If you look at the amount of funding fusion has been receiving up to now, it’s not really surprising that not much progress has happened. If China ends up devoting resources towards making it happen at state level, that’s a whole different game.
15 min would be huge, it’s going to be really interesting to see what this all looks like in a few years. Honestly, China cracking fusion would be the real new Sputnik moment for the world.
It’s just going to be a symbolic way for the US to assert dominance over Europe. The point here is to humiliate the EU.
Absolutely, annexing Greenland is also a disciplinary action for Europe. It’s basically the US telling Europeans that the US does whatever it wants and they’re just going to have to suck it up. The EU is basically trapped now because they rely entirely on the US military protection, and now they have strong and angry Russia on their border. The current European leadership worked themselves into a frenzy about Russia, and they don’t have any path towards reconciliation now. So, they basically need to keep the US in at all costs, and they will endure any humiliation to do that.
The pattern with Trump has been to launch limited, flashy military actions like strikes on Yemen, Iran, and the kidnapping in Venezuela. These moves keep the news cycle going without deep commitment. Occupying Greenland fits this model perfectly. It’s low risk with nobody likely to fight back, and Europeans are too diplomatically constrained to do anything about it.
The fact that despair island thinks they can take on China in general is absolutely hilarious. They can’t even produce steel on their own at this point.
They have achieved over a minute of sustained firing now. I personally, highly doubt that the problems are unsolvable, it’s just a matter of doing sustained investment in the tech which hasn’t really been done at this scale before. Meanwhile, the solution to plasma control problem is AI, Chinese team successfully developed a system that can do early detection of disruptions.
It’s both access to abundant energy and far higher efficiency in producing energy. Fusion is more energy-dense and efficient than fission because it converts a larger fraction of its fuel’s mass into energy. This comes down to the mass per nucleon curve which acts like an energy valley. In fission, heavy elements like uranium split into lighter ones, moving slightly downhill on the curve and converting about 0.1% of mass into energy. In fusion, light nuclei like hydrogen isotopes combine to form helium, which is much farther down the valley wall. This steeper drop allows fusion to convert up to 0.7% of mass into energy. So, gram for gram, fusion fuel can release roughly seven times more energy than fission fuel.
https://www.nsta.org/blog/focus-physics-how-e-mc2-helps-us-understand-nuclear-fission-and-fusion
yeah that too
Pretty much, the proof that China is advancing faster lies in catching up to the west in the first place.
I imagine money laundering is the appeal here.
The rate of technological progress in China is absolutely mind boggling, renewables, EVs, chips, robotics, etc. All of these things are advancing at a breakneck pace, and all of them are self reinforcing. Technology begets technology, and I expect that we’ll see China visibly pull ahead of the west in every front in the coming years.
given that they’ve been provably cooked since Biden admin days, I’d say no
I’m guessing Russia sees driving a wedge between the US and Europe as being more important than retaliation. Almost certain this will push Russia closer to China though, and China will need Russian oil even more with the US doing piracy on the high seas.
Indeed, we can see how different constraints are shaping the evolution of the tool within each society.
on Mastodon and Telegram mostly
I think there are going to be real tangible effects resulting from breakdown of statistics collections. Not that the US does much planning, but at this point it’s going to be all but impossible.