from Hacker News

HH70, the first high-temperature superconducting Tokamak achieves first plasma

by zer0tonin on 6/22/24, 8:01 PM with 261 comments

• by themgt on 6/22/24, 9:32 PM

  Insane factoid (post from Feb 27, 2022) ... this was funded by a Chinese gaming company and built in 2 years for relative pennies??:

  MiHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, has led a $65m funding round in Shanghai based Energy Singularity which is a company involved in nuclear fusion technology, tokamak devices and operational control systems.

  The company plans to build its own Tokamak device by 2024.

  https://x.com/ZhugeEX/status/1497957735337443331

• by physicistphil on 6/22/24, 10:35 PM

  Tokamak energy did this back in 2015[1,2] (the article is wrong)

  [1]: https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us/#trackrecord

  [2]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.201...

• by londons_explore on 6/22/24, 8:49 PM

  When talking about the price of energy produced by fusion, various estimates put it at 'probably about the same as nuclear fission, maybe a bit higher, but it won't have the proliferation risk/contamination risk of fission'.

  However, because the tech was '50 years away', it never made sense for private sector investors, so most investment was from governments.

  However, with solar and wind now far cheaper than nuclear due to no need for massive capital investments in concrete and steel upfront many years before production starts, does it even make sense for governments to go down this route?

• by ilaksh on 6/22/24, 8:30 PM

  Dumb question, but is the basic idea that you need to harvest more heat energy from the plasma than is needed to maintain the magnetic field?

  Also, very dumb question but the plasma means that fusion is actually occuring, right?

  And does anyone know how this one collects the heat and converts it into electricity or whatever?

  Or any other fusion device, how does it actually collect or output energy from the fusion. And how much do they make, and how far off is that from matching the input power?

  Maybe it was some protons escaping from the plasma and hearing something external or something.

• by convolvatron on 6/22/24, 8:15 PM

  "HH70 has independent intellectual property rights, with a localization rate exceeding 96%."

  what...does that mean?

• by Havoc on 6/23/24, 1:28 AM

  Silly question but say fusion works and we use massive amounts of it. Wouldn’t that increase global temps?

• by upmind on 6/22/24, 10:26 PM

  For someone who doesn't know much about physics, what significance does this have?

• by __experiment__ on 6/22/24, 11:36 PM

  I'm brave enough to remember LK99

  does anyone know how this differ from outside temperature?

• by baq on 6/22/24, 8:32 PM

  If this isn't a Sputnik and/or an Apollo 11-level wake up call to the western leaders I don't know what has any chance of working.

• by ab5tract on 6/22/24, 8:13 PM

  And here’s why it’s irrelevant and inconsequential…