Then we should not be discussing them or whether they work, just technical detail.
An article on engineering the beam tube or on how the control software or embedded systems were developed would be appropriate for here - and as dang said the point is to avoid all topics which might offend people and turn political.
Relativity was banned in China for decades because Einstein was considered a counterrevolutionary. All science is political, if you choose to view it as such.
> and as dang said the point is to avoid all topics which might offend people and turn political
This is an interesting example of 'seeing what isn't there'.
If you read dang's post[0] again you won't see mention of offence or instruction to avoid topics that might turn political.
You've erroneously extrapolated that from a pretty egregious misinterpretation of what was said.
In fact, with regards to 'topics that might turn political', the instruction was explicitly to flag threads within the topic and not the topic itself.
With regards to offence, dang never mentioned the word. Instead the focus was very much on promoting civility and avoiding the 'primitive brain'. The intent was nicely summed up in this sentence:
> The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control.
See, it's not about offence, it's about promoting intelligent discourse. You've added the offence angle yourself because of what you personally think offence to be in this context, but it wasn't part of the original intent of dangs post and in fact it's at best a secondary or tertiary consideration to the primary one of keeping HN a civil and intellectually stimulating place.
It's not something that will happen tomorrow, but it's an incredibly exciting time for nuclear fusion, with W 7-X officially competing with France's ITER tokamak reactor - both of which have been able to trap plasma for long enough for fusion to occur.
ITER hasn't been built yet and although it is located in France it is an international project. Errors like this make me wonder about the quality of the whole article.
I saw this on Phys.org 2 days prior, but I think it's somewhat of a given that these science news sites are for all intents and purposes content farms - their primary utility is for surfacing interesting bits that you can do your own followup/research on. To their credit, they do link to the original open access report.
I saw this show up a few days ago as well. What's nice is that the original Nature Communications submissions is open access: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13493
There's a bunch more interesting visualization of what's going on, so worth a click if you want to see more.
One meta detail that's particularly interesting to me is that this paper was originally submitted back in March:
Received: 22 March 2016
Accepted: 07 October 2016
Published online: 30 November 2016
So that's about an 6 months before it was accepted and about 8 months before it was widely disseminated, make me think about the implications.
Also, as a point of reference, the paper was submitted about a month and a half after the original live stream for "first hydrogen" (OP-1) February 3, 2016 - I believe they ran about a month of test runs, and no doubt started crunch numbers immediately after the first run.
>And it produces no radioactive waste or other byproducts.
Well, not true. It's just that the waste it does produce is relatively alright, and becomes inert again within a century - as opposed to a few hundred thousand years.
The problem with this claim is that (generally speaking) material with a short half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about anything around it. Something that decays to one tenth of a percent of original mass over a century has a half-life of ten years. You don't want that anywhere around you, and a containment leak will be ugly.
> material with a short half-life is very "hot" and will kill just about anything around it [...] You don't want that anywhere around you, and a containment leak will be ugly.
This description fits a huge number of chemical industrial reagents used in factories worldwide. Being able to seal it in a barrel and render it harmless by submerging it in a pool for a few decades (which is well inside the operational lifetime of the reactor) are trivial challenges both compared to the usual cleanup problems at Superfund sites and compared to the problem of storing nuclear waste with half lives in the hundreds or thousands of years.
In my student days I went to a talk from one of the scientists working on the Taurus in Oxfordshire (I think he went to the French project soon after) and they were having major problems finding materials that could withstand the heat and radiation produced. He described it as a machine that produced tons of melted and irradiated beryllium.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 74.7 ms ] threadSorry, but gotta flag.
An article on engineering the beam tube or on how the control software or embedded systems were developed would be appropriate for here - and as dang said the point is to avoid all topics which might offend people and turn political.
Relativity was banned in China for decades because Einstein was considered a counterrevolutionary. All science is political, if you choose to view it as such.
This is an interesting example of 'seeing what isn't there'.
If you read dang's post[0] again you won't see mention of offence or instruction to avoid topics that might turn political.
You've erroneously extrapolated that from a pretty egregious misinterpretation of what was said.
In fact, with regards to 'topics that might turn political', the instruction was explicitly to flag threads within the topic and not the topic itself.
With regards to offence, dang never mentioned the word. Instead the focus was very much on promoting civility and avoiding the 'primitive brain'. The intent was nicely summed up in this sentence:
> The values of Hacker News are intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. Those things are lost when political emotions seize control.
See, it's not about offence, it's about promoting intelligent discourse. You've added the offence angle yourself because of what you personally think offence to be in this context, but it wasn't part of the original intent of dangs post and in fact it's at best a secondary or tertiary consideration to the primary one of keeping HN a civil and intellectually stimulating place.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
"This is political" => Physics ?
"Many do not believe fusion to work" => also in the Sun?
"this could turn into a flame war about fossil fuels" => not unless someone wants to start one, I get paid Koch shills have to keep busy.
But it's because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404
They just verified that the machine generates the magnetic field that the designers intended.
That's great, worth reading about for sure, but it is not "really works" in the sense of it's about to power Berlin.
ITER hasn't been built yet and although it is located in France it is an international project. Errors like this make me wonder about the quality of the whole article.
There's a bunch more interesting visualization of what's going on, so worth a click if you want to see more.
One meta detail that's particularly interesting to me is that this paper was originally submitted back in March:
So that's about an 6 months before it was accepted and about 8 months before it was widely disseminated, make me think about the implications.Also, as a point of reference, the paper was submitted about a month and a half after the original live stream for "first hydrogen" (OP-1) February 3, 2016 - I believe they ran about a month of test runs, and no doubt started crunch numbers immediately after the first run.
Well, not true. It's just that the waste it does produce is relatively alright, and becomes inert again within a century - as opposed to a few hundred thousand years.
This description fits a huge number of chemical industrial reagents used in factories worldwide. Being able to seal it in a barrel and render it harmless by submerging it in a pool for a few decades (which is well inside the operational lifetime of the reactor) are trivial challenges both compared to the usual cleanup problems at Superfund sites and compared to the problem of storing nuclear waste with half lives in the hundreds or thousands of years.
Enlightening (german) podcast about the topic with some of the researchers: https://alternativlos.org/36/