- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
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In sum, these guys at EAST got the Greenwald limit elevated in their tokamak, which indirectly influences the Lawson criterion: nTTau, density * time at said density * plasma energy released. Lawson is the master finish line for measuring whether a fusion system can actually make more power than it consumes.
To date, when you cross the Greenwald limit, the man/woman in the operators seat should expect the plasma inside the device to become uncontrollable, hurting the reactor by touching the walls or instruments inside, a so-called “disruption”. Only a few topologies like the stellerator can exceed the limit, and so far, only by 5x.
But here we have a way to exceed the limit in the much more researched tokamak. This research has positive impact for all but the weirdest/niche fusion devices.
Artificial sun rising from the EAST? These guys know how to name things.
Only 75 more years to go!
If China’s economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
Obviously the graph is very out of date, US funding is around 600 million 2012 dollars annually and China’s is double that.
A graph is not proof of fusion energy. Yelling at clouds would probably generate more net energy than all fusion research has to date.
It’s a dead end. It will never ever work. A combination of civilizational die-back and concomitant reduced energy use and a hodge-podge of renewable sources is the likely future for humanity.
And that’s my optimistic take.
My more realistic take is that we are running out of cheap easy energy. The kind of monstrously massive contraption filled with high-tech exotic materials that is a fusion reactor is exactly the kind of thing we will NOT be able to build anymore in the future.
It’s the same impasse that kills all the space fantasies (like people who think Avatar is just around the corner). If we HAD the resources to build fusion reactors or mine asteroids, we don’t HAVE a resource problem!
And if we have such a resource crunch that we think fusion/space is the only solution, we don’t have the resources to do it.
The future is horses, not Star Trek.
Get used to it.
Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.
US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
Lol any year now!
ha hahahahaahaaaa… oh boy… you techno utopians are funny. Maybe build a Space Elevator out of 3D printed AI Bitcoins and run a fusion reactor at the Lagrange point? Privately! On the Moon! To colonize Mars and mine the asteroids! Become a multi star species!
OK, time will tell. How about I save you the wait: nothing will happen. At all.
It is pretty easy to point out how long we have been researching fusion. That said, few of the skeptics will highlight just what an explosion of private capital we have seen in recent years and how different that is to previous decades. They will not show you the previous times in history when we have seen similar patterns.
Sure this capital is speculative. And most of them will have picked the wrong winner. But history tells us that this is what it looks like before a technology succeeds. Not 30 years before. More like 10. Which means saying 5 is ambitious but not exactly crazy.
Fusion does not belong in your list. First, some of them exist. You can buy a 3D printer with bitcoins. Of those that don’t, none has more than perhaps one resource unconstrained backer. Not a lot of people think we are colonizing Mars anytime soon. Fusion has billions of dollars of private capital chasing it as this point.
The situation may be closer to Quantum Computing than your examples. And I would say there are more physical unknowns in quantum computing. Because we do not have a quantum computer we can see in the sky everyday.
Your list looks funny in another way. Did you know that a company just launched a solar power satellite to do AI in orbit. It is up there and operational. They want to build a solar powered AI data-center in space. Whether you back such and idea or not, you cannot say something is impossible that has already been done.
And sometimes things work out differently than intended. For example, the technology developed or fusion stelerators is being use for drilling. One use may be to drill geothermal power vents. Who knows, maybe fusion power research will inadvertently make geothermal so cheap that fusion reactors no longer make economic sense.
How about: figuratively tilting at windmills would have generated more net energy than fusion research.
you techno utopians are funny.
I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.
It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.
Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”
Dude, 10 years ago was 2016… We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least. I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.
I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.
I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)
I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.
To be fair there was and is huge push back against EVs, the US is setting itself back a couple centuries just to not admit it is viable.
I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago
Ten years ago Swanson’s law for solar photovoltaics was well established, not comparable.
“It’s only sunny during the day” is a line uttered ad nauseum by people who didn’t see lithium batteries falling through the same price drop.
You’re so dense you could fuse hydrogen.
What a low quality joke. The humor was bad too.
Unlike this captain positivity’s social life, fusion is making some sizable strides forward in short order.
I design diagnostics going into systems like these, there’s a lot of positive news coming our way.
Helion’s gonna have some problems though.
*Slaps on top of fusion reactor*
“You can boil so much water with this.”
Is it only me that had the C&C Generals Nuke Cannon tagline going off in their heads saying BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN in a deliberate voice and a heavy Chinese accent?
Hey, is that game any good? I only every did Tiberian Sun and RA2, is it worth getting into?
I loved that game so much back in the day
https://chronodivide.com/ play online man, try demo mode against the PC for a bit too to practice
Completely free andnopen source
If you get to zero hour try the chaos mod. Its really flushing out all the generals with new abilities and units and a new campaign.
IMO it’s great but it is a departure from earlier titles in more than just going to 3D, and the sides are a 90s caricature of the US/China/Middle-Eastern people, so it’s something that you definitely couldn’t make today.
Like the “terrorist” side gets suicide bombers and a unit called “angry mob” to which Chinese flamethrowers or American snipers are a good counter, while China gets two soldiers for the price of one and propaganda loudspeakers everywhere that makes units fight harder.
The story is barely there as well, which was a strong point of the RA2 and Tiberium universes.
And there’s no Tim Curry, who frankly makes RA2
Yeah but good luck getting it working reliably on modern Windows. Runs great on Linux. It’s probably the last truly great C&C game, if you ask me. C&C 3 was alright too I guess…
Oh yay! I am on Mint, though I am an idiot so I will likely fuck it up. I have no GPU just an old optiplex and I think I have the game on steam.
Should work fine, I run it on Steam with proton 10! Good luck & have fun!
“I am big!”
This day is to be remembered.
China has been generous
If China has managed to do something that scientists genuinely thought was impossible why are there several nuclear fusion research facilities all over the planet? If it’s impossible that seems like a bad use of resources.
I think maybe that scientists thought it was entirely possible, and that’s why they were trying to do it.
Scientist: “Scientific discoveries are meaningless when taken out of context.”
Newspaper: “Scientist confirms that scientific discoveries are meaningless.”
Journalist reads “limit” and clickbaits it, typical
There are a bunch of things to research on fusion. Maybe they just thought this specific thing was out of reach, but were still trying to do other things.
Like the PvsNP computer science problem. Most computer scientists believe its impossible to make a polynomial algorithm that solves the traveling salesman problem, so most dont even try. But we dont know for certain that its actually impossible.
Fusion is possible. It just needs 20 years of research first.
Fusion was achieved decades ago. But right now it takes more energy than it produces. The theoretical possibility of energy-positive reaction is more or less established. The problem right now is engineering and a little bit of material science. And when (and if) it will be solved there will be whole another set of economical problems, how to make it a commercial product.
All of that hinges less on science and more on whatever intersection of politics, economics, and psychology occupies this space. It was always 15 years away, and it was always correct estimation, it’s just it’s supposed to be 15 years of founded research and development, not 15 years of begging for funding, trying to navigate political situation, and restarting everything from scratch because previous two were unsuccessfulIt’s been that way for over 40 years lol.
That is what they said. Twenty years ago.
I know. They have been saying twenty years since I was very young.
Yes, because the argument was never “we’ll have fusion in 20 years”, it’s always been “we COULD have fusion in 20 years IF research was properly funded”. It’s never been properly funded, hence it’s always 20 years away.
It’s a bit like my boss coming to ask me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. We don’t get funding. 6 months later he comes and asks me how long it would take to do project X. I tell him 6 months after we get funding. Queue shocked Pikachu face that the estimate is still 6 months, 6 months later.
Fusion would really hurt oil companies, so not going to get funded.
This diagram shows the LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) for various technologies - i.e. how much does one kWh of electricity cost if you divide the total number of generated kWh by the total cost of the power plant.
“utility-scale solar” means large-scale flat-area solar parks
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
I doubt it; It’s not only about technology costs but also about advantages like decentralization. If you can generate your own electricity in your own back-yard, you’re much more independent than if you’re dependent on large-scale fusion power. Because that will necessarily be very large-scale and centralized because nobody can set up a fusion reactor in their own back yard.
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
Will solar with interseasonal storage ever be even feasible?
People like to throw LCOE around, occulting that running countries with solar (and wind) power is plain science-fiction and nowhere close to change, while nuclear (at least fission) is empirically proven to work reliably, even for cheap, costing less than 200 billions of euros in the span of 60 years in France for example.
When you don’t have enough sun (or wind), you either have sufficient backup in hydro or solar, or you burn coal and gas.
my take is that 1. you don’t need equal supply year-through because big consumers should be able to sleep and reduce their energy intake in the winter. yes i know that is complicated, but sleep is also complicated in nature and evolution still pulled through with it because it does pay off in the long term.
secondly, storage can also be renewable biomass. i have some napkin math sitting around somewhere on my disk that says that about 5% of the yearly energy demand can be covered with basically non-cost “waste” biomass that’s basically being burned to get rid of it today. I actually wanted to write a longer post about it in the !bathtubthoughts@discuss.tchncs.de community, i just couldn’t figure out how to properly present my calculations yet.
but isnt it being centralized being the point? I have the (probably not so rare) tin foil theory that big energy spends a lot of money to dampen solar and other decentralized power generation. As a politician you have to ask yourself, do I get nice packages from big energy for not looking so closely when another forest is turned into a hole or do I hope that 20000 random people try to bribe me for something. In terms of money gain for a few big power plant is double plus good. Boring solar might be better for all of us, the rest, but not for the guys calling the shots. This all assumes of course that there is no empathy at all in the local legislation
That’s why I always want to crowdsource corruption. Everybody who wants something gives 3 Euro/Dollar/Whatever and we just carry those cash suitcases to the morons in charge. What big companies can do, we can do!
I haven’t looked into it but isn’t the problem that bribing and corruption, as we general think of it, is not common anymore. They’ve gotten creative.
They don’t hand you cash. they form super PACs that are legislative black holes so “people that align with you politically” can use that money to help you run, or your family member is hired as a VP in a company where they do nothing but get millions in stock options. They can also you can also get paid for talks, meetings, lectures in exotic locations. Hell, Clarence the supreme court judge gets stuff all the time from his billionaire friend. here’s John Oliver.
Well, I just give them a contract for a speech of two minutes, worth 3 million, I guess. Even those politicians will see the appeal in just receiving plain ol’ money instead of jumping through all those hoops.
But will Fusion ever be cheaper than solar?
Eventually. But, much like traditional fission power, you’ll need a very large and complex piece of infrastructure to deliver it.
You won’t be able to put a fusion plant in your basement like you can put solar on your roof.
There are fusion reactors that fit between your fingers.
Solar is technically fusion though
Solar is Fusion as a Service or FaaS technology.
The sun is in the cloud(s)?
Technically, there’s only two sources of energy in the universe: nuclear energy and the expansion of the cosmos.
Like, solar is fusion, ofc, the light coming from the sun. So is wind and water and bioenergy (indirectly). Geothermal is fission (heat comes from radioactive decay inside Earth).
But then there’s another source of energy that nobody ever talks about: tidal power It works by converting the rise and fall of water with the tides into electrical energy. This energy ultimately comes from the moon orbiting around Earth, more precisely, its mechanical energy: The fact that the moon is distant from Earth is only because the universe expanded after the big bang. Had it not done this, the moon and earth would be located at the same location, and there would be no “orbiting” to extract energy out of :P
I just made a post about this here
Solar power is not a feasible solution in all parts of the world, though, and large-scale storage is still very much an issue.
So I take it Doctor Octavos is a Red LoL
I really hate how so many of these articles feel like they need to dumb it down with this “artificial sun” imagery. It feels so condescending. I’d rather learn more about the latest progress with nuclear fusion
Most Americans read at or below a 6th grade level
So we hear. But the world is not America and this is a British newspaper.
To be fair I don’t think literacy rates in the UK blow the US out of the water or anything.
articles such as this one usually are optimized for their audience, you just aren’t the audience. that’s ok. I’m rarely the audience either :) a quick search should give you what you’re looking for https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040
Cool, thanks. So much more readable
It isnt optimized. Its gibberish written just to give some weight to the headline. People do bad jobs at science popularization too.
article didn’t say anything. How does denser plasma achieve higher temperatures or other benefits? What advances did their denser plasma produce?
Plasma is made from basicly over charging a gas with electrons the gas getting all pissy about having those electrons and starts dumping them. something do with elements wanting stability. In that process you get alot of heat out put. Now f you make it more dense I would conclude simply, you now have more ionized atoms in the plasma stream, meaning your plasma will be hotter if the stream will be the same size or if the plasma stream is shrunk but has the same number of ionized gas atoms, you have the same heat out put but in a smaller stream.
You’re having a space characters infestation, you should do something about that.
?
While a plasma is far from an ideal gas:
pV=nRT
p is the pressure, T the temperature, when you increase the pressure while keeping everything else the same, you increase the temperature aswell. The density here is the colloquial term for pressure.
Right. where’s the actual content, the wording not treating us like idiots? What is the actual improvement?
There is no current actual improvement other than the possibilities. By cooling the plasma edge and using clean wall materials, they broke a theoretical density barrier that could potentially bring steady-state fusion closer to reality.
That’s all it is. We’re no closer to steady fusion, but now we know we can push past the Greenwald limit.
Thanks. Seems like a positive step
I generally agree that science reporting treats everyone like children, but I really don’t have a problem with this analogy. Stars are the only naturally occurring fusion we have to observe and compare it to. To me that makes sense.
Sure… but the metaphor glosses over the fact that they haven’t really told us anything of interest. It SOUNDS good, but there’s no way to tell how significant it actually is.
Fusion breakthroughs have sounded good since the 90s, but we’re still the proverbial 10 years away from anything useful.
Meanwhile USA is stealing Venezuelan oil. Good job everbody. 👍
Well. At least it will guarantee the USA’s eventual fall from power.
Can you imagine the tech bros and anti-intectuals groveling to rejoin the scientific community?
Unfortunately science is not a morality structure.
Just a few years ago US labs were the first to generate more power than they put into a fusion reactor, it was one of the most important breakthroughs to date in fusion.
Even under the shitheap Trump, the US is continuing to research into fusion and building stellarators such as Infinity 1 in Tennessee.
Europe likewise is leading breakthroughs such as with Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany lasting for 43 seconds. This is being improved with the new Proxima Alpha stellarator being built.
China’s EAST reactor had a breakthrough when they achieved 1,000 seconds last year. While Europes recent ITER tokamak should be achieving its first plasma in the coming years.
Fusion is a global effort, and scientists are benefiting from the works being put in elsewhere. Stellarators and Tokamak are both breaking new grounds each year, and each has their own pros and cons.
Don’t fall for any propaganda trying to claim anyone is “winning”.
it was one of the most important breakthroughs to date in fusion
What ? It was not really. Here’s a physicist discussing why.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/fusion-foolery/
In the end, the NIF fusion accomplishment might be called a stunt. Stunts explore what we can do (often after an insane amount of preparation, practice, and failure), rather than what’s practical. Stunts hide the pains and present an appearance of ease and grace, but it’s a show.
The “more energy out than laser energy in” equation masks several fundamental problems. NIF’s doped glass lasers have an efficiency of about 0.5 percent, meaning that they would have sucked in roughly 400 megajoules of energy from the grid in order to produce the 2.1 megajoules of light energy…
To be fair the hype machine was from the press not the scientists
Let’s pause to say: well done! Honestly. No sarcasm. What they did was ridiculously hard, and it finally worked after more than a decade of trying. They actually produced a significant number of fusion events! There’s no faking that, and I’d like to see you try. So let’s be clear that I’m not knocking the accomplishment in itself. My major beef is how we interpret the implications for society.
Stunts also draw attention to stuff. Its yet to be seen if its a net positive but it did help me get up to speed on the current state of fusion technology.
oil, coal and nuclear are clearly not winning.
we could solve the worlds energy problems today but they’d never be applied simply because oil exists. its literally why the US just attacked venezuela. They could have built another reactor or windmills or whatever the fuck else they feel they need if energy was the reason. but energy has nothing to do with energy and all to do with being a natural monopoly that’s making a small group of people quite wealthy.
We killed a lot of people to ensure that oil is bought and sold with dollars around the world. No way we’re going to let that currency crutch just go away.
Yes but those are not fusion. Fusion is the ‘holy-grail’ of energy technology. It is a long term goal that we must work towards. It’s a problem of science.
For now renewables are the cheapest, quickest, and best method we have. They should be receiving all the money wasted on those 3 methods you’ve mentioned above. That’s a problem of politics.
We easily have the means to achieve both, we are hamstrung by shortsighted corporate interests and yes this applies to China as well.
It doesn’t matter if the people with the war machines are the ones who control the grids,lines,pipes,etc.
The ‘holy grail’ will most likely result in further top down dominance. As god king tyrants demonstrate their continued uselessness to humanity by creating more powerful and destructive weapons and hoarding the infinite power supply for their own.
I gotta be honest, as amazing as the promise of limitless fusion energy is, I’m really not optimistic that it’ll be a major or even an important technology for the energy sector, at least for the next 200 or so years.
The thing is, we already have fission power and we’re struggling to use it right now. The biggest hurdle for fission is the upfront costs of building a plant, the time needed to build a plant (construction can take up to a decade), and ongoing costs. While nuclear power is probably one of man’s greatest achievements, it’s also generally pretty expensive. And fusion has almost all the same strengths and drawbacks, but bigger. I do believe we will achieve sustainable fusion, probably soon. But I’m certain that while it will “work”, it will also prove to be the most expensive form of power generation with the largest upfront costs that the world has ever seen. And I don’t expect those prices to come down for a very long time.
Personally, I think anyone who expects fusion to be some kind of miracle technology is kidding themselves. And if people really want a miracle technology in the energy sector, keep your eyes geothermal, that’s the only tech I see that has any potential to become cheap, limitless, and constant.
I do think fusion will have good applications, but it will likely remain niche for a while. I definitely look forward to seeing spacecraft propelled by ion drives and powered by fusion, it would be amazing to be able to get to Jupiter and back on one tank of (xenon) gas.
Fission has the “long (1+ centuries) term storage solution of the byproducts” problem (output is dirty and long lasting). Fusion has no such big problem (output is dirty and short lasting).
I like hyperboles so here: If everyone did fission in their backyard, we’d have a big and long lasting problem. If everyone did fusion in their backyard, we’d have a medium and short lasting problem.
This is true, the waste issue is different with these two technologies, but I don’t think it’s all that significant in either case.
Fission produces some awful waste, but what I like to point out is just how little it produces. My favorite example is nuclear submarines. Nuke subs have to come to port every so often for food, equipment, supplies, etc, but not because they’re low on fuel. They don’t carry a lot, about 500kg (half ton) and that lasts them a very long time. So how often do they need to be refueled? Once, most subs are refueled just once in their ~30 year lifetime. Some subs will be decommissioned before ever refuelling, using just one set of uranium fuel rods for their whole life.
Edit: I wanted to visualize how much 500kg is, and I know uranium is heavy but I really didn’t have any idea what a half ton would look like. Turns out, it’s about 26 liters, 1 cubic foot. (Though, ideally your uranium wouldn’t be measured in either of those units, you really don’t want liters of liquid uranium, and that’s exactly where a solid cube is headed too…)
Given the tiny volume of waste produced over such a long time… We can figure out the storage. Even if the solution is costly, there’s really not much to store, this is very manageable.
So yeah, I’m not saying waste isn’t an issue for nuclear power, it is. But I think it’s not the biggest drawback, it seems like the overall cost is still the bigger problem in operating a plant.
Nuke subs are a bad example for looking at waste because they use higher enriched uranium. And that creates big casks of depleted uranium hexafluoride that we just have no idea what to do with other than sitting them in fields and hoping they don’t leak.
My problem is that waste being unborn next generation’s problem. Who are we to demand them to keep guarding our shit? With fusion, the waste is the alive-generation’s problem.
Erm pretty sure Nuclear Fusion is a thing. Meaning Fusion research involves nuclear material
Nuclear is different from oil and coal.
They’re not solving the world’s problems not because oil exists, but because big powerful private oil companies exist who lobby the government and publish propaganda to manipulate the public. And big oil companies exist because of capitalism. But at this point, you start spewing all the anti communism propaganda you’ve been fed since your birth.
God, I wonder if we could fund a next gen fission plant with what we already spent on Venezuela
With US being the leading oil producer and stealing all of Venezuela’s’s oil, we’re positioning ourselves to control the world’s supply …… as the world yawns and continues moving to the future of tech that we helped develop then threw away
the US is more likely to invade and destroy any country that make fusion viable than to let it compete on the energy market.
Not that easy, considering the major candidates to succeed is China and the EU.
Why you attacking nuclear? It’s an amazing technology
Passenger vehicles and homes and most businesses could be covered by solar and wind, but oil will still be used for quite a while for cargo shipping and commercial trucks and things like tires. We could use a lot less, but oil is going to hang around for quite a while. Passenger vehicles account for about 25% of oil used.
These comment sections can be a place of puerility and defeatism. Thanks for being the difference.
While we maybe researching and contributing into Fusion we are not at all looking into making use for the energy grid. At most just if it can be used for the Data Centers
(Which is yes we could but I think providing free energy for homes is a better use you ask me.)
Thanks for your positive and refreshing comment ❤️
I’m assuming the sole reason the Orange cunt hasn’t destroyed the US’s fusion research is because he wants to give exclusive rights to build and use it to
Vault-Techthe tech broligarchs who bribe him.It’s still decades to never from being practical.
It always will be until the day it isn’t. Breakthrough’s cannot be timelined or predicted.
Stay positive buddy.stay positive buddy, if oil become obsolete the struggle of the us will end. Their trouble is price of oil. They need to inject oil in the system to reduce price and stay competitive with solar, etc. And they have to attack other country to maintain the system. It stay viable for long they will have to go renewables.
Tanks, jets and rockets don’t run on electric. Can’t do a big war without some good old crude oil.
But drones can. Little propeller drones are killing Russian invaders by the thousands
Trump and other dictators are vain (uh, reviving an outdated class of naval ship and naming it after yourself sound familiar?) so they’ll prefer bombers, tanks, and rockets over some little robots with little propellers. They disdain things that look weak regardless of their usefulness.
Pitch that to Trump and his team and see if they will run their next kidnapping op by propeller drone only.
Well, current electric helicopters don’t have a long range. But that’s a 2026 problem, when battery tech improves they can be made just as good. Actually, better, since electric helicopters are quieter
I’m not a fan of China (government)… at all. But when I check all the technological breakthrough they are getting in these last years while the US was inflating his fucking ai-bubble. Objectively, they are getting so far ahead is not even funny. At least Europe is on a good track themself.
China is now the world leader in science by most metrics (largest proportion of the top 1% most cited papers, most publications to prestigious journals, etc). It makes sense, with their high population and their government willing to fund research. I’m guessing their culture is much less anti-intellectual than the West too, especially the US.
I wouldn’t blame AI, I would say that overall the US is becoming more and more anti-science overall. Just look how people are against vaccines or flat-earthers. Even academics are leaving US because of funding cuts by the current administration. Schools are in bad shapes…
I’m no China expert but I lived In South China for a while between 2016 and 2024. The Chinese people I know are mostly hardworking, very motivated to succeed, and well capitalized. In their major cities you might be surprised to learn normal guys who earn half what you do are living a higher quality of life than you are, in terms of access to technology.
Their government is no doubt using uncouth methods to give their country unfair advantages. They don’t play well with others.
But holy shit there is one thing this Chinese government is doing well: effectively driving growth with targeted investments in the economy. They have been focused on that one mission consistently for a long time.
While democracies fuck around trying to decide if they should tax themselves to build public transportation, China installs 10 new ultrafast subway lines in just a few years in every big city. Covers the country in a network of high-speed rail. Drives the price of shipping goods around the country to almost nothing.
A kind of monoparty like China has is very likely a net negative when we look at world history, but for moments of time, if it’s the right one, amazing things can happen.
One thing I’ve been impressed with China for is moving towards greener technologies. They’re a leader in solar, their EV’s are apparently very good (not that I can get one here to verify that), and they’re pretty dogged in their pursuit of nuclear energy.
Meanwhile USA is apparently still in “let’s overturn regimes and take over other countries for the oil companies” mode
China has still fucked up its environment massively though. Being the world’s factory produces a lot of byproducts. Sure, they’re concentrating them and trying to detoxify the worst of it but the place is swimming in effluent that does great damage to life in one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. “Green” in the sense of renewable energy and climate change mitigation is not green in the sense of preserving the last tracts of intact wilderness to limit mass extinctions.
Hey, Americans are hard working too. Some work 3 jobs just to make ends meet.
The US government threatens other countries with tariffs and sanctions to give American companies unfair advantage. Is that not using unclouth methods?
Americans are hardworking too, but the American government is not actively working to support those hardworking Americans, which is the difference… the average American is working their ass off to earn less than ever to add wealth to the small percentage of ultra wealthy in power here. There are sanctions, tarriffs, and subsidies here, but the vast majority of them benefit the top of the pyramid, while leaving the majority to struggle.
The US government does everything in its power to make the wealthy even more wealthy. But hey, worker empowerment is communism.
Party’s don’t have to be part of democracy though. Nonpartisan democracy might more achievable for China than the west currently as the size of their single party continues to grow. Though I kinda doubt there is a lot of appetite for it. I’m a firm believer in democracy but it’s hard to look at the hyper polarization of today’s parties as beneficial in any way. Especially in the simple two party American system.
tax billionaires out of existence and the polarization will solve itself in short order
Yeah I suspect that’s right.
You should consider effects of scale.
With the size of China it’s simply easier to do “targeted investments”.
They are almost big enough for autarky with modern technologies and conveniences.
The overwhelming majority of their so called breakthroughs are just media fluff pieces though. Their sources are more and more often AI generated studies and their supposed advancements aren‘t going anywhere a lot of the time. By the time people start asking questions and want to know more details they have already prepared another story for you to be impressed by. It‘s shock and awe.
I’ve been seeing articles like these for the past at least 10 years, it is always “New China brrakthrough, can make drinkable water from enriched uranium” or some shit. It is never scalable, sustainable, or usable, and is never really widely, used or adopted. It is always technology, pharmaceutics, construction, or energy related.
They like to fake their image to the world and have been trying for very long. The only thing they succeeded at larger scale is oppresion, tracking of people, and selling knockoffs. Of course, mass manufacturing cannot be omitted.
And battery tech
Nothing they’ve done in recent years is ground breaking.
Room temperature superconductors? Fake.
Self-driving bus using painted lanes for navigation? We have trains and trams for that.
Thorium reactor? Germany had one in the 80s, shut it down because it was expensive, there’s around 20 different projects happening in Europe and North America to make it more efficient.
The fusion reactor from the article? They maybe potentially hypothetically achieved one breakthrough of the dozens still needed to make fusion viable.
Etc., etc.
Yea they are probably quite ahead in about %80 of critical tech. Not only that but they also seem to be investing quite alot in sustainable tech, public transport tech, medicine etc. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if center of attraction for science shifts from US to China in near future.
It already has. The West doesn’t like to advertise that though.
Given all the cuts to science, deportation of scientists, and blocking student researchersin the past year alone, I’d claim the US deserves half the credit for China’s impending science ascendancy
We’re not losing the competition, we’re throwing a tantrum and scattering the game pieces …… somehow thinking that’s the same as winning
Makes me sad I got the oppressive dictatorship that also wants me to suffer instead of pretending to give me good stuff
ESPECIALLY when statistically China would be way more likely to be born in
*yeah, not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
If all those stories from China from the last decade are true then science has already moved to China long ago. But it hasn‘t. Really makes you think, doesn‘t it?
Not sure, even like ten years ago when I was doing my PhD lots of students in prominent US universities like Carnegie Mellon were going to China to intern in HEP colliders.
But when China is running a huge energy surplus with new solar, wind, and battery technology, we’ll still have the most oil! facepalm.
What frustrates me is that China is indeed leading so much technological development on energy, but the amount of coal being burnt is just not budging… Please, China. Make the transition already.
It’s a bit two sided I believe. The energy demand is increasing, so there’s indeed more coal being burnt.
But at the same time, the share of clean energy sources compared to coal is also getting bigger and bigger.
So it’s not all bad. Mostly seems the demand for energy is growing too fast to decently transition, let’s hope they can catch up and get rid of coal as soon as possible.
Yeah, I hope that the renewables will continue exponentially… I agree that the growing share of renewables in the mix is awesome, but in the end what matters is each ton of CO2 emitted. And we’re not going in the right direction :(
That’s because 90% of these articles about their technological breakthroughs are bullsht.
At leas we won’t have to repect their patent…
Whoever develops fusion will be in the history books forever. I think that’s what they’re going for.
Thats the thing that truly pisses me off about the US govt right now.
Ok, China is doing all these things and we’re losing our advantage? Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
But noooo we do the polar opposite and also drive scientists out of the country because they can get funding elsewhere.
Hey, at least they’ve got evangelism down to a science. I’m sure militant devotion to [the parts they like from] the Bible will pay back dividends down the road. Who needs the disciplined and organized pursuit of modern science in earnest when some old book written by long-dead humans claiming to speak for a supreme being says it has all the answers (many of which involve smite-based solutions)?
Do what we did during the space race and pump cash into innovation, science, and research.
Oh they are. For AI. Instead of scrambling to Fusion, they’re putting the money into generating nudes of celebrities.
and kids. Look at grok
Chinese government is much better than the US government
Sure, if you like to compare corrupt, totalitarian states, have fun. Don’t forget russia.
People of the world including Europe, South America, middle East and Asia feel safer from Russia and China than America.
Nah they all fucking suck.
- a European
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
and it is a former USSR territory
So is half the EU. What’s this got to do with anything?
Greenland is more Europe than Ukraine because Greenland has been part of Denmark for over 1000 years but Ukraine is new. But It’s more likely that America will conquer Greenland than Russia conquers Ukraine.
I don’t care. They are all threatening us and I hope their leaders die very soon.
Forgetting Ukraine?
You’re more likely to lose Greenland to America than Ukraine to Russia. Ukraine isn’t even part of the EU and it is a former USSR territory.
That would be attacking EU citizens. Bullies don’t like difficult targets.
If you look at broad based EU markets vs the S&P over the last year they grew about twice the rate.
You don’t have to like the government, but they’re the sole reason China is slowly starting to take the lead in science and engineering. These are the fruits of marxism-leninism, whether you like it or not.
China is not Marxist-leninist lmao. They have a market economy.
State capitalism is not the same as Marxism.
Of course they are led by a marxist-leninist vanguard party. Just because they are leading a state owned market economy in order to build up their productive forces so they can counteract the power of US hegemony/imperialism, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing socialist state building.
No, they aren’t Marxist-leninist.
There’s no overthrowing of capitalism. China is capitalist as fuck.
Socialism is not “when the government does things”.
Their other fruits are despots and tyrants
How so? They’ve got less tyrants than most of the western world for sure
Higher density, yes, but at the cost of lower temperatures. So not as good. Nice but old new. With painfullll advertisement.
Through a new process called plasma-wall self organisation, the CAS researchers were able to keep the plasma stable at unprecedented density levels.
The latest breakthrough was detailed in the journal : Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz3040 )in a study titled ‘Accessing the density-free regime with ECRH-assisted ohmic start-up on EAST’.
When your result breaks the laws of physics, you need to check your measurements and maths just to be sure. Better yet, have others do it for you.
This isn’t a physics breaking finding. It’s breaking the Greenwald density limit in tokamaks. Some other types of fusions reactors can go above this limit by 2-5 times.
In this case they’re getting past that limit in the Chinese reactor. We had/have a limited understanding of exactly why this limit exists so hopefully these guy’s research can help us figure out a way to get past the limit and achieve higher energy production.
Gotta love science reporters. “Thought to be impossible.”
“A 747 jet took off from New York’s Kennedy airport this morning, accomplishing a feat once thought to be impossible.”
Ah yes, technically correct
“On this planet we obey the laws of physics!”
deleted by creator
RIP bro
Didn’t delete more like moved to to be replying to the article proper
Well, I guess this puts it right about 30 years out now.
