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China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds (www.livescience.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

I'd even say that it would make it "easier" to generate elements that are rare on earth for aplication purposes.

The first example already sort of feasible is production (and storage) of Helium.

And if we master (in the far, far future) both fusion and fission, then we can make almost any element "with ease".

Basically we would be able to do what the alchemist dreamed and be able to "turn stones to gold".

But nowadays, one of our "new gold" are rare earth like Neodymium for making magnets

And there are other elements that are even rarer and would have massive applications only if they were little bit more abundant than they are now

Now, again, that would be only true in a far, far future if (and a big if) we can truly master both fusion and fission (what I actually want to mean is that my comment is basically an "hallucination" similar to those on r/futurology)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I would think that using fusion or fission for synthesizing elements is going to still be less efficient (among all resources, not just energy) than using the newfound abundant/cheap energy to extract those preexisting elements from mixtures that exist on Earth.

Take neodymium, your example. That's pretty abundant in the Earth's crust. It's just that it's energy intensive to extract it from the mineral formations that naturally occur. At that point it's still probably much cheaper, energy wise, to separate a bunch of minerals into their constituent elements, rather than try to synthesize atoms through fusion and fission.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

I kinda agree with you tho. It is way more realistically to have asteroid mining facilities before what I said in the previous comment

(And of course, earthly mining already exists and will get more efficient in the future anyways)