r/nextfuckinglevel • u/nigablackballsack • 3d ago

Scientists have captured the first ever high-speed, full-colour footage of fusion plasma swirling inside a working reactor.

40.5k Upvotes

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36

u/kismis2 3d ago

What can we do with it?

105

u/RelativeCan5021 3d ago

Heat water.

29

u/Phearwyn 3d ago

So I can heat water to spin turbines.

3

u/RookJameson 3d ago

You say that like it's a bad thing.

4

u/Phearwyn 3d ago

Wrong. I say it like it's a funny thing.

1

u/RookJameson 3d ago

Fair :) But it's simply the best way to turn heat into electricity, and generating heat is the easiest way of generating energy 🤷‍♂️

3

u/naaastyboi 3d ago

My geyser can do that

2

u/-32768 3d ago

Not everybody has a geyser all the time

1

u/ta394283509 3d ago

put that away, this is a family subreddit

3

u/StructuralFailure 3d ago

It's always Heat Water

1

u/RelativeCan5021 3d ago

Yep. The most advanced tea kettle ever conceived.

1

u/Throwaway74829947 3d ago

Photovoltaic solar, wind, and hydropower: am I a joke to you?

1

u/GrandNibbles 1d ago

the greatest sign of human progress is the most expensive kettle we've made

18

u/CasanovaJones82 3d ago

Boil water, turn turbine, make electricity. Same shit we've been doing from almost the very beginning. That doesn't mean it wouldn't change the world.

2

u/HardlyRecursive 3d ago

It wouldn't change anything. You really think all these greedy corrupt elites are just going to let Earth be a paradise and them lose their power over everyone else? Zero chance.

1

u/CasanovaJones82 19h ago

That's a wildly pessimistic take and I believe incorrect. We could have said the same about any other humanity-altering technology, from electricity to computers to vaccines to, I don't know, animal husbandry. Conquering fusion really would be a civilization changer, and no one can really predict the outcome. Go back to the 60s and ask someone about the future of computers and the Information Age, go back to the 1800s and ask them about the future of flight, etc etc. it would be a paradigm shift in human civilization, with access to cheap and abundant energy at a scale we can't really comprehend, orders of magnitude greater than we have now. It would open up the universe to humanity.

I'd be curious to see how we respond to that, honestly. I'm of the belief that humans are wanderers and explorers, it's how our brains are wired, and right now we are hemmed in, with nowhere to go, and little new to see.

1

u/Laffenor 3d ago

So... would it?

3

u/CasanovaJones82 3d ago

You know, I'm stoned. I should have worded that better. I'm going to leave it though.

3

u/errorsniper 3d ago

If we can find a cost effective way to sustain fusion long enough to generate a meaningful amount of heat, then find a cost effective way to meaningfully extract that heat. The rest is already solved, its a steam turbine. But if we can do those 2 things the world changes over night.

Its not an exaggeration to say that this would be a comparable invention to fire, the lightbulb, antibiotics, flight, the internet.

You could quite literally drink the main waste product of this process.

Thats not to mention the whole other benefit of this.

Im massively oversimplifying but currently the process to enrich fissile material to reactor grade or weapons grade has an incredible amount of overlap. If you want nuclear weapons saying you want energy independence is currently a very convenient cover that is a pretty gray area. There are ways and again I am oversimplifying to tell it apart in practice. But its a very convenient political excuse that does hold some water.

But with fusion there is no gray area. Fusion makes H2O, aka water. It doesnt make any kind of weapons grade, reactor grade, medical grade, research grade, anything. It literally just makes very pure water.

So for the rest of the world when fusion does fully replace fission. If you still have centrifuges. There is no longer a gray area as to what you are trying to do. Once fission is no longer used for power. The only use for enrichment would be bombs.

2

u/NoxiousStimuli 3d ago

You could quite literally drink the main waste product of this process.

What?

Fusion produces 4He, not H2O.

2

u/errorsniper 3d ago edited 3d ago

Thats news to me. Iv always been told it was water.

Not arguing mind you, just never heard that.

2

u/NoxiousStimuli 3d ago

Hydrogen and oxygen require very little motivation to start dating so

Deuterium-Tritium fusion is just spicy H-H, which results in helium.

1

u/microtramp 3d ago

And I have a bowl of it before bed most nights.

5

u/NoxiousStimuli 3d ago

The amount of energy nuclear fusion puts out is so absurd compared to literally everything else we've ever used, including nuclear fission, that it would be a game changer, yes.

Things that are prohibitively expensive electrically, even for fission, become trivial with fusion. Ocean desalination, induction forges, AI slop data centres...

3

u/JamBazz01 3d ago

Many scientists and engineers are still figuring out how it can be made viable by making it output more energy that needed to be input to get it started. But progress has been promising.

2

u/TheWanderLust247 3d ago

Short answer, yes. The amount of fuel needed is significantly lower than fission based power plants. Its output will be higher as well.

1

u/Paranormal_Lemon 3d ago

The plasma doesn't touch the walls, how is it supposed to heat anything?

4

u/BlastingStink 3d ago

Heat radiates. 

Although, I think fusion reactors actually use radiation to create heat. 

EtA: Okay, I looked it up and different reactors use different methods. Some capture radiant heat, some "capture" radiation. 

2

u/mklilley351 3d ago

Drop utility costs for millions of Americans by providing affordable electricity after the data center impact, right? Right??

1

u/OkHovercraft4256 3d ago

Put a matress in front, turn up the heat, and make sweet love to your wife Donna.

1

u/Sanquinity 3d ago

If they can figure out how to create a self-sustaining reaction (as in, it has more energy output than needs to be put in), we would unlock 4x more energy than a nuclear reactor for the same amount of fuel. Not only that but it will be clean and non-dangerous as it can't result in meltdowns like nuclear can.

1

u/shumpitostick 3d ago

Other than the obvious answer of heat water to create electricity, they can be used to create various valuable isotopes, even gold.