Tencent-Backed UK Startup First Light Achieves Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough | Hacker News Reader

Tencent-Backed UK Startup First Light Achieves Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

bloomberg.com

> First Light used a hypervelocity gun, which engineers call their “Big Friendly Gun,” to fire a projectile at 6.5 kilometers (4 miles) a second into a fuel target to generate energy

I would love to be the scientist deadpan explaining to a reporter that BFG is short for Big Friendly Gun, and anything else is just a coincidence.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFG_(weapon) )

Hah, that's not the association I have with that acronym:

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG)

As long as the nerds know the truth ;)

I remain distressed by the relative lack of effort we put in to nuclear physics vs more mundane things.

> ...fusion plants seek to bind them together at temperatures 10 times hotter than the sun...

These are outrageous conditions compared to the entire geological history of the earth. Every interesting quirk at this point is a roll of the dice at potentially entering a new era of prosperity that has been the stuff of dreams; exploring opportunities that earth life has never had the opportunity to try.

There doesn't seem to be a level of funding here in proportion to the potential payoffs. We should be dumping attention and resources into this tech until it hurts.

But, on the other hand, consider how good we are at convincing teenagers to buy stuff from facebook ads.

From what I understand, producing a fusion reaction isn't the hardest part, it's maintaining it, extracting energy from it and preventing all the stuff containing the plasma from becoming radioactive. So I think by now generating a fusion reaction is not exactly breakthrough anymore? Sure the method is novel but I don't see how it helps with all the other stuff that's needed to make it useful.

Claims it's 1000x cheaper, so I suppose that's the breakthrough. Fusion has been achieved, you're right; next step is creating more energy than is consumed to do so; then commercialising it.

This makes it cheaper/easier to commercialise, but no closer (maybe further away, nothing claimed in the article) to the second step of getting more out than in.

Hacker News loves nuclear fusion headlines!

It's not a breakthrough if sustainable energy output hasn't been realised. Initiating fusion is not the hard part.

It's completely in the same category as battery technology - interesting advancement, probably not going to actually get to production, even if it does it'll take years.

That said, it is still an interesting advancement of interest to the sort of people on HN. You could argue that this is one of the better forums for this sort of news because we mostly know what sort of pinch of salt to take with the promises.

UKAEA validated the fusion. Fusion produced just 50 neutrons (microscopic fusion).

It's a baby step, but fun concept.

Man what field hasn't touched by Tencent right now?

The startup probably has a bunch of investors. I guess they just picked the one that is the best clickbait? It's not like Tencent themselves are working on it.

Looks like outrage porn or Bloomberg doing Tencent favors, yes. The FL press release contains no mention of Tencent [1]. It also doesn't contain a publishing date, which I find funny since they're claiming to be first:

> First Light Fusion (First Light), the University of Oxford fusion spin-out, today confirms it has achieved fusion.

[1] https://firstlightfusion.com/media/fusion

Bloomberg rewards reporters based on how much their news moves the market. Tencent is the only publicly traded investor I think.

Outrage porn? Nah, I just typical pop sci clickbait like we used to see with like cancer-linked studies or breakthrough

It’s also a very recent investor — apparently only got in at Series C in February 2022. The startup itself has been around for more than a decade. But of course “Parkwalk Advisors-backed startup” won’t get them the clicks.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/first-light-fusion/c...

I've realized by now that Tencent (or another chinese movie investment company) being a co-producer/investor in a "western" movie production is a pretty strong predictor of the movie being a medium-to-high budget mess with a very strange script.

'Moonfall' being the most recent example.

I searched the article for the letter "Q", and did not find anything. Any idea of how usefull the laser can be ?

Q predicted this?

to quote Wikipedia:

A fusion energy gain factor, usually expressed with the symbol Q, is the ratio of fusion power produced in a nuclear fusion reactor to the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state. The condition of Q = 1, when the power being released by the fusion reactions is equal to the required heating power, is referred to as breakeven, or in some sources, scientific breakeven.

TL;DR: high Q = free unlimited energy!!!! low Q = "fusion is 30 years away"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor

And undefined Q = "Let's get some press before our next funding round" /s

> TL;DR: high Q = free unlimited energy!!!! low Q = "fusion is 30 years away"

The real LPT is always in the comments.

No, but he’s always watching. The trial never ends…

This is at approximately Q=0.00000 stage, it also skips the lasers and simply fires a projectile.

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