China’s “Artificial Sun” Shatters Fusion Record With Over 17 Minutes of Plasma
China’s “Artificial Sun” Shatters Fusion Record With Over 17 Minutes of Plasma
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What we need to do is find some way to make a giant fusion reactor and put it in the sky and get energy from it that way.
But that's just a pipe dream...
What we need is robust decentralized multimodal energy production fit for the local area where it is installed and contributing to a well maintained distributed grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage so that incidental costs are minimized and uptime is effectively 100%. Energy is a tool and its generation is a category of tools, whining about people developing a better screwdriver rather than only using hammers is counterproductive when we're trying to build a house for as many people as possible that doesn't fucking kill everyone.
I'm whining about China spending very little on current green energy technology while building more and more coal plants and taking advantage of these sort of PR stories.
I can't help it, I'm one of those people who whines about climate change.
'spending very little'???
They produced more new green energy than the total capacity of green energy for the rest of the world combined in 2024.
And yet they keep building more coal plants.
In a generation they went from a famine every decade to the end of famines, in a second generation they went from a industrial age economy with most of its people living in extreme poverty to eliminating extreme poverty and some of its people living on par with those in the wealthiest nations. In this generation they have raised the standard of living of their poorest from a poverty the US hasn't seen in a century to that of middle class Americans in the 1980s. In order to accomplish this, massive amounts of electricity is needed. That lifestyle is naturally wasteful as it takes electricity for granted, but it's better by most accounts. This is on top of being the world's factory and the electricity use that entails.
In short, yes, they need both, and nuclear which they're also the leader in. Unlike the West they do have plans to get off coal as a power source, and the amount of work they've done eliminating coal usage near cities by itself is commendable, compared to its contemporaries like the US.
The poorest parts of China are still much poorer than any middle class. Most rural Chinese still do not complete high school.
And yet they own large farms that are tax free that they can earn money off of. The few low industrialized parts (currently representing less than 200 million) don't have schools or massive infrastructure, but also have guarantees their way of life and making money is secure until they do have access to those things. And Xinjiang alone shows it's not an empty promise; going from one of those regions you're referring to, to a region that rivals Vietnam or Malaysia by itself.
I bet you won't blame Mao for the last famine.
Just don't try to leave if you don't like it.
And no, nobody needs to make climate change worse with more coal plants.
Yeah, mao fucked up, like the US fucked up during its great famine, sorry dust bowl. And then no famine ever again.
To your second point, of course you can't leave if you're a criminal (every nation on earth has this policy) or in severe debt to the government (most nations have this policy), but you can leave under pretty much any other circumstances. I didn't click your link but even you wouldn't be spreading the conspiracy theory of secret global police that kidnap random yellow people for the cpc, right?
To your third point, coal plants and any other steam generators are easy to convert over to each other once built. A nuclear plant and a coal plant share 70% of their equipment. Building one lays the foundation for the other. If you need quick base load expansion, you can't really beat coal or diesel, and continually expanding the quality of life for 1.4 billion people requires constant base load expansion... Even better if it can later be converted into near infinite power sources like nuclear.
Ah yes, once again we hope that in the future, something is done about climate change.
Except China operates and so far has executed multi year long plans that have been incredibly successful. On top of this they're the reason green energy is cheap at all, given they're the world's producer.
Your words:
coal plants and any other steam generators are easy to convert over to each other once built.
That is hoping that in the future, something is done about climate change.
Building new coal-powered plants as the Earth continues to warm and we know for a fact what such plants do to contribute to that is not justifiable. It doesn't matter that they are "easy to convert" in the future. The coal is being burnt now.
Probably because they have a billion months to feed and a ridiculously inefficient incentive mechanism for progress in general. Kind of amazing that they put emphasis on green tech at all, except for the fact that they have the bodies to through at it and it's something the rest of the world values as well.
Yes, yes. China is the best country ever.
Not sure where you get that, just saying things aren't black and white at scale
Nobody said that though? You seem to be putting words in people's mouths.
The guy makes like 99 posts an hour, 18 hours a day. You can't expect them all to make sense.
Mistakes will be made, but we will correct them as soon as we found out.
Last year, China commissioned 96 GW of new coal production and commissioned 356 GW of wind and solar. This was the most coal production China has built in a single year since 2015, and it was still less than the amount of renewables that they put on it.
I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they've put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can't keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.
"The climate has to get worse for the benefit of the middle class" is a weird argument.
If that's what you think I was saying then you need to work on your reading comprehension.
Sure looks to me like that's what you were saying:
I wish China could wave a magic wand and have their entire energy grid go green, but the truth is that their middle class is still growing, and with it the demand for electricity, and even with the massive amount of spending they’ve put into wind and solar those forms of power simply can’t keep up with the rising demand on their own, so coal remains a necessary part of their multimodal grid with multiple redundancies and sufficient storage.
Calling coal necessary...
Coal is like 50% of their grid. If you removed it you would be plunging the whole country back into the dark ages.
The future is 100% green energy, but that isn't going to happen overnight, and especially can't happen overnight in a growing economy that needs to add energy at a high rate to keep up with demand.
China is spending more than the rest of the world combined on green energy, and they are currently putting more green energy on their grid than anything else. But they still need fossil fuels to maintain their current growth.
When that growth slows down, then it becomes possible for a shift to occur, where green energy is added and fossil energy is taken offline. It is not currently possible to do this in China.
You know where it is possible to do this? Fully developed countries like America, where demand has more or less peaked and there is no excuse for continuing to add fossil fuels onto the grid. If we spent half of what China spends on green energy, we could be retiring all of our own fossil fuel power plants by the end of the decade, but not only are we not doing this we have trained a certain sector of our population to clap like monkeys and point at other countries whenever the issue comes up.
Pointing at countries that have only developed recently and are still going through the process and saying "you can't use fossil fuels" while living in a country that built its entire economy on fossil fuels is peak chauvinistic bullshit. Have some self awareness and think about context before you make broad proclamations.
The climate has to get worse for the goal of adding more people from the lower class to the middle class. As someone IN the middle class, who has actual empathy for other human beings, as long as we aren't going out of our way to kill animals slowly and painfully and/or to the point of extinction, and the ecosystem hasn't collapsed, I refuse to believe in any goal that puts some vague emphasis on "the climate" as the "good guy" in this.
Evolution is an endless process of monsters eating the babies that need the most help to survive. Nature is the reason we're killing the environment, "survival of the fittest" i.e. only those with advantages survive and adapt to the changing status of the climate, is the very essence of the very capitalism that is killing the climate.
Survival of the fittest is obsolete and cruel. It's time we stopped fighting for "the climate" and started defying capitalism, the one place where we can remove Darwinian competition from it without just destroying it further. Sadly, nature needs competition and death to be what it is. That is why we CHOOSE to see humans as separate, instead of justifying it by calling ourselves "just animals". In the absence of an actual judge above man, we should strive to meet the expectations we would want a benevolent judge to force us to meet.
But let me guess, you're some greenwashed zealot who only eats vegan food and will probably think I think avocado on toast is common for "young people"? Because only privileged assholes want middle class standards to be lowered. If the superyachts or personal "business" jets were barred from being used by wealthy people like bicycles to globetrot where "the riffraff" can't afford to go, the dent in carbon emissions would outweigh ALL carbon emissions by everyone else. The rich need to stop riding alone, they can travel 1st class if they want but none of this having a personal jet plane with more seats than the owner has immediate family members. When a teenage "princess" owns a jet so she can fly back and forth to Europe partying non-stop in-flight and until they get back home from vacation-partying every weekend, owning a jet with more than 4 seats is no longer a reasonable thing for the law to allow for private citizens.
I can't survive without the few luxuries in my life because I literally feel so miserable without access to video games that I would commit suicide. That's not the same as thinking you're too good to fly commercial, because I believe no one can reasonably be denied access to the luxuries I have and I understand that people are denied much of what I have. If society can't uplift most people to middle class, fuck the climate. We're better off dying if it is doomed to collapse before we achieve a world where people are able to truly enjoy living, not just survive.
The USA and Lockheed Martin have been making PR stories about fusion for over a decade, while increasing emissions.
I really hope at least one of these is not bullshit.
Yep, they are doing the same thing. Anything but avoiding acting now.
Yeah, and then that artificial sun can give us power at night
It's too bad there isn't some sort of way we could store electricity in some sort of containment.
Then we could do stuff like take electrically-powered devices with us wherever we went! Think of how handy that would be!
Yeah! We could use such technology to trap this "artificial sun" instead, and then have a steady stable output throughout the night for things that use a bunch of electricity but run constantly, like water filtration plants and material processing facilities.
Great idea! But I guess more research is needed to make this work for the things that use the MOST electricity, instead of small portable devices that use a fraction of the electricity
I don't know, what you're saying sounds like a complete impossibility and there definitely aren't multiple options currently in use. So we better put all our hopes on a technology that has not proven viable in decades despite being always "right around the corner."
Yeah, too bad humans can only focus on one thing at a time.
It's always best to abandon projects that are difficult, even if minute progress is being done on them. Like, could you imagine if someone made a machine that can fly? That's just silly, after all only birds have flown for thousands of years.
And while we're cutting spending I suppose, why not shut down the LHC too? Barely any progress made there in decades too.
I love you, you've played squids game but better than he can. Bravo.
Can you please quote me making such suggestions? Because I looked through our entire conversation and haven't seen me suggest those things.
Oh squiddy
Oh amany?
Do I know you?
I never said you made an explicit suggestion, but if you think you've made an implied one, go ahead and point out what they might be 🙃
Maybe they should be focusing on reducing that with developed technologies, because they don't seem to be.
I don't see what that has to do with fusion energy development. Are they trying to fuse coal into bigger lumps of coal?
It has to do with energy development in general. Or rather what they are not doing in terms of it. China is working on developing fusion technology while not doing much with developed green technology, instead increasing their reliance on fossil fuels.
But it's great PR for them because this article makes it sound like they're on their way to the green energy they aren't doing enough about now.
Batteries will never be enough for full down time store. Anyone who's saying otherwise is selling you batteries.
Just try to do some paper napkin math how much lithium batteries can store and how much we'd need to just satisfy current demand, not even talking about the near future.
The only battery technology that has promise is good ol' hydro but it's only accessible to a few places around the world and in no way sustainable.
Good thing there are options other than batteries. Which I have already linked to.
Also, I am amused that you are suggesting batteries will never have enough storage in a glowing article about non-practical fusion power.