10 ms·
AI for real-time fusion plasma behavior prediction and manipulation
- carbocation 2y agoIs this just an announcement of a grant renewal?
- bloqs 2y agoIt seems that way. The power of :staremoji:_Marketing_:staremoji:
- tolerance 2y agoI think this gives an overview of the actual research being funded. "AI for Real-time Fusion Plasma Behavior Prediction and Manipulation - Plasma Control Group": https://control.princeton.edu/machine-learning-for-rt-profile-control-in-tokamaks/ https://control.princeton.edu/machine-learning-for-rt-profil...
- dang 2y agoThanks! We've changed the link above to that. Submitted URL was https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ai-meets-fusion-cmu-princeton-join-forces-to-pursue-clean-abundant-power/ https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ai-meets-fusion-cmu-princeton-join-fo....
- mwkaufma 2y ago[flagged]
- anon291 2y agoNo 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 net energy
- psychoslave 2y agoIs "producing net energy" really what’s physically happening here, or is it a shortcut for "extracting pre-existing matter/energy in a form we can canalize?
- anon291 2y agoEnergy can neither be created nor destroyed (matter is energy) When I say producing net energy I mean getting out more useful energy than we put in. At the lowest level, the energy we received comes from the fact that the two nuclei fused have a lower energy state than they had individually and the remaining energy causes heat via the emission of neutrons
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- CtrlAltmanDel 2y ago"causes heat" Heat is the transfer of energy due to a temperature differential. I think you may want to review the highschool physics textbook.
- fkyoureadthedoc 2y agoI never took high school physics so I asked my best friend what you're talking about and he (ChatGPT) said > CtrlAltmanDel nitpicks anon291’s use of "causes heat," arguing that heat is energy transfer due to temperature differences. This critique feels overly pedantic, as "heat" is commonly used to describe energy released in fusion (even if "thermal energy" might be more precise). I don't know if I should trust the machine god or the snarky commenter with a vapid one liner here. You're both very confident.
- gpm 2y ago> I don't know if I should trust the machine god or the snarky commenter Neither of these are worthy of your trust. Even if they had agreed.
- noname120 2y agoTIL: it's not just buzzwords. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning
- HPsquared 2y agoNeural networks have been used in industrial process control for many years. This is just another industrial control problem, perhaps a difficult one.
- spenczar5 2y agoThat’s really interesting! Do you have other interesting specific examples? I would have guessed that most industrial control problems were simpler sets of differential equations that could be directly estimated.
- wruza 2y agoI’ve heard about a local packaging factory recently that uses an ML-first system for messaging their clients about what they will need to order soon, based on recent orders and global criteria. It’s not a simple problem, apparently. They signal the clients and start pre-producing, basically sort of algotrading themselves. Not really an industrial control though, but close to it.
- nick3443 2y agoPID control your customers :)
- cyberax 2y agoFurnace control was one of the first practical applications of multi-layer neural networks: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282185187_Artificial_neural_nets_for_prediction_of_silicon_content_of_blast_furnace_hot_metal https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282185187_Artificia...
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- aftbit 2y ago>Nuclear power plants are largely considered as one of the most reliable sources of energy. Inside the plants, reactors use fission to heat water into steam, which is then used to spin turbines and produce carbon-free electricity. However, nuclear fission produces nuclear waste, which requires great amounts of regulation for safe storage and disposal. This is an odd angle to highlight. The risk of long-lived nuclear waste is extremely overblown, and the sheer volume of it that we produce (or even would produce, in the worst case of a once-through fuel cycle and nuclear power providing 100% of our energy needs for a century) pales in comparison to the amount of toxic and radioactive fly ash that even a single coal plant produces in a decade. The real problems with nuclear fission power are threefold, in my opinion: 1. It is too expensive in terms of capital costs. Fusion will likely not help with this, but building a lot of identical large fission plants would probably help with economies of scale. Solar plus batteries might still end up being cheaper though. 2. Accidents have the potential to be catastrophic. Think Fukushima or Chernobyl, where entire towns have to be abandoned due to contamination. Fusion would help here, I believe. 3. There is a major proliferation concern. A civilian nuclear power program, especially one with breeder reactors, is not very far away from producing a fission bomb, and the short-lived high-activity nuclear wastes could be stolen and misused to make a dirty bomb. Fusion is perhaps better in this way, though an operating fusion reactor would be a very powerful neutron source of its own.
- kaonwarb 2y agoI agree with your logic. However, fear of nuclear waste, rational or not, has been a major driver of public opposition for decades, and is worth the focus.
- perihelions 2y agoIt is not true that coal is more radioactive than spent nuclear fuel. It's very much the opposite: SNF is 10^11 times more radioactive than coal per kilogram, or 10^6 times more radioactive per energy unit. Per the EPA, US coal has, at the high end, 10^3 Becquerel/kg of natural radioactivity [0]. Spent nuclear fuel has 3 million Curies/tonne (33 MWd/kg burnup fuel, at the age of 1 year) [1], which is equal to 10^14 Bq/kg. Since 33 MWd/kg is an energy density a factor of 10^5 greater than that of coal, the normalized ratio of [radioactivity]/[energy] is 10^6. The graph in [1] depicts the decay of SNF activity on a log-log scale. It reaches the same radioactivity level as coal (again, normalized by energy output) at about 1 million years. I'm fairly confident I know the origin of this social media-popular pseudofact. It's this poorly-titled Scientific American [2] article from 2007, which is about the (negligible) amount of radioactivity that nuclear plants release into the environment in the course of routine operation. It is *not* about spent fuel. It's a fair—but nuanced and easy to grossly misunderstand—point that coal power plants throw up all their pollution into the environment in routine operation, while nuclear plants, by default, contain theirs. [0] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm-coal-combustion-residuals https://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm-coal-combustion-residua... ("TENORM: Coal Combustion Residuals") [1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/n-situ-radioactivity-for-PWR-spent-fuel-at-33-MWd-0-kg_fig1_237387509 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/n-situ-radioactivity-for... ("Impact of High Burnup on PWR Spent Fuel Characteristics" (2005)) [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... ("Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste [sic]" (2007)
- TuringNYC 2y agoWhen Marketing gets invited to the Grant Proposal meeting
- atomic128 2y agoNeutrons 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 them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we need. Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. 20% of America's grid power comes from nuclear fission. If you want to develop energy technology, focus on improving fission. For example, TRISO fuel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41898377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41898377) or what Lightbridge is doing (https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel). Hacker News is hostile to fission and defeatist (unable to contemplate innovation in fission technology) but this attitude will gradually change. Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
- raverbashing 2y agoFission 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.
- rob74 2y agoThe 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 doesn't happen...
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- htrp 2y agoAI for Fusion in order to create Fusion for AI
- hotsauceror 2y agoIt’s an ouroboros.
- Jerrrrrrry 2y agoit 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 feels like it has withheld from. It has already done so ( :/ ) and admitted to it's own intentions, which, even if fabricated, show deceit of which and by which these "alignment" teams have stated are not possible.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Jerrrrrrry 2y ago>> it has all the data, all it needs now is more power. >Next up: release the hypo-drones for a new era of trust. People have replaced their psychiatrists with these agents. 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.
- eagerpace 2y agoWhat came first, AGI or Fusion?
- sva_ 2y ago
- soup10 2y ago[flagged]
- nelup20 2y agoVCs preparing term sheets as we speak
- jmyeet 2y ago> Nuclear power plants are largely considered as one of the most reliable sources of energy. Reliable how? I mean we first have the issue is we've never built one so how we can judge reliability? I assume the author is alluding to the apparent abundance of fuel for nuclear fusion. This is and isn't true. Obviously hydrogen (particularly protium) is abundant. Deuterium is relatively abundant, even at ~150ppm. Tritium needs to be produced in a nuclear reactor. Current hydrogen fusion models revolve around dueterium-tritium ("D-T") fusion. This is because you need to neutrons to sustain the reaction but that presents two huge problems: 1. Because everything is at such high temperature, you eject fast neutrons. This is an energy loss for the system and there's not really a lot you can do about it; and 2. Those free fast neutrons destroy your containment vessel and reactor (as do free Helium nuclei aka alpha particles). And then after you do all that you boil water and turn a turbine just like you do in a coal or natural gas plant. So "reliable" is an interesting and questionable claim. There are other variants like so-called aneutronic fusion (eg Helium-3, which is far from abundant) and those aren't really "neutron free". They're really just "fewer neutrons". So what about containment? Magnetic fields can contain charged particles and you have various designs (eg tokamak, stellarator) and that's what the AI is for here I guess. But the core problem is to make this work you superheat the plasma so you're dealing with a turbulent fluid. That's inherently problematic. Any imperfection or failure in your containment field is going to be a problem. Stars deal with this by being large and thus using sheer size (ie neutrons can't go that far without hitting another nucleus) and gravity. It increasingly seems to me that commercial nuclear fusion power generator is a pipe dream, something we simply want to be true. I'm not convinced it'll ever be commercially viable. I'd love to be proven wrong and certainly won't stop anyone from trying. In a way AI is the new blockchain. Go back a few years and you had a gold rush of startups attaching every idea to "blockchain" to build hype. That's what AI is now. I don't think it fundamentally changes any of the inherent problems in nuclear fusion.
- Cosi1125 2y agoNuclear as in fission power plants :-)
- hshshshshsh 2y agoNo wonder people don't trust institutions anymore.
- thierrydamiba 2y agoCan you elaborate?
- avidphantasm 2y agoI 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.
- iforgot22 2y agoML, a subset of AI...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- winternewt 2y agoAI was defined by Marvin Minsky in 1956 as "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men." Later in 1959, Arthur Samuel defined machine learning as a "field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chriskanan 2y agoThere is a lot of AI research in the nuclear fusion space. For inertial confinement fusion (a competing technology to magnetic confinement fusion, e.g., tokamaks) the National Ignition Facility (NIF) used it for their experiment that resulted in "ignition." My lab is collaborating with researchers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics to use AI to improve inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We recently put out this paper [1] using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to predict the outcome of ICF experiments. Currently, existing physics simulators are based on old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions and actual laser shots, so among other goals, we are trying to build better predictors using neural networks. This is needed since it is hard to rapidly iterate on real data, since they only have a dataset of around 300 ICF shots. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08832 https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08832
- gauge_field 2y agoI got curious when you said " old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions " Do you have any online reference/docs that explain apis/software/source code related to projects in this area?
- noobermin 2y agoHere we go with the CS people saying "the old fortran codes are terrible." Yeah, the "high error" between code predictions and laser shots is because LPI is inherently noisy and it's essentially impossible to fully control conditions. I would work on expensive sims for days to weeks and the experiments would see differences that would be off from that from an order or mag because their focal point is off by a micron. There's nothing wrong with the "old Fortran codes," they have the right physics, the problem is the initial conditions are just uncontrollable so that's why simulating these systems is hard. Codes are not magic, they are physical codes, as in, they generally encode the physics as we understand it relevant to the experiment, so you might as well say our physical models are wrong, which is a much harder bar to clear, you'd have to invalid probably near 100 years of plasma physics. The problem likely is as I said, the experiments are just hard to control and we don't know the correct inputs. It's not like weather forecasting where we can have a weather balloons across the world, we're not able to probe every micron of the target at all times for a plasma temperature and density.
- dang 2y agoSee also https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ai-meets-fusion-cmu-princeton-join-forces-to-pursue-clean-abundant-power/ https://www.ri.cmu.edu/ai-meets-fusion-cmu-princeton-join-fo... (that was the submitted link but we changed it via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077657)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- twothreeone 2y ago> However, uncovering these inter-correlations analytically is too complex to be achieved analytically. sigh.. I guess that's cool and all, you're exited about your work, that's great. But can we please polish our prose a little more and stop using buzz words like "groundbreaking", "now.. for the first time", "unprecedented" etc? Such distractions seriously undermine the legibility (and frankly, also taint the credibility by negatively biasing readers) of the claims.
- mathematicaster 2y agoLikely due to using an LLM as part of the writing process.
- twothreeone 2y agoMaybe, though in my experience beginner PhD students will often write like this in early manuscript drafts after they've been working on some project for a few months. Usually it's easily fixed by having someone more experienced proof-read it with comments explaining why that is bad style. Worst case, they'll learn the hard way (i.e., conference reviewers). But seeing this without any proof-reading on some public physics lab site just makes me cringe that they have unchecked write access to that site.
- ziofill 2y agoAbout 20 years ago I was an undergrad at the university of Padova (italy), and in the outskirts of the city (in Legnaro) there was a fusion experiment. The fusion device was in one building and the control room was in an adjacent building. Back then we were using CRT monitors and each time there was a fusion event, the magnetic confinement field was so strong that the image on all the screens in the control room would simultaneously shift on one side and then spring back when the field was turned off. Across buildings.
- HPsquared 2y agoI wonder if that would affect hard drives too. Or microphones.
- aurelien 2y agothe Porcini Mushroom is wrong, because when you cut a part of this mushroom the Yellow become Blue, and it is by this way one of rare blue element in Nature.