Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is this the end-all solution? I certainly hope so. Still, there are tons of fossil fuels being combusted every second, and we need an answer for this energy crisis as well. Hopefully commercial fusion can facilitate this.
--- Sigs are dumb.
Utah had a head start on A&M by years!
I think that fusion research is great and all, and I do think that it has potential. But I'm tired of hearing scientists say, "we're only a decade away!"
Note to future readers of ambitious scientists: ten years means, "we don't really have any idea where we are, but we're getting really close!"
I guess that I kind of feel for them (the scientists), since the public is really unwilling to fund "blue sky" research, but to keep prognosticating like this is irresponsible. Predicting timelines is best left to engineers.
For years, fusion has been 50 years away. To find out what date most people think fusion will become practical, all you need to do is add 50 to the current year. That means that fusion will be practical in 2051.
Of course in 2051, fusion will still be 50 years away.
Amazingly, by calculating the density and power requirements of the latest and greatest CPUs from Intel, we get the same number. By Moore's law of fusion, the heat and energy available to start a fusion reaction in a typical Intel processor doubles each year. By a simple formula, you can determine that in the year 2051 Intel CPU's will be so hot they can fuse hydrogen! This amazing calculation through two independent means confirms the majority opinion: fusion is still 50 years off.
I'm sure there's somebody out there trying to imagine a Beowulf cluser of fusion processors.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The way the law is going, I can see a "DCMA for the energy industry" whereby fusion would be made illegal. It's a shame the article doesn't have more details on the MAST system they are building....the only details were "it's like JET but smaller".
Within reach in the next decade, yeah right.
For years I hear the same, fusion/cloning/AI/whatever will be available within a decade. Of all that, cloning is the only thing that materialized so far.
Show me the proof or go away. Now.
(No proof? I'm hardly surprised.)
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
- a cool picture of a pink torus of plasma
- commercial fusion may be possible in "a few decades"
- that is all
These seem like reasonable goals. Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago? I wonder if the scientists in this article took their circumstances into consideration when setting out the timeframe in the article... The thing was remarkably light on details...
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
IIRC, these folks are all using a tritium-deuterium reaction, which yields helium and a neutron. For one thing, it's a much easier reaction than, for instance, deuterium-deuterium, and, for another, the neutrons give you a way to extract the energy and manufacture tritium. Of course, the other thing the neutrons do is irradiate the structure of the reactor, which ends up leaving you with all sort of fun radioisotopes to dispose of later.
Of course, that probably pales by comparison to the amount of waste generated while refining fissile fuels, and you completely avoid the possibility of a meltdown, but still, I might not go so far as to claim it's 'pollution free.'
At the current rate of fossil fuel consumption, the world's fossil fuel (particularily oil and gas) reserve will be depeleted in about 40 years presuming there are no new major reserves discovered and consumption rate stays constant (which it more likely won't). What then?
Fusion will definitely be important then and I hope it will not be vaporware still. Any advances in alternate energy and fuel conservation ( I think hybrid cars are great) should be welcomed and I can only hope that the scientists didn't embelish on their claims.
Maybe fusion will be viable before the world's oil reserve runs out. But with our addiction to petroleum in mind, we will probably be at a war to "secure" other people's oil when fusion is announced to the world as THE next energy source.
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.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
Fusion and Cold Fusion ARE NOT THE SAME THING!
I mean, really... What more can I say?
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
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
Anyone have any more info on texas A&M?
http://students.washington.edu/djwatson
...but we see these stories appearing in the news media every time fusion researchers get a little concerned about their funding. It seems that the main reason these stories appear is to drum up some public support for continued funding (as with all sorts of long-term science research that's mostly funded by public money).
It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society. This is one area where I have resigned myself to the fact that it's not worth trying to change the system - it's just not going to happen. At least a reasonable level of public funding is available for such research, even if it's never quite enough.
Anyway, fair play to the researchers, they've got their media coverage, their funding is assured for a little longer.
I hope that the great dream of widely-used fusion power is something I will see within my lifetime. Perhaps people in future centuries will then look back on our lifetimes and know that not everything that we did harmed ourselves, our rights and our planet.
personally, i don't particularly care if it's 50 years off, or even 100. so far in this forum, i haven't seen one post speaking of the environmental effects of a fusion generator....so i'm guessing other than excessive heat (used to make steam), there is none. no radioactivity, no cancer, no threat to humanity as we know it when one of these 'melts down'. i personally see fusion power being developed in my lifetime (i'm nearly 18). probably half of you slashdotters will live to see fossil fuels become scarce and the entire atmosphere look like LA on a bad day, i know most of europe is already like this...been there, saw it. it's depressing to stand in a beautiful garden in the mountians and look down over barcelona, and barely be able to make out the cathedreal being built there : (
they've already demonstrated that they can create the the field(s), it's just a matter of fine-tuning things. personally, i'd like to help fund their project, seeing as how electical power is the world's life-blood, and this is the best soultion as of yet to help us generate more of it. nuclear war eventually will be inevitable, but personally i'dlike to be in the country that funded powering these things, so that when the sky is so thick with ash you can't see the sun anymore, our country is still capable of heating all of america's homes (as fusion produces enormous amounts of power).
moox. for a new generation.
Free enegy has always been the holy grail of science. Fusion appears to be one step towards the realisation of such an energy source. The previous millenium's energy darling, nuclear power, has proven unfeasible due to the tremendous clean up costs involved. Fusion seems to have none of the same costs.
If the energy produced by fusion exceeds the cost of producing it (collection and production of fuel, maintenance of energy plant, cleanup and pollution) then we will essentially have a scenario where energy production can accelerate to the point where we can theoretically have all the energy we want, dirt cheap.
After that point is reached, anything is possible. Unlimited food production: Need light? No problem. Need water? Go boil some from the sea. Need fertilizer? Create your own lightning to get nitrates. Unlimited material wealth: need more raw material? Go on dig it out of the ground with your fusion powered machines. Factories can run all day and all night cos energy is free. Incredible high-energy research opportunities. Spaceflight! Basically everything will follow this principle: use energy to collect/generate raw material and use this raw material and energy to create means of production.. and then the final product in great quantity.
Of course, private energy firms will never produce energy in such quantity. but what if the government were to fund this? once energy production reaches a critical mass.. WOW!
Oh GOD I hope so! Then we wouldn't have to listen to all these stupid people, who constantly barage other people with their lack of fundamental physics and solid belief in astrology and the flatness of the earth.
Go Osama!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I can't wait to run my quantum computer, with it's optical storage system, off of fusion generated power. I hear it's right around the corner.
anybody got any info on what tech problems?
MAST is a spherical torus....and ST's are suppose to solve a few issues that tokamaks (doughnuts) where found to have. First Tokamaks reuire a very large magnetic field for containment. Producing the magnetic field is probably the biggest overall cost money and energy-wise. An ST, like MAST or NSTX (www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html) or the machine I'm chained to NSTX's little brother CDX (w3.pppl.gov/~cdx) use proportionately less external field that a tokamak would need for the same plasma current. For fusion reactor design that's a big advantage for the ST.
The ST also hopes to solve a real plasma physics issue...MHD instabilities. Making cold plasmas isn't all to difficult. Once you start pumping energy into the plasma you get very exotic plasma wave physics that can tear the plasma apart. You can design some of the instabilities away, if your design is clever enough....is the ST a clever enough desgin? I don't know. but ST's do allow access to a new regime of labortory plasmas
There are a lot of unresolved issues in magnetic confinement fusion. The ST machines are definitely worth exploring but it's not clear that a working fusion reactor will be based on anything like MAST.
-jef
im too tired to write anything longer
You can apparently even buy a working (fusor type) fusion reactor from EADS
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
From what I heard, nobody was able to reproduce their experiments, which tends to indicate that they were just plain wrong.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
For an insight into the MAST program and its precursor START, slashdotters could do worse than click on the link at the bottom of the article.
Briefly, the START program proved the advantage of spherical tokomaks over conventional tokomaks. A tokomak is a torus shaped confinement vessel responsible for generating the magnetic field.
START was so successful, that MANY researchers world-wide are now using spherical tokomaks. The issue now is not "can we sustain a fusion reaction" but "can we do so efficiently."
Currently we can't which is why there's been no press releases. At this point it's purely an efficiency problem.
As an interesting aside, I noticed a page with some interesting uses for spherical tokomaks. One in particular caught my eye:
-- QUOTE --
Actinide Burner
Another idea for using the source of neutrons generated by a spherical tokamak is to "burn" unwanted long-lived actinides present in the spent fuel from a nuclear (fission) power station.
By transmuting these into shorter-lived nuclides, the waste burden from conventional nuclear power could be alleviated.
-- END QUOTE --
Now that's a useful fringe benefit.
Cryptimus
The reason why there has been little Real World(tm) development of alternative energy is that nobody in the U.S goverment or the big energy cooperations wants to develop it. They would rather depend on oil trade, which btw is the biggest industry in the world(except the shady arms deals). And research into alternative energy costs a lot of money. A viable alternative would rip the industry apart. The same story as microsoft and open source development. If we can develop a truly useful, safe and environment friendly alternative or an alternative with lower destruction of the environment, and/or something thats significantly safer we would still have to convince the use of it by the goverments of the world. And that is not likely to happen with most of the goverments in the pockets of the oil sheiks. It is not surprising that Texas would try to stop such research into alternative energy. Lets destroy the world brothers. We could live happily in our lifetime. Whoever wants to think of the planet and its children and the children of the children and their children.
It all depends on who this 'scientist' is. When I worked on a fusion power project in the late 70's we had two major milestones:
Even back in the 70's people said that ``Success was just around the corner''. For years now, predictions almost always said ''demo in the next 10 years with commercial plants 10 years after that''.
You will know that significant process has been made when that '10' is reduced to a number such as '5' or smaller. It is my guess that in 10 years they will start saying success is slightly less than 10 years away. At that rate by 2035 hopes and reality will meet.
chongo (was here)
ok man, that was great
it took me 3 read through's of the last (well not the last, the second to last) para, before i could understand what it was doing there (i'm ripped), but it was worth it
Damn Cold Fusion! I was starting to really enjoy the rolling blackouts, besides the super long coffee breaks, I got to grope the hot intern in the copy room when the lights went out.
Fusion is a ways off. I am currently doing fusion research at PPPL. Everyone here (and everywhere) really wants it to happen, and we realize that brute force projects are not the way to go. While it is technically feasible to build a working fusion plant (ITER), the cost would be so astronomical that it would never be used for its intended purpose. Sure, we would get more energy out than we put in, but it wouldn't be the most cost efficient process... The current thrust of the US fusion program appears to me to be aimed at designing smaller, cleverly designed machines that move us towards fusion while being cost efficient. The end goal is the adoption of fusion power. But if that adoption costs more money than the energy-equivalent amount of fossil fuels, no power companies are going to adopt it.... In answer to the safety questions of fusion power, I'm pretty sure most experiments nowadays are using D-T reactions (deuterium and tritium). Tritium is pretty goddam radioactive. 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. Bottom line: nasty byproducts, but with 2 or 3 years of storage, safe as anything outside. None of this 20,000 year half life.... If you want to get into something really creepy (in my mind) check out the loosely disguised bomb research known as Inertial Confinement Fusion. The Nation Ignition Facility (NIF) etc. Scary.
(ducks rocks tossed by the faithful)
- Lawrence Person
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
im not out to burst anyones bubble or anything, just thought id remind everyone that "a leading scientist" usually translates to "a crackpot we found who happen to have a degree". im not saying this is the case with dr. sykes here, but it might be.
its comparable to the "leading computer scientists" that get interviewed by some big news company and claims "A.I is a couple of years away".
we might get there, but probably not real soon.
-- gunzip-howto.tar.gz
As the Soviet society had free energy. no incentive was there to develop energy-saving equipment and thus all the consumer-goods and high-end technological devices we use today (like cell phones and portable computers). This is also the main reason that the Soviet Union finally collapsed. The Soviet people also wanted the goods the western world had. Had the situation been the opposite, the Soviet Union would be the worlds only superpower today.
This is also the main reason that european people uses only half as much energy per capita as in the US. In the US, energy (especially petrol) is much cheaper than in Europe allowing americans to drive in their crappy old chevy's etc. (although they do look cool i must admit).
Thus as long as there is an incentive to do research into energy-saving technologies, research into those areas will likely be able to spawn lots of consumer-products never thought of before.
My point is, there should be a price on energy and all other resources, otherwise a catastrophical amount of waste of resources is bound to happen and reaserch might not result in new high-tech consumer products that we all might benefit from.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer
Saw a nice article on Plasma Shields. (Fusion Powered) Then it goes onto Fusion powered flight, but you can tell where this is leading..
:)
Space Travel.
After all, we've found a way to use up practically "limitless" data storage and cpu power :)
I'm also concerned with - groan - global warming. After all, when you use any kind of energy there is some loss in the form of heat. When we start using this stellar quantity of power, I hope some of it goes toward the construction of a planet-sized heat sink.
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.
What I find really interesting is that the article states that smaller reactors are more efficient and usefull than one large reactor. Now I am curious as to how small they can make these, because what would cause a major revolution in society would be the availability of cheap personal reactors that you could run your home on. This would allow people to be free of the power grid, and generate their own power at a very good cost. The potential of this for raising the standard of living in 3rd world countries is amazing.
As well as the environmental aspect, this would be a trully liberating technology. I can see see massive resistance to something like this from existing power structures, but I really really hope that that cheap small scall fusion technologies emerge. It would quite possibly be the greatest acheivement of modern society.
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
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
It's quite simpel, nuclear fusion simply is the ultime energy source within our reach.
It will supply us with a next generation energy souce...
Making oil less needed...
Making oil companeys less profitable...
That's something the major power (politically and economically then, not electrical) does not like.
I bet, that once the supply of oil/gas really runs out, they will come up with fusion and a replacement portable fuel within seconds...
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.
The article referred to does not say what Slashdot "quotes". Specifically, the Slashdot item substitutes the words "in the next decade" where the original has "in a few decades".
Fusion reactors don't appear in Simcity 2000 and 3000 until about 2050!
Go go gadget independent confirmation!
Various firearms also use tritium for sighting.
...it's about 149 597 870 kilometers away.
93 million miles and an ozone layer seems about right.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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
--
and some random shit to kill the lame filter...
... when they (these scientists) are running over the budget and they are still need in of money.
"Fusion is close" - I heard this in the 70es, 80es, 90es. Now again. Sigh.
The budgets of fundamental research are getting worse over the years and there is allways somebody in a decisive position who asks "when and how many money we will get from this? Why do you need soooo much money?" etc.
(and how about the boys and girls
at NASA, ESA e.g.?)
So we will hear something like this again and again and again.
But it's getting better! A few centuries ago, scientists ("turning lead to gold is close!") are getting executed or kept in prison - the special kind of intellectual property of those early times...
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...
At the heart of the PR mission is communicating the value of what is being publicized. Good communication skills are pretty important to good science, and especially important if you want anything useful to come out of whatever work you do. There's lots of PR bullshit out there, but the core job of PR is both necessary and useful. PR is not just a shenanigan.
Not everyone by default cares and can fully appreciate good science projects without PR "education", just as not everyone can appreciate good homeless shelters and reading programs without a little PR. Sure, people always seek to know about the stuff they're interested in, but the vast masses have to be convinced that things they care less about are worth sparing a few (taxpayer) dollars for. PR widens the circle of aware people. And it's bottoms-up education rather than top-down. You might think about why such a distributed system has advantages.
--LP, who never thought he'd be defending PR people, on Slashdot of all places
Read the article. They talk about using water as fuel. Fusion is to fission what hydrogen fuel cells are to petrol generators.
A word can paint a thousand pictures
let me just make sure that everyone knows
that it was the chemistry department.
Yes, the guys with the grant
for turning lead into gold.
You think I'm kidding.
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." -- Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Yes, no poluents while working, but the waste that remains after they are done with it.... takes quite a lot of years to get rid of that stuff...
I'm all for alternative methods of power, but not fusion.
I think the risk is just too great of something going wrong. Something which is probably on the level of mass cataclysm.
I have a question, which all of these articles ignore.
What happens if something goes wrong in a fusion reactor? Literally, speaking. What could the consequences be?
Before I made any kind of decision like this, I'd like to know what could happen in the case of a foulup.
This is a way off-topic discussion...
I will agree that the US is not a perfect country or has a perfect governement, But fighting in a "out int the open war" vs getting submarined are 2 completely different things.
All lives are valuable...it's the blind idiot who are looking foward to 72 virgins who don't.
Any another thing, why is it you weenies always pick out every negative thing you can to say about the US?
We have great freedoms, we give aid and food to every country out there...who gives us aid? Answer me that! hell, yesterday Bush approved food aid to the Afghans...what evil country would do that?
No sir, we are not perfect but we are the best thing going.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
OTOH, whether terrestrial fusion reactors make sense is debatable. Fusion reactors still generate large amounts of radioactive waste. Whether they are any safer than fission reactors also remains to be seen. If we want unsafe, waste-producing energy, however, we still have plenty of fissionable materials for hundreds of years to come, so why bother with fusion?
Doesn't stop it being radioacive waste. Ever hear of heavy water (d20)??? Helium, or hydrogen or whatever is an element name. Doesn't mean no isotopes can exist or be dangerous. Also the plant it's self will become highly radioactive overtime as it soaks the radiation given off. Already happened to the existing test reactors. On a live system you'd probably have to replace a lot of the plant every so often & that's going to be some big bits of kit to dispose of safely. D.
Ever since they first got the idea, Fusion energy has been exactly a decade away. Never more, never less, always exactly "in the next decade".
If you doubt me, check your historical sources so see just _how_ often that has been predicted. Even Scientific American has started to notice...
One is apt to wonder if that isn't the right safety-distance for a fusion power plant: one decade into the future...
Poul-Henning, Old enough to remember...
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Another design worth keeping an eye on:
http://www.psfc.mit.edu/ldx/
So much sunlight and not a drop to drink - err, a particle to convert into electricity. What's up in this field of technology?
Now... where did I pack that Flux Capacitor when I moved?
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
The Myth of Soviet Fighters having vaccum tubes vs. the West's solid state technology making the Soviet's able to fight in a nuclear environment is just that a myth.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, the United States, Europe and Soviet next generation fighters had all progressed from a vaccum tube level of technology to solid states.
The Third Generation Jets
US - F-4, F-111, A-6, A-7, F-8
USSR - MiG-21, MiG-25, Su-17/19
Europe - Jaguar, Mirage III, Buccanner
Were being replaced by the Next Generation aircraft, and at the time (1976) Soviet CPU technology was just as good, if not better than that of the United States (The KGB Archives book talks about this). It was only in the mid 1980s that the economy of scale and massive money put into AMD, Intel, Samsung and Motorola designs began to outstrip Soviet clock-speeds and designs.
The older Soviet designs tended to be cheap and disposable aircraft, but by the late 70s, they were building smaller numbers of world class aircraft like the West, and they used advanced avionics and computer systems.
The Fourth Generation Jets
US - F-14, F-15, F-16, F/A-18
USSR - MiG-29, Su-27
Europe - Tornado, Mirage IIIE
(Note the F-14 is something of a bastard that crosses Generations with features of both. And the MiG-31 is just an upgraded MiG-25)
It's true that EMP and TREE has a serious effect on solid state electronics, and it's also true that the West spent billions of dollars hardening thier equipment against EMP.
The myth of Soviet gear being more survivable because of vaccum tubes, for the most part is a myth. The Soviets hung tight with the West until about 1985 in technology, and with each advance the West made, the Soivets matched it or passed it.
I had a physics class from Dr. Jones (BYU) when Pons and Fleischmann announced this thing. Shortly thereafter someone asked him about it and he basically said he told them they shouldn't have announced because the data was not yet ready (ie, conclusive). Looks like he turned out to be right.
I dunno, but just by looking at the pink picture of the plasma in the article, the thing strikes me as not having much energy in it... If it had enough energy, it should at least radiate in the UV, not in the reds...
Remember, cultural relativity is all the rage. That is, as long as you aren't American or Jewish, your culture is relatively OK compared to ours. Even if you condemn racism, it's okay if it's against Jews. Even if you condemn sexism, it's okay as long as it happens in Islamic states. Even if you condemn military action against an aggressor, an unprovoked attack aimed right at a civilian building is okay because we "asked for it."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
BTW, if it works, why wasn't it on the market almost immediately?
Lack of funding.
It's always, "I just need your signature on the cheque, sir, before we can show you that miracle." If there was only one man in the field, I'd consider it that claim, but with hundreds allegedly working on it, the lack of funding would really be more of a private investment opportunity for those involved than an insurmountable obstacle.
You claim to have a compact, safe source of power that could easily be built in a garage. Yet not a prototype of a practical generator to be seen. With 5X over electrical input, you could just run a damned steam engine turning a generator to feed itself and have a virtual perpetual motion machine. Any backyard tinker could build such a device for a hundred dollars or so, given the heat source you claim to offer. There is plenty of video of electrolysis tubes bubbling away, but the only evidence we are given are your claimed readings, which may be intentional fraud or simple incompetence.
Worse are the constant claims about "peer-reviewed journals" and patents, as if these constitute any sort of evidence. Everyone knows that the patent office never bothers to confirm that an invention works before registering it, and patenting a non-marketable device is the very hallmark of crackpotism. Any two people can start a "peer-reviewed" journal, it doesn't mean anything unless you already respect the people doing the reviewing. Such cargo cult science is done by ufologists, astrologers, designers of perpetual motion machines (a large number of whom I see moving to cold fusion research), etc. It means nothing by itself.
Briefly, you make these claims:
-you have a working power source
-it is simple enough to build at home (no moving parts, simple structure)
-it is thousands of times cheaper than hot fusion devices
-you need loads of money to make any kind of usable product
Hmm...
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter/tre1-1.html#Cranks
Fly (Aggie '94)
--
end of line
end of line
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.
Unfortunately, a successful reactor would spit out a lot of neutrons, which would tend to make the containment vessel highly radioactive over time. You'd still get a lot of nuclear waste, although perhaps not as much as with a fission reactor.
Did you read more than the subject line, pray tell?
Picture an apple, take out the core, the resulting
shape is a spherical torus. I.e. You cored a
sphere to make a sphere shaped donut.
2. The same three or four people wrote each of those articles!
3. They also wrote for "Infinite Energy Magazine" http://www.mv.com/ipusers/zeropoint/IEHTML/BACKIS
It is obvious this is still fringe science.
Don't act like it's not.
-Ben
...and it always will be. Ha. Ha. Ha.
I've heard that "fusion is ten years away" myth for as long as I can remember. It is right up there with "flat screen TVs" and "the Space Station" for being the most often cited "we almost have it figured out" technology.
Wait a minute...
We finally did get the flat screen TVs and the Space Station. Maybe it is the year 2001 after all. Maybe they will be right about fusion too. On the other hand, I don't have my flying car yet...
We could have a fusion power plant operating within a year or two if it were really important. We have had the technology to do so for DECADES. You think I'm kidding?
Here is how it is done. You need two deep wells and a geothermal style power plant. And it all needs to be in someone else's back yard. You lower a handy Hydrogen Bomb (which is fusion powered) into one of the wells and detonate it. The heat from the H-Bomb's fusion reaction turns groundwater around the well into steam, which is turned into power by your nearby geothermal-style power plant. For continous power production, you need at least two wells so that while one is being prepared for a detonation, you can get power from the other one.
Everything is proven technology. We have H-bombs. We have even detonated them underground, so we know how do do that. We also have working geothermal power plants. So what is the hold up? Well, first you have the whole problem of just whose back yard do you put this monster in. Then you have the problem of commercially available H-bombs for "power plant fuel" would make a horrible nuclear proliferation problem. And, of course, the energy industry does everything by cost and since no one has ever done one of these power plants and it contains a LOT of costs that could potentially get very large... no body wants to try it. I can't say I blame them. But it is technically possible. We could have a fusion power plant in the immediate future. But it wouldn't be a fusion power plant anyone would actually want to have.
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).
The problem is that with a scheme like this you end up with difficulties surprisingly similar to magnetic confinement fusion if you're operating in a regime that produces useful power.
If your particle streams are fairly tenuous, they pass through each other with few reactions, and you operate at very poor energy efficiency (most of your input energy is wasted).
If the particle streams are dense enough that most particles interact, then shortly after impact you have an ordinary cloud of hot plamsa. This will disperse very quickly, leaving only a very short time for interaction, which again results in very poor energy efficiency.
You can try to confine the resulting plasma with magnetic fields to get a longer interaction time... at which point you're dealing with magnetic confinement fusion with a novel injection and heating scheme. Still interesting to build, but not as completely different from magnetic confinement fusion as your post suggests.
There was a really clever idea (~10-15 years ago?) for using muons to catalyze cold fusion that never panned out (or at least, it lost all its funding). Except that the method DOES generate helium at room temperature, unlike all the palladium-electrode methods. And it was a really cool idea.
In muon-catalyzed cold fusion, you inject a muon into a cold mixture of hydrogen molecules (D-T or D-D) to create a singly-ionized muonic hydrogen molecule that consists of deuterium and tritium. They share the muon just as if it were a bound electron. But muons are 200 times heavier than electrons, so their orbitals are much, much tighter and so the nuclei are brought much closer together than in ordinary singly-ionized hydrogen. Since the charges are brought so much closer, enough energy is released to disperse the D-T molecule's electrons (which would only get in the way). And the muon screens the repulsive charges of the nuclei so well that they are brought close enough to each other to tunnel through the remaining potential barrier and fuse via strong interactions, forming helium. The muon generally survives this process and is free to catalyze it again with another D-T or D-D molecule.
The problem with muon-catalyzed fusion is that muons are expensive to make (they're about ~100 MeV) and the fusion reaction generates only a few MeV. So you have to recycle your muons over and over again just to get your initial investment back. The muon is actually quite recyclable, but you have to use it fast because it decays to an electron + neutrino + antineutrino in something on the order of a microsecond. (Which is a pretty long time actually.) Muons are also lost when they stick to the helium instead of going off to catalyze the next reaction. This is the bigger problem. In fact, muon-alpha sticking is how you eventually lose most of your muons. They did manage to recycle muons to catalyze about 150 fusions, but that's not enough to make break-even.
Still, people have made helium with this method! That's a hell of a lot more than you can say for the palladium electrode voodoo that completely ruined the reputation of "cold fusion".
Would Moore's law work for fusion like it does with semiconductors? Once we had a computer, we used it to create better computers. Once we have a fusion reactor, we can use its energy to run stronger electromagnetic fields in better fusion reactors. More energy makes it possible to create higher temperature, higher density fusion, and the process feeds itself.
The Texas A+M story seemed to focus on cold fusion, while the link article seemed to focus on large scale reactors. When the general public thinks of cold fusion they generally think of pons and fleishmann (sp?) tubes that caused so much controversy a decade and a half ago. The D20/paladium set up is quite different from a huge plasma fusion reactor. (Although, of course, the underlying physical principles are the same)
CERN already has a good way to 'burn' radionuclides
into less harmful stuff - throw it in front of a
cyclotron beam. This produces a good net energy
gain in the bargain, and all the tech is quite
prosaic by high-energy research standards.
Google up the
Energy Amplifier by Prof Carlo Rubbia.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
Apart from the containment vessel, no radioactive waste will be produced at all.
The reactor itself will be radioactive in a harmful way for about 100 years (this ultimately depends on what material it is built of). This is much better than the 10000+ years for a fission reactor, and totally acceptable, I think.
An old coal power plant is also quite radioactive, at about the same magnitude as a fusion power plant.
I remember back in my Air Warrior days that the new version was always just two weeks away. After a while it became a running joke about anything at all, new machines, your new baby, etc.
Open on my desk is a copy of "Project Sherwood - The U.S. Program in Controlled Fusion", published in 1958 - I believe as a part of a huge nuclear energy conference in Geneva. I'll quote something from the conclusion for you:
"With ingenuity, hard work, and a sprinkling of good luck, it even seems reasonable to hope that a full-scale power-producing thermonuclear device may be built within the next decade or two."
Well _I_ find it amusing!
I believe it is safe to say we will not see fusion plants as power sources within our lifetime. Oh, it's certainly possible that we will build a working reactor, but no one will buy it. Why bother? We already have nukes and they're about the same cost to run. Better yet, coal is cheap.
We just don't need them. At least not right now. If we need more non-poluting power, we will build more nukes. We haven't even come close to saturating that market even for the existing overbuilt infrastructure. Now we have to build new devices and infrastructure for this new power source that we don't even need?
Sorry. Maybe as a space driver around 2100, but with micro-nukes that seems unlikey too.
Maury
The tomahawk fusion reactor performs fusion very, very carefully and it is very delicate.
Tokamak, not tomahawk...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I think this guy was trying to make some sort of stunning revolutionary point to us. Problem is, the Afgan Mujahedin were not the Taliban. They were actually mostly what is now referred to as the Northern Alliance. After the Soviets were expelled, all the little tribes turned on each other. The Taliban won this royal rumble and took control of the country.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
One thing many people seem to miss is the problem of waste heat. Since fusion power still obeys the laws of thermodynamics, waste heat will inevitably flow into the environment. This, along with heat caused by power transmission losses (very significant) will have a significant environmental impact if power use were to drastically rise.
It's straightforward enough to get rid of the excess heat - concentrate it and let it radiate out into space. The per unit power cost of this is fairly low, so by the time we'll need it, we'll be able to build it.
It would only be a big problem if a fairly large area (hundreds of miles on a side) were to use much more power than the same area receives from sunlight, though. That would require a very high population density over a very large area. In the near term, it'll only hold for very small, densely populated areas (like cities). While this causes a local environmental impact, the effect on the environment as a whole is quite small for the time being (I'd worry more about chemical waste and deforestation).
I sent an email to one of the Profs involved, and I am hoping to get a response.
a lr eview/pdfs/nhmfl2000ar-pubs.pdf
k Se lection=Advanced&Univ=UF (search on Tri Alpha Energy Inc)
t ml
Looking into things, though, I have found the following links - seems like they have gotten a small amount of funding from a company called "Tri-Alpha Energy Corp" or "Tri-Alpha Energy Inc":
http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/publications/2000annu
http://sage.fiu.edu/searchengine2/index.cfm?Tas
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/CLASnotes/0102/grants.h
All of this seems to have happenned in 2000, though I found a little tantalizing bits via Google that indicated this last February (2001) was the last grant money for it.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to locate who/where this "Tri-Alpha Energy Inc" is - still looking, though...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
and 10 years before that? I'll believe it when I see it.
I remember seeing an article in Popular Science magazine about fusion. It was right next to some facts about the city of the future, with flying cars and where everything was shaped like a Gropius accident or automobile fenders from the 50s.
- jonese (http://farmaccidentdigest.com)
...and for a few more in-depth journal articles on CBF from Physical Review Letters:
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
:)
hawk
the tokamak design was a drastic improvement over linear fusion devices built early on, which allowed huge losses of energy through either end of the device. as the tokamak is a torus shape, the plasma can theoretically be 'confined' and energy isnt lost out of ends, as there aren't any!
however, the issue with a tokamak is its extremely difficult to produce a uniform magnetic field over a donut-like shape. and if the magnetic field is weak at any point, the plasma can escape confinement. energy is lost to the surroundings, instead of being pushed back into the fusion.
"spherical tokamak" is a contradiction of terms... if it is a tokamak, it is a torus. and if it is a torus, their reactor is subject to the same issues as JET, princeton's experiments, mit's experiments, etc. i am unaware of extensive research with spherical confinement of a plasma, but research at the us's national ignition facility focuses on bombardment by lasers on a tiny sphere of deuterium and tritium in hopes to start and sustain a fusion reaction by this means. the results have been less than spectacular thus far.
ask any physicist how the sun works, and they will tell you their theory. sure, the sun works through fusion, but to make equations balance to explain this, you have to take into account theoretical subatomic particles... things we can't detect(maybe because they arent there), and if they do exist, what role do they actually play?
getting fusion to work before we actually understand it is like fiddling with genetics before we fully understand that. sure, we have a basic understanding, but we certainly don't know it all.
oh yeah, final note... fusion is "clean" in that the containment vessel only becomes slightly radiated. radioactive isotopes still form in the reactions, but replacing the containment vessel after many years of use is very different from having to dispose of 55 gallon drums of radioactive waste constantly. certainly an improvement, but nothing will ever be perfect.
-agent "learned e&m from the head of mit's plasma fusion center" oranje
-agent oranje.
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.
I don't want to sound like some trekkie fanboy, but that sounds like it could be used as a weapon
If you were using it as a weapon, you'd be better off just firing the neutron beam at your target and letting everyone inside die of radiation poisoning from activated materials, as opposed to trying to use fusion as the energy source.
In practice, generating a neutron beam is likely to remain difficult and energy-expensive. This means that even if we can make the energy cost low enough to make power generation practical, we're probably not going to get much more energy out than we put in. There would be no easy way to turn this into a weapon (energy output (as heat) from the lead block would max out as some low multiple of the power rating of your (big, expensive) neutron generator).
Causing their submission? I can hardly be called anti-american, considering I have an american girlfriend, but I have always been anti-uninformed. I seriously doubt you know anything about the events that led up to the dropping of two nuclear armaments on Japan, nor anything about the state of the japanese warmachine at the time.
It's fine to have opinions, so do I. It's fine to have different opinions, I'm known for it, but if you don't have any facts to back up claims with, I don't see how anyone could take a person like that serious.
Yes, Fusion has always been 10 years away (uhmmmm, ahhh, 20, 50, take your pick). But there are a variety of reasons the quest to achieve Fusion Energy should be accelerated.
Economic damage from 9-11-2001 has been put at anywhere from 20-50 billion directly. Total in economic slowdown, increased spending to fight terrorism, and a 300 billion projected surplus that goes to zero or lower in the coming year alone -- might as well call 9-11-2001 the Trillion Dollar Attack, for the effect it may have over the next 5 year period.
While I don't favor driving the Middle-East into poverty, it may very well be that had the US not had to factor in energy concerns over the last three decades in its responses to events in the middle-east region, Osama bin Laden would most likely already have been neutralized, the World Trade Center Towers still standing.
Given all this, we need to line up the best minds in the fusion energy field (some of whom may be reading this) and ask questions like:
How much money to achieve practical, deployable fusion energy in a five year time frame?
A ten year time frame?
A twenty year time frame?
Likelyhood of success at projected funding levels?
Many will say these are unfair questions, but I'm guessing just such questions were asked at the inception of the Manhattan Project, and this must now be viewed with very much the same urgency.
If the best consensus answer comes back 100 billion dollars in five years, I say "Fine -- Time to Write The Check"
Letter To Iran
It might sound pedantic, but the shift from the word tokamak to the word torus in the US fusion program is politically motivated. Somewhere along the like the standard tokamak concept got a very bad rap in the congressional funding circles...I don't know why exactly, but the US fusion program pointedly decided to call ST's spherical tori to distant the concept away from the aging tokamak design. So in the US, you won't hear ST's called spherical tokamaks very often. Spherical torus, spherical tokamak...its the same thing...a rose is a rose...but try explaining that to congress.
"you are being manipulated."
/. but you won't be successful.
I know you are trying vary hard to do just that here on
Not in my case, anyway.
A device based on an earlier Farnsworth design is currently being sold as a neutron source by Chrysler - it is correctly advertised as producing neutrons by controlled thermonuclear fusion.
Farnsworth's work has been duplicated by a number of amateurs and at least one professor at a university.
Most people in the fusion field have never heard of Farnsworth's fusion experiments, and are unfamiliar with the combination of electrostatic and inertial confinement he used.
Philo Farnsworth is best known for his invention of the entire system of television: cameras, picture tubes, transmitters, and receivers in 1927! Among his other inventions are the photo multiplier tube, and Infrared 'night vision' scopes used by the U.S. military during World War II. He is a member of the inventors Hall of Fame at the Patent office in Washington D.C.
Sadly, shortly after succeeding in creating a working fusion device, Dr. Farnsworth suffered a series of strokes which led to his death a few years later.
Ok, does anyone else besides me find it disturbing that they are building a $5 billion dollar device to fling dangerous chemicals around at god knows how fast, in the middle of the RING OF FIRE? Jesus, what if an earthquake hit that thing right when they fired and the plant exploded?
"Right now we have machines that about break even, ie. they generate enough energy to run themselves" Not true, they about break even "theoretically" - no single watt of energy released is used. What this people don't tell us is how to use this energy. If I remember correctly energy that is useful and not used for supporting the burning plasma is released in the form of high energy neutrons. How one can use the energy of these neutrons?! By placing fusion reactor in the core of the nuclear reactor and use it as additional fuel as well as for isotope production. The whole idea of fusion reactors was always fueled by DOD and cold war. I never heard arguments how to use this energy in any clean way. If you really want to use fusion energy - point your solar arrays to the Sun or use plasma winds instead.
>
Fusion is the power source of the future... and always will be.
Well there isn't a similar hot fusion device built by _humans_ you can power your remote control truck with.
And yet the hot fusion people still get a lot more money, and for the past 50 years they've been saying it's 20 years away. So now it's only 10+10 years away? Wow.
You're just raising the bar. Just because there isn't a cold fusion device for an RC truck doesn't mean there isn't a cold fusion device.
Whatever it is, there's enough evidence that this palladium "cold fusion" thingy produces some interesting phenomena. It may not be fusion, but I'd figure it's worth funding just to study the phenomena, especially compared to other experiments and research. Like that guy who keeps sticking simple electronics into his body and then claiming he's a cyborg.
Why don't you guys work on a fuel cell _system_ that produces energy from hydrocarbons? By system I mean the fuel cell itself could just run on 2H2 + O2 to 2H2O and wastefully throw away the C + O2 to CO2 route. I note a recent report of a carbon fuel cell, so with some luck and effort we could use everything.
Then we can run electric cars off gasoline etc. They'll run a lot more efficiently and produce a lot less pollution.
Don't let the typical bias against fossil fuels stop you. They make distributing and storing hydrogen a lot easier.
And when fossil fuels become expensive, you can easily switch to plant oils using the same distribution system. OK so plant oils aren't hydrocarbons but I figure by then the switch shouldn't be too much of a problem.
So any reason why the focus seems to be on pure hydrogen or at best methanol?
Is your brain very, very tiny; (each new line of input erases the last? Rely heavily on pre-programmed responses?)
Sheesh. It's like talking to the walls around here sometimes. . !
-Fantastic Lad
Yup, at the GE clock plant in Ashland, MA.
I used to live up the street. Bunch of old ladies died nasty deaths from cancer.
The school teams are still called the "Clockers".
My guess this is an AC troll, but on the off chance it isn't:
1) what about instability of the plasma configuaration? what IS the exact plasma configuration and how long do you maintain it ?
2) what is the cross section of p-boron ->boron 12 reaction (IIRC this should be oom e^-11 of d-t, i.e. 1000 to 10000 smaller than d-t)
3) links, articles, anything ???
Working for necessity's mother.
".. Pulsed laser experiments experiments involve using arrays of uber lasers to heat and compress solid hydrogen pellets.."
;> ) i.e. shell-radiation: from an initial Z-pinch X-ray source in a spherical chamber that focuses the X-ray on the fuel pellet.
actually you mean ICF (inertially confined fusion), and recent reserch is not on uber-lasers, but on ion beams, which pack a much stronger punch, but are harder to focus (in time and place)
another opportunity is using hohlraum (hope I spelled this right
this is akin to what happens in the usual H-bomb, save for the X-source.
Working for necessity's mother.