[HN Gopher] First Light (Oxford University spinout) achieves nuc...
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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?
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