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Google Enters Race For Nuclear Fusion Technology (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Google and a leading nuclear fusion company have developed a new computer algorithm which has significantly speeded up experiments on plasmas, the ultra-hot balls of gas at the heart of the energy technology. Tri Alpha Energy, which is backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has raised over $500 million in investment. It has worked with Google Research to create what they call the Optometrist algorithm. This enables high-powered computation to be combined with human judgement to find new and better solutions to complex problems. Working with Google enabled experiment's on Tri Alpha Energy's C2-U machine to progress much faster, with operations that took a month speeded up to just a few hours. The algorithm revealed unexpected ways of operating the plasma, with the research published on Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The team achieved a 50% reduction in energy losses from the system and a resulting increase in total plasma energy, which must reach a critical threshold for fusion to occur.
*twitch*
I'm just waiting for them to build a hive complex somewhere under the bay area.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Fusion reactor
Curing cancer
Life extension (fountain of youth)
Driverless cars
Flying cars
Sentient AI
Did I miss anything?
Well, that ought to finally put an end to those meddlesome European kids and their lawsuits!
Google has nukes!
Don't like way Google runs their business in your country!?
Eat neutrons, baby!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Now it's only 49 years away from commercial use!
Google's corporate attention span is roughly equivalent to that of a hyperactive two year old.
#DeleteChrome
when the algorithm builds a very large power plant that produces enough power to provide continuous, perpetual electricity for a large American city, say the size of the Denver metropolitan area.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Oxford lost all credibility years ago.
808 years ago ;-)
Fusion reactor
Curing cancer
Life extension (fountain of youth)
Driverless cars
Flying cars
Sentient AI
Did I miss anything?
They just released 20 million modified mosquitos in an attempt to wipe out Aegypti and eliminate Zika in Long Beach Ca.
"Is it better like this, or like this?" ...
"I, I can't tell..."
"like this, or like this?"
"I.."
"like this or like this?"
"they look the same"
"like this or like this?"
I DON'T KNOW!
I recently read some updates about Google's sister company releasing 20 million mosquitoes infected with some kind of Virus. Is google taking over all the domains that effect human existence.
Inertial fusion attempts will never be able to compete against tokamak or stellarator designs. This type of experiments delivers knowledge that is mostly usefull for nuclear weapons, so it's no wonder nthat this type of fusion research is the dominant one in the US.
. Optimisation and MI is fragile for edge/unexpected cases, so I'm not sure I want this piece of maths used to control an over-white-hot stream of plasma. At least, I'd want decades of testing before deployment and not anywhere near my house or family.
I'm not a big believer in fusion anyway, except that large, conveniently placed fusion reactor that we call 'the Sun'. If we must fiddle around with this, it's worth looking at the Stellerator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that's come on, since 1951.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
May Silicon Valley burn in hell.
That's certainly a viewpoint - but why? Isn't solving a problem like our dependency on fossil fuels important enough that we should be pragmatic about it? As Terry Pratchett once said (different context, though): "I'd gnaw the arse of a dead mole, if I thought it would help".
I don't get it. What exactly annoys you about this story?
... and immediatelly went into full riverdance knee-jerk mode clearly without even having a clue about what nuclear fusion is. The worrying thing is that people like you have a vote.
> Tri Alpha Energy, which is backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
The design leads of TriAlpha described their design in a late 1997 paper in Science.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/278/5342/1419
Issues over the next year contained responses from other researchers. They invariably point out that the design simply will not work. In one specific instance, the original paper describes the "Q" of the reactor running on p-B to be about 2.3. One of the responses goes into this calculation in depth and calculates it to be 0.02.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/281/5375/307
This system will not work. As demonstrated at about the same time, it is HIGHLY unlikely any non-thermal-equilibrium system ever can due to massive energy losses through radiation. We've known this for almost 70 years, but the evidence by this point in time is absolutely overwhelming.
ITER, this is where the money should go. Either that, or show us a new structure, and the math/simulations that say it will get to break even more efficiently. Or don't show us... just do it.
I just watched this presentation yesterday by Dennis Whyte from MIT, and I must say it looked quite promising. His main point was that the recent development of commercially available high-temperature superconductors has radically changed the fusion playing field.
This is due to HTSC's having much larger operating windows compared to traditional superconductors. This allows one to scale down the reactor size while maintaining the magnetic field strength. And smaller size means cheaper and faster development.
He probably glossed over some hard problems, but I must admit it sounded a lot more realistic than other fusion proposals I've heard about.
As far as I can tell, it looks like a high tech variation of the Trisops machine I worked on 40 years ago.
...are all we need then I'm your man. Get me a box of Taco Bell taco supremes and I could fuel the world.
It's the shit joke that everyone is expecting, and you're not even the first to make it. Give yourself a medal.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If fusion were to be able to be done, it would fundamentally change every aspect of our society.
I will propose an assertion: Energy = wealth.
If fusion becomes inexpensive and commercially available, perhaps along the "too cheap to meter" line, there would be a lot of things that are doable, which we could do, which we couldn't before:
1: Desalination plants on a large scale, combined with water pipelines. Once the warlords are out of the way, African droughts and famines would be over, and there would be a lot more arable, fertile land available.
2: Thermal depolymerization can be used as a very effective way to recycle plastics. Combine that with a ship, and it can actually harvest the plastic in the Pacific Gyre and turn it back into fuel.
3: Direct CO2 extraction out of the atmosphere, perhaps reusing it as fuels.
4: The ability to create stuff that would be prohibitivily expensive. Same thing happened with aluminum. Before electricity was available, getting aluminum from bauxite was extremely expensive. With energy cheaply available, titanium would be able to be used more.
5: The ability to do transportation networks which are wasteful on fuel right now. Cheap fuel + electric vehicles mean a bus service that can even handle rural areas with 1-2 hours on a street.
So, all, and all, if fusion is available, it will fundamentally change life as we know it, just as electricity changed things. So, it is worth keeping at it.
"The technology is expected to be 5 to 10 years away from commercial application."
Yawn.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
This makes it into my 'ten funniest jokes on Slashdot ever'.
To understand how clever the parent's joke is, you have to reach the third sentence in the article linked, which you will first believe to be a misdirection, and then realize it to be an insider joke like they have loong liked to pull on each other.
Of course, if you're from 'there' or 'the other place', you might have caught it at once.
Agree 100%. I have always thought that cheap/free energy would cause a huge societal shift. Think about anything you consume and estimate how much energy it requires to manufacture and deliver. With cheap energy, you don't need to work as much to live.
(But you said this so much better.)
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
-- Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human: Nature"
You're promoting alternatives that are going to cost ordinary people A LOT more money.
I'd rather Google continue the research that isn't coming out of my pocket.
... Google MrFusion (Beta) to be publicly available.
You need another M for Musk.
If fusion were to be able to be done, it would fundamentally change every aspect of our society.
I will propose an assertion: Energy = wealth.
If fusion becomes inexpensive and commercially available, perhaps along the "too cheap to meter" line, there would be a lot of things that are doable, which we could do, which we couldn't before:
OK, but energy will never be "too cheap to meter" unless we develop Tesla (the original guy) wireless energy transfer as the main cost of energy is not the fuel but the lines and infrastructure needed to move the electricity around. My state is almost completely hydro and has no fuel cost and energy to ship elsewhere, but still needed to be metered. Plus fusion has many of the issues that fission has. Fusion plants will also have issues with radioactivity and disposal as we can't really stop neutrons which will be colliding with the rest of the plant.
1: Desalination plants on a large scale, combined with water pipelines. Once the warlords are out of the way, African droughts and famines would be over, and there would be a lot more arable, fertile land available.
So, you're saying that Africa's population would have constraints removed and the number of people in Africa would consequently explode. I don't think you thought your cunning plan all the way through...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You don't need distribution infrastructure once it becomes possible to shrink production systems enough.
Thank your for your input Ray Palmer.
There was a paper a while back that showed that once an area was stable, populations stabilized. In areas where the economy is bad, there is a higher population growth, just because of mortality rates. If one kid lives out of three, people will have more children. Heck, even Kurzgesacht has an episode on this topic exactly.
And what's so bad about Africa taking a turn at becoming a developed continent? Haven't they have more than their share of the world shitting on them?
The biggest existential threat facing Europe right now is an exploding African population that don't want to stay in Africa because it's full of Africans. Somehow I don't think even more Africans is going to solve the problem.
The world doesn't shit on Africa, Africans shit on Africa.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To be fair, gasoline powered engines actually have a whole bunch of explosions. They have multiple explosion per second, even.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Humor doesn't always translate well to text. However, I know what they said. It was much funnier in my head.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
> If fusion becomes inexpensive and commercially available
And if you know absolutely nothing about how the energy world works, this sounds possible. If you do know a bit, then you know it's not. And the power companies have been telling the fusion folks this continually since the 1970s. But they don't listen - really, when you try to have this conversation they get mad and run away. Literally.
Consider this: any energy producing machine requires a certain amount of money to build. That money has a payback rate based on the riskiness of the investment. For investments like this where there's little salvage value, the rate is the "unsecured rate", about 6.5%. So very simply, if your machine does not sell enough energy in a year to cover those payments and make a profit, no one will build it. You get that, right?
Which is precisely why fission plants are being ignored. They have many technical merits, but at current prices, they cost about 5x as much as a wind turbine to build, but deliver about 3x as much power. And they have fuel, and more expensive maintenance. So no one is building them. That is the only reason.
We know that any possible fusion plant that's been presented will cost much more than a fusion plant. Even in their wildest predictions, assuming everything goes right, power from a fusion plant will be at least 50% more than a fission plant even if you look 100 years into the future:
http://www-pub.iaea.org/mtcd/publications/pdf/p1250-cd/papers/sese-v.pdf
> Cheap fuel + electric vehicles
You can do that now with PV. PV's down around 4 cents, 1/3rd the predicted value of fusion power, if it works, 100 years from now.