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NASA’s New Shortcut to Fusion Power (2022)
- Phreaker00 3y agoThis is an article from 2022. Previous post with more comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30503111
- throwaway69123 3y ago“The enriched uranium fuel they use must be kept secure. “ really lacking context on this sentence, enriched nuclear waste is stored because of non proliferation treaties not because of limitations of the science or technology
- theonlybutlet 3y agoNon-proliferation and more importantly nefarious use.
- hutzlibu 3y agoLike dirty bombs, that anyone can make easily, who can make a ordinary bomb.
- jabl 3y agoEnriched uranium would not make a particularly impressive dirty bomb. Spent nuclear fuel, or some specific very radioactive isotopes, maybe.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoEven more sinister would be to just hide radioactive material some place. No bomb, no one knows whats wrong because no one casually sweeps a geiger counter, and this probably would probably irradiate people nearby for years before its found.
- hutzlibu 3y agoYeah, but the point of terror is to make terror, that people are afraid. Not to actually damage much. A dirty bomb would be a perfect terror weapon as people are afraid of radiation and mostly would not trust government when they declare it is safe.
- jjk166 3y agoThe US actually does have a radiation detector network that covers most major cities. If you have enough radioactive material to pose a threat to people's health from brief exposure over a non-trivial area, it would be detected. You'd probably also wind up on a lot of intelligence agencies' radars trying to acquire that much radioactive material and the equipment for handling it.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoHow many smoke detectors would you have to stockpile before getting a knock on your door?
- XorNot 3y agoDirty bombs are an overblown threat, compared to a regular bomb parked near a stadium security line or what you can make with off the shelf chemicals.
- simiones 3y agoThe fallout from a dirty bomb would be relatively easily cleaned up with showers and a few hoses on streets and buildings. The people close to the blast would also inhale some radioactive dust which will be a much bigger problem, but most of them will probably just die because of the conventional explosion itself. The radioactive dust is definitely far less problematic than shrapnel from a fragmentation bomb. Overall dirty bombs are really not a problem bigger than any other kind of bomb.
- rsaxvc 3y agoIn addition to proliferation and other tasks: do not turn into radioactive meteor upon reentry breakup.
- RC_ITR 3y agoIt will be interesting to see if this helps solve the tritium/helium 3 problem that all current fusion companies face. I’ve always found it interesting that they are allowed to pitch VCs claiming that they are doing the same thing the sun does, when the sun in fact does proton/proton, proton/deuterium, and helium 3/helium 3 fusion at a relatively slow rate under extremely high pressure.
- wheelerof4te 3y ago"when the sun in fact does proton/proton, proton/deuterium, and helium 3/helium 3 fusion at a relatively slow rate under extremely high pressure." We actually don't know how the Sun does fusion. If we did, we'd have created it here on Earth already.
- ryanpandya 3y agoI thought we're pretty clear that it's thanks to absolutely colossal mass, which... Can't really happen on earth since it requires the mass of a huge number of earths.
- wheelerof4te 3y agoThen we need to find another way to generate fusion power, or admit that it's impossible to do on this planet. Throwing lumps of cash at fusion power venture capital feels almost like a money-laundering fraud.
- jiggawatts 3y agoThis smells of pseudoscience, somewhere between LK99 and cold fusion. For example, they reference an experiment so bad that I as a layperson could find a dozen glaring flaws in the associated published paper. The referenced "result" was about changes in a Johnson-Matthey purifier when deuterium and/or hydrogen was cycled through it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319920333462?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603... This experiment is destructive, so the team compared two different palladium-silver hydrogen gas purification tubes with months worth of gas cycled applied to them. They then assumed that the tubes started out "the same", and hence they wrote up any differences as changes that occurred because of the gases they used. This blithely ignores the differences in the tubes due to manufacturing variations! That's shockingly bad science, and I very much doubt that sincerity and honesty of anyone who chooses that specific "result" as something worthy of referencing in a journal article.
- perihelions 3y ago- "somewhere between LK99 and cold fusion" It's cold fusion. Lattice-confinement fusion was an attempted re-branding of the cold fusion field. - "There are also upcoming conferences: the American Nuclear Society’s Nuclear and Emerging Technologies for Space conference in Cleveland in May and the International Conference on Cold Fusion 24, focused on solid-state energy, in Mountain View, Calif., in July."
- DennisP 3y agoThe difference from cold fusion is that NASA is blasting the lattice with gamma rays, which is what gives deuterons the energy to fuse. Whether there's a chance of getting net power that way, I have no idea, but at least it's not depending on previously unknown nuclear reactions.
- perihelions 3y agoBut in another place (the paper the grandparent comment linked) they're claiming a classic Pons-Fleischmann experiment, where they're just pumping in cold deuterium gas–no heat, no radiation–and say they observed spontaneous nuclear reactions. Party like it's 1989. I agree with the grandparent commenter: zero credibility here, this group is doing nothing but trolling people.
- paulinahunt 3y ago[dead]