First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
firstlightfusion.comYou too can achieve nuclear fusion!
https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/
And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy than you'll produce
You can also buy commercial fusion reactors: https://www.thermofisher.com/search/browse/featured/us/en/80...
Any neutron generator that emits 14MeV neutrons is doing it with D-T fusion.
It's so cool, though. The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!
Solar panels harness the power of the sun too. Fun fact: The sun's energy density is only a few watts per ton. A thousand-pound chunk of the sun could barely run a flashlight. Practical fusion requires H/He conversion rates exponentially faster than stars.
Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.
Yes, but this I suppose is a bit like a mechanical watch (if many orders of magnitude less practical). You can spend $30,000 on a watch that keeps terrible time in comparison to a $10 quartz watch. But you know there's all these tiny precision machines inside ticking away, and that makes you happy.
The only power I can extract from a fusor is the current generated inside a Geiger counter. But in my head, I know there's all kinds of cool fusion reactions happening. Gamma rays, helium, tritium, neutrons... that's all going on and it's just cool to know you're making it happen.
If the $30k watch can't keep time, then those tiny machines aren't very precise
According to the COSC standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC), a mechanical watch is allowed to have a deviation of -4/+6 seconds per day, while a quartz watch has to have ±0.07 seconds per day. So a mechanical watch can be two orders of magnitude "worse" than an electronic one and still call itself an officially certified Swiss watch. But I'm sure that manufacturers of $30k watches hold themselves to higher standards - not that someone who buys a $30k watch nowadays really uses it to tell the time, but still...
That just means their mediocrity is up to spec
Watt is not energy, though, you mean power density. Also your flashlight would run for a few billion years, not bad.
On the other hand, the thermal energy in a cubic meter of the Sun's core is about the same as the yield of a 5 megaton H bomb.
> Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.
No apology necessary! I'm well informed on the content of the US mainstream media, and there I've learned that without any doubt all of
force, power, energy, volts, amperes, Watts, Kilowatts, Kilowatt hours, and current
are all just the same things, just synonyms for just the same things!
When I was studying physics, I thought that there were important differences, but now with a lot of exposure to the mainstream media I've learned that I must have been badly wrong!
It would run your flashlight until basically the end of time though. I think you neglected that small point.
Huh? End of time? Stars die "all the time" yet time still keeps on ticking.
Only a small portion of the Sun (relatively speaking lol) is hot enough to fuse matter. It kinda sounds impossible the way you phrased it but it really isn’t. It’s just… 20 years off.
...and it's been 20 years off for the last 50 years, I've heard that joke before.
You’ll hear it again in ten years, too. I suspect fusion energy is possible, it’s just really hard. It’s like powered flight, which was imagined for centuries and we couldn’t quite do it, until suddenly someone did it. Eventually, the physics, materials, and engineering will make a path.
Your hand, can in fact, harness the power of the sun’s power by receiving warmth on its own.
The neutron generator doesn't harness the sun.
It is a tiny sun!
(Well, sorta kinda)
Haven’t some recent experiments done more energy out than in?
nope
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft.
A little engineering later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo
Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly since the 1960s and 1970s.
I am typing this on a computer with a ~5nm feature size CPU. Hard things can be done. It takes time, focus, and funding.
Cynicism is well justified, given history and the present landscape.
Suppose they get this working, and able to produce, what, 300 MW worth of hot neutrons. They have to capture the neutrons and turn them into heat to boil water to drive a turbine to get out 150 MW. Thus, handle the, what, 1000 tons? 10,000 tons? of lithium needed to capture all those neutrons. And, I guess, sieve it for tritium? Maybe chemically separate micrograms of Li-3H from the thousand tons of pure, molten, radioactive lithium? And, every year replace all the pipes the lithium runs in, weakened by neutron bombardment. By remote control, because strongly radioactive.
This is clearly a bigger job than what needs to be done for a fission plant, where all you need to handle is water and fuel rods. (If you think a 1000 tons of molten radioactive lithium won't need containment, allow me to disabuse you.) But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + storage. In 10 years, fission will be even less competitive than today. There is no scenario where this ends up economically useful.
> Cynicism is well justified, given history and the present landscape.
The history, measured by the fusion triple product, is exponential progress on par with Moore's law [1], despite abysmal funding [2].
[1] Figure 1, https://www.scipedia.com/public/Sanchez_2014a
[2] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
If only achieving a high triple product were enough to achieve practical fusion. It's not -- there are serious obstacles, especially for DT fusion, that have nothing to do with plasma physics.
The history is of radical overpromising, and continual announcement of "breakthroughs" that do not bring plausible competitive viability any nearer.
The current funding level, given the abysmal prospects for any return, is too high. It was even higher before. We'll never get any of that back.
> The history is of radical overpromising, and continual announcement of "breakthroughs" that do not bring plausible competitive viability any nearer.
It sounds like your issue is with the PR, not the technology. Is there something faulty or misleading with the progress made in the triple-product score?
> The current funding level, given the abysmal prospects for any return, is too high. It was even higher before. We'll never get any of that back.
30 years of fusion research is what a single Nimitz aircraft carrier costs. The "even higher" level was one Nimitz carrier per decade. And it only lasted one decade. Eyeballing the funding graph, the US has spent a total of 3 aircraft carrier's worth of funding for fusion in total, since research began.
3 aircraft carriers in, 0 kWh out.
"But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + storage." Any source about that ? It just sounds like an arbitrary anti-nuclear opinion without any evidence backing it. But I'm still cursious if you have anything serious to prove this claim.
I could go google that for you. But, why?
Innumerable commercial entities are building out solar and wind farms as fast as they can scare up capital. Literally not a single purely commercially-backed nuke plant has ever been built in 70+ years. Not one. Capital did build and operate coal plants, at a profit. But nobody is building new coal plants, anymore. Even operating an existing coal plant is not competitive any more; coal plants are being shut down with no plan ever to re-open, exactly as fast as solar and wind come on line.
Nukes are made out of steel, concrete, plumbing, and pumps. None of those are getting cheaper. They produce power by blasting steam through enormous turbines, that need regular expensive maintenance, not getting cheaper. Mining and refining uranium is expensive and not getting cheaper. Solar and wind generation cost have been declining at an exponential rate for two decades, and are still falling. Can you even conceive of an exponentially declining cost not crossing any given constant cost?
Suppose you figured out a way to get power from nukes at half the cost, and that was less than renewables just now. How long would it be before they undercut that, again? Would you be able to finish building one, in that amount of time?
There is no future for fission, and even less for fusion.
"Literally not a single purely commercially-backed nuke plant has ever been built in 70+ years. Not one."
Sure, let's check wikipedia to see how this is not true : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
Also, after googling it: yes indeed, in some countries renewable energies are more competitive than fission. But that's not the case everywhere : https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el... Or maybe you were just talking about the US, in this case your statement might be true.
I hope renewable energies cost will keep decreasing as much as it did those last ten years but I'm not as optimistic as you are.
Supposed purely commercial plants are always, it turns out, massively subsidized. At minimum, they are absolutely protected against liability, so do not need to try to find an insurer, never mind pay premiums to one.
And, mining and refining fuel has been massively subsidized.
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft.
One of the easiest (laziest?) positions one can hold is simply to be dismissive of anything that hasn't happened yet, and which appears to be moderately difficult or harder. Fusion, AGI, etc... Just dismiss those things as ridiculous and you position yourself as wise, informed, erudite, whatever - to most people.
The first fusion-powered blockchain should push HN to cynicism supercriticality.
Fairly confident we’ll get fusion before we use a “blockchain” to buy a loaf of bread.
Somewhat famously, the very first commercial blockchain transaction twelve years ago was for two pizzas. Cynicism is fine but you don't have to be lazy about it.
I was the first person to accept bitcoin payment for a certain class of goods (not illegal, just don't want to out myself) - so yes, I'm aware of the pizza transaction and have friends who retired off of BTC. That doesn't mean I can buy a cup of coffee with what started as a cool currency idea and turned into a speculative asset for tech bros.
In fact, just yesterday had a conversation with a friend and realized at current prices we jointly spent several hundred thousand dollars on VPN services. So yeah, I was there before there was a there.
But there are excellent reasons to think DT fusion (which is what these people are trying to do, as well as most fusion efforts) is a nonstarter. And these reasons have been known since at least the 1980s. We skeptics get annoyed at vacuous optimism that just ignores these real arguments.
A lazier position is to dismiss the views of a vague group of people as empty posturing without even clearly identifying who you're talking about.
With modern nuclear technology, it is quite possible to convert lead into gold. It's been done. Years ago.
HOWEVER, it was also understood that the cost per ounce of the resulting gold was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of gold obtained via lower-tech methods.
So there were no serious attempts to scale up the original process. Nor to improve it. Nor to develop "new and better" lead-to-gold conversion processes. Nor to otherwise squander vast sums and resources chasing the "but it IS possible..." dream of making real gold from mere lead.
> we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible
We have excellent physical reasons to think DT fusion will not be practical. The power density will be terrible, so it would be more expensive than fission at boiling water -- and fission isn't competitive these days.
I'm bullish on fusion in general, but there is a lot of hyper-optimistic BS about any particular fusion setup, and it gets tiring really fast. I can't say I don't blame the cynics, since they're helping kill our species, but I do sympathize.
FWIW feature size doesn't really mean what it used to. Due to the 3d mesh manufacturing process, it's become a sort of shorthand for "equivalent in 2D." What really matters is transistor density, and different manufacturers differ wildly in how they relate transistor density to this "feature size in a 2D equivalent metric."
For instance, the M1 has a density of 171 million/sq mm and claims 5 nm 2D equivalent, while Willow Cove from IBM looks much worse at 10nm but its density is 100.
Saying this not to "cast shade" on certain chip fabricators, just saying that it doesn't actually mean that they have taken the same style transistor fab processes from ~10 years ago and shrunk them down to 5nm. I mean, by the time an actual 2D feature would reach ~2nm, we'd be talking about features that were only about 10 atoms across.
Sure, unwarranted cynicism isn't helpful. But neither is blind optimism. Moore's law has proven itself for decades. Fusion has failed for even longer. A little bit of cynicism is not only called for, but healthy in this case.
I've never seen "learned helplessness" linked to "technical progress in a scientific field" in such a way. Has anyone written about this analogy? It sounds super interesting. Like a nontrivial insight into how people approach open-ended problems.
(There's that one quote from a startup founder, "we did it because we didn't realize how hard it was", or something like that. From a pg essay maybe?)
> the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft
Those were flying in the 1980s.
The cynicism is due to the framing of these stories, failing to set them in the context of "this is a tiny part of a large number of difficult things that need to be achieved before any of this is useful".
Useful follow-up thread from the CEO with more technical details: https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122
>> Plans for a “gain” experiment (more energy out than in) are advancing at pace.
So the headline is very precise: they achieved fusion, but not power production using fusion. And as far as I can tell, achieving fusion is not the hard part.
As far as I can tell, the newsworthy part is that they achieve fusion using their "two-phase" which is supposedly different than conventional tokamaks such as ITER uses. I'm not sure how either of those technologies exactly work, but the article seems to suggest this is a cheaper way to build a fusion reactor. Then again, this is a press piece, so not exactly unbiased.
Devices like tokamaks use powerful electromagnets to compress a plasma. An alternative uses very powerful lasers to explosively vaporize and compress a pellet of fuel. In comparison, this uses the steampunk-esque method of firing a pellet of fuel into a target with a "hypervelocity gas gun".
This is just a press release, but an unusually informative one. For more information on what they have and have not done, see here: https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122
(Link from apendleton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923527)
They have good evidence of deuterium-deuterium fusion. IIRC this is harder to achieve than deuterium-tritium fusion, but as tritium is radioactive with a half-life of ~12 years, it is much harder to acquire and work with. In their concept of a power reactor, they would apparently use the deuterium-tritium reaction, which with the latter being created by bombarding a lithium blanket with the neutrons produced by the reaction, something that is envisaged in most other fusion power concepts.
Thanks for the short explanation. That clears things up, and you make the First Light approach sound very cool.
You had me at steampunk
It's remarkable and humorous how it's just a gun. Like this is how the Victorians would have approached fusion.
More power to them! We need to test a myriad of approaches. This could well turn out to be the best one.
To be fair, that's exactly how artificial nuclear fusion was done for the first time, (Also by the Brits, in 1934) accelerating a deuterium beam at a deuterated target: https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 Just with a really small gun and little teeny bullets.
"Little Boy" the first nuke deployed in Japan was also just a gun, firing a lump of enriched uranium at another lump of enriched uranium at the end of a tube.
I was going to say it fired a slug through a cylindrical piece of material, but decided to verify this on Wikipedia. It turns out:
>> For the first fifty years after 1945, every published description and drawing of the Little Boy mechanism assumed that a small, solid projectile was fired into the center of a larger, stationary target.[31] However, critical mass considerations dictated that in Little Boy the larger, hollow piece would be the projectile.
I had never heard this before and was in denial reading the part above that. So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light.
Edit: Following the reference is was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen
>So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light.
Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested. The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output. It is physically impossible for a small rogue actor to make a bomb from scratch. Germany during WWII, for example, was far advanced toward a bomb years before the Manhattan project, but their industrial capacity was simply never sufficient to build it.
The Nth Country Experiment, in 1964, took three freshly minted Physics Ph.D's without any security clearances of any kind, gave them access to a reasonably sized unclassified physics library, and asked them to design an implosion weapon. After approximately three man-years of effort (along with some basic calculation assistance from some 1964 unclassified calculators) those Ph.D's designed a workable implosion bomb. So by 1964 it is clear that design was not the limitation: every real country can scrape together a few Physics Ph.D's for three man years of effort.
I would STRONGLY disagree that the Germans were ever more advanced than the Manhattan project. The British were a bit (~9 months) ahead of the US before S-1 started (December 1941), but I've never seen any evidence that the Germans were ahead of either country at any point. Certainly the fact that they never managed to replicate CP-1, which went critical in December 1942 (and was still years of hard work away from an actual nuclear bomb) suggests that they were never very close at all.
The closest I can come up with is that the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938. In that work, there were five people who collaborated closely enough that today they would have all had their names on the one paper (because of Nazis the work was published in two papers, Aryans on one, Jews on the other): Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, and Wilhelm Traube. Hahn and Strassman were considered Aryan enough to stay in Germany. Meitner and Frisch escaped- Frisch ended up working on the MAUD report and then at Los Alamos, Meitner stayed in neutral Sweden. Traube did not manage to escape and died in Gestapo custody in 1942. So 20% of this team ended up at Los Alamos, and only 40% managed to stay in Germany, which does somewhat point to some of the underlying problems any German bomb project would have had.
>> Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested.
Yes, but you don't know if those plans are viable and correct. This whole thing about the gun firing a cylinder is a case in point. People *thought" they knew how it was built sans some detailed measurements and such, but it turns out they were completely wrong on a rather critical aspect of the design.
> The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output
Is this still true in the 2020s?
Supposedly the laser enrichment process is smaller and cheaper, though it's also kept secret.
You still need thousands of kilograms of natural metallic uranium, which is a rare heavy metal with few commercial uses and one really salient illegal one, or thousands of tons of uranium ore, which, see previous. It's hard to buy this stuff secretly, because not many people have it, and people who do have it have a big, salient, vested interests in not selling it to people who want to make nukes! It's not like selling drones to Saudi Arabia and saying "oh well guess it'll suck to be a Houthi". You might get nuked!
Nation-states can pull this off, since they have both land and state security apparatuses. Empirically, private groups or terrorist cells haven't been able to do it. The rumors I've read and the impression I've received is that AQA spent decades trying, lost a lot of lieutenants and trucks full of cash to CIA honeypots, and eventually gave up. Too hard, too expensive, too many dead ends and entrapment schemes.
Is enriching uranium in the US actually illegal? Seems like the answer is no.
The Atomic Energy Act put a licensing requirement on all civilian use of nuclear materials, in this case for uranium concentrations above what is found in nature. Enriching is definitely in this category.
To enrich uranium legally in the US you would have to get a license by justifying why you were doing it and there are not many legitimate reasons to do so outside slightly enriched uranium for power plants or highly enriched for a few medical isotopes.
But if you just decide to do it, yes it’s illegal and the NRC will probably find you.
I would be interested to see what you’ve read to lead you to that conclusion.
Well, after much searching I didn't find the parts of the Atomic Energy Act that required certification for any and all materials processing.
By default things are legal.
I've also spoken with scientists who do research that, at times, abuts nuclear science, and have heard stories of them just... not doing paperwork because it's annoying.
>Is this still true in the 2020s?
The laws of physics haven't changed in 80 years. Even if you started with yellow cake uranium (~70% enriched, and itself already nearly impossible for a non-state actor to acquire), to reach weapons grade at >95% you'd need hundreds of tons of it, and massive industrial scale chemical facilities to convert that into uranium hexafluoride and pull out the U235 isotopes [0], where the ratio of U235 to U238 (the non-fissile isotope) is 99:1. The vast majority of the Manhattan Project was in the engineering challenges required to do this, not really in the construction of the bomb. So far, only 5 countries in the world have been able to do it.
[0] https://web.evs.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uf6/index.cfm#:~:text=....
> So far, only 5 countries in the world have been able to do it.
I think you’re a tad optimistic there - sadly we have many more than 5 nuclear powers today.
5 countries have developed Uranium enrichment facilities.
Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States
There’s the list of “known” meaning publicly acknowledged countries with operating enrichment facilities, more than 5.
Notice it doesn’t include Israel which more or less everyone believes has nuclear weapons meaning enrichment facilities. There are several other countries which are very reasonably believed to have or have had enrichment programs.
South Africa had at one time.
I was thinking more that the industrial production has increased 10x in 70 years. Private companies can now build rockets that go to space...
Private companies could indeed do it. Heck, the mining and refining part is probably done by private entities these days. However, the only legal customers are nuclear power plants and governments.
The process has gotten a bit more efficient, but it still is nothing that can be run effectively in a garage. We are talking about separating not two elements, but two isotopes that behave chemically indentical and just differ in mass by 1.3% of the weight of the heavier one.
Another possibity is building a breeder reactor first to breed Plutonium.
Also, where to get Uranium ores in the first place? You can be sure that governments keep close tabs on who takes funny stones out of certain mines.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2011/11/08/the-mysterious-des...
Especially take note of Carey Sublette's comment on the design history in the blog comments: Mr. Sublette is definitely a name to be reckoned with, as far as unclassified nuclear analysis goes. His thought, that the design was basically taken direct from the Thin Man bomb design, is an especially interesting one.
As for why the unclassified world thought what it thought for so long, I always presumed it was because men in the 1940's naturally assumed that the rod moves into the long tube, not the tube moves to surround the rod. (Cut to shot of train going into tunnel.)
You mean a shot of the tunnel engulfing the train?
Moreso: a set of hollow rings. So, maybe the rings didn't nest together until they hit the target.
> decided to verify this on Wikipedia
Please, please don't say that. :(
The other bomb (Fat Man) used a different approach, using explosives to radically compress a ball of Plutonium.
I’m amazed the British did this first instead of Americans
Americans would of course do it with a nuke. Which actually they have already done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
Hah - this sounds not dissimilar from the first fission bombs that were "gun" type.
In fairness to them, the ultimate plan is for something at least slightly less gun-like. They're using these gunpowder charges during testing, but eventually plan to move to some kind of electromagnetic mass-driver setup to make the projectile go. (So, maybe like a railgun or coilgun, which... I guess are still guns, but not like, gun-guns).
The key number was, neutrons produced: 50 ("as predicted").
> First Light has achieved fusion having spent less than £45 million, and with a rate of performance improvement faster than any other fusion scheme in history.
I know that technically it's a "scheme", but with the history of this technology they should probably use different language
'Scheme' in this case is a Britishism, basically meaning a project (not something nefarious).
Yup, as an American living in UK for a bit it was very confusing to be required to sign up for numerous government schemes.
At least it's refreshing that their government admits they've been scheming.
Is it really unique to Britain? It's the first definition on Wiktionary and it doesn't mention anything about it being regional. Is scheme really only negatively in America?
It might be used this way in other commonwealth countries. In the US we'd use plan, project (personal endeavor), or program (government endeavor) instead.
Scheme itself means the same thing but it's fallen out of use and the only times I've encountered it is when the speaker wants to distance themself from it: get rich quick scheme, hare-brained scheme, nefarious scheme, malicious scheme, etc.
Yes. The Wiktionary entry mentions this: "In the US, generally has devious connotations, while in the UK, frequently used as a neutral term for projects"
Ah I missed that. Interesting!
Would Brits scheme, as a verb, in a non-nefarious way?
I note we here use schema, which is partly why I interpret a scheme neutrally.
No, I don't think we would. The verb carries an amount of deviousness.
I don't know how the word carries so substantially different moral leanings, but that's English. I'm sure there are many other words with evil twins.
> I don't know how the word carries so substantially different moral leanings, but that's English.
There's a book published by some Brits in Oxford that very usefully researches the history of English words. They have found examples of all the meanings discussed here from the mid-to-late 17th and early 18th centuries, FWIW.
English doesn't need words with evil twins. English is much more cunning than that in that the same word can have totally opposite meanings. They tend to be more slang usage, but for example "shit". Without recreating the George Carlin bit, there's so many different meanings depending on how it is used.
Word meanings evolve many ways. Sometimes two word forms evolve independently and coincidentally to the same outcome. Sometimes a word develops from Latin or Greek, and then centuries later someone coins a different word from the same Latin or Greek. Sometimes people apply old words to new situations. Etc. If you look up the field of etymology, you can find many models of how words form.
Even in American English it's fairly common to say "scheme" without implying "scam".
As a nuclear fusion ignorant, where is the small print here? What's the catch, drawback, issue that it will make actually nonviable ?
They made 50 neutrons from this shot! You can make billions per second, steady state, with a tabletop device plugged into a standard outlet.
Edit: Fusion makes ~ 10^15 neutrons for every watt-hour of energy released (for the easiest kind of fusion)
Roughly speaking, the catch with every fusion-related "breakthrough" in the past 60+ years is the not-so-slight difference between:
- "With a huge research budget, we found a nifty new way to reliably set a few tiny lumps of coal on fire in our lab."
and
- "We can reliably build useful and practical locomotives, ships, and electrical generating plants which are powered by burning coal...and are long-term economically viable in a world which has several other ways of powering locomotives, ships, and electrical generating plants."
Except that with coal, making a far bigger fire is incredibly easy. With fusion, all the $Billions in the world don't seem capable of making even a modestly bigger...
Here's something modestly bigger: the UK's JET reactor recently produced 11 megawatts for five seconds.
https://www.mpg.de/18250857/jet-fusion-facility-new-world-en...
The plasma was stable and they could have gone longer except instead of superconductors, JET uses copper coils that would melt if they went longer.
Their input energy was about three times their total output. But fusion output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength, and modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger fields than JET was using.
Wikipedia notes that JET produced 10MW of fusion power, sustained for 0.5 seconds, back in 1997. If that real-world rate of improvement continues, it'll reach 12MW for 50 seconds in 2047, and 13MW for 500 seconds in 2072.
Meanwhile, a set of 5 30-year-old diesel-electric railroad locomotives can reliably put out ~10MW of usable electrical power (vs. thermal production). Vastly cheaper, with a proven track record and 100% duty cycle. (Generously figuring 3 running, 1 standby, 1 down for maintenance.)
( Wikipedia reference on JET: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#1990s )
As I mentioned above, fusion output scales with reactor size and magnetic field strength, and five seconds is the limit of their copper coils. There's no way for JET to significantly change any of that, so I don't know why you'd expect large improvements from them.
After 1997, the only way to scale up was reactor size, and that started with ITER, the 20-story-tall reactor in France. That soaked up a lot of fusion money, has been slow to build, and it's still not running. But more recently REBCO hit the market, and the same scaling laws say a reactor smaller than JET using those should get substantial energy gain. Two projects are building such reactors, and at least one will be ready around 2025.
(In any case, I wouldn't say five diesel locomotives are comparable to "burning a few tiny lumps of coal.")
> If that real-world rate of improvement continues
Fusion research has not received anything even remotely resembling "all the $Billions in the world"
Literally you are correct - that phrase is a bit of English-language rhetoric.
But neither has fusion power shown anything even remotely resembling the real-world promise of fission power - which went from the first major attempt at a proof-of-concept reactor (Chicago Pile-1, Dec. 1942, ~1/2 watt thermal power output) to powering a large, high-performance warship (USS Nautilus, Jan. 1955, ~10MW on the propeller shafts) in just 12 years.
How do you keep your university spinoff running with such long-term focus?
Short story, they are shooting small plastic cubes with gas inside. The cubes are called "targets".
The "bullet" is fast enough to compress the gas inside the cube, creating fusion.
It works. But in the scenario it does work, a machine is manually opened, loaded, prepared, and then they do the shot. Whole process takes days to prepare.
For it to be viable they need to do this every five seconds.
That is a hard problem to solve. First lights business model is not to solve that problem, but rather producing the "fuel", the tiny cubes with gas inside.
They say there is many details in how they are built which increases efficiency.
But someone still has to figure out how to build a machine that can continuously reload both the fuel and the bullet.
Ok. So dumb question. What complicates this beyond a conceptual belt fed heavy machine gun?
> To deliver this fusion result, First Light used its large two-stage hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a target, containing the fusion fuel. The projectile reached a speed of 6.5 km per second before impact. First Light’s highly sophisticated target focuses this impact, with the fuel accelerated to over 70 km per second as it implodes, an increase in velocity achieved through our proprietary advanced target design, making it the fastest moving object on earth at that point.
Conceptually, maybe nothing, but we aren't really talking about your average MG-42 here.
For one thing, it's a light-gas gun - you don't just reload the projectile, you have to refill the hydrogen after each shot.
The small print is that you can achieve fusion in many, many ways. The problem is getting any energy out and doing so at a meaningful scale.
Something like ... the difference between folding a paper airplane and designing and building an airliner.
I can imagine the downsides of accelerating the fuel that hard at the target and missing might be fairly entertaining.
You _really_ need to say "Projectile approach enables a high-margin consumables business model" to get invetment in technology which will define the next era of human history?
Here is a video I found that explains the concept in a visual way that finally made sense to me after reading the release.
The 6.5km/s would slow a bit in atmosphere, yet still would beat first stage with the remaining velocity by the time it reaches high stratosphere.
>making it the fastest moving object on earth at that point.
Wait'll they hear about what those folks at CERN are doing.
Isn't this a bomb in a vacuum chamber?
In the sense that an internal combustion consists primarily of a series of bombs in tubes, sure. I don't think that this is a very useful analysis, though.
> First Light is working towards a pilot plant producing ~150 MW of electricity and costing less than $1 billion in the 2030s.
Finally, fusion in only ten to twenty years. I've been waiting ten to twenty years for this!
This same joke has been made for twenty years. If we can't even make progress in fusion-related humor, maybe we really are doomed at fusion research.
Duke Nukem Forever eventually got created, so why not usable nuclear fusion too?
It's been 20 to 40 years for about 60 years, now we're down to 10 to 20 we might get down to 5 to 10 in only 30 more years!
It's a full-on Xeno's paradox. Soon enough we will be 10 to 20 seconds away but will still never reach it.
You, Sir/Madan, are looking me. It's both pretty funny and despairing
It's my favorite go-to and the series number is so easy to remember:
(be sure to click for its very relevant alt-text)
I think this misses the most important thing about predictions:
* has been "10 years away" for many years: could be tomorrow
An example would be "How long before a computer beats a grandmaster at Go?" The answer was "10 years away" for decades, right up to 2015, and then one day in 2016, that day was "today".
>> The answer was "10 years away" for decades, right up to 2015, and then one day in 2016, that day was "today".
I've heard this a few times. In 2014 I was doing an MSc in Intelligent Systems ("AI" after the Winter) and Go was discussed in class in the context of Russel and Norvig. I don't remember the tutor saying that beating a grandmaster (? do they have grandmasters in Go?) was "10 years away". I remember him saying that Go was the last of the classic board games where humans still dominated machines because it requires intuition.
So, can you say where the "10 years away" quote comes from? Is it an actual quote? Do you know someone who actually said beating [a top human player] in Go is "10 years away" at some time before 2015?
For example https://www.wired.com/2016/01/in-a-huge-breakthrough-googles...
>In early 2014, Coulom's Go-playing program, Crazystone, challenged grandmaster Norimoto Yoda at a tournament in Japan. And it won. But the win came with caveat: the machine had a four-move head start, a significant advantage. At the time, Coulom predicted that it would be another 10 years before machines beat the best players without a head start.
I'm sure there's more to find, but of course google now biases towards the articles about AlphaGo actually winning.
Thanks, I appreciate the reply but the quote from the Wired article does not look like a direct quote from Coulom, so I'm still not sure what it really means. Was it really a "prediction", or more like an offhand remark? What does the person quoted, Coulom, really think about this "prediction" today, and what would they say they meant back then?
More to the point, when you commented above that "The answer was "10 years away" for decades, right up to 2015", did you have the Wired article in mind? I mean to say, did you read that article in 2014 and think that machines dominating Go is still 10 years away or is it more something you found with a search yesterday? Did you think in 2014 that machines dominating Go was 10 years away?
What I really want to know is what this "prediction" means. Was there really some kind of consensus on "10 years"? How seriously was this taken? It's all so vague and anyone could have said anything and meant anything.
Well, I am replying to a thread on an xkcd comic, so that is the level of seriousness that we're playing at! =)
But, ok, seriously, yes I am an armchair futurist, and also used to play go with my uncle (I am terrible at it), so since chess fell I've been waiting for go to fall too.
I am a believer in exceptional people and teams entering a space and turning established thought on its head. Another example would be spaceX. If you'd have said, ten years ago, that we'd have reusable rockets, that land on their tails like a 1950s sci-fi movie, you'd have been laughed at. On a boat! Ha ha! Crazy! Boeing still don't believe it, given what they've just managed to roll out. I've personally built my career on doing what others have said is impossible.
So, seriously then, sure, if enough people have been saying that something is still 10 years away, then other people have been listening, noticing the opportunity, working on it quietly, and a solution could happen later today.
Sorry for the late reply, you probably won't see this but I had some work troubles.
My perspective on this is that Go (I don't know anything about rockets), was a technological advance that should not have been surprising for anyone who knew the state of the art. One reason I don't know how to interpret Coulom's quote is that he must have been one of the few people who understood computer go as well.
You'd say, yeah, that's the point, but if you look at the AlphaGo paper it really has nothing new in it. There is no sudden breakthrough in scientific understanding, in algorithm design, in efficiency or accuracy of a search, or anything of the sort. All there is, is Monte Carlo Tree Search and neural nets. That's as old as bread and about as exciting.
The only reason why it was AlphaGo that dominated Go, and not some other system, is that it was created by a company with the resources of DeepMind, meaning Google. It had to be such a big company exactly because there was no real advance in the scientific understanding of the game of Go, and so progress could only be made by turning up the compute to 11.
The same thing happenned back in the 1980's with DeepBlue and chess, also: it had to be IBM because few others could make a minimax system that searched so far and deep, because few others had IBM's computing resources.
And you know, perhaps that's what Coulom meant when he said "10 years". That it would take 10 years for the scientific understanding of Go to advance to the point where a machine can beat a human. It just so happenned that turning on the firehose and spamming the dollars at the problem made it go away, so there's no need to understand anything anymore.
Same thing happenned with chess, also. Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, John McCarthy, all those AI greats, they thought that chess was a measure of human intelligence and they wanted to understand how humans play chess using our human intelligence. Well, it turned out that you don't need human intelligence to play chess, as you don't need it to play Go, and a dumb machine with a blind search can look deeper into a game tree and find better moves than a human. But as far as I can tell, predictions of "10 years" for chess or for go or for anything else, were trying to predict when the scientific understanding of those games and of human and artificial intelligence would have advanced far enough that we could make an intelligent machine capable of playing go like a human, but better. That's what McCarthy would have wanted- he once made a bet with a Grandmaster that "in 10 years" a machine would beat the grandmaster in chess; and lost the bet. Because McCarthy was thiking about understaning intelligence, not winning games. And he underestimated the difficult of the former and overestimated that of the latter. Coulom, in the Wired quote, probably made the same mistake, thinking along the same lines.
If so, then he wasn't wrong, because while we have machines that can play better Go than humans, we still don't understand how humans played better Go than machines for so long.
There's also a large confirmation bias in the search: If we look for '10 years away' predictions, we're going to find them.
Isn't that more than ten times the cost of a PV installation of the same scale?