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British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close
sh00z writes: "The article quotes a leading scientist saying that Fusion power is 'within reach' in the next decade, with commercial plants to follow within another 10 or so years. Shhhh. Don't tell anyone at Texas A&M. They might just jump the starting gun again."
Cold fusion may or may not work, however there is more than magentic containment. Try electrostatic. You could build a small (very ineffcient) fusion reator in you garage. They do away with using 'hot' plamsa and just go for ionized hydrogen being accelerated towards the middle of the reator. It works like a champ. And depending on the design of the reactor you can directly convert the energy released by the fusion reactions to (high voltage) DC (electricity).
More info at fusor.net
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
No, it would not explode. What is so difficult about fusion is to get the process run at all. If you interrupt the process with some external accident it will die immediately. The reactor only contains fuel for a few seconds (and is constantantly refueled). That also means that little harmful material will be released, even in the worst possible case.
The answer for petrofuels is "limited subterranean reserves of petrogunk". The answer for fusion is "human effort". Petrofuels can only supply the energy needs of the human race for a few hundred years, tops, but fusion will last for at least tens of thousands of years. That's the real gift of fusion: it replaces the hard problem of how to find scarce petrogunk with the easy problem of how to devote a tiny fraction of your population to tending the fusion plants.
There are political ramifications: a considerable amount of suffering comes from the fact that a few tyrannical governments control large reserves of petrofuels. With fusion, OPEC becomes irrelevant, the Saudi oil billionaires turn back into tin pot tyrants, and the rest of the world can tell them to go straight to hell. Nations and even cities will be able to provide their own energy locally. Energy would be a local issue, and not a global military adventure. (No doubt some would manage to screw it up. A fusion-powered California would have just as many rolling blackouts.)
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I wonder if this is a Boron-Hydrogen CBF reactor they are talking about. These sorts of reactors have two plasma streams guises by magnetic fields. The two plasma beams converge at high energy and Hydrogen whams into Boron fusing but causing the new Boron-12 radioisotope decays in about .0202 seconds down into three alpha particles with very high velocities which are guides through an energy converter (a magnetic coil) which generates electricity with a pretty high efficiency. You also end up with clean byproducts rather than Tritium-Deuterium fusion (heavy water fusion) I keep seeing pushed by researchers and oddly enough the DOE. I don't get how the DOE could keep a straight face whilst pushing the cleanliness of fusion power talking about heavy water plants. Tritium product isn't exactly cheap or easy considering you get it from sticking lithium into a laser implosion chamber because tritium is pretty damn rare naturally. Shit the only two facilities they've got working on the waste products are MIT and INEL (Idaho National Energy Laboratory) which is a fraction of the effort they're putting into everything else. This is what got us into the mess of nuclear waste disposal in the first place.
BTW, heavy water fusion (the fusion of H-2 and H-3) yields an alpha particle and a free neutron. Both of these byproducts are moving really fast after the reaction. The helium isn't much of a problem considering it has a charge and can be confinsed and controlled by magnetic fields. The neutrons however have no charge and thus fly in whatever direction they were originally headed. Thus heavy water reactors need lots of shielding and cooling systems due to the thermal pollution of the energetic neutrons. This adds up to alot of wasted energy in the form of heat (about two thirds of the total energy from the reaction). You can run the coolant through exchangers to get some energy back out of it but you're left with the same radiactive problems fission reactors have to deal with. Namely contamination. CBF's using Boron-Hydrogen or Helium3-Deuterium don't need this sort of extra bulk and also are more efficient since alot of their energy is being directed by the magnetic fields of the reactor and harnessed. They can thus be smaller and more efficient so instead of one big reactor you could have a handful of 100MW reactors distributed in a region. Oh yeah, for nuclear nuts I didn't go into He-3/H-2 fusion because He-3 is so fucking rare on Earth it would literally cost you billions of dollars to collect even a little bit for industrial use. Until we can efficnetly mine the Moon and asteroids and eventually the outer gas giants (Uranus and Neptune first and Jupiter and Saturn when we can have an efficient way of escaping their gravity) we're not going to be using He-3 for industrial purposes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Don't know what kind on info you're looking for, but I've picked up some gossip over my years as a College Station resident and Aggie.
A friend who was doing a post-doc in chemistry here took me for a tour of his lab one night. In one of the rooms, high atop a storage cabinet, was a cardboard file box labelled "Cold Fusion," supposedly one of the last remaining pieces of evidence of the experiments conducted here to (dis)confirm Pons and Fleischmann's results.
Conversations years ago with an aerospace engineer and on a separate occasion with a nuclear engineer indicated that there were some interesting non-fusion things coming out of those experiments, but any and all research in that direction was squashed after the public ridicule and scientific stigma became so great.
We also had an unrelated incident in which one of the senior chemists, after a long and respected career, started soliciting funding for research into transmutation. He was convinced he could get the process working at a net profit (Pb + energy => enough Au to pay for the resources consumed plus a profit). He, er, retired before that got off the ground =)
Pardon me, but I don't see anywhere in this article where a scientist says we're only a decade away. The submitter (not the scientist) said,
But all that proves is that he was more eager to submit the article than actually understand it.All the scientist said was that fusion power was "within reach" (which could hardly be more vague) and that
"Perhaps in a few decades" doesn't sound like wide-eyed optimism to me. And it certain doesn't mean "commerical plants in another 10 or so years."
...it's about 149 597 870 kilometers away.
The peak of the energy produced is in the infrared, with x-ray production just 9% above the baseline in a lead cave, and gamma-ray production only 2% above a lead cave's background levels.
This is wonderfully convenient. Care to offer a theory why? Last time I checked no one actually had a good reason why the energy released is incredibly different than what would be expected from fusion. It's lucky for the researchers though. If that original cell actually produced as much energy as they said, you would expect the cell to be hot as Hades. Not only would it have killed everyone in the room, but it should have still be hot enough to fatally irradiate everyone at the press conferences and tv interviews where they showed it off.
While were at it, where is the Helium? If it works, I expect your fusion apparatus to make helium right? There was no He found in the original cell and to the best knowledge no independant lab has ever found He embedded in a Pd cathode where the cold fusion people say it should be.
Maybe I'm totally wrong about cold fusion, but at this point I think you're going to have to come along with a marketable product before I going to believe it. BTW, if it works, why wasn't it on the market almost immediately? Codeposition on spongy Pd didn't take that long to think up.
"Contrary to popular belief, it's not just output that's a problem, the things are very large and complicated. I remember a story I heard about a group who spent 2 months taking apart, fixing, and putting their machine back together again, despite knowing at the start what piece had broken. If it's going to be profitable you need technology that is stable, long-term and easily repairable."
Well, I work at a nuclear power plant and sometimes it can take two weeks to dissassemble the systems enough to "get at" the faulty part. And any well designed power plant (of any energy source) well have sufficient monitoring and analysis systems to allow you to diagnose an impending failure and to know the exact (or very close) cause of the problem before you begin the expensive process of shutdown and dissassembly. So two weeks wouldn't be out of line with current large baseloaded power plants. It's not good by any means, but not excessive compared to whats out there right now.
Clocks used to use luminous paint containing radium. The numbers were painted by hand. The workers used to lick the paintbrushes to keep a fine point. http://www.semcosh.org/radium.htm
i ti um.html
The tritium in modern watches is much safer
http://www.dhs.vic.gov.au/phb/hprot/rsu/pubs/tr
Typical annual dose from wearing a plastic watch containing tritium - 4 microsieverts
Average annual dose from natural background radiation - 2100 microsieverts
rant
Really good information concerning
the biggest tokamak project and tokamaks in general:
www.iter.org
A global project. Except the US prefers to waste billions ($) in war and space.
--- censored
When this came out in 1997 it sounded (again) as if smallish, clean power plants were "just around the corner"... but I haven't heard anything much more from it since!
Check out the original article I read and its accompanying diagram.
Or go to the scientists' web site, which hasn't been updated since 1997!
And these aren't crackpots either... they're professors at UC Irvine, Los Alamos National Labs, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory!
Oh well, I still have high hopes for fusion, but I also have low expectations...
Actually, fusion reactors don't explode if you turn off the magnets. The plasma does expand, and it would probably ruin the magnetic coils and perhaps a small surrounding area, but its not very high density.
So as it expands, it also becomes diffuse, and there would be no giant explosion.
Fusion power would actually be relatively safe.
Wrong.
;) But your statement that it's perfectly clean is wrong.
If we're going to get an energy surplus out of this, we're definately not using plain old hydrogen for fusion. At least, not for a LONG time. Fusion reactors today use a mix of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. Tritium is quite radioactive, so the inside of the tokamak will also become radioactive. Sooner or later it has to be discarded.
I'm not complaining. A little bit of radiation never hurt anybody, if you ask me
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
Sigh,
Nothing goes wrong if the something goes wrong in the reactor.
The tomahawk fusion reactor performs fusion very, very carefully and it is very delicate. The small quantity of plasma (superheated gas) where fusion occurs is confined within the doughnut shaped reactor using magnetic fields away from the walls. This magnetic field maintains the plasma temperature and pressure that allows fusion to occur. There is no direct cooling like in fission reactors. If the magnetic field were to fail, then the plasma will lose pressure, fall in temperature signifcantly as it expands before hitting the reactor wall. The magnetic field is the only reason why the plasma can get hot enough to fuse, without it the plasma expands and cools to the point where it isn't dangerous. If anything else serious fails in the reactor (ie, the steam turbine cooling), and didn't cause the fusion reaction to be shut down, then the worst that could happen is that the reactor walls will melt. This would cause the vacuum within the reactor to fail, and the resulting inrush of air cools the plasma down and stops fusion from occuring.
Unlike most fission reactors, fusion reactors have to excert a lot of effort to extract energy. If the fusion reactor stops, the fusion stops with it.
Sure, we would get more energy out than we put in...
Of course, you mean MACHINE USABLE energy, because it would be really embarassing if you were completely ignorant of the first law of thermodynamics.
The byproducts of this reaction are radioactive as well. However, the half life is short enough that within 2 or 3 years (can't remember the numbers), the radioactivity of the fusion products is below that of the regular environment.
What byproducts? Fusion is not a decomposition reaction. How can there be byproducts? Fission creates all sorts of nasty byproducts because you're decomposing it. D-T fusion creates a lot of neutrons, which can be absorbed using lithium. The neutrons that aren't absorbed irradiate the reactor. The only other radioactive material in the entire reaction is tritium, and most of that is consumed in the reaction. FYI, tritium has a half life of 12 and 1/3 years. It's not that goddamn radioactive, and you've probably drunk some in your tap water at least once in your life.
Not only is the Deuterium and Tritium radioactive, but the process of fusion emits Neutrons. High energy neutrons, which activate particles in and around the building containing the reactor.
I believe it is the neutrons that are more worrisome than the deuterium and tritium.
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
Yes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, still there are alteratives in fusion research that have been ignored since virtually all grant money goes into Tokomaks (university funded) and Inertial Confinement(DOD funded)
0 2. htm
Each camp is entrenched and there is little money left over for persuing alterative machine designs. For one thing, plasma-shock approaches have been totally ignored.
Million degree plasmas are terribly unstable for a whole assortment of reasons (magnetic, viscous, chemical, thermal, etc.) and yet the goal of Tokamaks is to run the plamsa hot continuously, all kinds of bandaids have been applied to 'smooth' out the plasma, and it STILL doesn't work. Look at Tokamak articles from the 70's and they will say the same thing we read now: "Fusion is expected to viable in a decade. We have learned so much about plasmas that we are sure to succeed... "
Maybe it will be possible eventually, but I just don't see it as a reliable method. (I wouldn't bet on this horse!) Predictions of success in a decade are intended to secure another 5 years of funding for this pipe dream. Unfortunately the hardware and computing power required for these machines soak up most of the fusion research money.
Inertial confinement is used to get around nuclear test-ban treaties. It is not intended to be a renewable energy source.
Another approach is the Farnsworth fusor. A table-top fusion machine that works by electron bombardment. VERY little research money has done to this to try to figure out better designs for this inovative approach. (less than a hundred people are involved with Farnsworth Reactors, compared to 1000's on tokamaks:
http://www.richmond.infi.net/~rhull/highenergy0
Perhaps a combination of a Farnsworth electron bombardment with a shocked plasma core would work? (I don't have a clue) All I know is that such ideas won't see the light of day.
The idea of colliding beam fusion reactors is not new. In the early 70's Bogden Maglich came of with the idea of using a self-colliding ion beam architecture (based upon his precetron accelerator design which he created to study pion-antipion collisions in the 60's) to trigger aneutronic fusion without the plasma containment instability problems inherent in magnetic confinement fusion reactor designs. The results of his experiments over the years have been very promising, but he has had a great deal of difficulty getting funding for his research since his approach is so far outside of the "orthodox" mainstream fusion being conducted as Princeton and elsewhere. The uninformed also unfortunately tend to lump him in with crackpots such as Cold Fusion researchers and perpetual motion engine designers (and the "free energy" crackpots like to make him out to be one of their own), despite the fact that most experts in the fusion research field acknowledge that his science is sound.
For more info, here are a few links to get started. There was also an interesting article about him in Omni back in the 80's, but I don't recall the issue.
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
No low temperature fusion has ever been verified, though occasionally you will see new proposals for how it might be possible.
Actually, muon-catalyzed fusion at low temperature has been verified and is well-understood. The problem is that we don't have an efficient enough way of making muons to make this give a net energy gain.
Muon catalyized fusion works by firing a beam of muons at a pellet of frozen hydrogen. Muons will displace electrons in the H2 molecule. As muons are far heavier than electrons, they have a much shorter wavelength, which means that their molecular orbitals are much smaller, which means that the resulting hydrogen molecule is much smaller.
This puts the hydrogen nuclei close enough to have a reasonably good chance of tunnelling through the Coulomb barrier and spontaneously fusing.
The problem is that muons decay after a little while. In order for muon-catalyzed fusion to be energy-efficient, a muon must catalyze enough reactions in its lifetime to produce more energy than it took to create it. With current experiment setups and current methods of producing muons, this isn't the case.
[In case anyone's confused, this is completely unrelated to the "cold fusion" that caused such a stir a few years back and was mostly debunked.]
If you could find a magical way of producing a thermal neutron beam for less than, say, 100 keV per neutron, you could also get what amounts to catalyzed fusion just by firing the beam at a block of lead. Four neutrons being absorbed by the same lead atom results in two beta decays and one alpha decay - emitting the components of a helium-4 atom. This isn't time-sensitive, so you don't need a terribly intense neutron beam or any other special conditions. Unfortunately, I know of no way to produce neutrons out of thin air (or thin hydrogen) at a cost lower than a few MeV per neutron.
I am about ready to get my BS in Physics and I have talked with some of the professors that I work with in High Energy Physics about the possibility of fusion. There is another problem that they mentioned that you forgot, which is that after a while the containment area of the tokomak becomes highly radioactive and very weak after being bombarded with stray high energy particles. Basically after a while the entire containment area has to be replaced, and the old one put in a hazardous waste area. With a large tokomak that is a lot of radioactive metal to have to deal with.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Extremely trivial considering that according to Physics Today President Bush's budget cuts nuclear energy research by 29.4%. Of course that article was in June, who knows how much more he plans to take out for other projects? Cutting a budget by over 1/4 tends to send the message that it is not considered important.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Lack of funding.
My opinion is that lack of funding is just only part of the reason. Where are those portable fuel cells, or Flat-Panel CRTs, or even hot-fusion reactors people keep talking about. Just because something can't be produced commercially doesn't mean it doesn't or can't exist. Reducing an idea from concept to market takes money, time, and commitment. Cold fusion suffers from a double-whammy of; a) nobody's really sure how it works, and b) the scientific establishment knows cold-fusion is impossible and any evidence to the contrary is by definition fraudulent and anyone who claims otherwise is a fraud, QED.
As an aside, you claim that he claims, "to have a compact, safe source of power that could easily be built in a garage", but I can't find anywhere in his post where he claims that. To me, it seems dishonest to claim otherwise.