China's EAST project has set a new global record by maintaining a high-confinement plasma state for over 17 minutes, paving the way for future clean energy solutions by mimicking the sun's fusion process. China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), also known as the "artificial
Not a word about how much energy went into the process and how much was harvested…
I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave.
A 17 minute runtime in a Tokamak an incremental step on the path to success. You’re in the kitchen looking over the shoulder of the chef saying the steak he’s just put in the pan isn’t cooked enough yet. He knows, but you can’t have the steak on your plate cooked to perfection until he does this current step he’s on.
In 1964 you could build an honest to goodness fusion reactor copying the Farnsworth Fusor, yet that would never be on a path to a sustained fusion reaction with a net energy gain. The work in the article is.
I love when online commenters who didn’t even read the article are smarter than the scientists it’s about
Producing energy is not the goal of this facility which is why they don’t report on it. The useful output is in refining control and heating methods so that when power producing facilities are built, they can operate continuously. On that front, 17 minutes is very impressive. At the speeds at which the particles in a fusion plasma move, that time frame is essentially an eternity.
It’s the goal of the technology, though, isn’t it?
Yes, it’s a hard problem to solve.
Removed by mod
I took that comment as criticizing dumbed-down science reporting and/or being suspicious of reported breakthroughs from China.
I don’t get why people still doubt China on tech progress. “Hur dur they’re commies so they had to have faked it! There’s just no incentive for them to be smart and driven because America, number one btw, has all the money.”
Like yeah, the country we’ve exported nearly all of our tech and manufacturing to for 40 years definitely has no idea how anything works, guys. Keep doubting.
https://www.science.org/content/article/china-cracks-down-after-investigation-finds-massive-peer-review-fraud
https://academic.oup.com/pmj/article/98/1163/653/7096881?login=false
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2891906/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01697-y
this is just starting to be mean
Yeah well I guess I’m done being nice to people who think this way. We didn’t use to belittle science like this, we weren’t so afraid of it. We used to respect people for striving to learn more, not belittle them. I’m tired of listening to people belittle scientists because of their own issues.
You took a great deal of liberty in interpreting my comment. There is no anti-intellectualism there. That’s all in your head. My statement “I can create plasma using a candle and a microwave” was aimed at the reporters.
When the research is aimed at eventually building a power plant, then running the process for several minutes without even guesstimating an efficiency factor (or not reporting on it) seems very odd. We can be sure that energy was set free, which the researches must have had to dispose of somehow. I can’t imagine that they just blindly dumped it somehow without even checking how close their dumping process was to failing.
If you’d like to know what a constructive answer would’ve looked like, this is one: https://feddit.nl/comment/15463960