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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*
Fusion reactor
Curing cancer
Life extension (fountain of youth)
Driverless cars
Flying cars
Sentient AI
Did I miss anything?
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
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.
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.
Huh? A Farnsworth Fuser can produce neutrons and can be made in most physics labs. I'd be very surprised if any company working on fusion doesn't have at least one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Wendelstein setup looks very promising, been following that thing since they started their experiments. Plus, it looks like what you'd get if you asked Giger and Gaudí to collaborate on the design. Extra points. But at this stage I wouldn't even write off tokamaks just yet.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
> 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.
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.
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.
Huh? A Farnsworth Fuser can produce neutrons and can be made in most physics labs.
That's GOOD NEWS for EVERYONE.
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.