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Scientists believe the world will see its first thermonuclear fusion reactor in operation by 2025. That is a difficult task in short, especially when you consider that fusion has been “almost here” for almost a century.
Not to be confused with ordinary fission reactors, fusion reactors are Grails’ holiest when it comes to physical achievement. According to most experts, a successful fusion reactor would function as an almost limitless energy source.
In other words, if there is a working demonstration of a real fusion reactor by 2025, we could see the end of the global energy crisis in a few decades.
TAE, one of the companies working on the merger problem, says the big difference now is machine learning. According to a Forbes report, Google has been helping TAE find modern solutions to decades-old mathematical problems by using new artificial intelligence systems to facilitate the discovery of new fusion techniques.
TAE’s CEO says his company will commercialize fusion technology within the decade. He is joined by executives from several other companies and academic institutions who believe that we are finally within a decade or so of debuting evasive energy technology: MIT researchers say they will have done so by 2028.
But, this level of optimism is not reflected in the general scientific community. The promise of nuclear fusion has eluded the world’s top researchers for so long that, barring a major peer-reviewed ‘eureka’ moment, most respectful physicists are taking these new developments with an industrial-sized grain of salt. .
The problem is quite simple: crush a couple of atoms and absorb the resulting energy. But the merger is very, very difficult. It occurs naturally in stars like our sun, but recreating the conditions of the sun on Earth is simply not possible with our current technology.
First of all, the sun is much more massive than Earth, and that mass comes with the friendly benefit of melting higher gravity.
All that extra gravity breaks the atoms of the sun together. The combination of pressure and heat (the core of the sun swings at a spicy temperature of 27 million degrees Fahrenheit) forces hydrogen atoms to fuse, thus becoming helium atoms. This results in the expulsion of energy.
What makes this type of energy so wonderful is the fact that fusion produces much more energy than current methods. At least it should. Unfortunately, all current ground-based attempts at fusion have fallen short because, although many have been successful at fusing atoms, they always take more energy to produce the temperatures required to fuse atoms on Earth than those atoms produce in the process. This is because, lacking the required gravity, our only option is to increase the heat. Instead of 27 million degrees, Earth-bound melting occurs at several hundred million degrees.
But now we have harnessed the power of machines, something that previous researchers never had at their disposal. So how, exactly, is AI supposed to make the difference? Mainly in the area of data analysis. Physics experiments are not exactly simple, and examining the figurative tons of data produced by a fusion experiment is an inhumane task that is best left to the machines.
By giving physicists “super human” analysis skills, they can turn experiments faster. This allows for faster iterations and more meaningful results. It remains to be seen whether or not this is the game changer that will finally put us on the fusion hump, but there are many reasons for optimism.
Published April 27, 2020 – 23:18 UTC
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