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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

#41

Post by bell-cot »

darkwater wrote: post #6

As a nuclear fusion ignorant, where is the small print here? What's the catch, drawback, issue that it will make actually nonviable ?

Roughly speaking, the catch with every fusion-related "breakthrough" in the past 60+ years is the not-so-slight difference between:

- "With a huge research budget, we found a nifty new way to reliably set a few tiny lumps of coal on fire in our lab."

and

- "We can reliably build useful and practical locomotives, ships, and electrical generating plants which are powered by burning coal...and are long-term economically viable in a world which has several other ways of powering locomotives, ships, and electrical generating plants."

Except that with coal, making a far bigger fire is incredibly easy. With fusion, all the $Billions in the world don't seem capable of making even a modestly bigger...

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

#42

Post by thehappypm »

colechristensen wrote: post #19
Gravityloss wrote: post #3

It'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.

"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.

The other bomb (Fat Man) used a different approach, using explosives to radically compress a ball of Plutonium.

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

#43

Post by sandworm101 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #26
starwind wrote: post #9

You too can achieve nuclear fusion! https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy than you'll produce

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.

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

#44

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> Plans for a “gain” experiment (more energy out than in) are advancing at pace.

So the headline is very precise: they achieved fusion, but not power production using fusion. And as far as I can tell, achieving fusion is not the hard part.

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

#46

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #32
ck2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

>> 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 saying that Go was the last of the classic board games where humans still dominated machines because it requires intuition.

So, can you say where the "10 years away" quote comes from? Is it an actual quote? Do you know someone who actually said beating [a top human player] in Go is "10 years away" at some time before 2015?

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

#47

Post by bell-cot »

api wrote: post #23

The 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…

With modern nuclear technology, it is quite possible to convert lead into gold. It's been done. Years ago.

HOWEVER, it was also understood that the cost per ounce of the resulting gold was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of gold obtained via lower-tech methods.

So there were no serious attempts to scale up the original process. Nor to improve it. Nor to develop "new and better" lead-to-gold conversion processes. Nor to otherwise squander vast sums and resources chasing the "but it IS possible..." dream of making real gold from mere lead.

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

#48

Post by dangrossman »

IshKebab wrote: post #39
johneth wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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?

Yes. The Wiktionary entry mentions this: "In the US, generally has devious connotations, while in the UK, frequently used as a neutral term for projects"

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

#49

Post by nsxwolf »

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.

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's all kinds of cool fusion reactions happening. Gamma rays, helium, tritium, neutrons... that's all going on and it's just cool to know you're making it happen.

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

#50

Post by lta »

AQuantized wrote: post #11
coldpie wrote: post #5

> 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 been 20 to 40 years for about 60 years, now we're down to 10 to 20 we might get down to 5 to 10 in only 30 more years!

You, Sir/Madan, are looking me. It's both pretty funny and despairing
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