China fires up world’s biggest superconducting magnet for nuclear fusion project

the “artifical sun” is an extremely thin stream of plasma, and only exists for as long as you can keep it from touching anything - as soon as it does it grounds itself out, loses magnetic containment and dissipates harmlessly.

What you see in spiderman is (presumably, I have never seen it) some infinitely expanding ball of plasma that threatens to escape containment and explode the city. In reality, one of the largest unsolved problems in fusion research is how to even introduce additional fuel without instantly collapsing the magnetic field and, once again, letting the plasma dissipate harmlessly.

Fusion is not some chain reaction that survives infinitely without end or fuel sources like some mystical magical wormhole into a nether dimension of pure power, like movies and tv shows seem to portray.

It just stops working when it runs out of compatible fuel, the same as every other energy source.

Just like the sun will eventually.

The sun just has so much fuel available to it it literally powers the entire solar system just from the few degrees of radiation that hit a few space rocks. Like, it’s almost impossible to imagine how big and how much fuel the sun has at its disposal here.

So much, that when it eventually runs out of fuel to continue to generate radiation in the way that sustains life, it still has so much mass/fuel available that it turns into one of the densest things known to mankind, preventing even light from escaping.

Unless you know of a fuel source like that somewhere on earth, neither a mini-sun that blows up the planet, or a black hole that sucks in the planet, is ever, or will ever, be remotely possible.

Science is science, not magic.

Edit: to clarify with the correction below from Jax (thank you), our sun, in particular, will not be turning into a black hole. But other super-massive suns/stars will. So black holes aren’t even a thing possible in our entire solar system, ever. We simply don’t have enough mass, much less on earth.

That is why scenes like that annoy me (also in Batman Something). Fusion is inherently safe because the reaction just stops if it breaks and nothing more can explode. And you don’t have dangerous decay products.

But movies like to use fear of nuclear something and that unfortunately has real world consequences in funding for vital energy projects now.