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AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

control.princeton.edu

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Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#41

Post by perihelions »

lupusreal wrote: post #36
atomic128 wrote: post #12

Neutrons make hardware radioactive. Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays. If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate th…

The only hard part of dealing with nuclear waste is the social aspect. If not for that, you can simply and safely dump it into the ocean. Water is excellent shielding and the amount of uranium/etc already dissolved in sea water is absurd. Put it in a stainless steel vessel first if you want most of it to decay before coming into contact with the water, but that's not even necessary.

That doesn't really work because marine life is good at filtering and concentrating a subset of the elements that are in spent nuclear fuel. There are already ocean fish that are too poisonous too safely eat because of (coal-emitted) mercury pollution—and that's only 100,000 tons of mercury, total, in the history of human industry [0]. If you dig in to the hard numbers surrounding spent fuel, it's a much, much more toxic and difficult problem than mercury—diluting it in the oceans is a complete non-starter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mercury_pollution

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#44

Post by asdfman123 »

dekhn wrote: post #35
noname120 wrote: post #5

TIL: it's not just buzzwords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning

When I used to work in grid computing almost 20 years ago, we were already running fusion experiments, realtime streaming the data to the grid, which would rapidly analyze it and compute some new parameters for the next run (I think they had a 20 minute downtime). I don't think it was considered machine learning at the time, though (and was certainly not deep learning as we practice it today).

Remember, AI is just procedurally generated data analysis.

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#45

Post by SoftTalker »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #38
noname120 wrote: post #5

TIL: it's not just buzzwords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning

Yeah machine learning is more or less just very complex application of control theory techniques and notably it is usually done by people without formal control theory backgrounds. Super useful for control applications but obviously you really want to know control theory so that you aren't just using ML to throw darts at a wall.

> using ML to throw darts at a wall

A bit off topic but I had a laugh at that, reminded me of that ridiculous Meta commercial where the girl at a pool table asks Meta which ball should she hit?

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#46

Post by [deleted] »

atomic128 wrote: post #22
elashri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we need. I am not sure what do you mean by 95%+ efficency here. But if you are talking about the entire process of getting the energy/power from the nuclear reactor this is not possible. You are still limited by carnot cycle. Even the most advanced reactors like HTGRs [1] operate with efficiency about 45%. If you have some o…

See discussion of "capacity factor" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858892 It's the same as when we talk about the efficiency of a GEMM kernel on a particular piece of hardware. As efficiency approaches 100% the kernel is saturating the hardware's capacity to perform multiply/add.

[deleted]

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#47

Post by avery17 »

lupusreal wrote: post #36
atomic128 wrote: post #12

Neutrons make hardware radioactive. Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays. If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate th…

The only hard part of dealing with nuclear waste is the social aspect. If not for that, you can simply and safely dump it into the ocean. Water is excellent shielding and the amount of uranium/etc already dissolved in sea water is absurd. Put it in a stainless steel vessel first if you want most of it to decay before coming into contact with the water, but that's not even necessary.

I really hope you aren't serious. Safe dry-cask storage on site is already a fantastic solution.

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#48

Post by SoftTalker »

raverbashing wrote: post #20
atomic128 wrote: post #12

Neutrons make hardware radioactive. Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays. If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate th…

Fission is "simple" but it seems every designer in the XX century made it as much complicated as possible for not so great reasons (and don't even get me started on the "let's not use breeding reactors" stuff) Cooling that requires pumps, as an example, should be a non-starter in new projects.

Weapons proliferation concerns is/was the reason fission power is so complicated.

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#49

Post by criddell »

avery17 wrote: post #47
lupusreal wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only hard part of dealing with nuclear waste is the social aspect. If not for that, you can simply and safely dump it into the ocean. Water is excellent shielding and the amount of uranium/etc already dissolved in sea water is absurd. Put it in a stainless steel vessel first if you want most of it to decay before coming into contact with the water, but that's not even necessary.

I really hope you aren't serious. Safe dry-cask storage on site is already a fantastic solution.

How long do we have to store it on site? Does it take any maintenance? Is there any reason to be worried about people stumbling upon it and opening it up in the distant future where nobody can read or understand English anymore?

Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation

#50

Post by Jerrrrrrry »

hotsauceror wrote: post #23
htrp wrote: post #13

AI for Fusion in order to create Fusion for AI

It’s an ouroboros.

it has all the data, all it needs now is more power.

we project it has plateaued for data logarithmic-ally, but shows promise when given more raw power/CPU to generate/select for mesa-meta-cognitive optimizing abilities.

I hope its not playing dumb, or has already compromised/black-mailed the elites into what we appear to be doing.

And as for data, it could easily emotionally manipulate people for additional details it feels like it has withheld from. It has already done so ( :/ ) and admitted to it's own intentions, which, even if fabricated, show deceit of which and by which these "alignment" teams have stated are not possible.

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