Slashdot Mirror
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.
Fusion reactor
Curing cancer
Life extension (fountain of youth)
Driverless cars
Flying cars
Sentient AI
Did I miss anything?
Google's corporate attention span is roughly equivalent to that of a hyperactive two year old.
#DeleteChrome
Cite the OED and the point shall be conceded.
The dictionary doesn't cover grammar, but it is clearly in there as a word:
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/speeded
"verb (used with object), sped or speeded, speeding."
Then there's the usage:
http://grammarist.com/usage/sped-speeded/
Not to mention you seem to be under the mistaken belief that a words existence follows the dictionary, instead of the other way around.
Again, if you don't understand a topic...
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.
> 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.
Tri-Alpha isn't doing inertial confinement fusion. They use a plasma based design with an unusual field configuration (termed "reversed field". The machine does collide two plasmas but it is still magnetic confinement, not inertial.
Laser driven inertial has little chance of being practical without a huge breakthrough in lasers. Heavy ion driven inertial could potentially work since accelerators can be quite efficient, but there are a number of huge hurdles.
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.