What's the Register's unit of energy these days? Greg's Steakbake warmed from fridge to eating temperature?

I believe that this is the official list.

[1]https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

[1] https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

So energy would be Lg 2 Badger / s 2 and power would be Lg 2 Badger / s 3 .

I don't see the larger units such as swimming pools, double decker buses and Wembley Stadiums.

"... JET has continued to demonstrate the ability of scientists to work together even if lawmakers won't."

Are we sure about that? The director general is a Bigot.

But it's hardly the Mr Fusion unit I need to power my flying time car.

I'd be satisfied if it could reliably power my coffee maker, hopefully before I am no longer able to drink coffee.

Sadly, current technology seems to be indicating that if you want it running long term, ie more than 5 seconds, it needs to be much, much bigger. Mr Fusion looks unpossible with what we know now.

Unless there's multiple breakthroughs, I don't think we'll see super-cooled magnets creating containment fields for 100 million C plasma in a portable unit very soon.

Unless there's multiple breakthroughs, I don't think we'll see super-cooled magnets creating containment fields for 100 million C plasma in a portable unit very soon.

Methinks breakthroughs are the last thing one wants in a plasma containment field?

"The construction of a prototype fusion energy plant, producing net energy, is expected to be complete in the 2040 timeframe"

That's cutting it a bit fine if we're going to be carbon neutral by 2050.

Wouldn't it be funny if we finally get fusion working and everybody goes, "Nah, we've got it covered. Wind. Solar. Hydro. Tidal. Geothermal. HV lines from the Sahara, lots of batteries and these fission reactors we're locked into paying for to 2099. We don't actually need fusion now. Thanks, all the same..."

Lookup, the answer's staring you in the face (weather permitting)!

Much as to appreciate there's a lot of clever engineering and science going into this, you do have to wonder if it will be some completely different solution which eventually delivers practical fusion or other power solutions make it irrelevant?

Lookup, the answer's staring you in the face (weather permitting)!

I am interested in your birds as power plants proposal and would like to know more!

Oh, good grief!

Surely, on an IT site, you should know they are actually referring to power from the "cloud" :-)

>weather permitting

I take it you don't live in the UK?

I think there is a chance of this, and there maybe some competition with newer generation fission reactors, but I suspect if this gets done, we will find a way to use the energy - maybe CO2 sequestration plants!

There are lots of situations where fusion will make more sense than the alternatives, plus it might allow us to suck more of that CO2 back in.

While I laud your optimism for carbon neutrality. I reckon fusion will be important for next gen space travel. In interstellar space the only viable power source is one which travels with you. Fission reactors will only last a few decades. So the thing that powers propulsion and life support has to be fusion using interstellar hydrogen. Maybe not the original problem the tokamak was envisaged to solve. But there are plenty of examples of discoveries and technologies that ended up being used for completely different purposes from that which they were originally conceived for. The internet being a prime example.

I'm all for fusion energy research, very worthwhile even if results are always 50 years in the future. But let's not pretend it is going to be a real solution to climate change, which we must fix far earlier than by 2050, if we want to avoid a Mad Max scenario in a few decades.

So yes, even in the best case (or even a tolerable case), it is going to be Wind, Solar, ... and fusion is just a cherry on the top, if it ever works.

> we want to avoid a Mad Max scenario in a few decades.

Which IPCC RPC model is that?

( You aren't a science denier, are you? )

Wind and solar are absolutely the worst case. Neither produce affordable, reliable power. The current energy crisis demonstrates this, so low wind, windmills don't spin, so more gas needed to run proper turbines. And the solution according to Harrabin, the Bbc's chief luddite is to reward failure and throw even more money at the 'renewables' lobby.

As for 2050, that's just marketing. There's no scientific basis behind that date. Avoiding a Mad Max future will be easier. In the UK, the last V8 is due to be sold in 2035, at which point the Mad Max franchise will be re-imagined as the Last Cybertruck. Or possibly the first given production delays. But kinda fun to re-imagine Mad Max and other post-apocalyptic tales in an EV future.

At this rate, commercial fusion power could be as little as 30 years away.

it always has been

Let's assume humans manage to get fusion to work and we generate electricity from its heat - I wonder if we find 50 years after that the next problem we have is too much heat which we cannot get rid of - leading to a slightly different type of global warming.... (all heat engines generate excess heat)

Maybe we will need huge radiators which disperse the heat at into space.

I'm still excited about fusion.

There is active development of systems to radiate excess heat into outer space using infrared wavelengths between 8 and 13 micrometres where the atmosphere is most transparent.

Used as a roofing material it could absorb solar energy and radiate it back out to into the space, reducing the need for air conditioning.

May also be handy for space craft that have trouble getting rid of excess heat.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03911-8

Even if you get more than you put in it could still require absolutely shed loads of lithium to keep it going for relatively little power out and there's no recycling the lithium.

Big step forward though, finally looks like it might be plausible.

Can we have some detail on Power In vs Power Out please? This is the crucial piece, not "we've doubled the output and done it for longer".

From the article and the [1]BBC article , it's a proof of concept for the new internal plating to be used at ITER. They were limited to a max of 5 seconds run time because their magnets don't have the internal cooling that the much larger ITER will use. It's also a matter of scale, which they say have evidence for to go net positive.

From the Beeb article:

" But there is solid evidence that this deficit can be overcome in the future as the plasmas are scaled up. ITER's toroidal vessel volume will be 10 times that of JET. It's hoped the French lab will get to breakeven. The commercial power plants that come after should then show a net gain that could be fed into electricity grids. "

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60312633

A practical fusion generator will have to achieve Q > 1, but it will also have to achieve it at high powers for long periods. There is no one "crucial piece".

Achieving Q > 1 was not the aim of this experiment - JET is too small, so it loses heat fast.

They have two 500MW fly-wheels to run the experiment, so P-in vs P-out isn't worth measuring yet...

To be fair though, they need to run it bigger and longer, which JET can't do. 5 seconds is roughly the point where the electromagnets overheat - ITER is going to use a larger torus and supercooled electromagnets.

JET has pretty much run to its limits, but has proven the longevity of the burn.

The energy released - 59 megajoules - is equivalent to 14kg of TNT (The Guardian) or 60 kettle's worth of water (BBC). Both these are correct.

Clearly a kilogram of TNT is a lot less exciting than I thought.

Clearly you are not a petrolhead with a need for speed :-)

I'm also disappointed to discover that I could only boil 4 kettles with a kg of TNT. I'd been managing to boil about 3 kettles, sometimes 3 with an extra mug, and wondered why I was going so far wrong...

Sky News says "enough to power around 10,000 homes". I'm not sure how they're going to manage with only 60 kettles between them. I can imagine the headlines now: "Fusion Power Causes National Tea Crisis".

TNT is old hat. Not very energetic.

Why 2040? Seriously they just reverse engineering and then building the reactor that powers that UAP recovered in the '40s and making it a little bigger, just so they can re-flog us the green dream?

Little but little step by step....... disclosure is coming....

If they recovered it, it's not a UFO.

(No, I won't use UAP when talking about likely UFOs, or at least "things" which appear to be objects rather than wisps of swamp gas. UAP is just the new "fad" for a term with a much wider application than the more specific "traditional" UFO.)

The UFO "that crashed at Roswell" is now just a UO.

I was fortunate enough to visit JET and walk around the tokamak doughnut and see the quartz window thru which they fired the laser to "ignite the plasma". They said at the time that Fusion would be 50 years away.

This was back in 1985.

Hopefully these new coatings and much more powerful magnets and also better computing control will help keep it on track.

Ah, perhaps they should ape Marvel's Doctor Octopus and control the fusion process with robotic arms and most important of all, build it in a major population zone :D

I visited there in 81 and worked there as a placement student in 84.

It was a fascinating place, more like a university than a workplace, but it is hard to realize that some people have worked their entire life to get to this point

Go to all the top engineers in their outfit and find out what is needed to speed things along. I am utterly convinced that this is the only solution to infinite demand, and it cannot come quickly enough.

10MW isn't nearly industrial scale. Power plants (e.g. the EPR) work at about the GW level.

Plus - industrial plants run 24/7. If it's taken 25 years to double the performance, we're looking at 10 sec operation in 2047 !

There may be fantastic work being done at JET, but this press release is seriously underwhelming.

this is an engineering proof of concept. Once the engineering has been certified, in theory scaling up should be less of a challenge. The important thing is that theory has been proved so another obstacle has been removed to a full scale power station prototype.

Once that has been proved the designs can be optimized and scaled

This is a signpost not the final destination

Pure hand-waving. What's been proven ? In particular what's been proven now, compared with whatever was proven at the 50% lower performance 25 years ago ? Please do tell.

Certified !? We're a long long way from any certifications.