Visible-wavelength CCD image. Source:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/aa626c
That is the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science. The image is a probably an infrared or near-infrared image used to estimate heating in different areas of the plasma. This is almost certainly just plain hydrogen being heated to ionised plasma temperatures with no fusion occurring to test the confinement system in H-mode.
Stranger
Why do you think they call it
?
And if deuterium was all we needed, that’d be great.
But we need tritium as well, and that’s much harder to source.
And a little only goes a little way. I’ve seen figures that say about 300g per day of operation of a 1 GW fusion plant. That burns through the world stockpile of about 25 kg in a couple months.
We ever figure out D-D fusion, that changes things, but that’s a whole different energy level.
(Bolding mine)
Could you please talk about this a bit ? The numbers on per capita energy usage, I have seen, show a steady decline for all developed nations. ( You can see a downward trend 1990 onwards with peak usage around 1980). I work with Oil Refineries and it is very often remarked that no new Oil Refineries have been built since 1976 in the USA (as a result of and in major part due to year over year increase in energy efficiency)
Here is the data, I am referring for the US, UK and Germany :
This obviously true, but a lot of the hype surrounding this announcement is making me worry it’s going to turn into bionic duckweed:
Back in 2007, Roger Ford, a railway engineer and journalist, was giving evidence to the UK’s Parliament. He criticised a Government White Paper that had decided against electrifying rail lines, on the grounds that “because we might have… trains using hydrogen developed from bionic duckweed in 15 years’ time… we might have to take the wires down and it would all be wasted”. I suppose this refers to actual biotech innovations that could generate green hydrogen, but the name is too good to leave on the pages of Hansard.
In its broader sense, bionic duckweed can be thought of a sort of unobtainium that renders investment in present-day technologies pointless, unimaginative, and worst of all On The Wrong Side Of History. “Don’t invest in what can be done today, because once bionic duckweed is invented it’ll all be obsolete.” It is a sort of promissory note in reverse, forcing us into inaction today in the hope of wonders tomorrow.
There are lots of different types of bionic duckweed, and in fact the least troublesome is bionic duckweed that can be shown to be impossible. The more plausible the bionic duckweed is, the better the argument for waiting till it appears. But depending on the timeframe and consequences, it can still be an error.
Talk about purple prose! 
I could swear I’ve seen an increase in energy use per household/person but looking at EIA on primary energy consumption per capita, you are correct that it is flat to slightly declining:
Stranger
Stranger,
Thank you for linking this informative video by MS Hossenfelder. I don’t pretend to have a good understanding of nuclear fusion, none the less, MS Hossenfelder remarks are easy enough to follow.
In addition you point out that none of the well known scientific publications have yet to feature an article in regard this most recent announcement. I find that to be very telling as to it’s significance.
They don’t, they call it magnetoplasmadynamics.
Bumping: 60 Minutes is broadcasting a story about this tonight.
300 units of energy in, 3 units out. Hopefully they’re using solar cells to power it.
It might be viable by 2050.
Best line of the story: “Now it’s an engineering problem.”
Yeah. All we have to do is make a laser that can produce this kind of power with 10x higher efficiency, which has never been done.
This is a dead end for fusion for power. Most scientists are still hoping for the Tokamak design and putting their money on ITER.
I would like to see them try cold fusion. Not that blistering-hot P&F cold fusion, but real cold fusion. Like 10K cold. If you could ionize the fuel at 10K, squeezing it together would be so easy. And you would never have to worry about it scorching the chamber walls.
The problem isn’t that it difficult to “ionize the fuel”; the problem is overcoming electrostatic repulsion to between nuclei across a statistically large enough proportion of the plasma such that the strong force takes over and results in fusion interaction. The only way we have of doing this with normal matter is by increasing the average speed of the individual particles, i.e. heating the plasma to a required combination of density, temperature, and confinement time to even achieve fusion conditions, much less produce net power output from the input power to heat the plasma. Even then, the process of heating and maintaining confinement of the plasma will have huge inefficiencies just because of the temperature difference and self-interaction. Nothing about nuclear fusion is ‘easy’ unless you have ready access to an unlimited source of free muons, have technology that can alter the nuclear strong force, or have a stellar-mass of hydrogen to start with.
Stranger
No, the best line of the story was “We could see operating fusion power plants within twenty years.” I have laughed harder, but not by much.
My mother was watching the story on 60 minutes (she had it on DVR). She asked me if I’d heard about it. I explained that message board friends who know physics like I know comic books said it was vastly overblown.
The good news is we have one of those handy nearby. The bad news is it’s a certified bitch to string an extension cord from there to here. 
The story rather confused me. I was under the impression that a fusion reaction was self-sustaining once it got started, but the Livermore scientist said they’d need hundreds of ignitions every day to keep it going.
This does not sound self-sustaining.