• @Baggie@lemmy.zip
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      105 months ago

      Idk dude, we already have the sun and wind but they hate that stuff too, despite it being very close to free. Hell they’ll probably bitch about fusion causing a surplus of power outside peak loads.

      If it doesn’t perpetuate the broken ways we currently do things it doesn’t give their buddies money, so it’s woke or something else bullshit.

    • @Zink@programming.dev
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      35 months ago

      Well, if I lived in the world of American liberals and conservatives I was taught about growing up, the game would be over the moment fusion power became cheap, and everybody would be happy.

      In the real world though? We’ll wait way too long, then get excited when it finally starts to happen, and then right before The Big Day some smooth brained asshole will blow up part of the reactor or fly a plane into the facility or something.

    • @Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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      35 months ago

      Plastic Straws. Plastic cups. Wrapping indvidual food items in plastic and then putting them in a larger plastic bag which you carry home in an even larger plastic bag.

      • @njordomir@lemmy.world
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        35 months ago

        The food has been impregnated with microplastics as well. This machine runs on sugar, but someone put oil in the tank. :-/

        • @EndRedStateSubsidies@leminal.space
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          55 months ago

          The ironic thing is the human body runs on fat and a huge portion of our illness stems from the insane amount of sugar we consume.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cST99piL71E&list=PLE8LmUoWei5Qp5Nz7C4FMNs6hGNx7M3Jg&index=2

          Summary: In 1984 our group published the first modern study of the effects of adapting to a low carbohydrate high fat diets on athletic performance. I have spent the next 31 years expanding on this research. In my presentation I will present the results of that research program and conclude with our exciting new evidence for the role of low carbohydrate diets and ketosis in the prevention of whole body inflammation in athletes training daily at very high loads. I will also present evidence to show that elite ultra-endurance athletes have an unexpectedly high capacity to oxidize fat during exercise and so potentially to run at fast paces for prolonged periods without the need to ingest exogenous fuels.

          The 1928 Bellevue Stefansson Experiment McClellan W, et al. JBC 87:651,1930 http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.f… Keto-adaptation Demonstrated Vermont Study Phinney et al JCI 66:1152, 1980

          • @njordomir@lemmy.world
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            25 months ago

            Thanks for sharing. As a frequent cyclist who loves cheese and doesn’t drink soda or eat many sweats, I feel like this will be an interesting read.

    • Schadrach
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      25 months ago

      How ks the drill baby drill crowd going to compete against mini stars in a can?

      Nu-Cu-Lar Bad? That’s…about as far as they’ll make it. To be fair, that might be as far as they need to. It’s all the oil companies will approve of them learning, at least.

      Of course, it sounds like the big problem of how to remove more power from it than you spend keeping it reacting remains an issue, presuming they can continue to extend reaction lifetimes to be functionally unlimited.

    • @ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      15 months ago

      I suppose we’ll need to worry about that, once we get a net positive output from a fusion reactor.

  • @meowmeowbeanz@sopuli.xyz
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    95 months ago

    France’s 22-minute plasma reaction is a bold stride toward sustainable fusion energy but remains experimental.

    🐱🐱🐱🐱

  • @Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    25 months ago

    This is so cool. I remember seeing that Europe is working on a massive mega project to build an even bigger reactor for more experiements. Its costing like 75 trillion

    • @cynar@lemmy.world
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      675 months ago

      The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.

      It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.

      • @notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world
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        265 months ago

        I think this energy density math really depends on whether only the core or the whole surface area is taken into consideration.

      • @lurklurk@lemmy.world
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        55 months ago

        Arguably, the nearby sun scale fusion reactor has been fairly useful for us. Nowadays we can convert its output directly into electricity using solar cells

        • @cynar@lemmy.world
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          65 months ago

          I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.

            • @cynar@lemmy.world
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              15 months ago

              That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.

    • @yogurt@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.

  • @Placebonickname@lemmy.world
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    1505 months ago

    Meanwhile in America we’re trying to make macdonalds cheaper by bundling an extra sandwich to go along with a value meal…

  • @tomkatt@lemmy.world
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    1105 months ago

    This is freaking awesome. Only a few years ago it was exciting to see a fusion reaction last a fraction of a second.

    • @Thief@lemmy.myserv.one
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      225 months ago

      It is awesome. Whichever country develops it first will be remembered as the next ‘moon landing’ event forever.

      • @Saleh@feddit.org
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        -445 months ago

        So a big event without any practical relevance because there is more cheaper, reliable and safer alternatives available?

          • @Saleh@feddit.org
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            25 months ago

            Rovers as opposed to humans. Humans need food, a pressurized, temperated air environment, a discharge for their excrements, a higher level of safety and return mechanisms, much stronger radiation protection…

        • @ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          cheaper,

          Once commercial fusion comes out, it’s likely to be about half the cost of wind.

          [more] reliable

          There’s absolutely no way to know how reliable human-generated fusion is, but it powers every star in the sky for billions of years, so it could probably last for a few decades here on Earth without much trouble.

          and safer alternatives

          Nuclear fusion, when begun, creates water as its byproduct. This water is, admittedly, very slightly radioactive; if you drank the “nuclear waste” that is produced by a fusion plant as your only source of water, it would increase your radiation exposure the same as if you flew from New York to Los Angeles and back once per year. Now, that’s not nothing, but it is almost nothing.

          As for large-scale disasters from nuclear fusion, that’s almost impossible—and you can see why by the fact that this very article is news. With a nuclear fission reaction, the difficulty is in containment; get the right things in the right place, and the reaction happens automatically. There are natural nuclear fission reactors in the world, caves where radioactive materials have formed in an arrangement that causes a nuclear reaction. But in order for nuclear fusion to happen on its own, you need, quite literally, a stellar mass. So if something goes wrong in a fusion power plant, where we’re manufacturing the conditions that make fusion possible at great energy cost and effort, the reaction just stops unless there’s a literal sun’s worth of hydrogen hanging around. It cannot go critical, it cannot explode, it cannot break containment; it can only end. It’s hard to sustain a fusion reaction, and that’s why stories like this are news: because it’s a major breakthrough anytime we get closer to a reaction where we can feed enough power that it generates back into the machines that keep it running. Once the power to those machines is cut, a fusion reaction cannot continue.

        • AnyOldName3
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          245 months ago

          People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

          The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.

    • Pumpkin Escobar
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      775 months ago

      Or the world blows up and it’s all over. I guess what I’m saying is, no downside, fire it up and let’s see what happens.

    • @Obelix@feddit.org
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      65 months ago

      I’m sceptical. Even if somebody would present a working fusion reactor today, what would the timeline to replace everything based on fossil fuels even be? Build several thousand of expensive fusion reactors in every country of the world, even in geopolitical rivals like China, Russia or North Korea or war-torn third world countries? Replace every car with an electrical one? Replace home heating everywhere? Rebuild every ship and airplane worldwide?

      • @frezik@midwest.social
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        155 months ago

        If there were a practical fusion reactor shown today, it’d be 10 years before it could be started to be deployed at commercial scale.

        More to the point, fascism isn’t going away just because we have better electricity sources. Cheap power is a problem in capitalism.

        • @Obelix@feddit.org
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          85 months ago

          But pushing for more renewables can also be a way to stop fascism. Those texan oil barons are funding Trump exactly because they want to keep their business. Putin is funding all those right wing parties because he wants to keep selling gas. And the Saudis, Qataris and other dictators are also not to keen on not selling oil and gas.

          • @frezik@midwest.social
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            65 months ago

            Techbros are ready to pick up where the oil barons left off. Finding capitalists to fund fascism is never a problem.

        • @azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          15 months ago

          The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

          Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.

          Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.

      • @JayObey711@lemmy.world
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        55 months ago

        I mean yea that’s the plan. What are the other options? Force every countrie to stop producing instead to reduce carbon emissions that way? Wich one Sounds more realistic? And I feel like you assume that fusion reactors are dangerous because your comments about war torn countries. But it’s not possible to turn them into weapons. They run on hydrogen. And if they ever oberheat or something the magnets stop working and the reaction stops.

      • @LostWon@lemmy.ca
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        35 months ago

        I was just making an abstract sci-fi joke based on how cold fusion has been presented like a Holy Grail in the past. Obviously a better source of energy isn’t going to solve all our problems, no matter how good it is.

      • @CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafe
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        25 months ago

        Progress is progress, and it’s good to be skeptical (I literally just posted a comment saying “I’m skeptical”!), but progress is good. 🙂 What other alternatives are there?

        If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense. That’s why the electric car movement is having a hard time really taking off rn; it is hard to justify & all the tech, all our builds, aren’t exactly super economical yet. And they’re not built for tough conditions, heavy towing, long commutes, and easily workable & recyclable components.

        …but things are, indeed, getting better. If you look at it from a macro view. Lithium recycling can be done even a decade ago, but IIRC it was relatively small scale & the lithium could be refreshed “most of the way”, not fully. The right things will catch on when their time is right & its viability is realized.

        Man’s greatest strength is our shared knowledge, technology, science, and innovation. I encourage you to make good decisions in your personal life and be positive. 🙂

    • Sceptiksky
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      55 months ago

      No tech will give you a better timeline, back on the floor please ^^ It’s a political problem before anything else, and energy production is far from being the first problem.

      • @naught101@lemmy.world
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        35 months ago

        Scientists: invents commercial scale fusion Capitalist: hordes the almost free energy because why not? Poor people are only useful as a resource anyway.

  • Match!!
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    1075 months ago

    1,337 seconds? That… that number used to mean something, but now i can’t recall what…

  • @x00z@lemmy.world
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    835 months ago

    Why don’t we use “shatters world record” like the pro-China articles where they did this for 16 minutes?

    I know why.

    • @misk@sopuli.xyzOP
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      925 months ago

      IIRC it was expected because previous record from China was essentially a trial for this one. It all happens under ITER project so it’s not that much of a race.

      • @ZJBlank@lemmy.world
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        435 months ago

        Good shit. I’d rather this be a global cooperative effort rather than a jingoistic dick-waving contest.

        • Sceptiksky
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          65 months ago

          It’s several cooperative and competitives projects. Diversity is not bad for science anyway. ITER itself involve tons of countries.

    • @Akasazh@feddit.nl
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      5 months ago

      Good. The only thing that was quite remotely good about the cold war was the competition.

      • @ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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        215 months ago

        That’s not what this is, and even then, that competition wasn’t even good. You had two countries hoarding technological advancements for themselves, with everything having to be discovered twice.

        This is a worldwide collaboration, where each assists the others, and it’s a much better way of making progress. See ITER.

        • @Akasazh@feddit.nl
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          25 months ago

          I should’ve replaced ‘quite’ with a more clear ‘remotely’ but you’re absolutely correct