• Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      42 minutes 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.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      53 minutes 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.

    • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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      1 hour ago

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

    • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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      6 hours 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.

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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      5 hours 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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        1 hour 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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          57 minutes 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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            27 minutes 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.

  • Match!!@pawb.social
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    1,337 seconds? That… that number used to mean something, but now i can’t recall what…

  • meowmeowbeanz@sopuli.xyz
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    19 hours ago

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

    🐱🐱🐱🐱

  • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafe
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    Well, I’m still skeptical, but I have far more trust in France’s reporting than Chinese claims.

      • Zink@programming.dev
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        Yeah, just like all that anti-white sentiment towards the US because we elected a president who almost passes for off-white.

        Though I suppose there could be other reasons if we dig deep enough.

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        China: Spews blatant and obvious lies about everything that does or does not cast a shadow. Heavily censors any source.

        Some guy: I don’t trust information coming from China.

        China (and shills): That’s sinophobic!!

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        China had a long history of fraudulent science that they need to dig out of to gain a good reputation.

        • ubergeek@lemmy.today
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          1 hour ago

          Nothing like the very highly reliable pharmaceutical “science” done in the US, amirite?

          Its not like we ever had “science” come from the US that said an extremely powerful opioid wasn’t addictive, amirite?

        • cybersin@lemm.ee
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          Because a shit ton of fraudulent science hasn’t come out of the US or Europe. Nope. No sir.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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        23 hours ago

        huh, I learned a few new words today

        for others who want to know

        • Jingoism: noun

          1. Extreme Nationalism characterized by a belligerent foreign policy

          2. A bellicose patriotism; aggressive chauvinism; belligerence in international relations

        • Bellicose: adjective

          1. warlike or hostile in manner or temperment

          2. inclined to war or contention

          3. warlike in nature/aggressive;hostile

        • Chauvinism: noun

          1. Militant devotion to and glorification of one’s country; fanatical patriotism.

          2. Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one’s own gender, group, or kind.

          3. Blind and absurd devotion to a fallen leader or an obsolete cause; hence, absurdly vainglorious or exaggerated patriotism.

          • jenesaisquoi@feddit.org
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            13 hours ago

            America doesn’t have a government. It’s a continent. Are you possibly referring to the USA?

            • epicstove@lemmy.ca
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              2 hours ago

              In North America they teach that North America and South America are 2 separate continents.

              When someone refers to “America” in the contexts of countries they 9 times out of 10 mean the US. Since people from there usually call themselves “Americans” rather than “United statians”

            • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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              You don’t think uncritical and nationalistic dismissal of the “enemy’s” achievements as they must be both strong and weak has a place under “aggressive or exaggerated patriotism?”

              I guess that just makes them a racist then.

              • Tja@programming.dev
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                23 hours ago

                As far as I can tell by their comment history they are American, so I don’t know how is trusting France to be “nationalistic”. Or “patriotic”. Or aggressive, for that matter. Not a hint of militarisitc feeling either.

                I might be racist too, because I don’t trust what comes out of China as much as what comes from France. Or Germany. Or Switzerland. Or Japan. Or south Korea. Or Australia. Or India. Or Kenya. Yes, it must be racism.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      It’s always thirty years away because every time it gets close to 15 years away they cut the funding in half. Zeno’s Dichotomy in action.

  • tomkatt@lemmy.world
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    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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      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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        So a big event without any practical relevance because there is more cheaper, reliable and safer alternatives available?

        • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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          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@lemmy.world
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          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.

          • Saleh@feddit.org
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            15 hours 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…

    • cynar@lemmy.world
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      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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        2 days 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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        1 day 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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          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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              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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      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.

  • LostWon@lemmy.ca
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    Maybe if it runs longer, we all get to jump to a better timeline. 😅

    • Pumpkin Escobar@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • Sceptiksky@leminal.space
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      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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        20 hours ago

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

    • Obelix@feddit.org
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      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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        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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          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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            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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          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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        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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        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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        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. 🙂