12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Home (2018)

Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by LASR on Friday February 22, 2019 @06:18PM (#19230079)

This is certainly a pretty big deal for a 12 year old. But also, it’s a hobby project that’s been around for decades.

Fusion is something we hear about in the media as being something very hard to achieve. It’s not. Achieving fusion beyond breakeven - so we can generate power from it - now that’s a very hard problem. It takes the combined effort of seven countries and billions of dollars.

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by mikeash on Friday February 22, 2019 @07:15PM (#19230462)

Achieving fusion beyond breakeven isn’t super hard either. It’s far from trivial, but it was figured out almost seventy years ago and produced on an industrial scale. The hard part is doing it both breakeven and in a way that lets you send the power to a city without destroying that city.

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by jodrellblank on Friday February 22, 2019 @09:16PM (#19231158)

it was figured out almost seventy years ago

I've heard of the "young Earth" movement, but "young Sun" is a new one.

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by mikeash on Friday February 22, 2019 @09:34PM (#19231228)

What, you didn’t learn about Eisenhower building the Sun in history class?

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by msre1965 on Saturday February 23, 2019 @02:11PM (#19234967)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by discobean on Friday February 22, 2019 @07:47PM (#19230723)

I'll be ok with it just powering my house

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by redwall_hp on Friday February 22, 2019 @09:09PM (#19231135)

I'd go so far as to say that net positive energy from fusion is a solved problem, because the theoretical portion has been done for decades. The only limitation is refusal to throw money at it, space race or Manhattan Project style, to iron out the engineering problems.

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by iceninenines on Friday February 22, 2019 @07:20PM (#19230505)

???

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Re:12-Year-Old Claims to Have Achieved Nuclear Fusion at Hom... by GuiA on Friday February 22, 2019 @07:47PM (#19230716)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

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