Pretty much the only nation I have trust in to crack fusion at the moment. It will certainly accelerate the demise of the US economy if they do.
The project – the Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology – aims to create a miniature sun at over 100 million degrees Celsius (over 180 million Fahrenheit) and trap it inside a doughnut-shaped metal cage to generate electricity.
Can a smart person tell me how this won’t go the same way as in Spider-Man?
Fusion is not some chain reaction that survives infinitely without end or fuel sources like some mystical magical wormhole into a nether dimension of pure power, like movies and tv shows seem to portray.
It just stops working when it runs out of compatible fuel, the same as every other energy source.
Just like the sun will eventually.
The sun just has so much fuel available to it it literally powers the entire solar system just from the few degrees of radiation that hit a few space rocks. Like, it’s almost impossible to imagine how big and how much fuel the sun has at its disposal here.
So much, that when it eventually runs out of fuel to continue to generate radiation in the way that sustains life, it still has so much mass/fuel available that it turns into one of the densest things known to mankind, preventing even light from escaping.
Unless you know of a fuel source like that somewhere on earth, neither a mini-sun that blows up the planet, or a black hole that sucks in the planet, is ever, or will ever, be remotely possible.
Science is science, not magic.
still has so much mass/fuel available that it turns into one of the densest things known to mankind, preventing even light from escaping.
I don’t disagree with most of what you’ve said, but our sun will not be turning into a black hole. It would need something like 20x the mass it currently has.
That is why scenes like that annoy me (also in Batman Something). Fusion is inherently safe because the reaction just stops if it breaks and nothing more can explode. And you don’t have dangerous decay products.
But movies like to use fear of nuclear something and that unfortunately has real world consequences in funding for vital energy projects now.
Just need to educate people like Warl0k3 did below. Good luck with Americans!
the “artifical sun” is an extremely thin stream of plasma, and only exists for as long as you can keep it from touching anything - as soon as it does it grounds itself out, loses magnetic containment and dissipates harmlessly.
What you see in spiderman is (presumably, I have never seen it) some infinitely expanding ball of plasma that threatens to escape containment and explode the city. In reality, one of the largest unsolved problems in fusion research is how to even introduce additional fuel without instantly collapsing the magnetic field and, once again, letting the plasma dissipate harmlessly.
Cool, Thanks!
Here’s an archive link to get rid of the paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20260730034730/https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3358642/china-fires-worlds-biggest-superconducting-magnet-nuclear-fusion-project
Not a lot of info in there but at least it’s free.
Thanks.
There is also this https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/china-completes-worlds-largest-582-tonne-superconducting-magnet-for-artificial-sun/articleshow/132711254.cms with some more details but i don’t know if its the most trustworthy source
Thank you. The additional details are mostly about the structure and engineering as opposed to opinion, I’d trust it. Very cool to see sustainable fusion energy in my lifetime.