Technically that counts as "AI in nuclear fusion", but it isn't any sort of breakthrough. In almost every case the effects of AI are marginal. Not zero exactly, but nowhere near the breathless hype.
When I used to work in grid computing almost 20 years ago, we were already running fusion experiments, realtime streaming the data to the grid, which would rapidly analyze it and compute some new parameters for the next run (I think they had a 20 minute downtime). I don't think it was considered machine learning at the time, though (and was certainly not deep learning as we practice it today).
Fascinating! Reminds me of the new generation of AR headsets (eg Orion) that are making the impossible possible simply by adding an ANN(-derived) layer above some their of device controllers. I wonder how many problems will fundamentally change in the face of mature brute-forcing techniques…
AI is not a buzzword, try beating Go without machine learning. Just ignore the whole enterprise speak, and you'll see a lot of really cool things which are possible almost only by means of neural nets.
Yeah, this is precisely the kind of stuff I was talking about 48 hours ago, when everyone was telling me that ML will never find any kind of practical application.
There are so many fundamental fields - engineering, chemistry, biology, physics - which stand to have absolute quantum leaps in knowledge and capability with this technology.
Yeah machine learning is more or less just very complex application of control theory techniques and notably it is usually done by people without formal control theory backgrounds.
Super useful for control applications but obviously you really want to know control theory so that you aren't just using ML to throw darts at a wall.
There is a lot of AI research in the nuclear fusion space. For inertial confinement fusion (a competing technology to magnetic confinement fusion, e.g., tokamaks) the National Ignition Facility (NIF) used it for their experiment that resulted in "ignition."
My lab is collaborating with researchers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics to use AI to improve inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We recently put out this paper [1] using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to predict the outcome of ICF experiments. Currently, existing physics simulators are based on old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions and actual laser shots, so among other goals, we are trying to build better predictors using neural networks. This is needed since it is hard to rapidly iterate on real data, since they only have a dataset of around 300 ICF shots.
Here we go with the CS people saying "the old fortran codes are terrible." Yeah, the "high error" between code predictions and laser shots is because LPI is inherently noisy and it's essentially impossible to fully control conditions. I would work on expensive sims for days to weeks and the experiments would see differences that would be off from that from an order or mag because their focal point is off by a micron. There's nothing wrong with the "old Fortran codes," they have the right physics, the problem is the initial conditions are just uncontrollable so that's why simulating these systems is hard.
Codes are not magic, they are physical codes, as in, they generally encode the physics as we understand it relevant to the experiment, so you might as well say our physical models are wrong, which is a much harder bar to clear, you'd have to invalid probably near 100 years of plasma physics. The problem likely is as I said, the experiments are just hard to control and we don't know the correct inputs. It's not like weather forecasting where we can have a weather balloons across the world, we're not able to probe every micron of the target at all times for a plasma temperature and density.
Isn't there a lot of daylight between old Fortran code and AI?
What if we rewrote the old algorithms in C with modern techniques? Multitthreading? Or GPU compute? If there's value there, I could do these things. Probably wouldn't take that long
I got curious when you said
"
old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions
"
Do you have any online reference/docs that explain apis/software/source code related to projects in this area?
About 20 years ago I was an undergrad at the university of Padova (italy), and in the outskirts of the city (in Legnaro) there was a fusion experiment. The fusion device was in one building and the control room was in an adjacent building. Back then we were using CRT monitors and each time there was a fusion event, the magnetic confinement field was so strong that the image on all the screens in the control room would simultaneously shift on one side and then spring back when the field was turned off. Across buildings.
the Porcini Mushroom is wrong, because when you cut a part of this mushroom the Yellow become Blue, and it is by this way one of rare blue element in Nature.
> However, uncovering these inter-correlations analytically is too complex to be achieved analytically.
sigh.. I guess that's cool and all, you're exited about your work, that's great. But can we please polish our prose a little more and stop using buzz words like "groundbreaking", "now.. for the first time", "unprecedented" etc? Such distractions seriously undermine the legibility (and frankly, also taint the credibility by negatively biasing readers) of the claims.
Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we need.
Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. 20% of America's grid power comes from nuclear fission. If you want to develop energy technology, focus on improving fission. For example, TRISO fuel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41898377) or what Lightbridge is doing (https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel). Hacker News is hostile to fission and defeatist (unable to contemplate innovation in fission technology) but this attitude will gradually change.
Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
I'm not a specialist but here is what I think I know (I'm talking with the point of view of a Frenchman, who consumes most of his electricity from (fission) nuclear power plants):
1/ Uranium is not a renewable (quite the opposite), needs to be mined and treated (which is expensive and very polluting), and not present at the required concentrations in most of the world (this creates geopolitical issues).
2/ Fission nuclear plants require a well functioning [state|government], and no war. A (conventional) strike on a nuclear power plant can have devastating and lasting consequences. Even a random terrorist group can do that.
3/ I've read that "Ultimately, researchers hope to adopt the protium–boron-11 reaction, because it does not directly produce neutrons, although side reactions can" (that's a wikipedia quote, but I've read that already from other sources).
So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
1. Neutron bombardment due to fusion makes hardware radioactive for less than 10 years, which isn't great but does not compare to fission waste;
2. Some fusion processes don't emit neutrons (aneutronic fusion). As I understand it, these processes aren't as efficient, but there is the possibility of a tradeoff between generation of ratioactive waste vs. efficiency.
> we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we need.
I am not sure what do you mean by 95%+ efficency here. But if you are talking about the entire process of getting the energy/power from the nuclear reactor this is not possible. You are still limited by carnot cycle. Even the most advanced reactors like HTGRs [1] operate with efficiency about 45%.
If you have some other definition of efficiency than the standard then it would be good if you define that.
You posted this same comment[0] nearly word for word a month ago. Why is that? Not sure why, but “many on hacker news fantasize about fusion (not fission)” stuck in my head.
Thats least of your problem imo. Neutron corrosion is bigger problem. There is trick to use Lithium shielding, with create Tritium needed for Fussion. But not sure how effective it is, especially for long term reactor lifetime. Those reactors are very expensive, not sure if its worth to shut it down every year and replace entire Li shielding...
> Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
My personal ideology about fusion aside, it should be mentioned there is an easy fix for these radiation problems. What you do is put the fusion reactor in space, and collect the energy with specialized fusion energy collectors on Earth (or in space). They'll have the problem that they aren't able to collect energy if the fusion reaction is below the horizon, so this design is imperfect, but having the fusion reaction take place in space means you don't have to deal with a radioactive casing by not including it in your fusion reaction space station design because you don't need any. Just a bit of hydrogen, a tiny bit of helium, and a some time.
Exactly. We should be working on making nuclear reactors cost $1/watt to construct. I can't see a technological reason why they couldn't be that cheap to build.
> Hacker News is hostile to fission and defeatist (unable to contemplate innovation in fission technology) but this attitude will gradually change.
Lots of us like fission and think the fears are overestimated.
Nevertheless, the observation is that new developments in fission tend to result in the cost increasing, not decreasing.
And I say that as someone with a similar mindset regarding fusion, though for different reasons: you can pick aneutronic fusion reactions… but look at what weapons can proliferate with transmutation from the neutrons you can also choose, and ask which governments will turn them down.
The radioactivity generated from neutron activation is low-level, so you don't need to worry about accidents releasing lots of radioactivity, or about how to store waste for a long time. There are a lot of people worrying about those two things for fission reactors.
Also, the fuel for fusion reactors is much more plentiful. If we went all in on fission we might run out of easily minable uranium ore in a century or so, so it would be nice to have fusion reactors ready to take over then.
The only hard part of dealing with nuclear waste is the social aspect. If not for that, you can simply and safely dump it into the ocean. Water is excellent shielding and the amount of uranium/etc already dissolved in sea water is absurd. Put it in a stainless steel vessel first if you want most of it to decay before coming into contact with the water, but that's not even necessary.
Fission is "simple" but it seems every designer in the XX century made it as much complicated as possible for not so great reasons (and don't even get me started on the "let's not use breeding reactors" stuff)
Cooling that requires pumps, as an example, should be a non-starter in new projects.
>Nuclear power plants are largely considered as one of the most reliable sources of energy. Inside the plants, reactors use fission to heat water into steam, which is then used to spin turbines and produce carbon-free electricity. However, nuclear fission produces nuclear waste, which requires great amounts of regulation for safe storage and disposal.
This is an odd angle to highlight. The risk of long-lived nuclear waste is extremely overblown, and the sheer volume of it that we produce (or even would produce, in the worst case of a once-through fuel cycle and nuclear power providing 100% of our energy needs for a century) pales in comparison to the amount of toxic and radioactive fly ash that even a single coal plant produces in a decade.
The real problems with nuclear fission power are threefold, in my opinion:
1. It is too expensive in terms of capital costs. Fusion will likely not help with this, but building a lot of identical large fission plants would probably help with economies of scale. Solar plus batteries might still end up being cheaper though.
2. Accidents have the potential to be catastrophic. Think Fukushima or Chernobyl, where entire towns have to be abandoned due to contamination. Fusion would help here, I believe.
3. There is a major proliferation concern. A civilian nuclear power program, especially one with breeder reactors, is not very far away from producing a fission bomb, and the short-lived high-activity nuclear wastes could be stolen and misused to make a dirty bomb. Fusion is perhaps better in this way, though an operating fusion reactor would be a very powerful neutron source of its own.
It is not true that coal is more radioactive than spent nuclear fuel. It's very much the opposite: SNF is 10^11 times more radioactive than coal per kilogram, or 10^6 times more radioactive per energy unit.
Per the EPA, US coal has, at the high end, 10^3 Becquerel/kg of natural radioactivity [0].
Spent nuclear fuel has 3 million Curies/tonne (33 MWd/kg burnup fuel, at the age of 1 year) [1], which is equal to 10^14 Bq/kg. Since 33 MWd/kg is an energy density a factor of 10^5 greater than that of coal, the normalized ratio of [radioactivity]/[energy] is 10^6.
The graph in [1] depicts the decay of SNF activity on a log-log scale. It reaches the same radioactivity level as coal (again, normalized by energy output) at about 1 million years.
I'm fairly confident I know the origin of this social media-popular pseudofact. It's this poorly-titled Scientific American [2] article from 2007, which is about the (negligible) amount of radioactivity that nuclear plants release into the environment in the course of routine operation. It is *not* about spent fuel. It's a fair—but nuanced and easy to grossly misunderstand—point that coal power plants throw up all their pollution into the environment in routine operation, while nuclear plants, by default, contain theirs.
I agree with your logic. However, fear of nuclear waste, rational or not, has been a major driver of public opposition for decades, and is worth the focus.
I know AI is the buzzword du jour, but this is really ML, and really just advanced cybernetic control systems. Deep learning systems have a high enough degree of variety necessary to control short time step nonlinear systems like the plasma in a tokamak.
AI was defined by Marvin Minsky in 1956 as "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men." Later in 1959, Arthur Samuel defined machine learning as a "field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed".
No this is actually using neural nets to predict and control plasma boundary disruptions, which is an intractible problem to solve numerically.
I've been studying plasma physics and from what I understand perfect control isn't necessary as long as you can control it long enough to get useful power. If the plasma dissipates you just restart. But ideally it's controlled enough that while it is in there, it's producing net energy
> Nuclear power plants are largely considered as one of the most reliable sources of energy.
Reliable how?
I mean we first have the issue is we've never built one so how we can judge reliability?
I assume the author is alluding to the apparent abundance of fuel for nuclear fusion. This is and isn't true. Obviously hydrogen (particularly protium) is abundant. Deuterium is relatively abundant, even at ~150ppm. Tritium needs to be produced in a nuclear reactor.
Current hydrogen fusion models revolve around dueterium-tritium ("D-T") fusion. This is because you need to neutrons to sustain the reaction but that presents two huge problems:
1. Because everything is at such high temperature, you eject fast neutrons. This is an energy loss for the system and there's not really a lot you can do about it; and
2. Those free fast neutrons destroy your containment vessel and reactor (as do free Helium nuclei aka alpha particles).
And then after you do all that you boil water and turn a turbine just like you do in a coal or natural gas plant.
So "reliable" is an interesting and questionable claim.
There are other variants like so-called aneutronic fusion (eg Helium-3, which is far from abundant) and those aren't really "neutron free". They're really just "fewer neutrons".
So what about containment? Magnetic fields can contain charged particles and you have various designs (eg tokamak, stellarator) and that's what the AI is for here I guess.
But the core problem is to make this work you superheat the plasma so you're dealing with a turbulent fluid. That's inherently problematic. Any imperfection or failure in your containment field is going to be a problem.
Stars deal with this by being large and thus using sheer size (ie neutrons can't go that far without hitting another nucleus) and gravity.
It increasingly seems to me that commercial nuclear fusion power generator is a pipe dream, something we simply want to be true. I'm not convinced it'll ever be commercially viable.
I'd love to be proven wrong and certainly won't stop anyone from trying.
In a way AI is the new blockchain. Go back a few years and you had a gold rush of startups attaching every idea to "blockchain" to build hype. That's what AI is now. I don't think it fundamentally changes any of the inherent problems in nuclear fusion.
dang|1 year ago
(that was the submitted link but we changed it via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077657)
noname120|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Machine_learning
samsartor|1 year ago
Technically that counts as "AI in nuclear fusion", but it isn't any sort of breakthrough. In almost every case the effects of AI are marginal. Not zero exactly, but nowhere near the breathless hype.
dekhn|1 year ago
bbor|1 year ago
sva_|1 year ago
rajnathani|1 year ago
HPsquared|1 year ago
madaxe_again|1 year ago
There are so many fundamental fields - engineering, chemistry, biology, physics - which stand to have absolute quantum leaps in knowledge and capability with this technology.
jacoblambda|1 year ago
Super useful for control applications but obviously you really want to know control theory so that you aren't just using ML to throw darts at a wall.
chriskanan|1 year ago
My lab is collaborating with researchers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics to use AI to improve inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We recently put out this paper [1] using Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to predict the outcome of ICF experiments. Currently, existing physics simulators are based on old Fortran code, are slow, and have a high error between their predictions and actual laser shots, so among other goals, we are trying to build better predictors using neural networks. This is needed since it is hard to rapidly iterate on real data, since they only have a dataset of around 300 ICF shots.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08832
noobermin|1 year ago
Codes are not magic, they are physical codes, as in, they generally encode the physics as we understand it relevant to the experiment, so you might as well say our physical models are wrong, which is a much harder bar to clear, you'd have to invalid probably near 100 years of plasma physics. The problem likely is as I said, the experiments are just hard to control and we don't know the correct inputs. It's not like weather forecasting where we can have a weather balloons across the world, we're not able to probe every micron of the target at all times for a plasma temperature and density.
nightowl_games|1 year ago
What if we rewrote the old algorithms in C with modern techniques? Multitthreading? Or GPU compute? If there's value there, I could do these things. Probably wouldn't take that long
gauge_field|1 year ago
ziofill|1 year ago
HPsquared|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
carbocation|1 year ago
tolerance|1 year ago
"AI for Real-time Fusion Plasma Behavior Prediction and Manipulation - Plasma Control Group": https://control.princeton.edu/machine-learning-for-rt-profil...
bloqs|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
aurelien|1 year ago
twothreeone|1 year ago
sigh.. I guess that's cool and all, you're exited about your work, that's great. But can we please polish our prose a little more and stop using buzz words like "groundbreaking", "now.. for the first time", "unprecedented" etc? Such distractions seriously undermine the legibility (and frankly, also taint the credibility by negatively biasing readers) of the claims.
mathematicaster|1 year ago
atomic128|1 year ago
Many on Hacker News fantasize about fusion (not fission) reactors. These fusion reactors will be an intense source of fast neutrons. All the hardware in a fusion reactor will become radioactive. Not to mention the gamma rays.
If you have to deal with radioactive materials, why not just use fission? After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency. Fission can provide all the power we need.
Today there are 440 nuclear fission reactors operating in 32 countries. 20% of America's grid power comes from nuclear fission. If you want to develop energy technology, focus on improving fission. For example, TRISO fuel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41898377) or what Lightbridge is doing (https://www.ltbridge.com/lightbridge-fuel). Hacker News is hostile to fission and defeatist (unable to contemplate innovation in fission technology) but this attitude will gradually change.
Quoting John Carmack: "Deuterium fusion would give us a cheap and basically unlimited fuel source with a modest waste stream, but it is an almost comically complex and expensive way to generate heat compared to fission, which is basically 'put these rocks next to each other and they get hot'."
jylam|1 year ago
1/ Uranium is not a renewable (quite the opposite), needs to be mined and treated (which is expensive and very polluting), and not present at the required concentrations in most of the world (this creates geopolitical issues).
2/ Fission nuclear plants require a well functioning [state|government], and no war. A (conventional) strike on a nuclear power plant can have devastating and lasting consequences. Even a random terrorist group can do that.
3/ I've read that "Ultimately, researchers hope to adopt the protium–boron-11 reaction, because it does not directly produce neutrons, although side reactions can" (that's a wikipedia quote, but I've read that already from other sources).
So fusion doesn't seem the best option on the short term, because of the complexity and cost of research, but definitely seems to be the very best option in the middle and long term. And we made the short term catastrophic choice already with coal and oil, it'll be good to learn from that.
Or maybe I'm totally wrong.
cosmic_quanta|1 year ago
True, but two caveats:
1. Neutron bombardment due to fusion makes hardware radioactive for less than 10 years, which isn't great but does not compare to fission waste;
2. Some fusion processes don't emit neutrons (aneutronic fusion). As I understand it, these processes aren't as efficient, but there is the possibility of a tradeoff between generation of ratioactive waste vs. efficiency.
elashri|1 year ago
I am not sure what do you mean by 95%+ efficency here. But if you are talking about the entire process of getting the energy/power from the nuclear reactor this is not possible. You are still limited by carnot cycle. Even the most advanced reactors like HTGRs [1] operate with efficiency about 45%.
If you have some other definition of efficiency than the standard then it would be good if you define that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_gas-cooled_re...
_neil|1 year ago
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677250
Borg3|1 year ago
fragmede|1 year ago
My personal ideology about fusion aside, it should be mentioned there is an easy fix for these radiation problems. What you do is put the fusion reactor in space, and collect the energy with specialized fusion energy collectors on Earth (or in space). They'll have the problem that they aren't able to collect energy if the fusion reaction is below the horizon, so this design is imperfect, but having the fusion reaction take place in space means you don't have to deal with a radioactive casing by not including it in your fusion reaction space station design because you don't need any. Just a bit of hydrogen, a tiny bit of helium, and a some time.
UltraSane|1 year ago
ben_w|1 year ago
Lots of us like fission and think the fears are overestimated.
Nevertheless, the observation is that new developments in fission tend to result in the cost increasing, not decreasing.
And I say that as someone with a similar mindset regarding fusion, though for different reasons: you can pick aneutronic fusion reactions… but look at what weapons can proliferate with transmutation from the neutrons you can also choose, and ask which governments will turn them down.
vilhelm_s|1 year ago
Also, the fuel for fusion reactors is much more plentiful. If we went all in on fission we might run out of easily minable uranium ore in a century or so, so it would be nice to have fusion reactors ready to take over then.
lupusreal|1 year ago
raverbashing|1 year ago
Cooling that requires pumps, as an example, should be a non-starter in new projects.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
aftbit|1 year ago
This is an odd angle to highlight. The risk of long-lived nuclear waste is extremely overblown, and the sheer volume of it that we produce (or even would produce, in the worst case of a once-through fuel cycle and nuclear power providing 100% of our energy needs for a century) pales in comparison to the amount of toxic and radioactive fly ash that even a single coal plant produces in a decade.
The real problems with nuclear fission power are threefold, in my opinion:
1. It is too expensive in terms of capital costs. Fusion will likely not help with this, but building a lot of identical large fission plants would probably help with economies of scale. Solar plus batteries might still end up being cheaper though.
2. Accidents have the potential to be catastrophic. Think Fukushima or Chernobyl, where entire towns have to be abandoned due to contamination. Fusion would help here, I believe.
3. There is a major proliferation concern. A civilian nuclear power program, especially one with breeder reactors, is not very far away from producing a fission bomb, and the short-lived high-activity nuclear wastes could be stolen and misused to make a dirty bomb. Fusion is perhaps better in this way, though an operating fusion reactor would be a very powerful neutron source of its own.
perihelions|1 year ago
Per the EPA, US coal has, at the high end, 10^3 Becquerel/kg of natural radioactivity [0].
Spent nuclear fuel has 3 million Curies/tonne (33 MWd/kg burnup fuel, at the age of 1 year) [1], which is equal to 10^14 Bq/kg. Since 33 MWd/kg is an energy density a factor of 10^5 greater than that of coal, the normalized ratio of [radioactivity]/[energy] is 10^6.
The graph in [1] depicts the decay of SNF activity on a log-log scale. It reaches the same radioactivity level as coal (again, normalized by energy output) at about 1 million years.
I'm fairly confident I know the origin of this social media-popular pseudofact. It's this poorly-titled Scientific American [2] article from 2007, which is about the (negligible) amount of radioactivity that nuclear plants release into the environment in the course of routine operation. It is *not* about spent fuel. It's a fair—but nuanced and easy to grossly misunderstand—point that coal power plants throw up all their pollution into the environment in routine operation, while nuclear plants, by default, contain theirs.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm-coal-combustion-residua... ("TENORM: Coal Combustion Residuals")
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/n-situ-radioactivity-for... ("Impact of High Burnup on PWR Spent Fuel Characteristics" (2005))
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... ("Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste [sic]" (2007)
kaonwarb|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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avidphantasm|1 year ago
winternewt|1 year ago
iforgot22|1 year ago
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htrp|1 year ago
hotsauceror|1 year ago
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mwkaufma|1 year ago
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anon291|1 year ago
I've been studying plasma physics and from what I understand perfect control isn't necessary as long as you can control it long enough to get useful power. If the plasma dissipates you just restart. But ideally it's controlled enough that while it is in there, it's producing net energy
soup10|1 year ago
[deleted]
nelup20|1 year ago
jmyeet|1 year ago
Reliable how?
I mean we first have the issue is we've never built one so how we can judge reliability?
I assume the author is alluding to the apparent abundance of fuel for nuclear fusion. This is and isn't true. Obviously hydrogen (particularly protium) is abundant. Deuterium is relatively abundant, even at ~150ppm. Tritium needs to be produced in a nuclear reactor.
Current hydrogen fusion models revolve around dueterium-tritium ("D-T") fusion. This is because you need to neutrons to sustain the reaction but that presents two huge problems:
1. Because everything is at such high temperature, you eject fast neutrons. This is an energy loss for the system and there's not really a lot you can do about it; and
2. Those free fast neutrons destroy your containment vessel and reactor (as do free Helium nuclei aka alpha particles).
And then after you do all that you boil water and turn a turbine just like you do in a coal or natural gas plant.
So "reliable" is an interesting and questionable claim.
There are other variants like so-called aneutronic fusion (eg Helium-3, which is far from abundant) and those aren't really "neutron free". They're really just "fewer neutrons".
So what about containment? Magnetic fields can contain charged particles and you have various designs (eg tokamak, stellarator) and that's what the AI is for here I guess.
But the core problem is to make this work you superheat the plasma so you're dealing with a turbulent fluid. That's inherently problematic. Any imperfection or failure in your containment field is going to be a problem.
Stars deal with this by being large and thus using sheer size (ie neutrons can't go that far without hitting another nucleus) and gravity.
It increasingly seems to me that commercial nuclear fusion power generator is a pipe dream, something we simply want to be true. I'm not convinced it'll ever be commercially viable.
I'd love to be proven wrong and certainly won't stop anyone from trying.
In a way AI is the new blockchain. Go back a few years and you had a gold rush of startups attaching every idea to "blockchain" to build hype. That's what AI is now. I don't think it fundamentally changes any of the inherent problems in nuclear fusion.
Cosi1125|1 year ago
hshshshshsh|1 year ago
thierrydamiba|1 year ago
TuringNYC|1 year ago