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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

#71

Post by SimplyUnknown »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #44

>> 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.

As far as I can tell, the newsworthy part is that they achieve fusion using their "two-phase" which is supposedly different than conventional tokamaks such as ITER uses. I'm not sure how either of those technologies exactly work, but the article seems to suggest this is a cheaper way to build a fusion reactor. Then again, this is a press piece, so not exactly unbiased.

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

#72

Post by wolverine876 »

phkahler wrote: post #28
colechristensen wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

> decided to verify this on Wikipedia

Please, please don't say that. :(

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

#73

Post by wolverine876 »

johneth wrote: post #27
v8xi wrote: post #24

> 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).

Would Brits scheme, as a verb, in a non-nefarious way?

I note we here use schema, which is partly why I interpret a scheme neutrally.

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

#74

Post by acchow »

ramesh31 wrote: post #57
phkahler wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested. The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material req…

> The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output

Is this still true in the 2020s?

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

#75

Post by wolverine876 »

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…

> the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft

Those were flying in the 1980s.

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

#76

Post by mandevil »

phkahler wrote: post #28
colechristensen wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2011/11/08/the-mysterious-des...

Especially take note of Carey Sublette's comment on the design history in the blog comments: Mr. Sublette is definitely a name to be reckoned with, as far as unclassified nuclear analysis goes. His thought, that the design was basically taken direct from the Thin Man bomb design, is an especially interesting one.

As for why the unclassified world thought what it thought for so long, I always presumed it was because men in the 1940's naturally assumed that the rod moves into the long tube, not the tube moves to surround the rod. (Cut to shot of train going into tunnel.)

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

ncmncm wrote: post #34
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…

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 sep…

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by jeffbee »

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!

Isn't that more than ten times the cost of a PV installation of the same scale?

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

#79

Post by wolverine876 »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #56
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 say…

For example https://www.wired.com/2016/01/in-a-huge-breakthrough-googles... >In early 2014, Coulom's Go-playing program, Crazystone, challenged grandmaster Norimoto Yoda at a tournament in Japan. And it won. But the win came with caveat: the machine had a four-move head start, a significant advantage. At the time, Coulom predicted that it would be another 10 years before machines beat the best players without a head…

There's also a large confirmation bias in the search: If we look for '10 years away' predictions, we're going to find them.

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

#80

Post by eole666 »

ncmncm wrote: post #34
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…

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 sep…

"But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + storage." Any source about that ? It just sounds like an arbitrary anti-nuclear opinion without any evidence backing it. But I'm still cursious if you have anything serious to prove this claim.
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