Can't wait for my Trumper boss to bring this up at work again as "Did you hear China secretly replaced the sun?"
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
170 points (97.2% liked)
Science
3401 readers
132 users here now
General discussions about "science" itself
Be sure to also check out these other Fediverse science communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That's fucked up. I don't even know my boss's politics, (as it should be). Do you have an HR department? This is a huge liability for your company...
Meanwhile in America
Literally has tons of the same kind or reactor, and Europe is working on one that might actually do practical things.
Living in the UK I suspect you have the same problem we have. Plenty of people capable of doing all the impressive shit China is doing (science, infastructure, whatever) and all of them being starved of funding as all the money dissapears into gigantic blackholes of backroom deals where huge amounts of money are spent on vague things that never seem to materialize or even be adequately explained; but whatever they are they sure do generate enormous profits for the cronies of whoevers currently in power.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Anyone here calls paste glue?... Yup, wrong country. And now we got a word that we can use to detect AI.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Maybe they miss the sun because of all the smog in the air.
lemmy.world. Yep. Checks out.
IIUC the end goal, for any fusion reactor, is to heat up water and drive a steam turbine.
Imagine you could drive a steam turbine at zero cost. What happens if just keeping that turbine running costs more in upkeep than e.g. solar panels do overall?
Is there really much of an economic case for infinite energy on demand (and that is if fusion can be made to work in not just the base load case) if we have infinite energy at home already?
Even if not a single residential property gets hooked up to a fusion generator, there will still be an economic case for fusion, especially as you move away from the equator. Industrial applications require an enormous amount of energy, and with solar power having a hard limit on the amount of energy you can get from a square meter, you'd have to have square miles of panels and batteries to keep one plant going.
load more comments
(1 replies)
You know instead of the artificial sun we could use the real one no? I still think fusion is a good investment on the skill tree but not for consumer energy. Also can someone explain why we use solar panels instead of mirrors that heat up water and spin turbines? Almost every other method of producing energy uses that and from my understanding its more efficient and probably cheaper.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm studying Physics at the moment and Prof. gave us a printout of a textbook last week stating that the internal of the sun generates approximately 150 W / m³ on average. That's about as much as a compost pile, so, not very much. The sun only generates enormous amounts of power because it's so huge. In other words, reproducing fusion on Earth might actually not be very efficient.
load more comments
(11 replies)
I feel like little fusion has kind of missed the boat. It's been "just a few decades away" since I was in school, and that's a good while ago now.
We can already get limitless clean energy from the real sun.
A) solar energy isn't clean, and it's the exact opposite of environmentally friendly; it's just that current power sources are so much worse it looks good by comparison.
B) fusion cannot ever be profitable. The fuel for it is the most common on the planet, if not the universe, requires no special refining, and can't be made artificially scarce. A post fusion world is a post energy industry world. It's the practical end of what currently owns the US and other countries.
This has drastically reduced funding for it and has blocked advancement for decades. This project among others in China have no profit motive, they are trying to accomplish a goal without caring how they can become rich off it. If fusion energy is possible, it'll be done in China.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
0 theoretical hope for fusion energy to ever provide electricity under 30c/kwh. These are hot plasma experiments, which could be used to produce mass HHO from water vapour at just 2200C-3000C, even if endothermic. Can get energy from concentrated solar mirrors or just PV solar if plasma is used. Cooling magnets is a huge energy drain. HHO provide the highest turbine energy gain, though a net gain pathway is just slightly more in reach than fusion.
load more comments
(1 replies)