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."

Comments

Efficiency vs. Sustainability

[GospelHead821]

What needs to be understood is that they've managed to use a fusion generator to generate electricity. However, they've never managed to create electricity in a useful fashion.

As it stands, they can create an efficient reactor that is not self-sustaining or a self-sustaining reactor that is not efficient. In other words, the former uses very little outside power, but isn't stable and ceases to function. The latter is more stable, but uses more fuel than conventional means.

Fusion power is not a pipe dream. Just as conventional power reactors have been improved over time to produce electricity more efficiently, so will fusion reactors eventually be improved to the point where they're useful. Will it be in the next decade? It may well be, but regardless of when it will happen, it will happen.

Codeposition fusion is happening today

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people think cold fusion is complete bunk, because the field got off to a bad start, with poor early reproducibility. However, it has since been determined, mostly by the U.S. Navy, that electrolysis simultaniously co-depositing deuterium and palladium together on an ordinary cathode reliably produces a five-fold gain from input power.

Codeposition fusion might not only relieve a significant portion of our dependence on foreign oil (and we all know how important that is), but it might also be a natural way to retrofit our dangerous, dirty fission nuclear plants. Codeposition fusion produces nearly zero ionizing radiation of any kind, and no nuclear waste products.

Here are three good references:

"Calorimetry of the Pd + D Codeposition," by S. Szpak, P. Boss, and M.H. Miles, in Fusion Technology, volume 36 (Sept. 1999), pp. 234-241. search near the end of this page for the abstract ("...excellent reproducibility, high power outputs....")

"On the behavior of the cathodically polarized Pd/D system: Search for emanating radiation," by S. Szpak, P.A. Mosier-Boss, and J.J. Smith, in Physics Letters A, volume 210 (1996) pp. 382-390. (Phys Lett A is much easier to find than Fusion [Science and] Technol.)

"Calorimetry of Pd+D Codeposition in a Fleischmann-Pons Dewar Cell," by M.H. Miles, S. Szpak, P. Boss, and Martin Fleischmann (March 2001) abstract on web only

In short, codeposition fusion reliably produces a 500% power gain without fast neutrons, high-energy radiation, or radioactive waste. 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. There is a very high likelihood that codeposition fusion will soon be commercialized to drive electrical generation turbines, helping to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and, given sufficient electric vehicles, foreign oil. The cost of codeposition fusion electricity is likely to be less than one cent per kilowatt hour.

You may have heard that cold fusion was discredited. Early experiments used smooth, solid palladium cathodes, which did not produce reliable results. Some such smooth, solid cathodes would run for weeks without producing excess heat, and then would do so for perhaps a few days, and often would never do so again. Over 400 studies in the peer-reviewed scientific literature -- see: the Dieter Britz bibliography [about a megabyte] -- have confirmed that the effect is certainly real, but is only reproduceable in less than one out of ten attempts. Those who have studied codeposition fusion get 99+% reproducibility, and precise control of the effect. The crucial difference is that codeposition cathodes are mossy and dendritic, instead of smooth and solid. Any kind of mossy, high surface area cathodes produce much better results than any smooth cathodes, but they were not in common use until a couple years after the poor early results had discredited the entire field.

Of the six laboratories in the U.S. publishing cold fusion research, three are in California, one is in Mountain View (First Gate Energies), and one is in Menlo Park (SRI International.) Szpak et al's lab is in San Diego. The governments of Italy, France, Russia, Japan, and China all sponsor cold fusion research in their own national laboratories. However, the budget for cold fusion here in the U.S. is very small, because the entrenched plasma fusion "big science" community (whose most optimistic estimates indicate that plasma fusion will not be viable for another thirty years -- and even then it will produce nuclear waste; perhaps more than fission does) keeps funding away from cold fusion (which does not produce nuclear waste or dangerous radiation) through continued, unfair ridicule.

Cheers,
James

Re:ten years == we don't really know

[dragons_flight]

I recently earned a BS in physics and am now taking a year off before going to grad school (deferred admission to Berkeley). Fusion research is not my specialty, but I do know people that work in this area, and I think I can offer some insight into the issue.

Let me start by saying that cold fusion != fusion research. Cold fusion as popularly described has been debunked. The researchers in question were good people who were mistaken about what they observed, unfortunately when they were given proof of their mistake they chose to disappear from the public eye rather than admit their mistake. No low temperature fusion has ever been verified, though occasionally you will see new proposals for how it might be possible.

Now the real stuff. This means high temperature, high pressures, and almost exclusively isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium). There are three successful ways that man has produced fusion: Hydrogen bombs which are heated by one or more fission bombs, confined plasma (ie. tokomaks), and pulsed laser pellet experiments.

H-bombs are pretty useless because there is no way to make a small controllable explosion. All you can ever get is really big ones that would be impractical as a power source.

Pulsed laser experiments experiments involve using arrays of uber lasers to heat and compress solid hydrogen pellets so fast that they reach the point of fusion before the gas can dissipate. People in the physics community generally see this tech as a dead end because the technical requirements seem to scale exponentially with linear increases in power output. There is still research being done, but the power consumption of the lasers is orders of magnitude more than what little energy the fusion generates right now, so it's unlikely to see this being practical in the next half century.

Tokomaks are the standard in confined plasma fusion, though there are a couple alternatives that have some physicists excited. Tokomaks work; they just don't work very well. Right now we have machines that about break even, ie. they generate enough energy to run themselves. Given how much energy is involved just running the machine, if you can get another factor of 10 out of the best machines of today, you'd have enough for a useful small-medium scale power plant.

Confined plasma fusion is alluring for a number of reasons. The source hydrogen is easy to obtain or make (tritium is often created in fission reactors by exposing deuterium to nuetrons). The radiation is very safe compared to fission reactions. In both fission and fusion the components of the reactor itself will pick up some radioactivity, but the real concern in fission is all the spent fuel. You can't keep it where it is because it's no good as a fuel source and you don't want to dump it anywhere else either. In fusion reactors, the spent fuel is typically less rather than more dangerous when compared to the fuel itself, and contains no mid-range decay lifetime isotopes of the type which are most troublesome in fission reactors. Lastly, confined plasma can't have a "melt down", if the plasma gets too hot or electricity is turned off, the fusion reaction stops itself.

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. Right now, fusion is none of these. Part of the drive for smaller machines is that they should be easier to maintain and less prone to fail. The trade off is that smaller machines need tighter confinement than their large cousins and thus are harder to engineer.

Two decades is somewhat optimistic for commercial appliations, but the state of technology is such that the next generation machines by the end of the decade should be a good 20% or so above break even (not wide scale useful but something to notice). If we can keep progressing at the current rate (and there is enough inventiveness and creativity in the field to suggest that's possible) then I would think prototypes for small power plant type models might be ready by 2040 or so.

Of course then again I'm a physicist and we have a horrible track record in predicting the rise of fusion technology.