Technology

58150 readers

4367 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

157

Clean energy could be 'closer than ever' after a nuclear fusion machine smashed a record (qz.com)

submitted 7 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Clean energy could be 'closer than ever' after a nuclear fusion machine smashed a record::JET's final nuclear fusion experiment produced a record-breaking 69 megajoules of heat. Nice.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the problem that Uranium has a half-life of a couple hundred million years, while the half life of beryllium is less than a second?

Only Beryllium-10 has a long half-life for beta decay. Adding another neutron drops that back down to a few seconds and additional neutrons drop it back to a fraction of a second. So as long as that specific type of Beryllium isn't used, it would be fine, right?

Edit: https://www.thoughtco.com/beryllium-isotopes-603868

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Those quick half-lives decay right away, losing a neutron, right? So that Berillium-11 just decays back into Berillium-10.

The problem is that the blanket is constantly absorbing neutrons from the fusion reactions, that's it's job. So despite using simple berillium 5 to build your blanket, you end up with these heavy isotopes over time, and because the heavier ones quickly decay into lighter ones, you basically end up with a whole lot of berillium-10.