Fusion Via Persuasion

SEWilco writes "Researchers are making progress toward causing muon-catalyzed fusion. A muon allows creation of a tritium-deuterium molecule, then forces the nuclei together. This is fusion by atomic-level trickery rather than the brute force approach of simulating the center of a star. Progress is being made on the two lab-level problems in the process; if those are solved then a muon-catalyzed fusion plant becomes an engineering problem."

Comments

Way kewell!

[GMontag]

Persuasion and trickery is usually preferred over force (by me anyway).

Would this method also be less "lossy" as far as being able to channel a higer percentage of the resulting energy into work, instead of loosing it as heat or (pick an energy type)?

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Re:Way kewell!

[paRcat]

The problem is, how could we contain the energy produced by fusion and keep it cool? I mean, I can't recall anything I've read that didn't assume a huge amount of heat when fusion occurs.

Am I just out of the loop on this one?

Re:Way kewell!

[GMontag]

I thought this method worked at 3 Kelvin. Isn't that cold enough?

Anyway, you are restating my point. Massive amounts of energy from "classic" uncontrolled fusion are lost as heat and light.

Example: Thermonuclear bomb is used to dig a hole where a city sits now. However, so much energy "leaks" out that the hole is much smaller than if all of the energy was used for hole blasting (even if the bomb is buried really deep).

Theoretical example: old-school plasma type thermonuclear furnace is created for production of electricity and hi temp. product fabrication. However, heat is lost that is not used to spin a terbine or melt exotic materials and must be carried away to the cooling towers.

So, my question is more along the lines of: are we going to see more energy per reaction going into the intended purpose of the facility, or is it going to be just as lossy as plants are now?

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Re:Way kewell!

[GMontag]

Yes, the fusion is cool. But the energy produced isn't, right? So how do we contain the energy and use it, other than using a turbine system.

Hummm... I don't know. AIGGGHHHHHHH (bridge troll throws me into the valley of eternal doom or whatever it was in Monty Python)

Would be interested in knowing that too.

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Sustainable?

[martyb]

Maybe I'm missing something here, and I am NOT a nuclear physicist, but I don't see any way that this can be a sustainable source of energy. From the article:

• "In order to get a decent yield, the energy of the muonic tritium must be kept very low, about 1 electronvolt (eV), as it approaches the deuterium nuclei."
• "The researchers fired their beam of 1 eV muonic tritium at concentrated deuterium condensed onto gold foil, and chilled the whole set-up to 3 kelvin."

So you need an incredibly cold environment for this to work, right? But if the goal is to PRODUCE energy out of all this, as soon as it starts to really produce energy, the whole thing gets too warm to continue the fusion!?! If anything, wouldn't it take even more energy to power the equipment to keep things cool enough to sustain the fusion?

The only possibility I can imagine is that this fusion results in an increase in potential energy in the fused particles and that there may be a way to physically transport them someplace else where they can release the potential energy as kinetic energy. (Something along the lines of a heat pump?)

Could someone with a better understanding of nuclear physics please shed some light on this?

Re:Sustainable?

[AdrianG]

I think the low temperature was used because it is easier to collect useful data without letting other factors pollute the results. Muon catalized fusion is considered a cooler fusion mechanism because it can, in theory, produce useful output at temperatures of 1000 C or less. It cannot be used to produce useful amounts of energy (i.e. more energy than you put in) at the extremely low temperatures cited in the artcile, but it might produce useful experimental results.

Adrian

Re:Sustainable?

[stevelinton]

Basically you have two ingredients (muonic tritium and a deuterium nucleus) and you need to bring them together very carefully with exactly the right sized bump. If you do then, with luck, they go bang, producing an enegetic alpha particle, an energetic neutron and an energetic muon. You would then need to

a) recover the energy from the alpha particle
b) use the neutron to breed more tritium (lithium blanket
c) catch the muon and reuse it (quite a lot of times)

Probably the way to do this is in quite high vacuum, so that you can have cold beams of uT and D atoms coming in and reacting, largely unaffected by the energetic reaction products flying outwards to be caught somewhere. The hardest part of this would be stripping the muons off the alpha particles, separating them, cooling them and recycling them quickly enough and with enough efficiency, but it might be possible.

Someone didn't get enough coffee

[the_other_one]

The source listed at the bottom of the article Physics Review Letters (vol 85, p1674) is incorrect.

It looks like the correct source should be Physical Review Letters -- August 21, 2000 -- Volume 85, Issue 8, pp. 1642-1645

The Abstract is available here

You can download the .PDF or gziped PS version of the article for $20 US but I'm not that interested.

Muon-Catalyzed Fusion and the Princeton Fusion FAQ

[Schwarzchild]

The first time I heard of this type of fusion was when I visited a friend of a friend who is a physicist. He is working on cold fusion but showed me a printout of the Princeton fusion FAQ. I read pretty much most of it and it indicated that there was another form of cold fusion, namely this muon-catalyzed one. I asked him about it and he said that it went nowhere because the muons were extremely short lived. I think this type of fusion was proposed by Enrico Fermi.

Anyway I tried to find the Princeton Fusion FAQ but all I could find was a snippet of it that someone who does Q&A posted at Princeton.

Yes someone please repost this story on the front page! I found it completely by accident.

Do it in your home?

[ka9dgx]

What if we just take a nice palladium or nickel target, put it in an aqueous solution of lithium hydroxide, and apply a voltage differential to it? This would cause the metal matrix to load with the available lithium and/or hydrogen ions near the surface. We then just wait for a muon to happen along (cosmic rays, etc)... and watch what happens (aneutronic nuclear fusion). It might happen more frequently at altitude, say Denver or Boulder Colorado. It would be less likely to happen at lower altitudes, and might be very sensitive to impurities (aka Poisons) just like the first nuclear fission reactors were. Similar situations have happened with novel physics before, for example, If it weren't for stubborn engineers from Westinghouse insisting on more room for fuel, all the work at Hanford during WWII would have been waste. It was only later learned that certain products of fission reactions act to poison the reaction.

All the above could be done... any competent chemist could do it, no physicist required. Even the home brew experimenter can get into the game.

It might be interesting to consider the case of this happening with in a metal matrix that has just been so loaded, then compressed quite a bit, using something like a diamond anvil press, etc. It's quite possible it could go BOOM in a big way, converting some mass directly to energy. (If this were possible though, one might expect certain three letter Government agencies to get into the act of surpressing the technology).

That's my two cents for the day.

--Mike--

PS. Why didn't I see this story on the main page?