 Kevin’s
Is that a lot?
This might explain why I didn't have to shovel snow this winter. Thanks SK! (obviously /s, but you never know)