AI for Fusion in order to create Fusion for AI
What came first, AGI or Fusion?
AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
61–70 of 167 posts
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#62Neutrons 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…
I'm not a specialist but here is what I think I know (I'm talking with the point of view of a Frenchman, who consumes most of his electricity from (fission) nuclear power plants):
1/ Uranium is not a renewable (quite the opposite), needs to be mined and treated (which is expensive and very polluting), and not present at the required concentrations in most of the world (this creates geopolitical issues).
2/ Fission nuclear plants require a well functioning [state|government], and no war. A (conventional) strike on a nuclear power plant can have devastating and lasting consequences. Even a random terrorist group can do that.
3/ I've read that "Ultimately, researchers hope to adopt the protium–boron-11 reaction, because it does not directly produce neutrons, although side reactions can" (that's a wikipedia quote, but I've read that already from other sources).
So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#63Earlier 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.
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 t…
Mercury from burning coal is an extremely dilute pollutant. There's zero hope for capturing and containing it. Nuclear waste in contrast is literally just barrels/boxes of stuff. You can pick it up with a forklift and put it inside a sealed container for the next thousand years.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 has all the data, all it needs now is more power.
>Next up: release the hypo-drones for a new era of trust.
The sense of (possibly 'mal'-aligned) security (theater) is exactly the the effective altruistic sub-goal an entity would be innately optimized to foster.
Especially in the implicit/explicit ARM (pun intended) race we are in.
The future of our species isn't something we should let capitalism race to the bottom with.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#65Neutrons 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…
I'm not a specialist but here is what I think I know (I'm talking with the point of view of a Frenchman, who consumes most of his electricity from (fission) nuclear power plants): 1/ Uranium is not a renewable (quite the opposite), needs to be mined and treated (which is expensive and very polluting), and not present at the required concentrations in most of the world (this creates geopolitical issues). 2/ Fission nu…
Deuterium is also not renewable, even if it is more abundant than uranium.
The H1-B11 reaction would be a much better energy source than anything else, but for now nobody knows any method to do it. There is no chance to do it by heating, but only by accelerating ions, and it is not known how a high enough reaction rate could be obtained.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#66[flagged]
No this is actually using neural nets to predict and control plasma boundary disruptions, which is an intractible problem to solve numerically. I've been studying plasma physics and from what I understand perfect control isn't necessary as long as you can control it long enough to get useful power. If the plasma dissipates you just restart. But ideally it's controlled enough that while it is in there, it's producing…
> an intractible problem to solve numerically.
Yeah, so we'll just get a reduced dimension model that we don't know how it works.
Sounds good.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The designs are complicated, well, because in practice it's not as simple as "put these rocks next to each other and they get hot". When you put the rocks next to each other, they not only get hot, but also emit some nasty radiation that has to be shielded. And if the rocks get a liiiitle bit too close together, they might explode, which leads to huge headaches for everyone involved, so you'd better make sure that do…
>And if the rocks get a liiiitle bit too close together, they might explode
Impossible. Worst thing that can happen without carefully designed explosive lens is a nuclear fizzle.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#68I know AI is the buzzword du jour, but this is really ML, and really just advanced cybernetic control systems. Deep learning systems have a high enough degree of variety necessary to control short time step nonlinear systems like the plasma in a tokamak.
Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#69Re: AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
#70TIL: it's not just buzzwords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning
Very interesting if you consider life as a complex chemical reaction that tries to self-sustain.