- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
Fusion AND room temperature superconductors?! Damn boys, looks like the future is just 10 years away again.
The superconductor turned out to not be superconductor
Officially? There were still a lot of promising signs last I checked including a couple replications.
The difficult part seems to be the cooking process.
If nothing else, the material certainly has very interesting properties and can be iterated on.
Very cool, I hope it amounts to something in my lifetime.
Even if it doesn’t, I expect that we’ll need fusion power at some point, interstellar travel or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel
Nuclear fusion rockets
Fusion rocket starships, powered by nuclear fusion reactions, should conceivably be able to reach speeds of the order of 10% of that of light, based on energy considerations alone. In theory, a large number of stages could push a vehicle arbitrarily close to the speed of light.[48] These would “burn” such light element fuels as deuterium, tritium, 3He, 11B, and 7Li. Because fusion yields about 0.3–0.9% of the mass of the nuclear fuel as released energy, it is energetically more favorable than fission, which releases <0.1% of the fuel’s mass-energy. The maximum exhaust velocities potentially energetically available are correspondingly higher than for fission, typically 4–10% of the speed of light. However, the most easily achievable fusion reactions release a large fraction of their energy as high-energy neutrons, which are a significant source of energy loss. Thus, although these concepts seem to offer the best (nearest-term) prospects for travel to the nearest stars within a (long) human lifetime, they still involve massive technological and engineering difficulties, which may turn out to be intractable for decades or centuries.
NIF’s goal isn’t to produce fusion power for energy production. It’s to validate nuclear weapons. Nuclear fusion electricity is as far away as it has always been.
That’s not true. 20 years ago the consensus was that fusion was impossible to tame. Now the consensus is that we are possibly 30 years away from commercial use of nuclear fusion. We are in a position unthinkable a couple of decades ago
27 years ago I wrote a research paper about the promising, imminent future of fusion powered electricity generation. Wherever you got that 20 years from, you’re extremely wrong.
Research paper as in published in a physics journal? Good for you. It means you were a visionary person.
What made you change your mind then?
~20 years ago is when I studied fusion at uni
How could you have studied a field that you’re claiming essentially didn’t exist and nobody thought would exist? The first working Tokamak was build in 1958. There’s no way you studied this in any capacity and came away not knowing this.
Fusion is a boondoggle, and will never be used to generate electricity outside of using the effects of the sun.
I studied fusion as million of people around the world, as it is part of the standard curriculum of physics, theoretical chemistry, many branches of engineering. It is one of the most common topic in science. I did not specialized on nuclear fusion.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results.
The laboratory confirmed that energy gain had been achieved again at its laser facility, adding that analysis of the results was underway.
“Since demonstrating fusion ignition for the first time at the National Ignition Facility in December 2022, we have continued to perform experiments to study this exciting new scientific regime. In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF,” it said.
“As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.”
Interesting…
Eu in shambles
