21–30 of 129 posts
From the actual journal article: > Two additional complications arise because plasma fusion apparatuses are experimental and one-of-a-kind. First, the goodness metric for plasma is not fully established and objective: some amount of human judgement is required to assess an experiment. Second, the boundaries of safe operation are not fully understood: it would be easy for a fully-automated optimisation algorithm to pr…
From what I always understood is that the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction irradiate the surrounding structure and that there is still considerable nuclear waste (although lifetimes are better than with nuclear fission). Do the scientists not care or is this outdated info?
Google might try to become the conglomerate of all forward-facing things but it is somewhat funny to see how through it all, it's their advertising revenues that form the core of the business.
This pattern happens more often than you think. Microsoft: They make an Operating System and Office Suite. From Microsoft Research they have labs on Quantum Computing, they have five Turing Award winners (One is Leslie Lamport) and he developed TLA+ while employed there. Facebook: A social network Funds a bunch of Deep Learning Research and NLP. Elon Musk: Helped create PayPal, now does electric cars and rockets, (Te…
Outside of the title being misleading, I'm sceptical. It's one thing to have the hardware for research, and completely other to have the expertise for the research. Google entered the self driving cars research, and we have yet to see them driven around. This heavily reminds me of Intel and their diversification, up until recently, they were in IoT, makers market and what not. One solid push from AMD and they jumped…
>Google entered the self driving cars research, and we have yet to see them driven around. You see their working prototypes flying around mountain view all the time. And, they've been transparent with their progress. People have been working on this since the 80s.
And I live on a side street.
From the actual journal article: > Two additional complications arise because plasma fusion apparatuses are experimental and one-of-a-kind. First, the goodness metric for plasma is not fully established and objective: some amount of human judgement is required to assess an experiment. Second, the boundaries of safe operation are not fully understood: it would be easy for a fully-automated optimisation algorithm to pr…
There are two directions within the energy world that I don't completely get. One of them is hydrogen storage, the other nuclear fusion. From what I always understood is that the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction irradiate the surrounding structure and that there is still considerable nuclear waste (although lifetimes are better than with nuclear fission). Do the scientists not care or is this outd…
You need to use materials that stand up well to neutron bombardment. Many materials upon neutron capture have a half life measured in seconds, which isn't a big deal. As nuclear waste disposal goes, this really isn't a concern.
Addressing the wider article, it always surprises me that the focus fusion approach is never mentioned in fusion articles put out by the mainstream media. I don't know what to attribute that to, but it's surprising that one of the most promising fusion approaches is constantly overlooked.
To give an idea how drastically overlooked focus fusion is, here's a graph showing R&D budgets for different fusion projects...
http://lppfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/fusion-funds...
... and here's a graph showing energy efficiency of fusion devices (running on deuterium I believe)...
http://lppfusion.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/wall-plug-ch...
You'd think that the second most efficient device would've gotten more than $5 million in funding over 20 years (I think the original funding was from NASA back in 1994).
There are two directions within the energy world that I don't completely get. One of them is hydrogen storage, the other nuclear fusion. From what I always understood is that the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction irradiate the surrounding structure and that there is still considerable nuclear waste (although lifetimes are better than with nuclear fission). Do the scientists not care or is this outd…
OTOH, danger from irradiated materials (whatever that is, this is the first time I'm hearing this TBH) doesn't seem very pressing. I highly doubt any of the irradiated stuff would have a half life of millions of years.
This is actually a really exciting development to me. (Note, what is exciting is the "optometrist algorithm" from the paper [1] not necessarily googles involvement as pitched in the guardian). Typically a day of shots would need to be programmed out in advance, typically scanning over one dimension (out of hundreds) at a time. It would then take at least a week to analyze the results and create an updated research pl…
Isn't it basically the same thing they were already doing but more granular?
