I just can’t trust innovations and discoveries coming from China, I’m excited, but I’ll hold my breath until it’s been replicated by a less untrustworthy source
Who knows, commercial fusion power might actually be less than 50 years away now. LOL.
Edit: Do keep in mind that this stuff doesn’t have to be the efficiency of the Sun because the Sun is actually quite inefficient and takes millions of years for the heat to get from the core where it is fused out into the galaxy. They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun and more efficient.
They have to be hotter than the temperature of the Sun
Well they don’t strictly speaking have to but to get fusion you need a combination of pressure and temperature and increasing temperature is way easier than increasing pressure if you don’t happen to have the gravity of the sun to help you out. Compressing things with magnetic fields isn’t exactly easy.
Efficiency in a fusion reactor would be how much of the fusion energy is captured, then how much of it you need to keep the fusion going, everything from plasma heating to cooling down the coils. Fuel costs are very small in comparison to everything else so being a bit wasteful isn’t actually that bad if it doesn’t make the reactor otherwise more expensive.
What’s much more important is to be economical: All the currently-existing reactors are research reactors, they don’t care about operating costs, what the Max Planck people are currently figuring out is exactly that kind of stuff, “do we use a cheap material for the diverters and exchange them regularly, or do we use something fancy and service the reactor less often”: That’s an economical question, one that makes the reactor cheaper to operate so the overall price per kWh is lower. They’re planning on having the first commercial prototype up and running in the early 2030s. If they can achieve per kWh fuel and operating costs lower than gas they’ve won, even though levelised costs (that is, including construction of the plant amortised over time) will definitely still need lowering. Can’t exactly buy superconducting coils off the shelf right now, least of all in those odd shapes that stellerators use.
As a type 1 diabetic with a type 2 family member I want to be excited but I cannot for the life of me be suspicious, what are the talking about with the kidney. I mean maybe I’m missing something I only have diabetes idk everything about it
Diabetes can damage the kidneys, so presumably the patient got a kidney transplant. But yeah, looks like the journalist is getting the causation the wrong way round, I can’t think of why a kidney transplant would recover pancreatic islet function.
A common scam is to attribute medical miracles to stem cells - Similar to the cloning scandal from Korea - Because they know other countries legally CAN’T test the findings to either prove or discredit. They do this to fleece foreign institutions out of money and prestige.
Don’t dismiss it based on that criteria. It’s a particular type of study called a case study where they go more in-depth on a particular case or set of cases. Of course it should be complemented by other types of studies, but that’s just true of science in general. The danger, of course, is when laymen and journalists get excited over something like a case study and start spreading bad advice.
The fact you accept that 98% statistic with total credulity is telling. The Ceaușescu government in Romania also claimed similar levels of support. So does Putin. What’s the one thing they have in common?
Something isn’t right with this article. I’m suspect:
Type 1 is where your islet cells die off and you lose insulin production. Type 2 means your insulin production is fine, but your cells are resistant to the insulin. A Type 2 should have plenty of islet cells so adding more doesn’t seem like it would do anything. Your body should regulate those cells to output the same amount of insulin as before.
This same treatment has been done in Type 1s already. It’s not new. The problem is their body eventually kills off the transplanted cells and you have to do it again. Plus, you have to take immune suppressing drugs forever.
“Despite a kidney transplant, his pancreas still doesn’t produce insulin.” - This is just nonsense.
Type 2 can have a reduced insulin production, as well as the insulin resistance. In fact, insulin resistance can put increased demand on production and exhaust the producing islet cells.
Since type 2 is not an immune system disease, in that case there’s no need for immune suppressing drugs!
Thanks! I don’t really see anything about this patient’s miraculous recovery in the paper, though.
I haven’t read the entire paper, so I could be being bone-headed enough. It’s good to see some acknowledgement of their work to help support the claims.
If I understood this correctly, we had good data from other studies supporting that this method (probably) works, it’s the actually doing it that is the challenge. And of course one study is just one study.
I’m glad such progress is being made, although I don’t see an actual verifiable report of the impressive claims for this patient. The linked paper doesn’t discuss the report, and no other references to this patient appear to exist from the article.
I’ve read too many truly impressive reports from Chinese researchers this year that I feel extra need to take such reports with a grain of salt. If I had a dollar for every claim that we’ve just made a major advancement in battery technology that will replace lithium-ion from a Chinese university…
It’s a thorium based subcritical reactor. India tried to make something similar, but with some amount of plutonium to start this thing and to not include accelerator. The problem is that accelerator required is large and expensive, and needs to use up some fraction of power produced. As of waste, no heavy actinides are produced, and spiciest fission products have half-life of about 30 years, in particular there’s no plutonium or americium made with half life of 80 ish years and 430ish years respectively. This makes radioactivity drop in 100s of years instead of thousands. These problems can be solved in other ways, for example by using fast breeder reactors, but these are hard to make. So will be massive accelerator required, so i’m not holding my breath
freshly burned fuel is kept at nuclear powerplant spent fuel pool for months to years anyway precisely for this reason. heavy actinides have longer halflifes anyway
As countries look for ways to move away from fossil fuels, nuclear fission technology is poised for a comeback. At COP28 last year, 20 nations decided to triple their nuclear energy capacity in the next 25 years but plans for long-term storage of spent fuel have yet to be drawn up.
Where the alchemists failed, former scientists from CERN have been able to succeed. Using a particle accelerator, the researchers propose using a slightly radioactive element such as thorium and transmuting it into an isotope of uranium.
The technology is the brainchild of Carlo Rubbia, the former director-general of the physics laboratory at CERN.
While Rubbia might have had access to a particle accelerator at his old workplace, nuclear energy plants do not have the same luxuries. Building a particle accelerator near each plant can be quite expensive, considering that CERN spent nearly US$5 billion to deliver the Large Hadron Collider.
The other challenge is the opposition to nuclear technology itself. Interesting Engineering has previously reported how Germany phased off its nuclear power plants. Switzerland, too, has similar plans for its four existing nuclear power production facilities.
According to the Swiss national body, Transmutex’s technology could help reduce the volume of nuclear waste generated by 80 percent and reduce the time it remains radioactive to less than 500 years. More importantly, the technology could also be applied to 99 percent of existing nuclear waste.
Edit: added info below
Links in article:
Finland builds a facility to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years [Ameya Paleja | Jun 01 22 | Interesting Engineering]
I could probably say the same about AI and crypto and mega yachts sure
But healthcare, housing, education, childcare, sustainable green energy, sustainable food production… All of them seem way more important than sending more junk into orbit.
I mean you could say the same thing about the whole entertainment industry, or the whole tech industry, or basically anything else that isn’t directly necessary for human survival.
All of them seem way more important than sending more junk into orbit.
Do you know what actually goes into orbit? Mostly 4 categories: communication satellites (both commercial and governmental), scientific monitoring, ISS support, and military satellites. Every satellite we send into space has a purpose. Without satellites, we don’t get: widespread aerial imagery, accurate weather forecasting, GPS, widespread ecological data, etc.
I ordered my horse out of the stable. The servant didn’t understand me. I went into the stable myself, saddled my horse and mounted it. I heard a trumpet blowing in the distance and asked him what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. He stopped me at the gate and asked: “Where is the Lord riding to?” “I don’t know,” I said, “just away from here, just away from here. Always away from here, that’s the only way I can reach my destination.” “So you know your destination,” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “I told you: ‘Away from here’ - that’s my goal.”
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