
China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ achieves fusion breakthrough - jonbaer
http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/1103/c90000-9136786.html
======
kybernetikos
I would love to see a huge effort towards fusion, on the same (or even
greater) scale as the Manhattan project or the Apollo program. I had been
disappointed in the way that fusion always seemed to be 30 years away no
matter how many years went past, but I just assumed that that was because the
science was hard and just the way it had to be.

[https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg)

[https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_...](https://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf)

In 1976, a number of plans for investing in fusion were described, and what
actually happened was that less was invested in fusion even than the level at
which the program plan predicted we would never achieve fusion. This is the
kind of thing that anyone who cares about humanity in general should find
upsetting.

Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top
priorities.

Working, economic fusion power has a chance to revolutionize life as we know
it. The countries that have access to the technology first will be at the
forefront of a huge economic, social, cultural, scientific change.

It's more important than going to Mars (and would probably make going to Mars
significantly easier). It's more important than nearly anything we're working
on.

~~~
motoboi
> Massively abundant, cheap, clean energy should be one of humanity's top
> priorities.

What about the big fusion reactor in the Sky? Shouldn't we go all in on solar?
Why is so difficult to harness that source? Maybe the same obstacles make
fusion so difficult to pursue.

~~~
cc438
Land utilization is the issue. The largest solar farms in the US requires an
order of magnitude more land to produce the same amount of power as a
relatively average nuclear plant.

The largest solar farm in the US, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, covers
25sq/km has a peak generation capacity of 550MW. The source uses the median of
the 59 nuclear plants in the US to arrive at its 3.36sq/km (1.3sq/mile) per
1,000MW figure but the largest nuclear plant ever built, the Kashiwazaki-
Kariwa plant in Japan, produces ~8MW on just 4.2sq/km of land which makes it
twice as efficient in terms of land use as the median US plant.

That places solar at 13.75 sq/km per 1,000MW compared to nuclear's 0.525sq/km
using the best case scenario for the density of existing sources. That doesn't
even account for the variable output of the solar plant versus the consistency
of nuclear generation. Solar is ultimately far too land hungry to ever serve
as the world's primary source of electrity.

Source:
[http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Pap...](http://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/Policy/Papers/Land_Use_Carbon_Free_Technologies.pdf?ext=.pdf)

~~~
londons_explore
More importantly, with fusion, energy could become significantly cheaper
allowing us to do things which weren't economically viable.

Make everything out of environmentally friendly, lighter and long lasting
aluminium rather than steel + concrete.

Have street lighting that is as bright as sunlight over entire cities,
allowing us to no longer be dependant on time of day.

Growing food crops indoors with artificial light, saving massive amounts of
land.

Desalination to make all our water. No longer extracting it from rivers and
aquifers. A cleaner, less polluted water source.

A single energy source - today we use petroleum (cars), natural gas (cooking
and heating), electricity (lighting etc.), diesel (transport) and many more in
industry. All of those need distribution networks. A single cheap energy
source could coalesce a lot of infrastructure.

~~~
motoboi
I made me curious about something.

Will the heat from all that electricity generation affect the environment in
significant ways?

At which energy usage scale humanity will be restricted by the planet
environment capacity to deal with the generated heat?

~~~
londons_explore
If you have enough cheap energy, you could refrigerate earth and send excess
heat to space.

I think we're a long way from that yet though.

------
ars
It's unfortunate that it's like this, but I automatically do not believe any
scientific breakthroughs that come from China.

There has simply been too much fraud for me to believe anything they say.

[http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-
clinic...](http://www.sciencealert.com/80-of-the-data-in-chinese-clinical-
trial-is-fabricated)

~~~
fooker
In a few decades, when most of the new inventions will start coming from
China, this attitude is going to be very difficult to maintain.

~~~
maxander
It is quite possible that most of the new inventions will be coming from
China, _and also_ most of China's scientific production will be rubbish. China
has been great with scaling up its scientific community, but the problem of
establishing an academic culture of scientific honesty is harder.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you implying that "an academic culture
of scientific honesty" is something the non-Chinese world _has_ but China
doesn't?

I'll concede it's probably a matter of degree.

~~~
wastedhours
Especially on the front of medical trials, a recent Chinese government probe
found 80% of data used was falsified [0]

[0] [http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-
fakes-0927201...](http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/clinical-
fakes-09272016141438.html)

~~~
Gigablah
Sounds like a better track record than Theranos to me.

~~~
kobeya
You are demonstrating awareness of the point being made: if scientific fraud
was as rampant here as it is in China, Theranos wouldn't even be remarkable
and still unknown. But it is in fact rare enough to cause scandal.

If you want to keep that attitude and make non-contributory quips, go back to
Reddit. It is not appreciated here.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Most of Big Pharma's medicines don't actually work.

As in, they don't work to _cure_ the underlying condition. They work to treat
the symptoms, and thereby require you to take the medicine fairly indefinitely
if you want to by symptom free, side effects notwithstanding. Thereby
extracting economic value from the generally unwell and ageing population and
concentrating it in the hands of Big Pharma.

In that way I see _most_ of medicine as being fraudulent.

Also, you're probably being down-voted for your last sentence, as it is, as
you say _not appreciated here._

~~~
philipkglass
If Big Pharma developed treatments-rather-than-cures as a deliberate strategy
to milk recurring revenue, biotech startups could ignore those recurring
treatments and take over the market with easier-or-equally-difficult-to-find
one shot cures that doctors, patients, and insurance companies would all
prefer. But it turns out that Biology is Hard and the indefinite treatments
are still used because neither incumbents nor startups have been able to find
drugs that are once-and-for-all _cures_ for diabetes, heart disease,
Parkinson's, etc. It's the same reason we don't have Mr. Fusion powering our
cars instead of liquid hydrocarbons: not because the sinister oil cartels are
suppressing technology, but because developing that sort of breakthrough is
extremely hard.

~~~
fooker
And then you get to this convoluted certification and approval process that
more or less guarantees that the startup is going to be dead before it starts
selling anything.

------
Trombone12
Weird, as far as I can tell this result was essentially achieved in February;
at least that's when the register reported on it:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/06/china_shows_how_fusi...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/06/china_shows_how_fusion_is_done/)

EAST seems to be connected to ITER, and is testing confinement methods like
those planned for ITER. Here is an ITER press release about EAST hitting that
32 s H-mode confinement:
[https://www.iter.org/newsline/291/1783](https://www.iter.org/newsline/291/1783)

And here is a later article about EAST receiving an upgrade and shooting for
those 100 seconds in 2014:
[https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916](https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/1916)

~~~
vilhelm_s
Hm, so I think the experiment this article alludes to is not exactly the same
as the February one. This article seems to be based on this press release:
[http://www.ipp.ac.cn/xwdt/tpxw/201611/t20161102_352924.html](http://www.ipp.ac.cn/xwdt/tpxw/201611/t20161102_352924.html)
which (using Google Translate) says "In a new round of physical experiments
launched in August 2016, the EAST team achieved steady-state, high-
confinement-mode plasmas for more than 60 seconds in mid-October by further
optimizing the steady-state operation integrated control at long pulse time
scales".

It seems they reported their latest results at the IAEA Fusion Energy
Conference (17–22 October 2016); I'm guessing that they did a press release
based on that, and that's why it's getting picked up by news.

------
djsumdog
Anyone remember that really old game Outpost? It ran on Windows 3.1; used a CD
recording of The Planets as its soundtrack. That's the first time I've heard
of Tokamak reactors.

What these are trying to achieve is pretty amazing. I hope one day, one of
these reactors will be able to sustain a greater output than input. It has the
potential to move the planet into a completely different energy age. Imagine
if we could build something with that kind of energy output on Mars.

~~~
Razengan
I remember that game! Mini black hole starts gobbling up planet Earth. :) And
the voxels.

~~~
pierrec
You're thinking of Outcast (aka Infogrames Outcast).

~~~
Razengan
doh yes! Thanks.

------
akiselev
For someone more knowledgeable about the state of fusion research: is this
really a "breakthrough" or just another incremental step? It seems they only
kept it stable for about twice as long as they did four year ago and that's
not much of a breakthrough even if we did break the arbitrary one minute limit
(or maybe its not arbitrary and becomes harder to keep stable approaching a
minute for some reason?)

At this point it seems that the only real breakthroughs we can make in fusion
research is maybe another technique like magnetic or inertial confinement and
a power neutral/positive reactor, along with breakthroughs in orthogonal
fields like material science.

~~~
mng2
It's an incremental step on a long road. To be sure, the ultimate goal is to
understand how to control the plasma well enough to support indefinitely long
pulses. But incremental improvements add up, or rather they compound like
interest.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
What is the plan to extract energy from these things?

Same old heat exchanger > supercritical steam > steam turbine > alternator?

Or is there some way of getting electricity out of the plasma directly?

~~~
ufmace
Yes. That also makes it difficult to scale up to energy production - now you
need to route a bunch of cooling water plumbing and heat exchangers around it,
engineer it to transfer the bulk of the reactor heat output to the cooling
water without melting any heat exchangers, then build a turbine/generator rig
to attach to it. Might possibly need an extra water loop too, depending on how
much neutron flux ends up hitting the water and plumbing when running at a
reaction rate sufficient to generate power.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
The bulk of the reactor heat needs to stay in the reactor though, doesn't it?
as that is essential in keeping the reaction going?

How does that affect the economics?

~~~
ufmace
Actually no, the heat needs to escape to keep the temperature under control.
The temperature is what has to be kept in the proper range for Fusion to occur
at the planned rate. I don't know as much about control of fusion reactions as
I'd like, but I think the reaction rate is highly temperature-dependant, so
we'll want to keep the temperature in a tight range. Too low a reaction rate,
and the plasma cools down too much and would have to be re-heated externally;
too high and you might burn up fuel faster than you can resupply it, causing
what I guess you would call a stall, also requiring a restart.

All of the reactions we've generated so far have a low to nonexistent reaction
rate, because the reaction generates lots of heat, and the research reactor
designs we're using don't have a way to extract that heat at power-generation
levels. To build a power reactor, we'll have to maintain the reaction
temperature, at which massive amounts of heat are generated, and extract that
heat to keep the temperature stable.

Designing the heat transfer for that is sure to be fun. I don't know the
temperature of the burning plasma, but I'm sure it's insanely high compared to
any kind of conventional material or process. So somebody has to design a
system to transfer GigaWatts of heat from a burning plasma at effectively
infinite temperature to some perfectly ordinary water at a controlled rate
without melting anything.

~~~
mng2
I don't think the plasma being too hot is a problem in a tokamak. The average
ion energy is not enough for fusion; we rely on the high-energy tail end of
the Maxwellian distribution. Any potential source of heat loss from the ions
is a liability, including the natural predilection for ions to transfer their
energy to electrons, not to mention radiative losses. Keeping the plasma hot
enough is really the essential problem.

------
ztl8702
Just a quick note that this report comes from people.cn, a mouthpiece media of
the CCP. Perhaps more coverage from other sources would make this more
persuasive.

~~~
finid
A _mouthpiece media of the CCP_!

So if the NYT reports on the results of an amazing research from the JPL,
you'll not believe it, right?

~~~
Kadin
Uh, the situations are not analogous.

People.cn is the website of the [People's Daily][1], which is a longstanding,
official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. Not figuratively or in the
sense of having a slant or something, but it's literally the Party's official
newspaper.

It's tempting to equate it to Voice of America, but even VoR is managed quite
differently. There's not a direct equivalent in the US press, because the
systems work differently.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Daily](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Daily)

~~~
ww520
The US press has lost fair amount of credibility in this election cycle. Case
in point,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCcRnvMPEU&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOCcRnvMPEU&feature=youtu.be)

~~~
Godel_unicode
The journalists who cover science have lost credibility because of the
journalists who cover politics? Why would you think those things are related?

~~~
ww520
Isn't that the premise of the whole thread? Lumping all the reporting by its
organization.

~~~
Godel_unicode
That's not what I've read above. It seems to me that some on this thread are
saying they distrust science (and therefore science reporting) out of China
because of the low quality of historical science and science journalism from
China.

See the difference?

~~~
ww520
Kadin's comment, which I replied to, never mentioned anything about science or
science reporting. He only talked about press in general and made the point
that since the news organization is not trustworthy, any news out of it can't
be trusted. You were the only one talking about science reporting out of all
the comments in the whole thread. That's kind of irrelevant to the specific
discussion.

Edit: Or are you saying the science news reporting from People.cn are
separated from the political reporting and thus can be trusted? You were
making the point that science reporting and political reporting are different.

------
Annatar
Compared to the stellerator, tokamak is an older design. Germans have
sucessfully built and tested the _second generation_ stellerator, Wendelstein
7-X[1]. Now it will run for 32 minutes, where the Tokamak design is targeted
for 1000 seconds, or 16 minutes. (Yes, a stellerator is much harder to build,
but it's easier to control the plasma with; building one became feasible only
after doing finite element analysis optimizations.)

That they got the tokamak design to work is a testament to "when in doubt, use
brute force" maxim by Ken Thompson. It shows what can be done when banging on
something until it works, but I don't think it's the best way forward, because
the stellerator design already works, is easier to control plasma with, and is
now in its third revision.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X)

~~~
GlennS
Hold your horses, it hasn't run for 32 minutes yet. If it succeeds in that, I
expect we'll all be hearing about it.

This is a big improvement compared to the microseconds once was. So maybe
we're getting there.

Edit: removed some stuff that turned out to be fluff once I'd actually read
the article. Whoops...

------
tlarkworthy
An edit-compile-run cycle of 4 years. Must be tedious.

~~~
taneq
That's hardware R&D for you.

------
helthanatos
"This is not the first time that EAST has generated enduring plasma. In 2012,
plasma in a similar environment was maintained for 32 seconds, breaking the
world record at that time. Since then, EAST has had its tungsten diverters and
auxiliary heating system upgraded, laying the foundation to create long-pulse,
high-confinement plasma. Officially established in 2006, the EAST fusion
reactor is run by the Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, which aims for
plasma pulses lasting up to 1,000 seconds."

6 years after establishment, it got to 3.2% of its goal. What was the new
record time?

~~~
vilhelm_s
102 seconds.

~~~
helthanatos
So after 10 years, it's 10.2% of their goal. ~3% in 6 years to ~7% in 4 years.
The rate may keep rising or they may find something sooner. Hopefully it won't
take another 50 years to reach their goal.

------
amingilani
In A Nutshell just published a primer on nuclear fusion yesterday! It's my
favorite ELI5 style science channel.

[https://youtu.be/mZsaaturR6E](https://youtu.be/mZsaaturR6E)

------
peteretep
As per every fusion breakthrough I've read about ever:

"Sure hope so! Not quite ready to short fossil fuels yet though."

~~~
venomsnake
But solar/wind is good reason to. I was amazed at how low the energy payment
time for solar is - 0.5-1.5 years. With span of 20 - it gives 10 EROEI ...
that is respectable. Not as oil in eras past (1 to 100) but in line with
current 1 to 13

------
simonh
The Manhattan Project cost about $26bn in 2016 dollars, while ITER is expected
to cost over $20bn by the time it's done.

The problem with trying to solve something like this by throwing money at it
too early, is what if the technological approach chosen doesn't work out? The
more money you put into it, the more you would waste. Right now there at least
half a dozen possible ways Fusion could be achieved commercially, but we don't
know which one(s) will pan out. Even then, to be viable some of them may
require the development of enabling technologies we haven't even thought of
yet. So yes they are worth pursuing, but on the basis of a measured assessment
of cost and benefit.

~~~
kybernetikos
The Manhattan project took place over about 5 years. The US has been
investigating fusion since at least the 40s.

ITER is also an international effort, funded by 36 countries, not just the US.
The US also withdrew from funding it for 6 years in 2000 so I don't know what
its total involvement will be, but so far it will be __well __short of its
involvement in the Manhattan project.

I agree that the money that should be invested in fusion shouldn't all be
spent on a single approach though.

~~~
Glauc
ICF is also funded, though it has its fair share of problems.

------
Taek
Doesn't fusion pose the ability to overcome our energy needs without
threatening the environment? Also, if one nation were to gain exclusive access
to fusion, wouldn't they have an extreme advantage?

Should we be doing a Manhattan project to get fusion powerplants?

~~~
komali2
Building a wall is our first priority. /s

~~~
3chelon
I thought it was powering everything with coal again.

------
Pica_soO
You can make a lightning rod with a plasma creating laser. Could you make a
fusion container with a 3d printed plasma cage, through which you channel
lightning? Or at least patch existing unwinding containment with this?

------
Pica_soO
Congrats to China- go team humanity!

------
c3534l
Incremental progress, yay!

------
partycoder
Extraordinary breakthroughs require extraordinary evidence.

I am waiting for such evidence now.

------
Hydraulix989
Confirmed?

------
thrownblown
We already have a free fusion plant: the sun.

------
benliong78
What could possibly go wrong, really.

~~~
davesque
Not as much as could go wrong with a fission reaction.

~~~
davesque
And I don't mean to demonize fission power at all. Just wanted to point out
that a fusion reaction must be sustained while a fission reaction must be
controlled. Of course there's more to that story as well since a fission
reactor could be designed with some kind of passive failsafe (e.g. a frozen
plug which seals the reactor core or something similar).

