It's charming that the article uses Fahrenheit as a scientific temperature scale, perhaps they should adopt bananas for distance in scientific reports too.
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how many football fields is this
I want to see a demo where they approach it with all the trepidation and seriousness that such an advancement deserves, and pull out a perfectly golden toasted marshmallow.
all the comments are about the temperature units
think of the crypto mining potential!
Every time a headline comes out of China reporting major progress in fusion power generation I'm like
"God, please."
I feel like in the millions of degrees it is fine to use america numbers. Seeing it in C isn't gonna give anyone a more accurate understanding.
Or we could use what everyone else uses
At 160 million we may as well just be using kelivn.
Have you considered that it's never okay to use America anything including numbers?
Fahrenheit does have a wider range of whole numbers to express the temperatures in our daily climate. Unfortunately the digital thermostats I had for years, even one in Shanghai, would step in 0.5 deg increments regardless of it being in F or C. I assume it was using K internally throughout the system, so keeping it in F meant more granularity (68, 68.5, 69 being more specific temps than 20, 20.5, 21 could dial in). And it was noticeable enough to where I'd keep it in F (except one time when I was sick and wanted in between the two possible F setpoints).
You can divide by two and be roughly correct (÷1.8 even moreso). The offset is negligible.
The 1,000-second mark is considered a critical threshold in fusion research. Sustaining plasma for such extended durations is essential for demonstrating the feasibility of operating fusion reactors.
More doubling the previous record is impressive, so I'm not being cynical, but what's special about 1000 seconds? It's not as if the reactor achieved ignition.
This includes providing a clean and abundant energy source to address global energy demands and enabling ambitious endeavors such as deep-space exploration.
I hate how people about Fusion as if it is guaranteed to be some silver bullet to human energy problems. Fusion reactors use pretty exotic materials to build and are very large. And even when the first commercially viable fusion reactor goes online, it will still take a long time for fusion reactors to spread, since solar is so cheap and fossi fuels have an entrenched political regime behind them. Not to mention getting fusion to the global majority will be much harder than getting them solar energy.
As Song Yuntao, director of the Institute of Plasma Physics, emphasized, “Fusion reactions need to reach the order of thousands of seconds to sustain themselves. The latest record marks the first time humanity has simulated conditions necessary for operating fusion reactors in an experimental setup.”
So getting to ignition is based on sustaining the reaction for long enough? Or by "sustain" commercial sustenance is meant?


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