311–320 of 375 posts
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We have working reactors they just don't output more energy than they consume. We should be throwing more money at this...
There have even been reactors that produce more energy than they consume, just not in a practical, economical way.
This might work. It's from Lockheed's Skunk Works, which has a very good track record and tremendous respect in the aerospace community. With the basic physics laid out, this is mostly an engineering and construction problem. Their plan is to build and test a new prototype every year. The Skunk Works can do that; they've been doing it for decades. They're a manufacturer of prototypes, and have in-house capabilities f…
As long as they remain secretive, they have no right to demand to be taken seriously.
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That's hardly ever true. In my experience, Hacker News is full of people from the software field; folks whose professions are often unconstrained by physics,[1] and who have a generally optimistic "this can happen" mentality. That's why everyone here believes we'll have fully self-driving cars in 5-6 years. In the rest of the engineering world, the answer to any question is: it'll be harder than you think it'll be (p…
> coal plants, which still make up the majority of U.S. energy production This is no longer the case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States
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What's different this time (yeah, I know, I know) is that, if what they and EMC2 are separately claiming is true, it's gone from being a fundamental physics problem to relatively tractable engineering, with well-understood risks and timelines. Compare this with ITER, where they still don't know what material some fairly critical components can even be theoretically made of. It's just night and day.
>Compare this with ITER, where they still don't know what material some fairly critical components can even be theoretically made of. It's just night and day. the Skunk Works and EMC2 haven't even reached the stage where they would face the same issue of material - all of them would ultimately have to contain the same type of fast neutrons and there is no good known material to do it.
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It's always a safe bet that the top Hacker News comment will always be "won't work, it's too hard." It's like sitting around for a year trying to sell a project at my current employer, with everybody and their lead telling you "that'll never work," then you implement in a weekend and those same people start nitpicking what you've come up with. (What happened to it'll never work? "Well, your CSS isn't great.") Honestl…
That's hardly ever true. In my experience, Hacker News is full of people from the software field; folks whose professions are often unconstrained by physics,[1] and who have a generally optimistic "this can happen" mentality. That's why everyone here believes we'll have fully self-driving cars in 5-6 years. In the rest of the engineering world, the answer to any question is: it'll be harder than you think it'll be (p…
Lockheed Skunk Works, on the other hand, is not.
They've been pushing the frontiers of engineering in areas that are very much constrained by physics since 1943, and succeeding. Many times.
> Lockheed shares fell 0.6 percent to $175.02 amid a broad > market selloff. Doh.
> could be ready for use in a decade. That's the standard issue joke. "Nuclear fusion has been just ten years away for the last fifty years" It is so common as a joke I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.
What's different this time (yeah, I know, I know) is that, if what they and EMC2 are separately claiming is true, it's gone from being a fundamental physics problem to relatively tractable engineering, with well-understood risks and timelines. Compare this with ITER, where they still don't know what material some fairly critical components can even be theoretically made of. It's just night and day.
They dismiss the concerns of the scientific community. Why shouldn't they? They're getting rich off of the ignorance of generals and venture capitalists.
“the first reactors […] could be ready for use in a decade.” I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere before…
With all the alternative small fusion reactors I'm taking a strict "show me the energy" approach...
The mainstream magnetic confinement community has been very cautious about overhyping lately. Unfortunately, the over zealousness of groups like this and NIF saps credibility from them anyway.
I don't know much about fusion. It seems that the breakthrough they're talking about is that reactors are ~10x smaller. Why is this a big deal? Square footage is plentiful. I thought the problems are safety and how much energy it could produce.
Take a look at the footprint of ITER. It surprised me how massive the thing is planned to be. That's the competition.
Or any other power plant for that matter.
"If it sounds too good to be true..."
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That's hardly ever true. In my experience, Hacker News is full of people from the software field; folks whose professions are often unconstrained by physics,[1] and who have a generally optimistic "this can happen" mentality. That's why everyone here believes we'll have fully self-driving cars in 5-6 years. In the rest of the engineering world, the answer to any question is: it'll be harder than you think it'll be (p…
Physicists recognize the constraints on development imposed by the laws of physics. Software professionals recognize the constraints on development imposed by entropy, information theory, and other esoteric branches of mathematics. Rather than scoff at this article because Lockheed is making extraordinary claims without the backing of extraordinary evidence, I prefer to scoff because nuclear physics modeling and simu…
Conservation laws are the book-keeping of physics, and they act as global checks on correctness. If your code conserves energy, mass, particle number, charge, momentum, etc it is probably correct in the ways that matter, because it's incredibly hard to get bugs that get the physics wrong in materially interesting ways while still obeying conservation laws.
I once wrote a rarefied gas dynamics simulator (modelling a few thousand interacting particles--I was curious about some non-equilibrium thermodynamics questions) that conserved energy to +/-1 bit in double-precision (and which exercised the weird feature of some x86 processors that had something like 80-bit internal registers but did 64 bit double precision computations, and which allowed the garbage in the extra bits to contaminate the LSB, resulting in very slightly different behaviour in debug and release mode, which gave me fits for weeks.) It is just incredibly hard to get that level of conservation and still get the physics wrong.
And then there's semi-analytic solutions: to check that gas dynamics code I wrote a super-simple analog of the system in Perl based on approximate equations of motion, and got the same results. Because the underlying physics admits of different computational representations that are guaranteed to be the same if they are both correct and extremely unlikely to suffer from the same bugs you can have a very high degree of confidence in their correctness.
So no: the results of simulation are not wrong 97% of the time. I've worked on one experiment where the modelling was wrong, and which took three different computational approaches to sort out, but it's a rarity.
My feeling, based on experience, is these guys are onto something very interesting.