635
Nuclear fusion reaction releases almost twice the energy put in
(www.newscientist.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
635 points (96.1% liked)
News
23296 readers
3364 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's so refreshing to see an article at least mention the way these tests are measured are based on the energy just in the laser itself and not the total energy used.
I agree it's good that the article is not hyping up the idea that the world will now definitely be saved by fusion and so we can all therefore go on consuming all the energy we want.
There are still some sloppy things about the article that disappoint me though...
They seem to be implying that 500 TW is obviously much larger than 2.1 MJ... but without knowing how long the 500 TW is required for, this comparison is meaningless.
They imply that using more power than available from the grid is infeasible, but it evidently isn't as they've done it multiple times - presumably by charging up local energy storage and releasing it quickly. Scaling this up is obviously a challenge though.
The weird mix of metric prefixes (mega) and standard numbers (trillions) in a single sentence is a bit triggering - that might just be me though.
Electricity stuff is funny because it combines metric and imperial units sometimes to make bastard measurements
Huh? Whatchu talkin bout Willis?
Watt is a Joule per second
Volts, Amps, kWh, MJ... These are all metric.
Sssch don't tell the Americans or they will try to wrangle in BTU in nuclear power plants
WE INVENTED IT AND BUH GAWD, WE WILL MEASURE IT IN MURICA UNITS!
Ignore how nonsensical BTUs are: Gonna shove energy and weight into a single measurement and it changes based on the initial temperature of the water.
Or HVAC uses tons of ice needed to cool something. Euroguys probably don't have air conditioners, just that tilt window technology.
I do like the obscure AWG scale especially 0000
lol tilt windows
Y'all do know what BTU stands for, right?
British Thermal Units. It’s the energy needed to heat 1 lb of water 1 degree F.
The bad part is that no one bothered to set the starting temp of the water so there’s 5 separate standards for what the hell a BTU actually is, which makes it a really bad standard.
In a number of instances where there is not a standard in place already it is not uncommon to see metric measurements mixed with imperial or US customary measurements.
I’m not in any way shape or form claiming that ALL of it is mixed.
However what does actually happen is the a unit of measure might be mixed with a customary one and then that becomes the defacto measurement, you may see wire resistance shown as a mix of Ohms/1000ft.
I am not getting into an argument about the merits of metric, I’m on board, I am with you. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some silly oddballs.
Is their an imperial equivalent to ohm?
It might be the case that imperial resistance is ohm the same as metric. Metric uses ohm as it's constituent with base units of metric, but imperial doesn't abide by rules like that.
If you had to make a imperial equivalent to resistance, it would be a fraction of the resistance of the monarchs finger.
Until we actually electrocute a king there probably won’t be
There's no non metric electrical units except ohms/1000 ft or cross section dimensions, and AWG (and MCM kilo circular mils kcmils) versus mm^2
Why US uses awg with reverse scale instead of diameter is insane
formula: D(AWG) = 0.005·92^((36-AWG)/39) inch
Yeah electricity is weird because Americans use metric for it. And it’s that way because metric predates it
Fun fact: While metric predates our full understanding of electricity, our understanding of electricity played a key role in the definition of the SI units.
As I understand it, the reason the SI unit for mass is kg not g - making it an outlier to my mind - is so that electical engineers could keep volts and amperes as convenient numbers.
Long read: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.07306