In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at new advances in fusion power, how the new budget bill undermines clean energy, a new trick to treat autoimmune diseases and more.
  • ToastedRavioli@midwest.socialEnglish
    25·
    6 hours ago

    Theres no way in hell the US will be anywhere close to first in developing stable fusion power. Projects in Europe and Asia are lightyears ahead of us here, where we dont even have a reactor capable of producing a stable reaction. Meanwhile in Korea I think they have managed to achieve a stable reaction for over 10 minutes already. Who knows where China is at, although they likely have the largest facility working on it.

    Weve already lost the race thanks to our obsession with yesterday’s energy methods

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      5 hours ago

      Theres no way in hell the US will be anywhere close to first in developing stable fusion power.

      Looking at the projects underway I agree with you, however the US was the first to produce a nuclear fusion reaction with a net positive energy result at the NIF in 2022. source The subsequent 5 events have increase net positive yields significantly with the 2025 experiment yielding more than 200% net energy gain.

      To be able to create a energy net positive even on-demand has to be very helpful for research. I don’t know of any other country that is capable of doing that yet.

    • vinnymac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      6 hours ago

      I was curious about this, so I tried to find out what the record for KSTAR was to date. In my research I found that it ran for 48 seconds in ‘24. The goal is to able to run it for 300 seconds by ‘26, but they have not attempted this.

      Although for Plasma generation we’ve achieved much longer run times in both the east (1,066s) and west (1,337s)