US firm validates 1.1-GW nuclear fusion plant design to deliver 400 MW electricity

Isn't this how Half-Life began?

I thought this was 30 years away?

\_V cant wait to have another being attatch to my head

Just watched a really good and incredibly informative video on this, [url]https://youtube.com/watch?v=nt4rZgndOoE[/url]. From what is explained in the video is that this is mostly filing paperwork, they haven't verified their reactor works or that it's able to output power, let alone output more power than what is required to start and maintain a fusion reaction. So over all, a little exciting, but really nothing to get too excited about yet.

Edit: grammar fixes

No, that had nothing to do with fusion or fission. The Resonance Cascade was a quantum event created when Gordon inserted a Xen crystal sample into a Anti-Mass Spectrometer.

_They're waiting for you Gordon... In the test chamber_

(I feel the need to point out that it's been 30 years since people started saying this...)

Oh man though this one is cool - I have a dear dear friend working on this project, and it's absolutely wild. Nothing they're doing is new, exactly but modern magnet designs have enabled SPARC to simultaneously hit a bunch of metrics that were previously entirely reliant on purpose-built machines.

Excerpt from them when I asked them about this yesterday:

While no existing tokamak has reached the same parameters that SPARC will _simultaneously_, there is empirical evidence in part for all of the major parameters it seeks to reach. the purple dot is ARC, the power plant design, and the red X is ITER, the gigantic international tokamak being built which doesn't take advantage of newer and more powerful magnets (which is what allowed SPARC/ARC to have much smaller volume)

so like yeah, we've built a ton of reactors that could do all this individually and then CFS have managed a system that has combined those results into a single machine and that has been the big goal for years (beyond stopping the plasma from fizzling out). There's still challenges to solve, but this system has cleared all the previous hurdles (barring some of the noncritical ones). It's so damn cool. It's not fusion happening now, the headline is sensationalist, but it's the biggest step forward we've had probably since research into plasma fusion started.

Extremely complex and expensive engineering and technology development for 400 MW of net electricity generation. Why not just build a 400 MW solar farm (with battery shortage, of course)? There's a massive, natural fusion reactor in the sky blasting the Earth with petawatts of energy every day, for absolutely free.

Yeah this feels more like a long-shot gamble by a hungry start up that the beginning of a new transformative tech.

Because this is how research works and if we manage to get fusion power generation working well, we’ll have practically limitless clean energy available.

`have a very safe day`

This is like asking “why do R&D to invent solar panels when gas has always been 25¢/gallon?”

Technological progress isn’t free.

Thats what musk masturbates to...

So that’s, what, a 36% efficiency? What are the values of some other sources such as nuclear and solar. Or am i misunderstanding the values supplied?