The key number was, neutrons produced: 50 ("as predicted").
First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
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Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#32> First Light is working towards a pilot plant producing ~150 MW of electricity and costing less than $1 billion in the 2030s. Finally, fusion in only ten to twenty years. I've been waiting ten to twenty years for this!
It's my favorite go-to and the series number is so easy to remember: https://m.xkcd.com/678/ (be sure to click for its very relevant alt-text)
I think this misses the most important thing about predictions:
* has been "10 years away" for many years: could be tomorrow
An example would be "How long before a computer beats a grandmaster at Go?" The answer was "10 years away" for decades, right up to 2015, and then one day in 2016, that day was "today".
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#33The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. A little engineering later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly…
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. One of the easiest (laziest?) positions one can hold is simply to be dismissive of anything that hasn't happened yet, and which appears to be moderately difficult or harder. Fusion, AGI, etc... Just dismiss those things as ridiculous and you position yourself as wise, inform…
A lazier position is to dismiss the views of a vague group of people as empty posturing without even clearly identifying who you're talking about.
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#34The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. A little engineering later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly…
Cynicism is well justified, given history and the present landscape.
Suppose they get this working, and able to produce, what, 300 MW worth of hot neutrons. They have to capture the neutrons and turn them into heat to boil water to drive a turbine to get out 150 MW. Thus, handle the, what, 1000 tons? 10,000 tons? of lithium needed to capture all those neutrons. And, I guess, sieve it for tritium? Maybe chemically separate micrograms of Li-3H from the thousand tons of pure, molten, radioactive lithium? And, every year replace all the pipes the lithium runs in, weakened by neutron bombardment. By remote control, because strongly radioactive.
This is clearly a bigger job than what needs to be done for a fission plant, where all you need to handle is water and fuel rods. (If you think a 1000 tons of molten radioactive lithium won't need containment, allow me to disabuse you.) But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + storage. In 10 years, fission will be even less competitive than today. There is no scenario where this ends up economically useful.
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#35The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. A little engineering later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly…
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. One of the easiest (laziest?) positions one can hold is simply to be dismissive of anything that hasn't happened yet, and which appears to be moderately difficult or harder. Fusion, AGI, etc... Just dismiss those things as ridiculous and you position yourself as wise, inform…
The first fusion-powered blockchain should push HN to cynicism supercriticality.
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#36> First Light has achieved fusion having spent less than £45 million, and with a rate of performance improvement faster than any other fusion scheme in history. I know that technically it's a "scheme", but with the history of this technology they should probably use different language
'Scheme' in this case is a Britishism, basically meaning a project (not something nefarious).
Yup, as an American living in UK for a bit it was very confusing to be required to sign up for numerous government schemes.
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Little Boy" the first nuke deployed in Japan was also just a gun, firing a lump of enriched uranium at another lump of enriched uranium at the end of a tube.
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…
Moreso: a set of hollow rings. So, maybe the rings didn't nest together until they hit the target.
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. One of the easiest (laziest?) positions one can hold is simply to be dismissive of anything that hasn't happened yet, and which appears to be moderately difficult or harder. Fusion, AGI, etc... Just dismiss those things as ridiculous and you position yourself as wise, inform…
The first fusion-powered blockchain should push HN to cynicism supercriticality.
Fairly confident we’ll get fusion before we use a “blockchain” to buy a loaf of bread.
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#39> First Light has achieved fusion having spent less than £45 million, and with a rate of performance improvement faster than any other fusion scheme in history. I know that technically it's a "scheme", but with the history of this technology they should probably use different language
'Scheme' in this case is a Britishism, basically meaning a project (not something nefarious).
Is it really unique to Britain? It's the first definition on Wiktionary and it doesn't mention anything about it being regional. Is scheme really only negatively in America?
Re: First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
#40It's remarkable and humorous how it's just a gun. Like this is how the Victorians would have approached fusion. More power to them! We need to test a myriad of approaches. This could well turn out to be the best one.
In fairness to them, the ultimate plan is for something at least slightly less gun-like. They're using these gunpowder charges during testing, but eventually plan to move to some kind of electromagnetic mass-driver setup to make the projectile go. (So, maybe like a railgun or coilgun, which... I guess are still guns, but not like, gun-guns).