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Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#381

Post by Beltalowda »

soperj wrote: post #310
wowokay wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, we should discount all his contributions and hold him a accountable for his past actions right? Man I'm glad the rest of us never make mistakes and have all contributed so much more then him..

I'm sorry, but if the Queen can disavow her own kid for his affiliation with Jeffery Epstein, and Bill's wife can do the same, we can disavow Bill Gates. Just because he has money doesn't mean a damn thing w/r to whether we have to hold him to any regard. He's proven over decades to not be a good person. There's a reason Paul Allen ended his relationship with Bill Gates.

The difference between Prince Andrew and Bill Gates is that Andrew has been (credibly) accused of sexual abuse, whereas Gates was – as far as we know – just friends with Epstein. Maybe there's something more, but there's no evidence of it – it's not even clear how close they were, exactly.

I mean, Prince Charles and Jimmy Savile had a friendship of sorts; the queen didn't disavow Charles because that's all it was. The problem with Andrew wasn't really his relationship with Epstein *as such*, but the things Andrew did.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#382

Post by kuprel »

moogly wrote: post #175
ppaattrriicckk wrote: post #59

In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current…

> Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop OTOH, in a tokamak, the plasma volume (and potential energy output) scales quadratically with the torus' aspect ratio (ratio of major to minus radius), so I'm not sure that tokamak-based fusion really is particularly suitable to miniaturization.

Wouldn't the aspect ratio remain constant as you scale down?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#383

Post by unfocussed_mike »

dang wrote: post #237
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Please don't post flamebait to HN or take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I absolutely feel I did no such thing. It's not ideological to observe what I observed in my initial post. It's clearly factual and clearly relevant to the topic as it is actually raised in the original article.

I am working on the assumption that you are admin and therefore enforce rules.

If this counts as something you wish to flag and remove then I'd like you to remove me. So could you drop me an email about deleting or otherwise permanently disabling my account, please?

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#384

Post by scovetta »

This is super cool, but I didn't see how much energy was put into the system in order to generate the output 57 MW, and whether the output energy was all usable (e.g. could the team have actually boiled 60 kettles of water?). It'd also be useful to know how whatever energy is needed to run the machine would be expected to scale as the output is increased.

Don't get me wrong, fusion (IANANP) seems to be the best approach for long-term energy, and I'm strongly in favor of lots of research and experimentation in this area, and this seems like incremental progress. Kudos to the team!

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#385

Post by px43 »

ppaattrriicckk wrote: post #59

In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current…

The insane thing that people should realize about the 20T CFS test back in September was that it was them completing the first of 18 coils, and it performed incredibly well.

The secret sauce is better high temperature superconductors, and the ridiculous magnets you can build with them. They're pretty much putting these coils together as quickly as they can accumulate the HTSC wiring, and once they have all 18, they basically just need to put them all in a ring and light it up, and in theory they'll be generating over 10x the amount of power that they're putting into it.

This is the kind of tangible progress that gets me really excited. I wish there was a tracker on the CFS site to see how many coils they've completed so far, similar to tracking the progress of the JWST. Last I checked they were estimating completion around 2025, and at this pace that actually seems reasonable.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#386

Post by willis936 »

dfdz wrote: post #364
willis936 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a disingenuous argument. JET was not designed as a power plant. Those flywheels are used exclusively to transiently power the copper confinement coils. Since superconduction was discovered, no reactor study has had non-superconducting confinement coils because they are (very obviously) impractical.

The only purpose of my comment was to provide context for the numbers in the article via a thought experiment involving doubling. Since the calculation involves taking log_2, even if the estimate for the "used power" is off by a factor of 4 the result will only change by 50 years. Can you make your qualitative comment quantitative and update the numbers in my doubling thought experiment? I would be curious about what…

A quantitative approach is no virtue here, just a more convincing way to lie.

ITER will use roughly the same amount of power as JET, produce 10x the power 40 years later. Even using poor metrics such as Q you have enough data points to p-hack whatever incorrect timeframe model you want.

ITER isn't even using HTS coils.

If you really want a quantitative projection of MCF performance over time, here you go. Don't lie with numbers if you don't know what you're talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fustion_triple-product_di...

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#387

Post by whatshisface »

ambrozk wrote: post #344
soperj wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From other comment > I mean, start with why his wife is divorcing him (Jeffery Epstein) and why he's no longer on the board at Microsoft(inappropriate relationships with staffers), then go into how he's screwed up public schooling in the US, then Microsoft under him. That's the easy stuff that you can see publicly.

The guy's work has directly prevented the deaths of enormous numbers of poor people worldwide. That trumps everything else in my book. Also, don't fall for his wife's PR team. You have no idea why she's divorcing him. Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance.

>Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance.

If a PR team was going to pick a fake reason to hide a blasé real reason, why would they pick the biggest scandal possible? I thought rich people tried to keep their personal lives out of the news. Saying that they had drifted apart naturally while the real reason was Epstein is something like what a PR counsel would do, that I could believe, but you're suggesting that they're making that trade in reverse.

Another point to bear in mind is that the legal team does not care what the public thinks because the public doesn't decide anything in court. Lawyers usually tell you to keep quiet about your case, to reduce the risk of saying anything in public that the other side can bring up in court to use against you. That's another thing that usually works backwards from how you're suggesting it is in this situation.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#388

Post by dboreham »

soperj wrote: post #311
throwawayninja wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I find Bill Gates a pretty OK dude, all things considered. If you live life without making any mistakes/enemies that means you really didn't live at all.

Anyone who visited Jeffery Epstein's island and has also been removed from the board of directors of the company they started for inappropriate relationship isn't an OK dude. There's also the whole bit with Paul Allen where they tried to take all of his shares when he had cancer.

Quick note that simply associating with Epstein _may_ not imply badness of the kind you suggest. There's some suspicion that Epstein was some sort of intelligence operative and therefore may have engaged in all kinds of measures to attempt to befriend, influence and compromise powerful individuals. If that's the case, he would have used the approach we hear about vs underage girls etc if he thought that would be successful, but other approaches if that didn't seem likely to work. So it may be possible that an individual had contact with Epstein in a way totally unrelated to human trafficking. e.g. he said "come on my plane and you can meet " or "come to my island and I'll invest in your company". Basically, he was a person focused on compromising and influencing people, using a wide gamut of techniques, not simply a person focused on being an abuser/trafficker.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#389

Post by jjoonathan »

1024core wrote: post #372

It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. ... The British and their penchant for tea...

Did the British go with 240V because it makes tea faster? I don't know the history... but I want to believe.

Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

#390

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Filligree wrote: post #342
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no nuclear waste, what radiation are you measuring to come to this conclusion? neutrons that dissapear the moment the reactor switches off?

Activation of the reactor walls. The neutrons don't disappear; they're absorbed, and some fraction of the atoms that absorb them become radioactive themselves. I've seen lifetime estimates ranging from five to ten years for the walls, after which they'll be high-level waste.

Isn't the breeding blanket suppose to prevent that?
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