41–50 of 129 posts
Google might try to become the conglomerate of all forward-facing things but it is somewhat funny to see how through it all, it's their advertising revenues that form the core of the business.
> it's their advertising revenues that form the core of the business. You'd think the advertising staff would get pretty good treatment at Google. Do they?
From the actual journal article: > Two additional complications arise because plasma fusion apparatuses are experimental and one-of-a-kind. First, the goodness metric for plasma is not fully established and objective: some amount of human judgement is required to assess an experiment. Second, the boundaries of safe operation are not fully understood: it would be easy for a fully-automated optimisation algorithm to pr…
In software jargon, this is called a "Wizard" (i.e. installer wizard, calibration wizard, etc. that guide you through a process that is more complicated by asking a series of simple questions) and is an idea that dates back decades.
There are two directions within the energy world that I don't completely get. One of them is hydrogen storage, the other nuclear fusion. From what I always understood is that the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction irradiate the surrounding structure and that there is still considerable nuclear waste (although lifetimes are better than with nuclear fission). Do the scientists not care or is this outd…
With the reactor discussed in this article, the situation is even better, because it would use boron fusion. That reaction doesn't produce neutron radiation at all. There'd just be a tiny amount from side reactions.
There was a talk about the state of nuclear fusion by some MIT folks linked here on HN a few days ago. One of the biggest takeaways was that many fusion efforts are very far away (3 to 6+ orders of magnitude) on the most important metric, Q, which is energy_out / energy_in. Additionally, much press and public discussion completely fail to discuss this and other core factors that actually matter for making fusion viab…
When it comes to industrializing the idea, the scope is far broader. For example, the speaker was saying that they can use the neutron streams as the result of fusion for creating tritium. In reality, capturing the neutrons is much more complex than that [1]. Some of those may deposit on the inner surface of the tokamak and have to be recovered by 99% to have breakeven. The nuclear waste is another concern in the opposite case.
Given all these, you get a sense that why companies like General Fusion [2] get funded. He showed that General Fusion is very far away in his metrics. But the pinching technology the company is offering, allows for continuous use of the fusion in rapid bursts (like an automatic rifle). When I met them at the Globe conference, they were claiming that they will be ready for production within 5 years of achieving a surplus. I am not sure how fast the tokamak can get there.
Source: 1. http://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%E2%80%9... 2. http://generalfusion.com/
Am I the only one that never reads these articles but just goes straight to the comments? It seems like reporters always get the facts bungled and go for the simple story - out of necessity of course.
Often I'll skip the article entirely.
There was a talk about the state of nuclear fusion by some MIT folks linked here on HN a few days ago. One of the biggest takeaways was that many fusion efforts are very far away (3 to 6+ orders of magnitude) on the most important metric, Q, which is energy_out / energy_in. Additionally, much press and public discussion completely fail to discuss this and other core factors that actually matter for making fusion viab…
The video was eye opening though, I had no idea that high temperature super conductors were set to revolutionize tokomaks. If the potential is there, it seems like the prudent thing to do would be to reset the ITER project, and redesign utilizing the current generation of high temperature super conductors. But I'm just an interested observer, what do I know?
Am I the only one that never reads these articles but just goes straight to the comments? It seems like reporters always get the facts bungled and go for the simple story - out of necessity of course.
On this article I clicked on it, realized The Guardian was going to be waaay to general, and then went to the comments knowing I would find a quick break down of the facts written by "my people" for an audience like me. Often I'll skip the article entirely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a complete outsider, I don't understand what's special about the "optometrist algorithm." As described in the Nature article it's just hill climbing using humans as the evaluation function. Isn't it basically the same thing they were already doing but more granular?
Basically nobody was using automated gradient descent / etc because of the proclivity of these algorithms to get stuck on a boundary. The problem is the boundaries are not well defined. One example might be a catastrophic instability. If it gets triggered it has the potential to damage the machine. But the exact parameters in which the instability occurs are not well known. So with this algorithm you mix the best of…
There are two directions within the energy world that I don't completely get. One of them is hydrogen storage, the other nuclear fusion. From what I always understood is that the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction irradiate the surrounding structure and that there is still considerable nuclear waste (although lifetimes are better than with nuclear fission). Do the scientists not care or is this outd…
The comparison is not b/w fusion and a hypothetical waste free source of energy. Its b/w fusion and fission. The waste products of fission are much more dangerous, expensive to handle and we still haven't found foolproof, effective ways of disposing them. OTOH, danger from irradiated materials (whatever that is, this is the first time I'm hearing this TBH) doesn't seem very pressing. I highly doubt any of the irradia…
There was a talk about the state of nuclear fusion by some MIT folks linked here on HN a few days ago. One of the biggest takeaways was that many fusion efforts are very far away (3 to 6+ orders of magnitude) on the most important metric, Q, which is energy_out / energy_in. Additionally, much press and public discussion completely fail to discuss this and other core factors that actually matter for making fusion viab…