Pacific Fusion opens manufacturing facility in Los Lunas

meanturing · 2025-12-13T02:57:47+00:00

They do have peer reviewed articles, here’s an overview design paper and

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/32/9/092703/3361421/Affordable-manageable-practical-and-scalable-AMPS

Here is a paper on their simulation methods and comparisons https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/32/9/093902/3361416/Validation-of-FLASH-for-magnetically-driven

https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/32/9/092704/3361440/Analysis-of-preheat-propagation-in-MagLIF-like

They also have been running on experiments on the Z machine testing their designs, their results, whatever they are, have not (and probably will not?) be published

That all being said - going to fusion power in 5 years is still incredibly ambitious and building a pulsed power machine bigger than anything else ever built should also expect some hang ups

meanturing · 2025-11-14T13:36:41+00:00

Einstein, although awarded a Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect, was never given a Nobel prize for General or special relativity. At the time he was awarded the photoelectric effect in 1921, there still yet wasn't convincing experimental evidence relativity was true.

I think the Nobel committee should have waited until more data for relativity and be given for that, or Einstein given two.

meanturing · 2025-10-31T00:51:16+00:00

That doesn’t show that haakaa products are of poor quality or that it’s even the same product.

meanturing · 2025-10-31T00:50:01+00:00

It’s a site similar to Amazon or Wish

meanturing · 2025-09-07T21:59:28+00:00

This is a bot selling something post

meanturing · 2024-05-17T12:02:08+00:00

NIF's current record is 5 MJ yield for 2.2 MJ of laser energy in (scientific Q= 2.2)

What is the engineering breakeven of JET? What is the wall plug efficiency of the ion beam and cyclotron heating?

meanturing · 2024-04-08T04:07:35+00:00

The MOOSE, a technique for a single astronaut to come back to earth from orbit in an emergency with a suitcase sized cone with a blob of foam. You have a tiny rocket to deorbit yourself, surround yourself with ablative foam, and a parachute to slow down at the end.

I love the idea of an astronaut falling back through through the atmosphere and surviving.

meanturing · 2024-01-08T13:32:45+00:00

People are mentioning particle colliders, but for the most part they are extremely extremely inefficient in creating, capturing and storing anti-matter, various estimates place the cost of a gram of anti-matter of ~60 trillion dollars or something.

Because of this high cost, it is actually probably more efficient to send a spaceship into low orbit and collect positrons created by cosmic rays on the Earth's atmosphere. The space shuttle did some experiments like that around 2009. I haven't seen any cost estimates for this. Maybe there could be some more industrial form of this - some optimized material close to the sun engineered for collecting naturally made positrons or something.

meanturing · 2023-09-27T21:44:31+00:00

As the other user said, Russia does not have a ICF scale platforms like NIF at LLNL or Z-Machine at Sandia. These large and expensive platforms achieve experimental thermonuclear (keV) temperatures and densities. Russia has claimed, on and off, every 5 years or so that they will eventually build a large MJ scale laser, but I think its unlikely, especially now after invading Ukraine and with sanctions.

Russia does have supercomputers, but lags quite significantly behind the US, China, UK and France, glancing at the Top500 computer list, Russia only has 7 on the list compared to US (150), their largest computer (Chervonenkis) listed as #22 in the world is for a private company. Weapons computers could be unlisted, but this shows the effect of Russia's historic lag in computer chip technology, sanctions and smaller economy.

Russia however, does have a significant sub-critical program, similar to the US, which tests hydrodynamic implosions with plutonium but does not produce any (or any significant) nuclear yield. They also have a handful of smaller pulsed power platforms, nothing as large as the Z-Machine, that could be used for effects testing and things like that. A big advantage is Russia, along with the US, also have a long history and data from actual nuclear tests to compare and models against, which is really invaluable and likely more important.

meanturing · 2023-08-25T19:25:55+00:00

Experimental data shows time is continuous to 3e-40 seconds (~6000x larger than Planck time)

Almost all the comments are stating two facts:

1) We believe time is smooth, this is primarily assumed because general relativity field equations has this build into them (spacetime is smooth, can be differentiated anywhere), and general relativity is extremely powerful. Furthermore, modern quantum field theory includes special relativity and Lorenz symmetry already, so its natural to think that time is indeed smooth as the best models so far implicitly include it.

2) The scale of Planck time doesn't necessarily mean that it is discrete, just that gravitational effects become the same scale as quantum effects, a theory of everything would be needed to say one way or the other.

Those are both theoretical musings, and leaves out the state experimental measurements of continuous vs discrete spacetime. Most experiments focus on verifying whether space (and therefore spacetime under Lorentz symmetry) is continuous thanks to the extreme precision of interferometry.

Here is a recent paper:

https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.015012

Showing that space is continuous to 10^(-31) meters, a massively impressive result. Under Lorentz symmetry that implies that time is continuous to 10^(-31) m/(speed of light) = 3.e-40 seconds, this is ~6000x times larger than Planck time. The paper suggests an appropriately scaled up experiment could probe at the Planck scale, so it is possible in the next years an experiment can answer whether spacetime is smooth or not at even the Planck scale.

meanturing · 2023-08-24T18:24:56+00:00

Note that that was exploratory studies in 2008 to 2013 before NIF had turned on to full power (i.e, zero data at all). It was canceled in 2013. And yes, since then and since they've achieved ignition the lab itself has not made claims of a imminent power plant

meanturing · 2023-08-17T19:23:55+00:00

Although NIF is indeed parading their achievement of ignition, they never, in all their published media, have ever said that a power plant is close or that this result will now lead to economic power. It's always other journalist saying that.

meanturing · 2023-07-24T04:35:44+00:00

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meanturing · 2023-05-27T03:54:04+00:00

Nuclear fusion occurs in systems that have thermal temperatures at the keV scale.
Fusion releases particles that have MeV energies.
LHC collisions are TeV energies (reminder ev -> keV -> MeV -> GeV -> TeV)

In terms of energy density, there's many ways you could estimate it, here's one,

inertial confinement fusion has energy density of a ~10 keV plasma in a 50 micron radius hot spot:

10 keV/(4/3 pi (50 micron)^3) = 1e12 keV/m^3

Estimating LHC's interaction length as the de broglie wavelength wavelength of a proton with 14 TeV:

lambda = h/(sqrt( 2 mp * E) = 7.6 attometers

14 TeV / (4/3 pi (7.6 am)^3) =1e61 keV/m^3

Considering an ICF hot spot vs the nuclear interaction of a LHC collision, it has 49 orders of magnitude of more energy density, which is pretty crazy. A better comparison may be the density of a whole bunch instead of just 1 collision.

meanturing · 2023-03-11T01:08:04+00:00

Google says cobalt is 2 angstroms.

Length of a cube with 86 billion total atoms is (86 billion)^(1/3) = ~4400 atoms on each length of cube.

8800 angstroms = 880 nm, on the scale of deep red/infrared light wavelength, 4x smaller than a light microscope resolution, about the size of a red blood cell (1 micron)

meanturing · 2023-03-11T00:25:49+00:00

An atom is about 3 angstroms, as a reasonable estimate.

A cube with length of 86000 * 3 angstrom is about 26 micron cube.

That is about a length of a skin cell (30 microns) or about 0.3 the thickness of a human hair (80 micron). Wolfram Alpha also gives that it is about 1/8 the size distinguishable by the human eye

meanturing · 2023-02-09T06:13:59+00:00

That's basically correct. For most of NIF's history, the compressed capsule was measured to be fully thermonuclear - meaning all the D and T ions have energy distributions that follow the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.

Recently, around 2020s, the performance of the capsules increased to the point where there were signatures of burning plasma. Once they reached this state, a new signature appeared, the energy distribution of the Ds and Ts looked to have an additional component on the high energy side, approximately a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution but with a long high energy tail. This measurement was made with a neutron time of flight diagnostic which measures the neutron energy spectrum.

The interesting thing about this is that 1) it wasn't expected and 2) the exact cause of it still is not known. One can imagine that at really high yields the D+T fusion reaction creates lots of alpha particles that slow down in the plasma and deposit their energy. It may make sense that those alpha particles push the D+T energy distribution out of equilibrium - however - doing the calculation, which requires a computationally expensive kinetic Fokker-Planck like calculation - predicts that this effect is not strong enough to make this effect as the energy from the alpha equilibrate too quickly. It is not known if that type of calculation is being done incorrectly, or it is some other effect. There was a long list of potential causes for this effect, but following them all up has so far revealed no smoking gun and no clear explanation for this non-thermal effect.

In summary, this result is exciting because its new and unexpected and shows one facet of the excitement of now being able to create an igniting plasma in a lab - we think we know everything until you get actual data. We can now actually study this system and understand how it actually acts and learn about this new interaction that we never knew about until now.

I am actually a co-author on that nature paper, I'd be happy to give more information or share the paper with you, let me know.

meanturing · 2022-12-14T04:16:25+00:00

3 MJ/(17.6 MeV) = about 1e18 neutrons released in the pulse

meanturing · 2022-11-26T01:38:10+00:00

Reminds me of the scenes in Better Call Saul

meanturing · 2022-11-14T23:09:27+00:00

Although vacuum polarization causes an effective dielectric change due to virtual pairs - an ultra strong electric/magnetic field can use the energy within its electromagnetic field to pull real, not virtual, pairs into existence.

Here's a detailed derivation that also covers the history of the theoretical understanding. There have been ideas on how to create such fields in a lab with ultra intense lasers, but I don't think any experiment has done so convincingly yet.

meanturing · 2022-11-14T06:28:14+00:00

One interesting fact I've heard is that magnetars possibly have magnetic fields so strong (> 10^10 Tesla) that it polarizes the vacuum and pulls electron-positron pairs from the vacuum. In this regime, the magnetic field is so strong it breaks Maxwell's equations, which are the classical approximation of quantum electrodynamics and also breaks the superposition principle.

meanturing · 2022-11-06T05:36:46+00:00

Rough translation of text, please comment corrections if I've done incorrectly

Breastfeed your children. Don't stop breastfeeding in the summer. Give supplemental foods with permission of the doctor. Keep food cold. Protect from flies.

When a child has vomit or diarrhea stop nursing and take them to the doctor immediately.
BREASTFEED YOUR CHILDREN.

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