Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

newatlas.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 285 posts

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#231

Post by sterlind »

lovemenot wrote: post #227
eloff wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's bad because drones are evil? I'm sure I don't agree with a blanket statement to that effect. They're a tool of warfare and I don't see how they're particularly worse than other ways of killing your enemies. I can think of a few ways they're better.

While you may not agree, you can surely recognise that others may appreciate the heads-up. I can easily imagine some people may be pleased to work on fusion, but not on drones. Your parent merely notified us that more than one type of product is in development at that company and one that is not fusion is specifically designed to kill people.

another factor is clearance. people may be unwilling or unable to obtain security clearances that General Atomics requires for all their engineers, if they're a major defense contractor.

I've dreamed about getting into fusion research myself, and concluded the best pivot would be to help with the plasma simulations at a university while obtaining a PhD.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#232

Post by philipkglass »

graycat wrote: post #196
frankus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge if true. Most fission plants throw away about two-thirds of their energy output as waste heat (according to: https://www.answers.com/Q/How_much_of_the_heat_generated_in_... ), and their cooling towers are so much bigger than the reactor itself that they've become a symbol of the plants as a whole.

Sorry to get away from some really nice physics and suggestion of some really good news for some of relevant reality: The cooling towers? The photographs in the news commonly show huge clouds of water vapor escaping from the tops of the towers with a picture caption about "nuclear" power or some such. So, the suggestion is that nuke plants generate huge clouds of dangerous radioactive byproducts. Such news content is…

Nuclear plant operators show the steaming cooling towers on their own web sites:

https://www.exeloncorp.com/locations/power-plants/limerick-g...

The same imagery shows up on the covers of nuclear textbooks:

https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Engineering-Handbook-Mechanic...

If anything, laypeople think that radiation is scary because it's invisible, tasteless, and odorless.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#233

Post by throwaway010718 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #76

Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since. > "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company…

> because it makes less radiologically hazardous material

Why is there any radioactive material produced by a fusion reactor ?

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#234

Post by Gibbon1 »

philipkglass wrote: post #232
graycat wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to get away from some really nice physics and suggestion of some really good news for some of relevant reality: The cooling towers? The photographs in the news commonly show huge clouds of water vapor escaping from the tops of the towers with a picture caption about "nuclear" power or some such. So, the suggestion is that nuke plants generate huge clouds of dangerous radioactive byproducts. Such news content is…

Nuclear plant operators show the steaming cooling towers on their own web sites: https://www.exeloncorp.com/locations/power-plants/limerick-g... The same imagery shows up on the covers of nuclear textbooks: https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Engineering-Handbook-Mechanic... If anything, laypeople think that radiation is scary because it's invisible, tasteless, and odorless.

Laypeople think radiation is scary because they don't understand it and the nuclear industry lies reflexively.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#235

Post by eloff »

lovemenot wrote: post #227
eloff wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's bad because drones are evil? I'm sure I don't agree with a blanket statement to that effect. They're a tool of warfare and I don't see how they're particularly worse than other ways of killing your enemies. I can think of a few ways they're better.

While you may not agree, you can surely recognise that others may appreciate the heads-up. I can easily imagine some people may be pleased to work on fusion, but not on drones. Your parent merely notified us that more than one type of product is in development at that company and one that is not fusion is specifically designed to kill people.

Yes, that's fair. I think the subtext of the OPs post is that drones are evil, but he didn't write that.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#236

Post by anonuser123456 »

russfink wrote: post #83
anonuser123456 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not going to make an appreciable amount of helium with this process. And MRIs of the future will be constructed with REBCO magnets and cooled with liquid nitrogen.

Start looking for unexplained helium signatures among the exoplanets, as evidence of a civilization that applied this method successfully.

And when you don't find them because said civilizations were smart enough to just go build Dyson spheres around red dwarfs then what?

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#237

Post by analog31 »

throwaway010718 wrote: post #233
acidburnNSA wrote: post #76

Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since. > "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company…

> because it makes less radiologically hazardous material Why is there any radioactive material produced by a fusion reactor ?

You don't get to precisely choose which isotopes are produced by the reaction. Even among the light elements, there are radioactive isotopes, such as tritium. And it doesn't take much of it, to render the entire mixture hazardous unless refined in some fashion. One hope is that the refinement process can return the radioactive stuff to the cooking pot, so that the ultimate waste products are safe.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#239

Post by caymanjim »

kbenson wrote: post #154
throwaway894345 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect that you lose efficiencies with respect to security. I.e., it's not easy to secure one large nuclear reactor (fission or fusion), but it's a lot easier than securing dozens of small reactors.

There might also be less security needed if you have dozens of smaller reactors. You have to secure the one because losing it affects so much. If losing a couple is not as big a problem, you an rely more on the redundancy of the system than on the redundancy of the component. This depends on the threat model to some degree, but there's security in knowing that it's vastly harder for a threat to affect multiple target…

There's not much security around existing power plants, even nuclear ones. There's vastly more security around a casino or even a large shopping mall. I don't think it's a limiting factor, especially for non-weaponizable fusion reagents.

Re: Radical hydrogen-boron reactor leapfrogs current nuclear fusion tech?

#240

Post by LaMarseillaise »

eloff wrote: post #235
lovemenot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you may not agree, you can surely recognise that others may appreciate the heads-up. I can easily imagine some people may be pleased to work on fusion, but not on drones. Your parent merely notified us that more than one type of product is in development at that company and one that is not fusion is specifically designed to kill people.

Yes, that's fair. I think the subtext of the OPs post is that drones are evil, but he didn't write that.

lovemenot is correct. I do not think drones are evil.
Post reply on HN