The scientists used lasers to fuse two light atoms into a single one, releasing 3.15MJ (megajoules) of energy from 2.05MJ of input – roughly enough to boil a kettle.
Why do we even study this? Renewables are the only way. This is a waste of money which is a finite resource.
Why do you have multiple post of breakthroughs in nuclear tech with negative criticism?
In fact multiple posts appearing to concern troll renewables with statements like “coal is here to stay”??
Id you’re going to judge me on my post history, then read ALL of them.
Creep
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Fusion is the first step to a post scarcity world. All the new technology, products, agriculture methods, ect. that would be made possible with abundant, clean energy would completely transform the world. I doubt solar and wind could ever provide enough to make those advances.
You’re kind of a lame dude. Piss off.
Renewables are already well researched. It’s up to governments to enforce their use if they want.
Fusion can be huge because it can theoretically be scaled up significantly.
Even though both this reactor and ITER have small energy production goals, if they can get a reaction to run for a usable period of time, then it becomes something worth investing into to improve.
Even the USA chucks money at it because it could have military use. Fission power started in a similar way.
You’re not even citing the right reactor. LLNL did that experiment, this reactor in Japan is to try to scale it.
There’s a difference between what works best now to meet our energy needs (renewables) and the furthering of the science behind nuclear technology. We can do both.
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The current energy consumption of the planet is 113,000Twh (according to Wikipedia). Since every single Joule of renewable energy is some derivative of solar energy (solar, wind, tide, hydro, but not geo I suppose) the maximum energy we can derive from renewables is 765,000Twh.
The problem with that, is if we start to consume 10’s of percent of the total solar radiation through “renewables” that would otherwise go into generating weather and other natural events, well I’m sure you can see the potential problems.
So, we have to get away from carbon intensive electricity generation, but we can’t physically rely solely on renewables. Therefore we need fission/fusion.
There’s obviously the case of our current economic system causing us to overuse energy in the name of profit (oil is so important because it makes energy cheap and thus easier to make profits), and a change in production/consumption/distribution priorities would likely cause huge decreases in energy needs globally. But we can only really consider energy needs based on what we know.
Whoops, I forgot the “achtually”.
OK - let’s ignore the shitshow of responding to OP’s hot take.
What kind of research is this particular reactor going to do?
