Chinese plasma reactor

[HampusK]

The Chinese are experimenting with their own Plasma Reactor,


https://www.livescience.com/planet-eart ... 00-seconds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwUjwVo ... annel=WION

Looks similar to “The SAFIRE projects reactor” albeit with a higher budget?

Interesting times…

[Roy]

PrOBLEM ONE is trusting the truthfulness of the (communist) Chinese reports.

PROBLEM TWO is how the energy taken off is converted into usable form. Fusion reactors, like nuclear reactors, will boil down [you should pardon the pun] to converting heat to steam, that then drives turbines that turn electrical generators, producing electricity to keep the whole thing going with a surplus to sell.
The startup current is external, a vulnerability I suppose.

[BeAChooser]

The Chinese are experimenting with their own Plasma Reactor,
... snip ...
Looks similar to “The SAFIRE projects reactor” albeit with a higher budget?

No, the Chinese EAST reactor is not at all like the Safire project. EAST is a tokamak, just like ITER, JET, and so many other experimental fusion reactors that have made headlines over the years. A tokamak heats and confines plasma in a donut shaped chamber using magnetic fields. These fields compress the gases to heat and create plasma. The Safire reactor is nothing at all like a tokamak. In its reaction chamber, there’s an anode that is meant to represent the sun (shaped like a ball) in a generally negatively charged environment which they get from a set of cathodes. There are no magnets. Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS6gkrZXuaQ

[JanPalmer]

Let the French and Chinese engineers tinker away with their billion-dollar fusion contraptions, built on the rather charming assumption that the Sun is powered by a man-made nuclear reactor at its core. It’s an adorable thought, but let’s be honest: fusion reactors like those don’t actually exist anywhere in nature. It’s a bit like trying to build a campfire by replicating the center of a star, only with more bureaucracy and superconducting magnets.

The plan is simple—almost charmingly so. First, pour in colossal amounts of electricity, preferably from old-fashioned nuclear fission plants (you know, the ones that actually work), to heat the reactor core to temperatures hot enough to make the Devil sweat. Then, just coax a few shy deuterium atoms into fusing into helium. Voilà! Endless, clean energy for centuries to come. All it takes is a limitless supply of seawater and the not-so-trivial trick of holding a writhing, superheated plasma donut in place using magnetic fields generated by electric currents that behave like caffeinated snakes.

Projects like ITER, JET, and EAST are engineering marvels in the same way a Rube Goldberg machine is: complex, expensive, and unlikely to do anything useful. Remember the Superconducting Supercollider? Scrapped for being too costly. These shiny fusion dreams are marching proudly down the same path—toward a budgetary black hole.

And let’s not forget the inevitable byproduct of this hypothetical fusion bonanza: helium. Lots and lots of helium. It’ll drift off into the upper atmosphere, giggling at our efforts. One can only wonder: What exactly are we going to do with all that noble gas? Fill party balloons? Start a voice modulation industry?

Until physicists come to terms with the actual nature of mass and energy—and maybe give the electric force the credit it deserves for running the cosmos—we’ll keep tossing public funds into this thermonuclear wishing well, hoping that fusion will magically stop being 30 years away... for the first time since 1950.

[seasmith]

JanPalmer wrote:

"Projects like ITER, JET, and EAST are engineering marvels in the same way a Rube Goldberg machine is: complex, expensive, and unlikely to do anything useful. Remember the Superconducting Supercollider?
..."

[Sun Friend]

Then there's Mark LeClair's work tapping the zero-point field:

https://www.rexresearch.com/leclair/leclair.htm

[joabel1971]

Then there's Mark LeClair's work tapping the zero-point field:

https://www.rexresearch.com/leclair/leclair.htm

Rediculous. It's becoming more obvious that the "zero-point reference" is simply the places in the universe where no charge exists. So, if cosmic web filaments are truly plasma instead of dark matter - then zero-point is outside those filaments (true empty space).