https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/
And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy than you'll produce
Any neutron generator that emits 14MeV neutrons is doing it with D-T fusion.
Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.
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.
No apology necessary! I'm well informed on the content of the US mainstream media, and there I've learned that without any doubt all of
force, power, energy, volts, amperes, Watts, Kilowatts, Kilowatt hours, and current
are all just the same things, just synonyms for just the same things!
When I was studying physics, I thought that there were important differences, but now with a lot of exposure to the mainstream media I've learned that I must have been badly wrong!
It is a tiny sun!
(Well, sorta kinda)
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 since the 1960s and 1970s.
I am typing this on a computer with a ~5nm feature size CPU. Hard things can be done. It takes time, focus, and funding.
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 separate micrograms of Li-3H from the thousand tons of pure, molten, radioactive lithium? And, every year replace all the pipes the lithium runs in, weakened by neutron bombardment. By remote control, because strongly radioactive.
This is clearly a bigger job than what needs to be done for a fission plant, where all you need to handle is water and fuel rods. (If you think a 1000 tons of molten radioactive lithium won't need containment, allow me to disabuse you.) But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + storage. In 10 years, fission will be even less competitive than today. There is no scenario where this ends up economically useful.
The history, measured by the fusion triple product, is exponential progress on par with Moore's law [1], despite abysmal funding [2].
[1] Figure 1, https://www.scipedia.com/public/Sanchez_2014a
[2] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
The current funding level, given the abysmal prospects for any return, is too high. It was even higher before. We'll never get any of that back.
Innumerable commercial entities are building out solar and wind farms as fast as they can scare up capital. Literally not a single purely commercially-backed nuke plant has ever been built in 70+ years. Not one. Capital did build and operate coal plants, at a profit. But nobody is building new coal plants, anymore. Even operating an existing coal plant is not competitive any more; coal plants are being shut down with no plan ever to re-open, exactly as fast as solar and wind come on line.
Nukes are made out of steel, concrete, plumbing, and pumps. None of those are getting cheaper. They produce power by blasting steam through enormous turbines, that need regular expensive maintenance, not getting cheaper. Mining and refining uranium is expensive and not getting cheaper. Solar and wind generation cost have been declining at an exponential rate for two decades, and are still falling. Can you even conceive of an exponentially declining cost not crossing any given constant cost?
Suppose you figured out a way to get power from nukes at half the cost, and that was less than renewables just now. How long would it be before they undercut that, again? Would you be able to finish building one, in that amount of time?
There is no future for fission, and even less for fusion.
One of the easiest (laziest?) positions one can hold is simply to be dismissive of anything that hasn't happened yet, and which appears to be moderately difficult or harder. Fusion, AGI, etc... Just dismiss those things as ridiculous and you position yourself as wise, informed, erudite, whatever - to most people.
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.
We have excellent physical reasons to think DT fusion will not be practical. The power density will be terrible, so it would be more expensive than fission at boiling water -- and fission isn't competitive these days.
For instance, the M1 has a density of 171 million/sq mm and claims 5 nm 2D equivalent, while Willow Cove from IBM looks much worse at 10nm but its density is 100.
Saying this not to "cast shade" on certain chip fabricators, just saying that it doesn't actually mean that they have taken the same style transistor fab processes from ~10 years ago and shrunk them down to 5nm. I mean, by the time an actual 2D feature would reach ~2nm, we'd be talking about features that were only about 10 atoms across.
(There's that one quote from a startup founder, "we did it because we didn't realize how hard it was", or something like that. From a pg essay maybe?)
Those were flying in the 1980s.
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.
This is just a press release, but an unusually informative one. For more information on what they have and have not done, see here: https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122
(Link from apendleton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923527)
They have good evidence of deuterium-deuterium fusion. IIRC this is harder to achieve than deuterium-tritium fusion, but as tritium is radioactive with a half-life of ~12 years, it is much harder to acquire and work with. In their concept of a power reactor, they would apparently use the deuterium-tritium reaction, which with the latter being created by bombarding a lithium blanket with the neutrons produced by the reaction, something that is envisaged in most other fusion power concepts.
More power to them! We need to test a myriad of approaches. This could well turn out to be the best one.
>> 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, hollow piece would be the projectile.
I had never heard this before and was in denial reading the part above that. 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.
Edit: Following the reference is was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen
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 requires nation-state level of industrial output. It is physically impossible for a small rogue actor to make a bomb from scratch. Germany during WWII, for example, was far advanced toward a bomb years before the Manhattan project, but their industrial capacity was simply never sufficient to build it.
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.)
Please, please don't say that. :(
I know that technically it's a "scheme", but with the history of this technology they should probably use different language
Scheme itself means the same thing but it's fallen out of use and the only times I've encountered it is when the speaker wants to distance themself from it: get rich quick scheme, hare-brained scheme, nefarious scheme, malicious scheme, etc.
I note we here use schema, which is partly why I interpret a scheme neutrally.
I don't know how the word carries so substantially different moral leanings, but that's English. I'm sure there are many other words with evil twins.
Edit: Fusion makes ~ 10^15 neutrons for every watt-hour of energy released (for the easiest kind of fusion)
- "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...
https://www.mpg.de/18250857/jet-fusion-facility-new-world-en...
The plasma was stable and they could have gone longer except instead of superconductors, JET uses copper coils that would melt if they went longer.
Their input energy was about three times their total output. But fusion output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength, and modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger fields than JET was using.
Meanwhile, a set of 5 30-year-old diesel-electric railroad locomotives can reliably put out ~10MW of usable electrical power (vs. thermal production). Vastly cheaper, with a proven track record and 100% duty cycle. (Generously figuring 3 running, 1 standby, 1 down for maintenance.)
( Wikipedia reference on JET: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#1990s )
But neither has fusion power shown anything even remotely resembling the real-world promise of fission power - which went from the first major attempt at a proof-of-concept reactor (Chicago Pile-1, Dec. 1942, ~1/2 watt thermal power output) to powering a large, high-performance warship (USS Nautilus, Jan. 1955, ~10MW on the propeller shafts) in just 12 years.
The "bullet" is fast enough to compress the gas inside the cube, creating fusion.
It works. But in the scenario it does work, a machine is manually opened, loaded, prepared, and then they do the shot. Whole process takes days to prepare.
For it to be viable they need to do this every five seconds.
That is a hard problem to solve. First lights business model is not to solve that problem, but rather producing the "fuel", the tiny cubes with gas inside.
They say there is many details in how they are built which increases efficiency.
But someone still has to figure out how to build a machine that can continuously reload both the fuel and the bullet.
Conceptually, maybe nothing, but we aren't really talking about your average MG-42 here.
Something like ... the difference between folding a paper airplane and designing and building an airliner.
Wait'll they hear about what those folks at CERN are doing.
Finally, fusion in only ten to twenty years. I've been waiting ten to twenty years for this!
(be sure to click for its very relevant alt-text)
* 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".
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?
