• Tony! Toni! Toné! ☑️
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    381 year ago

    Wait, but fusion is working. They’re seeing net positive output. It’s still quite small at the moment, but moderate gains continue to be made in the field.

    • starbreaker
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      161 year ago

      We already have a perfectly good nuclear fusion reactor about 93,000,000 miles from our planet. We just need to make better use of its output.

      • @sleep_deprived
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        281 year ago

        I mean yeah, we should absolutely be replacing as much fossil fuel use as we can with existing renewable energy tech. But there’s no reason we shouldn’t also be investing in fusion research, at least as far as I’m aware

        • Mossy Feathers (She/They)
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          71 year ago

          They already do this fyi. Solar plants tend to use mirrors that concentrate light to heat water and turn a turbine instead of actual solar panels. Amazingly, iirc converting light into heat, the heat into steam, and then the steam into kinetic energy, is still more efficient than a normal photovoltaic cells.

              • @[email protected]
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                11 year ago

                Sadly I believe they found adding more mirrors did not appreciably raise the temperature of the focal point. Diminishing returns and all. So unfortunately more mirrors is not the answer, more Lasers is!

      • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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        51 year ago

        Well seeing how you almost need the output of a Dyson swarm to make a Dyson swarm, cool glowy rock power and explodey gas power can and will work just as good. Especially for places that are far away from the ideal conditions to exploit solar energy terrestrially. Where I’m at we have to use literal piles of garbage to be able to get high enough above the trees to achieve sustainable output.

    • lol3droflxp
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      151 year ago

      This isn’t properly calculated though. They only count the actual laser energy inside the reacttvs output. They don’t account for the huge amount of energy thatch’s needed to run the lasers in the first place or the rest of the facility. It’s nowhere near putting out more energy than it consumes and it’s also a reactor for nuclear weapons testing so they don’t really try to produce energy anyway.

      • @[email protected]
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        81 year ago

        You’re not wrong. It’s still an important step for the field though. Having a net positive within the reaction itself could theoretically mean eventually the energy from the reaction can help sustain the reaction after the initial higher activation energy. But with the poor state of science journalism the result was reported with extreme hyperbole.

    • @Fosheze
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      51 year ago

      Exactly. And that’s with the little reactors. If I remember correctly ITER is less than 5 years from first plasma. After that monster gets online, fusion research gets much easier.