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First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

firstlightfusion.com

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Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#131

Post by samus »

acchow wrote: post #95
ramesh31 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is this still true in the 2020s? The laws of physics haven't changed in 80 years. Even if you started with yellow cake uranium (~70% enriched, and itself already nearly impossible for a non-state actor to acquire), to reach weapons grade at >95% you'd need hundreds of tons of it, and massive industrial scale chemical facilities to convert that into uranium hexafluoride and pull out the U235 isotopes [0], where the r…

I was thinking more that the industrial production has increased 10x in 70 years. Private companies can now build rockets that go to space...

Private companies could indeed do it. Heck, the mining and refining part is probably done by private entities these days. However, the only legal customers are nuclear power plants and governments.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#132

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #56
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The answer was "10 years away" for decades, right up to 2015, and then one day in 2016, that day was "today". I've heard this a few times. In 2014 I was doing an MSc in Intelligent Systems ("AI" after the Winter) and Go was discussed in class in the context of Russel and Norvig. I don't remember the tutor saying that beating a grandmaster (? do they have grandmasters in Go?) was "10 years away". I remember him say…

For example https://www.wired.com/2016/01/in-a-huge-breakthrough-googles... >In early 2014, Coulom's Go-playing program, Crazystone, challenged grandmaster Norimoto Yoda at a tournament in Japan. And it won. But the win came with caveat: the machine had a four-move head start, a significant advantage. At the time, Coulom predicted that it would be another 10 years before machines beat the best players without a head…

Thanks, I appreciate the reply but the quote from the Wired article does not look like a direct quote from Coulom, so I'm still not sure what it really means. Was it really a "prediction", or more like an offhand remark? What does the person quoted, Coulom, really think about this "prediction" today, and what would they say they meant back then?

More to the point, when you commented above that "The answer was "10 years away" for decades, right up to 2015", did you have the Wired article in mind? I mean to say, did you read that article in 2014 and think that machines dominating Go is still 10 years away or is it more something you found with a search yesterday? Did you think in 2014 that machines dominating Go was 10 years away?

What I really want to know is what this "prediction" means. Was there really some kind of consensus on "10 years"? How seriously was this taken? It's all so vague and anyone could have said anything and meant anything.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#133

Post by phkahler »

ramesh31 wrote: post #57
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…

>So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested. The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material req…

>> Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested.

Yes, but you don't know if those plans are viable and correct. This whole thing about the gun firing a cylinder is a case in point. People *thought" they knew how it was built sans some detailed measurements and such, but it turns out they were completely wrong on a rather critical aspect of the design.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#134

Post by ncmncm »

eole666 wrote: post #130
ncmncm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could go google that for you. But, why? Innumerable commercial entities are building out solar and wind farms as fast as they can scare up capital. Literally not a single purely commercially-backed nuke plant has ever been built in 70+ years. Not one. Capital did build and operate coal plants, at a profit. But nobody is building new coal plants, anymore. Even operating an existing coal plant is not competitive any…

"Literally not a single purely commercially-backed nuke plant has ever been built in 70+ years. Not one." Sure, let's check wikipedia to see how this is not true : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... Also, after googling it: yes indeed, in some countries renewable energies are more competitive than fission. But that's not the case everywhere : https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of…

Supposed purely commercial plants are always, it turns out, massively subsidized. At minimum, they are absolutely protected against liability, so do not need to try to find an insurer, never mind pay premiums to one.

And, mining and refining fuel has been massively subsidized.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#135

Post by nr2x »

solveit wrote: post #101
nr2x wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly confident we’ll get fusion before we use a “blockchain” to buy a loaf of bread.

Somewhat famously, the very first commercial blockchain transaction twelve years ago was for two pizzas. Cynicism is fine but you don't have to be lazy about it.

I was the first person to accept bitcoin payment for a certain class of goods (not illegal, just don't want to out myself) - so yes, I'm aware of the pizza transaction and have friends who retired off of BTC. That doesn't mean I can buy a cup of coffee with what started as a cool currency idea and turned into a speculative asset for tech bros.

In fact, just yesterday had a conversation with a friend and realized at current prices we jointly spent several hundred thousand dollars on VPN services. So yeah, I was there before there was a there.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#136

Post by dylan604 »

rob74 wrote: post #118
dylan604 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

According to the COSC standard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC ), a mechanical watch is allowed to have a deviation of -4/+6 seconds per day, while a quartz watch has to have ±0.07 seconds per day. So a mechanical watch can be two orders of magnitude "worse" than an electronic one and still call itself an officially certified Swiss watch. But I'm sure that manufacturers of $30k watches hold themselves to higher…

That just means their mediocrity is up to spec

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#137

Post by lowbloodsugar »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #132
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example https://www.wired.com/2016/01/in-a-huge-breakthrough-googles... >In early 2014, Coulom's Go-playing program, Crazystone, challenged grandmaster Norimoto Yoda at a tournament in Japan. And it won. But the win came with caveat: the machine had a four-move head start, a significant advantage. At the time, Coulom predicted that it would be another 10 years before machines beat the best players without a head…

Thanks, I appreciate the reply but the quote from the Wired article does not look like a direct quote from Coulom, so I'm still not sure what it really means. Was it really a "prediction", or more like an offhand remark? What does the person quoted, Coulom, really think about this "prediction" today, and what would they say they meant back then? More to the point, when you commented above that "The answer was "10 yea…

Well, I am replying to a thread on an xkcd comic, so that is the level of seriousness that we're playing at! =)

But, ok, seriously, yes I am an armchair futurist, and also used to play go with my uncle (I am terrible at it), so since chess fell I've been waiting for go to fall too.

I am a believer in exceptional people and teams entering a space and turning established thought on its head. Another example would be spaceX. If you'd have said, ten years ago, that we'd have reusable rockets, that land on their tails like a 1950s sci-fi movie, you'd have been laughed at. On a boat! Ha ha! Crazy! Boeing still don't believe it, given what they've just managed to roll out. I've personally built my career on doing what others have said is impossible.

So, seriously then, sure, if enough people have been saying that something is still 10 years away, then other people have been listening, noticing the opportunity, working on it quietly, and a solution could happen later today.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#138

Post by wolverine876 »

dylan604 wrote: post #113
oliwarner wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think we would. The verb carries an amount of deviousness. I don't know how the word carries so substantially different moral leanings, but that's English. I'm sure there are many other words with evil twins.

English doesn't need words with evil twins. English is much more cunning than that in that the same word can have totally opposite meanings. They tend to be more slang usage, but for example "shit". Without recreating the George Carlin bit, there's so many different meanings depending on how it is used.

Word meanings evolve many ways. Sometimes two word forms evolve independently and coincidentally to the same outcome. Sometimes a word develops from Latin or Greek, and then centuries later someone coins a different word from the same Latin or Greek. Sometimes people apply old words to new situations. Etc. If you look up the field of etymology, you can find many models of how words form.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#139

Post by dredmorbius »

colechristensen wrote: post #128
speed_spread wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 countries have developed Uranium enrichment facilities.

Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States There’s the list of “known” meaning publicly acknowledged countries with operating enrichment facilities, more than 5. Notice it doesn’t include Israel which more or less everyone believes has nuclear weapons meaning enrichment facilities. There are several other cou…

South Africa had at one time.

Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion

#140

Post by R0b0t1 »

sbierwagen wrote: post #123
R0b0t1 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is enriching uranium in the US actually illegal? Seems like the answer is no.

I would be interested to see what you’ve read to lead you to that conclusion.

Well, after much searching I didn't find the parts of the Atomic Energy Act that required certification for any and all materials processing.

By default things are legal.

I've also spoken with scientists who do research that, at times, abuts nuclear science, and have heard stories of them just... not doing paperwork because it's annoying.

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