[HN Gopher] First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuc... ___________________________________________________________________ First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuclear fusion Author : ruaraidh Score : 126 points Date : 2022-04-05 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (firstlightfusion.com) (TXT) w3m dump (firstlightfusion.com) | apendleton wrote: | Useful follow-up thread from the CEO with more technical details: | https://twitter.com/FLF_Nick/status/1511374600575365122 | api wrote: | 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 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. | andrewflnr wrote: | I'm bullish on fusion in general, but there is a lot of hyper- | optimistic BS about any particular fusion setup, and it gets | tiring really fast. I can't say I don't blame the cynics, since | they're helping kill our species, but I do sympathize. | bell-cot wrote: | With modern nuclear technology, it is quite possible to convert | lead into gold. It's been done. Years ago. | | _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. | wolverine876 wrote: | > the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable | spacecraft | | Those were flying in the 1980s. | qiskit wrote: | Sure, unwarranted cynicism isn't helpful. But neither is blind | optimism. Moore's law has proven itself for decades. Fusion has | failed for even longer. A little bit of cynicism is not only | called for, but healthy in this case. | mindcrime wrote: | _The 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. | kitd wrote: | The first fusion-powered blockchain should push HN to | cynicism supercriticality. | nr2x wrote: | Fairly confident we'll get fusion before we use a | "blockchain" to buy a loaf of bread. | omnicognate wrote: | A 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. | ncmncm wrote: | 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 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. | car_analogy wrote: | > Cynicism is well justified, given history and the present | landscape. | | 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... | ncmncm wrote: | The history is of radical overpromising, and continual | announcement of "breakthroughs" that do not bring plausible | competitive viability any nearer. | | 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. | car_analogy wrote: | > The history is of radical overpromising, and continual | announcement of "breakthroughs" that do not bring | plausible competitive viability any nearer. | | It sounds like your issue is with the PR, not the | technology. Is there something faulty or misleading with | the progress made in the triple-product score? | | > 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. | | 30 years of fusion research is what a single Nimitz | aircraft carrier costs. The "even higher" level was one | Nimitz carrier per decade. And it only lasted one decade. | Eyeballing the funding graph, the US has spent a total of | 3 aircraft carrier's worth of funding for fusion in | total, since research began. | ncmncm wrote: | 3 aircraft carriers in, 0 kWh out. | eole666 wrote: | "But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + | storage." Any source about that ? Seems like it's re | trhway wrote: | The 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. | ncmncm wrote: | The key number was, neutrons produced: 50 ("as predicted"). | v8xi wrote: | > First Light has achieved fusion having spent less than PS45 | 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 wrote: | 'Scheme' in this case is a Britishism, basically meaning a | project (not something nefarious). | nr2x wrote: | Yup, as an American living in UK for a bit it was very | confusing to be required to sign up for numerous government | schemes. | wolverine876 wrote: | 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. | IshKebab wrote: | Is 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? | grayrest wrote: | It might be used this way in other commonwealth countries. | In the US we'd use plan, project (personal endeavor), or | program (government endeavor) instead. | | 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. | dangrossman wrote: | Yes. The Wiktionary entry mentions this: "In the US, | generally has devious connotations, while in the UK, | frequently used as a neutral term for projects" | defgeneric wrote: | Even in American English it's fairly common to say "scheme" | without implying "scam". | anecd0te wrote: | starwind wrote: | You too can achieve nuclear fusion! | | https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ | | And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy | than you'll produce | nsxwolf wrote: | It's so cool, though. The power of the sun, in the palm of my | hand! | sandworm101 wrote: | Solar 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. | jona-f wrote: | Watt is not energy, though, you mean power density. Also | your flashlight would run for a few billion years, not bad. | oneoff786 wrote: | Your hand, can in fact, harness the power of the sun's | power by receiving warmth on its own. | nsxwolf wrote: | Yes, 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. | hyperbovine wrote: | It would run your flashlight until basically the end of | time though. I think you neglected that small point. | Gravityloss wrote: | It'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. | colechristensen wrote: | "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. | thehappypm wrote: | The other bomb (Fat Man) used a different approach, using | explosives to radically compress a ball of Plutonium. | phkahler wrote: | 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, 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 | ncmncm wrote: | Moreso: a set of hollow rings. So, maybe the rings didn't | nest together until they hit the target. | ramesh31 wrote: | >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. | acchow wrote: | > 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? | mandevil wrote: | 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.) | wolverine876 wrote: | > decided to verify this on Wikipedia | | Please, please don't say that. :( | apendleton wrote: | In 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). | Izikiel43 wrote: | I'm amazed the British did this first instead of Americans | smachiz wrote: | Hah - this sounds not dissimilar from the first fission bombs | that were "gun" type. | Gravityloss wrote: | Americans would of course do it with a nuke. Which actually | they have already done. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike | bradgranath wrote: | Isn't this a bomb in a vacuum chamber? | NoraCodes wrote: | In 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. | tpmx wrote: | https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/twrwqj/uk_startup_c... | beefman wrote: | And: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30916343 | coldpie wrote: | > 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 wrote: | It'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 wrote: | It's a full-on Xeno's paradox. Soon enough we will be 10 to | 20 seconds away but will still never reach it. | lta wrote: | You, Sir/Madan, are looking me. It's both pretty funny and | despairing | [deleted] | ck2 wrote: | It's my favorite go-to and the series number is so easy to | remember: | | https://m.xkcd.com/678/ | | (be sure to click for its very relevant alt-text) | lowbloodsugar wrote: | I 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 wrote: | >> 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? | lowbloodsugar wrote: | 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 start. | | I'm sure there's more to find, but of course google now | biases towards the articles about AlphaGo actually | winning. | SantalBlush wrote: | This same joke has been made for twenty years. If we can't even | make progress in fusion-related humor, maybe we really are | doomed at fusion research. | jeffbee wrote: | Isn't that more than ten times the cost of a PV installation of | the same scale? | YeGoblynQueenne wrote: | >> 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 wrote: | 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. | ZiiS wrote: | You _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? | darkwater wrote: | As a nuclear fusion ignorant, where is the small print here? | What's the catch, drawback, issue that it will make actually | nonviable ? | beefman wrote: | They 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 | colechristensen wrote: | The 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 wrote: | Roughly 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 wrote: | Fusion research has not received anything _even remotely | resembling_ "all the $Billions in the world" | bell-cot wrote: | Literally you are correct - that phrase is a bit of | English-language rhetoric. | | 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. | DennisP wrote: | Here's something modestly bigger: the UK's JET reactor | recently produced 11 megawatts for five seconds. | | 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. | bell-cot wrote: | Wikipedia notes that JET produced 10MW of fusion power, | sustained for 0.5 seconds, back in 1997. If that real-world | rate of improvement continues, it'll reach 12MW for 50 | seconds in 2047, and 13MW for 500 seconds in 2072. | | 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 ) | DennisP wrote: | As I mentioned above, fusion output scales with reactor | size and magnetic field strength, and five seconds is the | limit of their copper coils. There's no way for JET to | significantly change any of that, so I don't know why | you'd expect large improvements from them. | | After 1997, the only way to scale up was reactor size, | and that started with ITER, the 20-story-tall reactor in | France. That soaked up a lot of fusion money, has been | slow to build, and it's still not running. But more | recently REBCO hit the market, and the same scaling laws | say a reactor smaller than JET using those should get | substantial energy gain. Two projects are building such | reactors, and at least one will be ready around 2025. | | (In any case, I wouldn't say five diesel locomotives are | comparable to "burning a few tiny lumps of coal.") | regularfry wrote: | I can imagine the downsides of accelerating the fuel that hard | at the target and missing might be fairly entertaining. | androa wrote: | Short story, they are shooting small plastic cubes with gas | inside. The cubes are called "targets". | | 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. | oneoff786 wrote: | Ok. So dumb question. What complicates this beyond a | conceptual belt fed heavy machine gun? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-05 23:01 UTC)