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Sandia Labs Takes First Steps Toward Fusion
robosmall writes "Sandia Labs has successfully demostrated the emission of neutrons (a side effect of thermonuclear fusion) from a BB-sized capsule of deuterium using using their venerable Z-Machine (eye-candy!). With this achievement they enter the race to create sustained fusion reactions."
Fusion seems to be the ultimate goal for energy. Offering a
clean and abundant power supply that could potentially alter our
entire power production system. One of the problems with the
transition to a hydrogen based economy has been that energy is
required to extract the hydrogen from known reserves (petroleum,
water, etc). The most common solution offered seems to be solar
powered systems, however fusion could offer a great alternative
which in the long run may prove more viable and more extensively
useable than solar, hydro-electric, or wind power individually,
maybe even collectively.
It's particularly encouraging to see the scientists questioned
their results and tested for extraneous sources before
publishing preliminary findings.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
...however fusion could offer a great alternative which in the long run may prove more viable and more extensively useable than solar, hydro-electric, or wind power individually, maybe even collectively.
Yeah, but can I hook one up to a DeLorean and do time travel?
The opposite of progress is congress
So can I play Zork on this thing or what?
-_-_-
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
What kind of energy can we pull out of this sucker? Acceptable benchmarks are: how fast you can microwave a basket of hamsters, how many AMD machines you can power per unit of fuel, and how long can Marge Simpson blow dry her hair.
"Derp de derp."
Talk about a wild desktop background!!!
My computer can do that too. If you're trying to impress me, you've failed.
Hey, I want one of those zmachines in my office to play with !!
How long until the lights go out and demons from another dimension are sucked into the building?
Imagine a beowulf cl...
"Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." - Roald Dahl
Coolest... picture.... ever....
$0.02 (CDN)
Z produces fusion neutrons, Sandia scientists confirm
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- Throwing its hat into the ring of machines that offer the possibility of achieving controlled nuclear fusion, Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine has created a hot dense plasma that produces thermonuclear neutrons, Sandia researchers announced today at a news conference at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia.The neutrons emanate from fusion reactions within a BB-sized deuterium capsule placed within the target of the huge machine. Compressing hot dense plasmas that produce neutrons is an important step toward realizing ignition, the level at which the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining.
The amount of energy a larger successor to Z could bring to bear offers the still-later possibility of high-yield fusion -- the state in which much more energy is released than is needed to provoke the reaction initially to occur. The excess energy could be used for applications such as the generation of electricity, said Tom Mehlhorn, a project leader on the machine.
Z causes reactions to occur neither by confining low density plasmas in dimensionally huge magnetic fields, as do tokomaks, nor by focusing intense laser beams on or around a target, as in laser fusion, but simply through the application of huge pulses of electricity applied with very sophisticated timing. The pulse creates an intense magnetic field that crushes tungsten wires into a foam cylinder to produce X-rays. The X-ray energy, striking the surface of the target capsule embedded in the cylinder, produces a shock wave that compresses the deuterium within the capsule, fusing enough deuterium to produce neutrons."Pulsed power electrical systems have always been energy-rich but power-poor," said Ray Leeper, a Sandia manager. "That is, we can deliver a lot of energy, but it wasn't clear we could concentrate it on a small enough area to create fusion. Now it seems clear we can do that."
A partial confirmation of the result came about when theoretical predictions and lab outcomes were determined to be of the same order of magnitude. Predictions and measurements of the neutron yield were both of the order of 10 billion neutrons. The predicted neutron yield depends on the ion density temperature and volume. Those quantities were independently confirmed by X-ray spectroscopy measurements.Neutron pulses were observed as early as last summer but researchers were wary that the output was produced by interactions between the target and ions generated by Z's processes, rather than within the capsule itself. Ion-generated neutrons were not the point of the experiment, since they would not scale up into a high-yield event in any later, more powerful version of Z.
But a series of experiments completed in late March demonstrated that the production was within the capsule itself. To show this, researchers inserted xenon gas within the capsule. The gas prevented the capsule from getting hot during compression. Thus, the neutron yield dropped dramatically, as predicted.The action takes place within a container the size of a pencil eraser, called a hohlraum, at the center of the Z machine, itself a circular device about 120 feet in diameter.
Sandia researchers Jim Bailey and Gordon Chandler led the experimental team and Steve Slutz performed theortical calculations. Sandian Carlos Ruiz and Gary Cooper of the University of New Mexico performed the neutron measurements.This story reminds me of a cartoon I saw once. I've lost the source of it, and can't find an on-line version. I'll try to do it justice in prose:
2 scientists are standing in front of a bizarre looking aparatus, with but a single recognizable object within it. The caption read:
"We've achieved Cold Fusion in a sock. Do we tell anyone?"
Soko
P.S. Thank you robosmall - best dual-screen wallpaper evar. Period. Full stop.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Fusion research isn't just for the big guys - you can build a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor at home! Seriously, these things are capable of fusing hydrogen when built properly. I think they're only like 1% efficient at generating power, but it looks like there's still some room for experimentation. You could probably put one together for a few hundred bucks if you're good at scavenging. The biggest danger really isn't from neutron emission, it's from working with vacuum equipment. I wouldn't want to be near a glass bell jar when it implodes. Still, it'd be worth it just to have a cool, glowing fusion reactor in the garage.
Not even close. Matter / anti-matter based reactors would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
Yay! Now I can throw out my Mr. Fusion home reactor!
-ted
I'm sorry....
Which way in that picture, is up?
Looks like one of those painings with all those "Up" directions. Freaky.
I got nothin'.
Hmmm. I wonder how long it will be then until the guys at powerlabs give this one a shot.
Er... probably awhile.
Meanwhilst, they have some pretty cool videos.
ok, for those of us that like pretty pictures but then try to figure them out, could someone please explain for us WTF that Z-machine thing is? All I can tell is that it looks like some massive electrical arcs that are somehow confined to a single plain. Anyone?
"Clean fusion" is a myth. Even if we leave aside the radioactivity of deuterium and tritium, fusion produces neutrons. These neutrons bombard everything in the vicinity. If fusion goes big-time, that means that just as with fission reactors, very large quatitites of radioactive waste will be generated. Remember, most fission-plant waste is not fuel, but other substances that are exposed to the neutrons. Of course, fusion is better on other fronts, but not all that much cleaner.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I haven't been collecting all this garbage for nothing.
I have been hearing this fusion is just around the corner crap for at least the last 20 years. Even my own school (University of Rochester) had a massive laser lab for doing fusion research. I had more than a passing interest in this since I was a Navy Nuclear Operator.
Wake me when they get it working.
Can you picture a world where it will finally be cheaper to do something in-country than ship it over-seas? How about a world where the energy barrons have no dominion over the developed world.
I finally feel, for the first time in my 28 years, that humanity is actually doing something DIFFERENT and NEW, as opposed to slapping a rev 27 on an old idea.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sadly, the first thing that went through my mind when I saw the headline was "Dragonball Z?" thinking of the fusion martial arts technique -- then I see the machine they were using was called the "Z-machine" and I start wondering if there are some anime geeks at Sandia.
The first is when large-scale fusion reactors become viable. This will largely replace fission and fossil fuel power plants. The main effect will be to produce power for the transmission grid safer and cleaner.
Phase two is the real kicker though. This is when a fusion reactor is designed that is relatively small in size. Then the real effects of the fusion revolution will become apparent. Hopefully it will follow the path of electronics in that smaller and smaller versions will be designed. i.e. First airfares will go way down when fuel is replaced by an onboard fusion reactor. Then fusion powered cars will eliminate the need for refueling (except one in a lifetime). Eventually handheld electronics could be fusion powered. Once this happens power consumption is basically a moot point. Who knows what will be developed to make use of this? Only the future can tell...
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
I remember reading an article a long time ago (a few years back) when sandia was doing fusion research with this same machine, and they mentioned an X machine which was supposed to be even bigger and badder. the Z machine broke several records (heat produced and energy produced), and so the X machine should be even cooler. oh, in fact, they mention the X-1 here
http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm
it's gonna be pretty ridiculous
also, more pertinent info about the Z machine is at that article also. really cool
I think that should fusion become viable for providing energy to the masses, then fuel cells could also be practical soon thereafter.
Due to the laws of the conservation of energy, one can electrolyze (is that the proper word?) as much water as they need to get the hydrogen for fuel cells, but you still have to use energy to do it. That energy would have to be provided by some other means, such as coal and natural gas, et. al, solar, wind, or nuclear.
Solar and wind are great ideas and there are many inroads being made. Nuclear works now, but it's dirty and no new plants have been built for ~25 years. We're trying to move away from fossil fuels, so boo on them.
Fusion, while having many prominent failures, would be a wonderful adjunct to solar and wind. Powering the hydrolysis plants to make cleaner fuels for the masses would kick ass!
i think pink floyd invented the z-machine 20 years ago.
I mirrored this article, including the images, on my website (a quick one hosted with Yale.edu bandwidth) in case the main link goes down: Here is the Mirror
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'm talkin bout flyin' cars man! Where we're going, we don't need roads!
It's full of stars!
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Watch out for the head crabs coming from the far side of the room.
This picture (zmachine.jpg) instantly became my new desktop background!
"It's a BB-sized capsule of silicon that not only emits neutrons"
So not only do I have to have to think about liquid-cooled case designs, I have to start building my cases out of lead? Sheesh! With all that hassle, it's almost worth going back to Intel.
Almost.
From the outside it looks to be a competition, and mutually exclusive at that. What are the possibilities of hybridizing these methods? Could all 5 approaches come together and cooperate towards solving this puzzle? I can even suggest a few new Fusion approaches of my own.
Fusion is generally considered clean compared to Fission, at least in direct by-products (your containment vessel is another matter due to high-energy neutron bombardment). Could we abandon the completely clean approach to get across the finish line, and then improve towards pure forms of Fusion? By this I mean Fusion-Fission hybrids similar to an H-Bomb, which uses the neutron burst (and heat and compression) from a fission reaction to trigger a fusion reaction. Would seeding our deuterium-tritium pellets with cores of plutonium, or other more unstable isotopes, yield better conversion ratios? Can micro critical masses be achieved by compression with fissionable products? How about micro fission generators, that rely on micro fission explosions. Then like our theoretically perfect fusion reactors, it would be impossible to go critical, because you would never have the fuel density to achieve run away fission (take away the compressive mechanism, no fission).
Anyway I'm just a lay person, but I figure there should be a few good Physicists in the forum, that could answer my core question about whether there a hybrid approaches being tired. I would be especially intrigued to learn if muon catalyzation has been tried with any of the other 4 approaches. For those unfamiliar with muon catalyzation, the essential idea is that an electron can be displaced by a muon for short periods of time, with a subsequent huge reduction in the size of the electron/muon orbital cloud, allowing atoms to come much closer together before mutual repulsion forces them apart. Thus a much lower thermal energy is needed for fusion -- hope I got that right :-)
Letter To Iran
still, my favorite pun on fusion is in a starcraft cinematic, where a bunch of terrans go to destroy an infested science vessel. One of the marines says while opening a cooler with a fusion bomb and beers in it, "Thank god for cold fusion!"
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
IIRC, President Bush mentioned in his recent State of the Union address funding research into alternative energy sources in general and fusion in particular. Now that Sandia has made some new headway, will we start seeing more money flowing into the DoE and Sandia?
I personally can't wait until the Middle East once again becomes a red herring...
Right Click> Use image as> Desktop background
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Can't say anything about the validity of the reactor, but I can say it makes a very cool desktop background!
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I think the picture was worth a front page story on slashdot!
Also, interesting to see that the US government is also working on this independently from the other two international organizations.
But where is my dilithium crystal warp core reactor?
That little BB that is a piece of crap. Literally. ;-)
Karma: NaN
What I wanna know is, where do I get a plasma ball that big? It would look cool in my living room...
-- sigs cause cancer.
That picture is definately going on my desktop background..
Actually, it's already there! SOOO COOL!!
Oooooooooo.....
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
From http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/nuc/reactions.h
Good luck getting your hands on tritium. Deuterium can be bought, or produced yourself with patience. Other reactions have very high threshold energies.
Note that this energy still isn't enough to penetrate the Coulomb barrier - it's the best tradeoff point between getting the particles close together and keeping them nearby long enough for there to be a reasonable chance of quantum tunnelling taking you through the barrier. So, most collisions will still just cause scattering.
Also note that any system involving a lot of scattering becomes Maxwellian (has a Maxwell-style temperature distribution). The fusor functions best in non-Maxwellian regimes. When the plasma thermalizes, it gets much colder due to the presence of cold ions (or cold, neutral molecules) from the source gas.
Now that is practical! NOT...
All that electricity being applied in a shockwave to affect a cylinder the size of an eraser head?!?!
Mad Scientists all of them! Well, here's to not seeing fusion in my lifetime as a viable energy solution.
Good luck guys,
According to SimCity, we'll have Fusion Power by 2050, they had better step up the pace a bit if they want to accomplish that feat!
...using their venerable Z-Machine...
So it can perform nuclear fusion...but can it play text adventures?
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
The US government is in negotiations to get back involved with ITER. ITER is the big international magnetic confinement fusion experiment. The US government pulled out in the mid-nineties after Newt Gingrich's congress greatly reduced DOE's research budget.
If you want "cheap abundant power", biological and catalytic processes for producing hydrogen from solar energy are much more relevant: they promise to be safe, simple, and not require central control or huge up-front investments. And, in fact, the simplest way of creating cheap, abundant power without increasing greenhouse gas emissions is to grow plants for fuel.
An even better way of "creating" lots of energy is not to use it in the first place: in particular, here in the US, we are unnecessarily wasteful in our use of energy.
It costs about as much to decomission a nuclear power plant as to build it. All that material is radioactive. You don't just walk away from it, and you don't just walk in with hammers and start knocking it down. And then you have to store it somewhere ....
Infuriate left and right
Why would we content with helium as output? Ok, as a first step, lets get there first, but would it be relatively easy to produce heavier elements than helium? Elements which are rare and expensive to mine?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Ok, what would the impact of releasing helium into the atmosphere be? Yes, helium is an inert gas, but over a millinium, could helium account for say, 5% of the atmosphere? Could oxygen levels, as a percentage of air, fall? Can helium contribute to the green house effect, or counter it? What color will the sky become? Are tenors an endangered species? :)
Anybody has calculations on how much helium is expected to be produced worldwide when fusion becomes commercial?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
If you don't pay a 5 digit tax bill, you're not trying hard enough.
Seriously, there should be a way to pay extra taxes, and like, to encourage it, they could give you a tax credit for it.
God, I'm full of good ideas.
> flip the switch
Which switch do you mean? The red switch, the green switch, or the aluminum knife switch attached to the scary-looking fusion apparatus?
> the aluminum switch
All of the electricity on campus goes out.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I can't believe there aren't a ton of replies making references to the Great Underground Empire. Bah, the kids these days. They gotta have all the glitzy mind-rotting graphics in their games. Hmph.
[
Note that several varieties of digital watch (e.g. Timex IndiGlo) contain tritium.
n ous_dials.htm
Not as far as I can tell - they use electroluminescent chemicals.
Radioactively-driven phosphor watches went out of vogue about the time Radium did.
For a good source of information about this, check http://www.watchprince.com/Rolexreport/rolex_lumi
I looked for a good five minutes at the picture of the Z Machine, and I couldn't locate the place where you insert the banana peels and other garbage for fuel.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
'Cept it doesn't emit neutrons, you tool.
In that case, one of us looks very foolish.
As long as we abdicate control of our own govt to corporate forces, why should it be otherwise?
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
But where are the fricking sharks with the fricking laser beams ?
They got the H-bomb to work using a staged approach. Stanislaw Ulam had the original idea for a staged advice, but the final Ulam-Teller device used x-rays rather than the shock blast from the A-bomb, reflected or reemitted from a U-238 jacket, to energize, of all things, Styrofoam as an imploder. That didn't set off the fusion reaction either, but it imploded a plutonium "spark plug" that gave off enough neutrons to set off the deuterium, which in turn produced most of its energy in neutrons that acted on the U-238 jacket that gave most of the yield of the device.
I have now idea (or care to have) whether modern, compact warheads use the same principle as Ivy Mike. But I bet that the National Labs have tons of experience with variants of these Rube Goldbergesque "staged" devices. Now the Z-machine is a staged device -- instead of using x-rays, it uses buckets of electric current to implode this little wire cage surrounding a pellet. You don't apply energy directly to the deuterium but to something else which in turn implodes the deuterium.
Besides its Bomb heritage, the method has more ominuous applications. Long before this device is useful as an electric power generator, it will be useful for generating bursts of neutrons. To do what? To simulate mini H-bomb blasts of course. I believe the U.S. has signed or pledged or whatever to suspend all nuclear tests. While some believe that the people in the Bomb business are atomic-pyros who can't get enough of testing, suspending nuclear tests means that over time we are giving up are nuclear military arsenal because bombs get old and without testing you can't be sure if they are going to work as promised. There are two answers to that. One is computer simulation with clustered computers and all the Beowolf-cluster jokes on Slashdot. The other is to use the Z-machine to make little bursts of neutrons to do sub-scale H-bomb tests.
I highly recommend looking at the image. It looks like something out of Star Trek, or any other sci-fi show. Glowing blue things and all.
I really doubt that they could make fusion generated power as expensive as oil for one obvious reason: competition. There is very little competition in the oil supply market because the nations that are blessed with huge oil reserves would have it no other way. There is no way that a similiar fusion cartel could be created because anyone can make their own reactor once the technology is mature enough.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
That zmachine looks COMPLETELY like the lab at the beginning of Halflife.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
In theory, one can fuse non-radioactive Helium-3 and get basically non-radioactive end-products, plus truckloads of energy. The problems are:
- Fusion technology isn't ready (yet)
- There's not much Helium-3 on Earth
There have been "blue-sky" plans (pardon the expression) for years and years about mining the moon for its Helium-3, once fusion technology is ready for it (ie, limited only by lack of fuel).Then again, "the only difference between theory and pactice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice"!
Part of the Second American Revolution!
We already know, more or less, how to get kinetic fusion of (e.g.) protons with boron nuclei, which produce nice charged particles that are easy to extract the energy from, with high efficiency and without the bloody neutrons. (Google for "Farnsworth Hirsch Bussard" to find a nice article on the design.) Simple, clean, small. A little too practical, though, I suppose.
It's not as simple as that. The temperatures and pressures needed to fuse helium into heavier elements is several magnitudes above what is needed to fuse hydrogen into helium. The energy expenditures needed would far outweigh the current cost of obtaining these elements.
A good way to research the topic of fusion is to look up information on the formation and life cycle of stars, nature's fusion reactors. You'll find that as very massive stars age, they burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly. Once that's all used up, gravity threatens to collapse them, until temperature and pressure in the core raises to the point that fusion into heavier elements can happen.
But then you'll see that the first steps of the heavier fusion processes create very common elements: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. That's precisely why these elements are so abundant. By the time you get to elements even remotely rare, you're talking pressure and temps on astronomical scales. Finally, in the very massive stars, fusion can't go any further than iron, because after iron, fusion reactions no longer yield energy, but absorb energy. So after iron, it becomes an even more uphill battle.
Most likely if we do ever manage to harness fusion, it will stop at helium, as that will serve our needs well.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
As long as the helium released is made of stable isotopes, it will have little to no effect. The Earth has insufficient gravity to retain either hydrogen or helium in significant quantities. The helium will basically waft away into space. If helium could be retained in the atmosphere Earth would be a gas giant.
OK, here's the thing. You get *billions* of times more energy per kilogram of fuel in fusion power than you do with chemical reactions, so, in terms of "burned" fuel, you'll end up with billionths of the quantity. In other words, over a millennium we might end up with a couple of hundred tonnes of helium. Big deal.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I will explain a bit more slowly:
it doesn't matter all that much if we do develop fusion power b/c it will be completely under the control of CorpGovMedia.
Why should they offer fusion power cheaper than its primary competitor, oil? If oil costs N cents for 100 KWatts, then that is how much fusion power, even if it only costs N/100 cents to provide 100 KWatts.
THis is because we have no control over CorpGovMedia....
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
I really doubt that they could make fusion generated power as expensive as oil for one obvious reason: competition. There is very little competition in the oil supply market because the nations that are blessed with huge oil reserves would have it no other way. There is no way that a similiar fusion cartel could be created because anyone can make their own reactor once the technology is mature enough.
WTF are you talking about? If CorpGovMedia develops fusion power, it may very well be very cheap to generate. Fine...
But CorpGovMedia has lots of guns and stuff, and so if they want to sell it to Americans at the same price as oil, who will stop them? American citizens? Puh-leeze!
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
I don't believe this picture for one minute. I am certain John Carmack and his cronies made this in the Doom III engine, I can see he didn't have the anti-aliasing turned on though...shame on him.
-Xanadu
And you believe a guy whose family is heavily invested in the oil industry? Oooh, oooh, because he SAID so! I guess this depends on what the definitions of 'alternative' and 'fusion' are.
Get a grip, people. We can power our entire planet with 'alternative' technology we've had for decades. Anyone who has done even an afternoon's worth of research already knows this.
*sigh* I wish I still had mod points, that is exactly what I was thinking...
*wow*
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Well, I'm a plasma-physics grad-student. Good or bad, I'll try to answer, just remember, like every physicist, I may be totally wrong
The Z-pinch+hohlraum (==shell radiation) method is a hybrid method:
use magnetic confinement (Z-pinch) to create an X-ray source for a symetric X-ray wave (resonated from a spherical chamber) which will create inertical confinement.
using any of the other ICF methods (laser, ion-beam) will just create initial asymetries which will cause instabilities: defying the original purpose of the symetric hohlraum
Using muons (which was quite a cool idea, IMHO) seems dubious for several reasons:
1) Muons are energetically expensive, and they (half-) live for just 2.2 microsecond. you need to time them just right.
2) you need to seed just the middle of the pellet, because most of the pellet mass is in the exploding outer shell. I see no clear way to do that.
3) (and this is one of the major reasons muon catalyzed fusion was abandoned in the eighties) muons tend to stick to the energetic helium "ash" neucleus, and so are lost. It will probably take many collisions for them to "unstick" from the helium, and by that time they may decay.
-- HTH
Working for necessity's mother.
Once again, the boondoggle continues to roll on, sucking up billions of dollars of U.S. tax dollars chasing the promised "clean" fusion energy that would make everything cheap and simple. Let me point some things out to you guys:
And why are we persuing this hopeless mirage like Ponce de Leon, starving in a land of plenty? I, personally, have no idea. Hey, dipshits. Look up. You see that big bright ball of light? It's called the Sun and it's a functioning, efficient fusion generator just pouring it's useful energy (in the form of visible and near visible light) out at us. And why is the energy so useful? Because the dirty fusion by-products have been filtered into heat and light by ~500k km of Sun stuff situated between us and the fusion. (And don't give me that shit about solar panels costing more energy to make than they produce. You don't need to convert it directly into electricty, do you?). If solar energy is so damn inefficient, how do you think our entire planet got along until now? Even oil is solar energy filtered through a couple generations of conversion.
It seems to me that the main problem holding solar energy back is the lack of efficient, large scale, energy storage facilities. Hey, give me a billion and I'll make a couple for you and we can get off of this fusion chase, and start generating useful energy. From the sun. Like the rest of the Earth.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Or are you proposing that some CorpGovMedia with guns is going to stop anyone else from building their own reactor. If that's the case then why don't you give a real example of who would and could do that, instead of some fictitious world dominating entity.
For the record, no I don't trust most governments or big corporations. However your argument sounds more like paranoid ranting then a reasonable concern.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
That zmachine looks COMPLETELY like the lab at the beginning of Halflife
...
Actually, I wouldn't be at all surprized if some graphical maker of HL actually saw this, or some similar picture sometime (such pictures have been around for quite a while.)
Science-fiction and science usually interact heavily
Working for necessity's mother.
I recall one paper mentioning that a asteroid contains more rare metals than anything that has been mined off the face of the earth in the history of mankind.
Please enlighten someone who is not from the USA.
Take a look at the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) site. http://www.jet.efda.org/ The image gallery is very cool especilly pics like this http://www.jet.efda.org/images/gallery/images/jp20 01-368.jpg
And then laptops get fusion reactors...
:)
;)
And then lots of people using Dell laptops get impotent...
And then Dockers releases pants with "fusion shielded" pockets...
And then Jay Leno jokes about it
Amazing how technology affects everyone
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Produces much more fusion neutros for much less money. It is the only fusion technology I know of that has seen deployment outside research labs.
have a look here to build your own.
[imagine a beowulf cluster of these]
--
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Tritium is harmless till it gets into the water supply and you drink it. Neutrons are harmless until you get in the way of them. Our ability to organise effective containment so far has been less than exciting. Tritiated water is slowly leaching towards the Colorado river in large amounts, and the Irish Sea has amazing amounts of the stuff from the British nuclear program (the solution to it reaching British beaches? Make the pipe longer so more of it reaches Ireland.) Both governments have sites with tanks that contain mixtures so radioactive that they have to be constantly cooled with circulating water - so what happens when the pipes corrode and leak? Huge taxpayer costs, that's what.
The coal power industry had to spend a lot on research to deal with the problem of ash disposal, and a lot of it now finds its way into cement. There's not much chance of that for radioactive waste. On the other hand, wind power and solar power produce little pollution, can be dismantled at end of life and removed without trace, are relatively terrorist-proof (a wind farm needs a lot of artillery and bombs to destroy completely) and can be built in marginal areas (exposed seacoasts and littoral, desert). Sadly, they seem to attract practical engineers rather than mad scientists, and it's mad scientists that seem to get government funding.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
ah! finally we get to see what it was that infocom's Z-Machine was emulating. pretty impressive i'd say. all that to play Zork on...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
The neutrons emit you!
The Z pinches YOU!!
and run my engine on banana peels and tin cans?
No! He's saying that whichever CorpGovMedia controls this technology is not going to release it for anywhere near a justifyable price. Just look at the cost AIDS drugs. Nuff Said.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
How will France get their paws on this technology? Surely you don't think the US and Israel will give this technology to France; who the US and Israel "intelligence" claim have given Iraq Nuclear technology.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
With this fusion they enter the race to create sustained achievement reactions
Yeah, maybe you've heard of licensing? You don't think the gov is going to allow just anyone to own a reactor?
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
I was shocked at the article, because of what was left out. Normally in an article about a fusion breakthrough, there is a standard sentence about "This technology may lead to practial use in about 20 years."
I know, because I have been reading such statements for 20 years now.
Never the less, I hope to live long enough to see it come true......
Hang on a minute. I'm old enough that I know I've seen that picture before. I'd be hard pressed to say what issue, but I know for a fact that that picture ran in National Geographic many years ago. What the heck?? I think someone is pulling the wool over someone else's eyes. What day did that site go up? Would it have been April 1st??
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
wreak havoc
not wreck havok.