First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

Post by dylan604 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

mandevil wrote: post #76

phkahler wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say it fired a slug through a cylindrical piece of material, but decided to verify this on Wikipedia. It turns out: >> For the first fifty years after 1945, every published description and drawing of the Little Boy mechanism assumed that a small, solid projectile was fired into the center of a larger, stationary target.[31] However, critical mass considerations dictated that in Little Boy the larger, h…

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2011/11/08/the-mysterious-des... Especially take note of Carey Sublette's comment on the design history in the blog comments: Mr. Sublette is definitely a name to be reckoned with, as far as unclassified nuclear analysis goes. His thought, that the design was basically taken direct from the Thin Man bomb design, is an especially interesting one. As for why the unclassified world thought…

Post by ILMostro7 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:45 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #106

SimplyUnknown wrote: post #71

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As far as I can tell, the newsworthy part is that they achieve fusion using their "two-phase" which is supposedly different than conventional tokamaks such as ITER uses. I'm not sure how either of those technologies exactly work, but the article seems to suggest this is a cheaper way to build a fusion reactor. Then again, this is a press piece, so not exactly unbiased.

Devices like tokamaks use powerful electromagnets to compress a plasma. An alternative uses very powerful lasers to explosively vaporize and compress a pellet of fuel. In comparison, this uses the steampunk-esque method of firing a pellet of fuel into a target with a "hypervelocity gas gun". This is just a press release, but an unusually informative one. For more information on what they have and have not done, see h…

Post by R0b0t1 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:49 AM UTC

sbierwagen wrote: post #84

acchow wrote: post #74

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> The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output Is this still true in the 2020s?

Supposedly the laser enrichment process is smaller and cheaper, though it's also kept secret. You still need thousands of kilograms of natural metallic uranium, which is a rare heavy metal with few commercial uses and one really salient illegal one, or thousands of tons of uranium ore, which, see previous. It's hard to buy this stuff secretly, because not many people have it, and people who do have it have a big, sal…

Post by rob74 » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #110

nsxwolf wrote: post #49

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Yes, but this I suppose is a bit like a mechanical watch (if many orders of magnitude less practical). You can spend $30,000 on a watch that keeps terrible time in comparison to a $10 quartz watch. But you know there's all these tiny precision machines inside ticking away, and that makes you happy. The only power I can extract from a fusor is the current generated inside a Geiger counter. But in my head, I know there…

If the $30k watch can't keep time, then those tiny machines aren't very precise

Post by graycat » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 5:21 AM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #43

nsxwolf wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so cool, though. The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!

Solar panels harness the power of the sun too. Fun fact: The sun's energy density is only a few watts per ton. A thousand-pound chunk of the sun could barely run a flashlight. Practical fusion requires H/He conversion rates exponentially faster than stars. Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.