6mo ago

China’s ‘artificial sun’ sets nuclear fusion record, runs 1,006 seconds at 180 million°F

6mo ago

The Chinese EAST nuclear fusion reactor has set a world record for sustained nuclear fusion of 17.8 minutes at 100 million Celsius.

charmingscience.com /chinas-artificial-sun-sets-nuclear-fusion-record-runs-1006-seconds-at-180-millionf/

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6mo ago

China’s ‘artificial sun’ sets nuclear fusion record, runs 1,006 seconds at 180 million°F

charmingscience.com /chinas-artificial-sun-sets-nuclear-fusion-record-runs-1006-seconds-at-180-millionf/

57 comments

It's charming that the article uses Fahrenheit as a scientific temperature scale, perhaps they should adopt bananas for distance in scientific reports too.
- you gotta admire the dedication to using the most absurd measurement system though
  
  farenheit isnt even that bad compared to the other imperial units, what are you talking about lmao
  
  We could use rankine just to confuse people more.
- At least it wasn’t measured in campfires or number of hotcakes.
  
  Damn now I kinda wanna know how many campfires this is equivalent to
- How hot is it in Hot Pocket?
  
  2.5 hot pocket
- How many cubits was this sun? At least a furlong right? And how many hogsheads of fuel did it need?
  
  The sun is 3,007,856,729.2152 cubits in diameter
- Could be a communication thing. As much as I love the metric system, for frontfacing stuff like articles, scientists have to sometimes use freedom units.
  At least that was my experience with school.
  
  And that is precisely why the Mars Polar Lander failed.
  https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/
  Face it, the USA has defined the inch as 25.4 mm. It did so in 1933. The country is already metric, it's been metric for 92 years.
  It's time.
  
  That temperature is hotter than anyone could really imagine to the point that any scale is meaningless
- farhenheit makes way more sense than the other imperial measurements imo
  
  how so?
  arbitrarily setting the freezing point of water to 32 and the boiling point to 212 and then filling in the rest from there isn't what I'd call "making sense"
  I guess they're 180 apart but why 32, why not 0 and 180?
how many football fields is this
- About twelve AR-15s
I want to see a demo where they approach it with all the trepidation and seriousness that such an advancement deserves, and pull out a perfectly golden toasted marshmallow.
- To toast a marshmallow you'd need an opening and air exchange, which would mess up the process. You don't want oxygen in the chamber, let alone sucrose.
  The closest you could hope for is toasting it on an external element that heated up.
  
  Is this you being fun at a party?
cool, this is the one funded by genshin impact lol
all the comments are about the temperature units
think of the crypto mining potential!
- lol only way fusion would get funded in the US 🤣
Every time a headline comes out of China reporting major progress in fusion power generation I'm like
"God, please."
I feel like in the millions of degrees it is fine to use america numbers. Seeing it in C isn't gonna give anyone a more accurate understanding.
- Or we could use what everyone else uses
  
  At 160 million we may as well just be using kelivn.
- lol yeah it's very hot
- You can divide by two and be roughly correct (÷1.8 even moreso). The offset is negligible.
  
  Dividing 160million by 1.8 is not gonna help me understand things any better I fear.
The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors.
More doubling the previous record is impressive, so I'm not being cynical, but what's special about 1000 seconds? It's not as if the reactor achieved ignition.
This includes providing a clean and abundant energy source to address global energy demands and enabling ambitious endeavors such as deep-space exploration.
I hate how people about Fusion as if it is guaranteed to be some silver bullet to human energy problems. Fusion reactors use pretty exotic materials to build and are very large. And even when the first commercially viable fusion reactor goes online, it will still take a long time for fusion reactors to spread, since solar is so cheap and fossi fuels have an entrenched political regime behind them. Not to mention getting fusion to the global majority will be much harder than getting them solar energy.
As Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics, emphasized, “Fusion reactions need to reach the order of thousands of seconds to sustain themselves. The latest record marks the first time humanity has simulated conditions necessary for operating fusion reactors in an experimental setup.”
So getting to ignition is based on sustaining the reaction for long enough? Or by "sustain" commercial sustenance is meant?

57 comments