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AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

control.princeton.edu

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Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#11

Post by psychoslave »

anon291 wrote: post #8
mwkaufma wrote: post #3

[flagged]

No this is actually using neural nets to predict and control plasma boundary disruptions, which is an intractible problem to solve numerically. I've been studying plasma physics and from what I understand perfect control isn't necessary as long as you can control it long enough to get useful power. If the plasma dissipates you just restart. But ideally it's controlled enough that while it is in there, it's producing…

Is "producing net energy" really what’s physically happening here, or is it a shortcut for "extracting pre-existing matter/energy in a form we can canalize?

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#12

Post by atomic128 »

Neutrons make hardware radioactive.

Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.

If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we need.

Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. 20% of America's grid power comes from nuclear fission. If you want to develop energy technology, focus on improving fission. For example, TRISO fuel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41898377) or what Lightbridge is doing (https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel). Hacker News is hostile to fission and defeatist (unable to contemplate innovation in fission technology) but this attitude will gradually change.

Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#14

Post by anon291 »

psychoslave wrote: post #11
anon291 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is actually using neural nets to predict and control plasma boundary disruptions, which is an intractible problem to solve numerically. I've been studying plasma physics and from what I understand perfect control isn't necessary as long as you can control it long enough to get useful power. If the plasma dissipates you just restart. But ideally it's controlled enough that while it is in there, it's producing…

Is "producing net energy" really what’s physically happening here, or is it a shortcut for "extracting pre-existing matter/energy in a form we can canalize?

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed (matter is energy)

When I say producing net energy I mean getting out more useful energy than we put in.

At the lowest level, the energy we received comes from the fact that the two nuclei fused have a lower energy state than they had individually and the remaining energy causes heat via the emission of neutrons

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#15

Post by spenczar5 »

HPsquared wrote: post #7
noname120 wrote: post #5

TIL: it's not just buzzwords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning

Neural networks have been used in industrial process control for many years. This is just another industrial control problem, perhaps a difficult one.

That’s really interesting! Do you have other interesting specific examples? I would have guessed that most industrial control problems were simpler sets of differential equations that could be directly estimated.

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#16

Post by CtrlAltmanDel »

anon291 wrote: post #14
psychoslave wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "producing net energy" really what’s physically happening here, or is it a shortcut for "extracting pre-existing matter/energy in a form we can canalize?

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed (matter is energy) When I say producing net energy I mean getting out more useful energy than we put in. At the lowest level, the energy we received comes from the fact that the two nuclei fused have a lower energy state than they had individually and the remaining energy causes heat via the emission of neutrons

"causes heat"

Heat is the transfer of energy due to a temperature differential. I think you may want to review the highschool physics textbook.

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#17

Post by [deleted] »

anon291 wrote: post #14
psychoslave wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "producing net energy" really what’s physically happening here, or is it a shortcut for "extracting pre-existing matter/energy in a form we can canalize?

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed (matter is energy) When I say producing net energy I mean getting out more useful energy than we put in. At the lowest level, the energy we received comes from the fact that the two nuclei fused have a lower energy state than they had individually and the remaining energy causes heat via the emission of neutrons

[deleted]

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#18

Post by bbor »

noname120 wrote: post #5

TIL: it's not just buzzwords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning

Fascinating! Reminds me of the new generation of AR headsets (eg Orion) that are making the impossible possible simply by adding an ANN(-derived) layer above some their of device controllers. I wonder how many problems will fundamentally change in the face of mature brute-forcing techniques…

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#20

Post by raverbashing »

atomic128 wrote: post #12

Neutrons make hardware radioactive. Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays. If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate th…

Fission is "simple" but it seems every designer in the XX century made it as much complicated as possible for not so great reasons (and don't even get me started on the "let's not use breeding reactors" stuff)

Cooling that requires pumps, as an example, should be a non-starter in new projects.

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