'Star in a Jar’ Fusion Reactor Works and Promises Infinite Energy

space.com

26 points·mrfusion··9 comments

When I read articles like this I always think that supernovas could be some alien civilisation where someone's crazy Uncle Fred is messing around in his mother's basement and his last words were 'And starting test #1. Now...'.

Haha, never thought of it like that. Brilliant.

We've been able to fuse deuterium into helium for decades. What makes this different? If they're implying that they were able to get the fusion reaction to break even, that would be an incredible breakthrough, but the article doesn't say anything about that.

IIUC, they've been able to create the magnetic field that they intended to create. Using that, they think they can get a fusion reaction to break even.

This is just preliminary validation that the 7-X stellarator is working as designed. This is actually a pretty big step for the project, but that's really it. It's still a research project that may or may not lead to commercialization, just like the other fusion projects.

Interesting to hear about, but not a game changer.

"infinite energy" -- what a crap headline.

For all intents and purposes, it's more energy than we will ever need so it's closer to infinite (conceptually) than finite.

Maybe it's all you'll ever need. I'm going to try to get 1kg moving at c.

On the other hand, our demand for energy will increase with the greater supply (this has happened with oil and coal).

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