World News @lemmy.ml naturalgasbad @lemmy.ca 5mo ago

China's commercial 'artificial sun' achieves first discharge

www.globaltimes.cn /page/202406/1314447.shtml

78 comments

Maybe at some point the Americans will get scared that the Chinese are actually making strides ahead of them in electrification and decarbonization to actually get unstuck from their idiotic culture war over fossil fuels.
- America will stop trying to sell oil when it runs out of oil and not one second before, no matter the actual cost.
  
  and will lash out for being behind for as long as they still have guns
- Eh take news from China with a Giga size grain of salt.
  
  I don't know about this particular piece of news, but the insane expansion of HSR for example is no fake news.
  
  As opposed to news from the united states, which is certified good and true and democratic
- It will take a new space race for that to happen.
  
  The space race is on. That’s why Starship has been launching so much. Someone at the FAA must have finally realized that if SpaceX doesn’t go ahead at full SpaceX speed, we’re gonna see China take over space.
  
  They’ve got a space station and a rover on the moon. China will easily overtake us in space, has already in a few places.
- Fossil fuels aren’t just a culture war. Energy is really important for people, including poor people.
  
  Poor people also care about not dying from the effects of climate change.
  
  Poor people don't care about the megaprofits of the oil, gas, and automotive industries.
That's hot
- Discharge though. Ew.
- I see what you did there
To the best of my knowledge, this is the first commercially-funded (i.e., non-government) nuclear fusion reactor. Notable investors are MiHoYo (developers of Genshin Impact), Nio (Chinese EV company), and Sequoia Capital...
- It's the CCP. You can't have a non government funded company.
  
  Your claim is that MiHoYo, a gaming company responsible for Genshin Impact, is a government funded company?
  
  Okay then.
- In your guys opinion, is that good or bad? Privately funded would mean proprietary & profit driven implementation for such a crucial technology (if successful). I personally don't like it.
  
  The CPC still maintains a lot of influence over companies even when they're getting their funding from private industry as part of their "politics in command" strategy for controlling market forces. We'll see how it plays out.
  
  Any path that takes us to unlimited clean energy is the right one IMO. We could always do a little espionage and make our own domestic fusion drive eventually.
  
  I don’t mind profit driven because I’m confident that free markets are good for everybody.
- No??
  
  I've supported engineering at several privately funded nuclear fusion companies, though all of them, this Chinese company included, are building a product out of public school research.
  
  Off the top of my head there's:
  
  CFS
  
  TAE technologies
  
  Thea
  
  Zap Energy
  
  And several more...
  
  Building, or built? Either way, maybe these companies will come out with a better design than Tokamak, but until then they're literally just research ventures because the vast majority of investment at actually scaling fusion is happening for Tokamak tractors.
This is an article from a CCP operated tabloid... Seriously?
- I’m sure news outlets that operate for capital are much more trustworthy.
- There you go dronnie:
  
  https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/china-nuclear-fusion-reactor-artificial-sun-chengdu-b1767393.html
  
  Next time Google it yourself
  
  Edit: Actually that one's from 2020. Youll have to wait until western sources "verify" (read: cope) about it in a week or two
In the image of the discharge you can clearly see that the device has no cladding. That means a discharge would be limited to a duration of a few seconds, otherwise the material ablated from the wall would lead to extreme heat losses of the plasma. Did they include a future vessel cladding to the plasma volume calculation in the article?
- Good points and questions. First wall interaction is going to be an interesting problem for this team to work around.
It means it's been commoditized, which is useful for obvious reasons
- Natural gas bad, but ccp good?

78 comments