• DarkCloud@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      23 days ago

      Yeah, and we measured them to the purpose of flight… Not wingspan, or how soft the wheels were.

      So maybe we should measure technology that’s about generating power by…

      I’ll let you fill in the blank.

      P.S I have a “perpetual” motions machine that can run for 30 minutes (8 minutes longer than this fusion reactor), are you interested in investing?

      EDIT: Four years ago the British Fusion reactor (J.E.T. originally built in 1984) produced “59 megajoules of heat energy” none of which was harvested and turned into electricity. The project was then shutdown for good after 40 years of not generating power.

      • cubism_pitta@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        23 days ago

        LLNL has achieved positive power output with their experiments. https://www.llnl.gov/article/49301/shot-ages-fusion-ignition-breakthrough-hailed-one-most-impressive-scientific-feats-21st

        No fusion reactor today is actually going to generate power in the useful sense.

        These are more about understanding how Fusion works so that a reactor that is purpose built to generate power can be developed in the future.

        Unlike the movies real development is the culmination of MANY small steps.

        Today we are holding reactions for 20 minutes. 20 years ago getting a reaction to self sustain in the first place seemed impossible.

        • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          23 days ago

          Predicted fusion energy and energy actually harvested and converted to usable electricity are not the same thing. Your article is about “fusion energy” not experimentally verified electrical output.

          It’s a physicist doing conversion calculations (from heat to potential electricity), not a volt meter measuring actual output produced.

          • tburkhol@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            23 days ago

            If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.

            • Llewellyn@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              edit-2
              23 days ago

              We were absolutely not sure how fire really works (low temperature plasma dynamics and so on) when we used it in caves eons ago.

              • scarabic@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                23 days ago

                We also did not build turbines then.

                Also, a campfire is not plasma, so you probably shouldn’t be building any turbines either.

                  • scarabic@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    0
                    ·
                    22 days ago

                    Very hot flames can contain enough ions / free electrons to be considered a plasma but a wood campfire the likes of which cavemen built, which is what we are discussing here, do not achieve such temperatures. If cavemen wielded acetylene torches then they might have more experience with plasma.

                    If you were thinking something simple like “fire is plasma” that is reductive, and the cases where flame is plasma are not the everyday kind. Hence, when I said “a campfire is not plasma” I was being pretty specific. Your reply that ”fire is a low temperature plasma,” as an unqualified blanket statement, is wrong. Go read on it. It’s interesting.

      • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        23 days ago

        Yes, but you’re asking how much cargo it can take while we’re barely off the ground. Research reactors aren’t set up to generate power, they’re instrumented to see if stuff is even working.

      • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        23 days ago

        A fusion reactor has already output more power than its inputs 3 years ago. Running a reactor for an extended period of time is still a useful exercise as you need to ensure they can handle operation for long enough to actually be a useful power source.

        • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          23 days ago

          Generating massive amounts of heat and harvesting that and converting it to power are two (or three) different problems.

          • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            23 days ago

            Agreed. But just to go along with the flight analogy proposed earlier, it took hundreds of years from Da Vinci’s flying machine designs to get to one that actually worked.

            • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              23 days ago

              In 1932, Walton produced the first man-made fission by using protons from the accelerator to split lithium into alpha particles.[5]

              We’ve been at this for coming up to 100 years too.

              Let me know when they actually generate power. I don’t want another article about a guy jumping off the eifle tower in a bird suit. A successful flight should be measured by the success of the flight.

              Power generators should be measured by the power generated.

              0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing.

              America, the UK, France, Japan, and no doubt other places have been toying with fusion “power” for 90 years… We’ve created heat and not much else as far as I can tell.

              • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                23 days ago

                Fission isn’t fusion, the first artificial fusion was two years later in 1934. That gives us a mere 332 years to beat the time from Da Vinci’s first design to the Wrights’ first flight

                0 watts. Franz Reichelt went splat on the pavement having proven nothing

                He demonstrated pretty clearly his idea didn’t work.

        • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          edit-2
          23 days ago

          Verified electrical output, the answer is verified electrical power generated.

          …as in we should measure power generation experiments by how much power they generated.

          Isn’t that obvious?

          • hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            23 days ago

            They weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.

            Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.