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South Korea’s artificial Sun ran for 102 seconds and it could change the future of energy (timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

There's a good reason why it's been talked about since the 60s but never happened:

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago

    IIRC that chart only shows US Government investment / spending. A lot of other countries, such as South Korea, are spending on this and even here in the United States large sums are being spent on it by Venture Capitalists.

    The "actual funding" line is wildly out of date since there's several Fusion Companies that have spent more than that each in the past few years.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I mean, that's certainly some napkin math.

    But $3-9B is pretty cheap by modern corporate standards. Does this mean OpenAI will have a working fusion engine some time in the next ten years?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    If they devoted billions of dollars per year to it and nothing else, maybe.

    Keep in mind that OpenAI still hasn't made any profit, their entire valuation is based on hype that will be exploited to steal money via the ipo, and then the Altar will beg Trump for a bailout to prevent a bankruptcy.

    Altman and Musk both tried to get their companies into Nasdaq and the S&P 500

    They really pushed, because retirement funds are required to buy shares of the the entire index, and if any of the companies in that fund have sudden bankruptcy issues, the government is more likely to step in to save the company. Theoretically, this saves the retirement funds. It never has, but that's how saving the company is sold.

    Anyway the Indexes refused to change their rules so the bailout will have to come from bribing Trump.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    If they spent real money (not paper passing around deals between companies) over a decade and had tens of thousands of scientists and engineers and institutional knowledge and partnerships with academia in order to do it properly, yes they could.

    But we both know they don't have any of those things, so no practically they couldn't.

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