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First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion
- tpmx 5y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/twrwqj/uk_startup_claims_to_have_achieved_fusion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/twrwqj/uk_startup_c...
- beefman 5y agoAnd: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30916343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30916343
- Gravityloss 5y agoIt'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.
- Izikiel43 5y agoI’m amazed the British did this first instead of Americans
- smachiz 5y agoHah - this sounds not dissimilar from the first fission bombs that were "gun" type.
- Gravityloss 5y agoAmericans would of course do it with a nuke. Which actually they have already done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike
- colechristensen 5y ago"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.
- phkahler 5y agoI 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, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coster-Mullen
- ncmncm 5y agoMoreso: a set of hollow rings. So, maybe the rings didn't nest together until they hit the target.
- ramesh31 5y ago>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 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.
- 5y ago
- apendleton 5y agoIn fairness to them, the ultimate plan is for something at least slightly less gun-like. They're using these gunpowder charges during testing, but eventually plan to move to some kind of electromagnetic mass-driver setup to make the projectile go. (So, maybe like a railgun or coilgun, which... I guess are still guns, but not like, gun-guns).
- sbierwagen 5y agoTo be fair, that's exactly how artificial nuclear fusion was done for the first time, (Also by the Brits, in 1934) accelerating a deuterium beam at a deuterated target: https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 https://www.nature.com/articles/133413a0 Just with a really small gun and little teeny bullets.
- bradgranath 5y agoIsn't this a bomb in a vacuum chamber?
- NoraCodes 5y agoIn the sense that an internal combustion consists primarily of a series of bombs in tubes, sure. I don't think that this is a very useful analysis, though.
- coldpie 5y ago> 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!
- AQuantized 5y agoIt'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!
- thanatos519 5y agoIt's a full-on Xeno's paradox. Soon enough we will be 10 to 20 seconds away but will still never reach it.
- lta 5y agoYou, Sir/Madan, are looking me. It's both pretty funny and despairing
- ck2 5y agoIt's my favorite go-to and the series number is so easy to remember: https://m.xkcd.com/678/ https://m.xkcd.com/678/ (be sure to click for its very relevant alt-text)
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoI 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".
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago>> 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?
- darkwater 5y agoAs a nuclear fusion ignorant, where is the small print here? What's the catch, drawback, issue that it will make actually nonviable ?
- beefman 5y agoThey made 50 neutrons from this shot! You can make billions per second, steady state, with a tabletop device plugged into a standard outlet. Edit: Fusion makes ~ 10^15 neutrons for every watt-hour of energy released (for the easiest kind of fusion) https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+Wh+%2F+17.6+MeV https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+Wh+%2F+17.6+MeV
- regularfry 5y agoI can imagine the downsides of accelerating the fuel that hard at the target and missing might be fairly entertaining.
- colechristensen 5y agoThe small print is that you can achieve fusion in many, many ways. The problem is getting any energy out and doing so at a meaningful scale. Something like ... the difference between folding a paper airplane and designing and building an airliner.
- bell-cot 5y agoRoughly 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...
- mcronce 5y ago
- starwind 5y agoYou too can achieve nuclear fusion! https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy than you'll produce
- nsxwolf 5y agoIt's so cool, though. The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!
- sandworm101 5y agoSolar 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.
- nsxwolf 5y agoYes, 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.
- dylan604 4y agoIf the $30k watch can't keep time, then those tiny machines aren't very precise
- rob74 4y agoAccording to the COSC standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSC), a mechanical watch is allowed to have a deviation of -4/+6 seconds per day, while a quartz watch has to have ±0.07 seconds per day. So a mechanical watch can be two orders of magnitude "worse" than an electronic one and still call itself an officially certified Swiss watch. But I'm sure that manufacturers of $30k watches hold themselves to higher standards - not that someone who buys a $30k watch nowadays really uses it to tell the time, but still...
- anecd0te 5y ago
- api 5y agoThe 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 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.
- dboreham 5y agoThe cynicism is due to the framing of these stories, failing to set them in the context of "this is a tiny part of a large number of difficult things that need to be achieved before any of this is useful".
- mindcrime 5y agoThe amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. 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.
- omnicognate 5y agoA lazier position is to dismiss the views of a vague group of people as empty posturing without even clearly identifying who you're talking about.
- kitd 5y agoThe first fusion-powered blockchain should push HN to cynicism supercriticality.
- nr2x 5y ago
- v8xi 5y ago> 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
- johneth 5y ago'Scheme' in this case is a Britishism, basically meaning a project (not something nefarious).
- nr2x 5y agoYup, as an American living in UK for a bit it was very confusing to be required to sign up for numerous government schemes.
- R0b0t1 4y agoAt least it's refreshing that their government admits they've been scheming.
- IshKebab 5y agoIs 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?
- dangrossman 5y agoYes. The Wiktionary entry mentions this: "In the US, generally has devious connotations, while in the UK, frequently used as a neutral term for projects"
- IshKebab 4y agoAh I missed that. Interesting!
- ZiiS 5y agoYou _really_ need to say "Projectile approach enables a high-margin consumables business model" to get invetment in technology which will define the next era of human history?
- ncmncm 5y agoThe key number was, neutrons produced: 50 ("as predicted").
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago>> 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.
- SimplyUnknown 5y agoAs 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.
- mannykannot 4y agoDevices like tokamaks use powerful electromagnets to compress a plasma. An alternative uses very powerful lasers to explosively vaporize and compress a pellet of fuel. In comparison, this uses the steampunk-esque method of firing a pellet of fuel into a target with a "hypervelocity gas gun". 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 https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122 (Link from apendleton: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30923527 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.
- ILMostro7 4y agoYou had me at steampunk
- 4y ago
- apendleton 5y agoUseful follow-up thread from the CEO with more technical details: https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122 https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122
- trhway 5y agoThe 6.5km/s would slow a bit in atmosphere, yet still would beat first stage with the remaining velocity by the time it reaches high stratosphere.
- ouid 4y ago>making it the fastest moving object on earth at that point. Wait'll they hear about what those folks at CERN are doing.
- willemlabu 4y agoHere is a video I found that explains the concept in a visual way that finally made sense to me after reading the release. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN7lyxC11n0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN7lyxC11n0