this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (4 children)

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first commercially-funded (i.e., non-government) nuclear fusion reactor. Notable investors are MiHoYo (developers of Genshin Impact), Nio (Chinese EV company), and Sequoia Capital...

[–] [email protected] 41 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's the CCP. You can't have a non government funded company.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

In your guys opinion, is that good or bad? Privately funded would mean proprietary & profit driven implementation for such a crucial technology (if successful). I personally don't like it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The CPC still maintains a lot of influence over companies even when they're getting their funding from private industry as part of their "politics in command" strategy for controlling market forces. We'll see how it plays out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Yep, if they need to disappear a CEO, no matter how big, they can and have done so in the past.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago

Won't somebody think of the CEOs!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

i don't know why you got a downvote, disappearinga CEO should be the most popular thing the ccp does

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Not to an Amerikan cosplay-capitalist lmfao. (I call them cosplay-capitalists because not a one actually owns capital; they just lap at the scraps that fall on the low-quarters of the c-suites they worship.)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

The billionaires deserve it tbh

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Any path that takes us to unlimited clean energy is the right one IMO. We could always do a little espionage and make our own domestic fusion drive eventually.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t mind profit driven because I’m confident that free markets are good for everybody.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No??

I've supported engineering at several privately funded nuclear fusion companies, though all of them, this Chinese company included, are building a product out of public school research.

Off the top of my head there's:

  • CFS
  • TAE technologies
  • Thea
  • Zap Energy

And several more...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Building, or built? Either way, maybe these companies will come out with a better design than Tokamak, but until then they're literally just research ventures because the vast majority of investment at actually scaling fusion is happening for Tokamak tractors.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Built, physically operational reactors that operate as close to Q=1 as they can, with all the diagnostics included.

The diagnostics are very important, as plasma instabilities have been, and continue to be, the critical issue preventing anything useful coming out of our decades of fusion reactor design. All these companies are sharing data on overcoming plasma instability issues, with multiple geometries aimed at evaluating how plasma responds to different inputs in different environments. We're all trying to understand how to control and compress something far too hot to physically touch.

@[email protected] scaling fusion isn't a trivial problem, and saying it like it is indicates a lack of background knowledge. This isn't a competition between companies (no matter what our CEOs suggest), as we in industry quietly all agree that any of us that cracks this unchains humanity from the solar system. Because government funding has unfortunately sucked so much ass, we're sort of using private money to get the basic research done. We'd be so much farther ahead otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

It is not the first commercially funded fusion reactor even assuming this qualified.

https://www.energystartups.org/top/fusion-energy/

Not hard to find a bunch.