141–150 of 194 posts
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they also say this isn't possible with their current techniques. That's fine by me, it was not very long ago that we were unable to get more out of the fuel than we put into the fuel. That's step one to fusion ignition, and was done for the very first time last fall, so as far as I'm concerned they are still fleshing out step one.
Doesn't every H-bomb have substantial positive fuel yield?
Here's the paper. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... They would like to charge you $32 to look at it, nature -ally. The fusion yield is (?) 14 kilojoules (inferring this from physicist Mark Herrman's "5 million billion fusions" [WaPo], at 18 MeV per fusion), which is a moderate improvement over the 8 kilojoule achivement from last fall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6459289 [WaPo]…
17.3 kJ for the latest shot, according to the paper. But only some 8 kJ of that came from fusion (the balance came from the laser input). D-T fusions are about 17.6 MeV, but 80% of that is in neutrons, which escape unless captured in a special blanket. The 8 kJ reported was all alphas. So 8 kJ / 3.5 MeV = 1.4e16 fusions, vs. 5e15 in the quote. He was probably talking about a previous shot. For comparison, a typical A…
E_{fusion} is the calculated neutron yield Y_{total}=6.1e15 times 17.6 MeV: 17.2 kJ + rounding. Check out page 3, right column.
> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the…
Totally agree. Just so you know, the purpose of the NIF was for military testing right from the beginning. The reason it initially got funded (shortly after the end of the cold war) was to help with stockpile stewardship (making sure our aging weapons still work via simulation, without having to do actual weapon tests). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock…
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No offense to anyone, but this link should be deleted. You may not like the system, but HN isn't the place to protest IP laws with civil disobedience. A lot of YC companies have their own IP they'd like to protect I'm sure.
"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) founded by the University of California in 1952" [1]. My tax dollars paid for this research I should be able to read it. As far as YC is concerned AirBNB and Uber encourage people to break the law all the time, some rules are just stupid and outdated and don't make sense and should be broken. This is "Hacker"…
I mean, I agree with you, but this is a silly statement. Just because the government pays for something does not allow you access to it.
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I totally agree with you, but now I'm wondering what the upside to fusion is over fission, besides being a great science landmark. No radioactive inputs or outputs?
I guess availability of fuel is one big advantage, along with the cleanup of a fusion plant hopefully being a lot easier and cheaper than a fission reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Waste_management A lot safer too!
Anybody else excited that one of the guys working on fusion power is named "Mr. Hurricane?"
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It's not worth it. The terrorists won.
By terrorists you mean those illusionary guys that the politicians use as the boogie man, to beat down the rationality of ordinary people by provoking fear, so they are legally allowed to do virtually anything without nobody to stop them?
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there's two ways you can take 'return on investment' - the wholistic qualitative way (if x has a tiny chance of improving the whole world then its worth it) or the narrow quantitative way (once we research it, we'l probably have to give x away basically for free and its is likely not to work out anyway and will take years so its practically valueless to our organisation on this years financial model). unfortunately t…
"Return on investment" generally means what you get back for what you put in. Both quality and quantity matter and I think this is often recognized, but if you're getting essentially nothing, it doesn't matter what quality of nothing you get.
Anybody else excited that one of the guys working on fusion power is named "Mr. Hurricane?"
I thought it was kind of hard to take the article seriously after that. I know it's the guy's real name, so I feel bad about this (as bad as I can feel for someone with an awesome name!), but it doesn't change that it sounds like something from a comic book. A fusion scientist named Omar Hurricane? Come on! Next thing we hear is there's been a horrible lab accident involving high powered lasers and lead scientist Oma…
He didn't spend all that time in Evil Physicist School to be called Mister, thank you very much.