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Bubble Fusion Results Replicated by 4 Institutions
Trackster writes ""TROY, N.Y. - Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement." Here's another link in case EVWorld gets burned."
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We hear, every so often, that "nuclear fusion has occurred", and nothing ever comes of it. It either can't be replicated or is impractical for power generation.
Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?
The trouble with fusion reactor experiments (of the tokamak kind) is that they are tremendously expensive and lengthy to build. After the previous generation of European experiments (JET) there supposed to be something like a seven-year gap before ITER would become available. IIRC the US pulled funding on their independent fusion programme, but eventually decided to join ITER too; its pretty much the only tokamak game in town.
However, due to its cost, ITER has always been mired in politics (even the site hasn't been chosen yet - 5 years after the project was supposed to have started) and this leads to more delays and increased costs.
Plasma theorists also have to find something else to do (and alternate funding) between each round of testing; seven years is a long time and people leave the subject, retire, etc, never too return. You'd be a very brave man to pin your career hopes on ITER being built on time. This then causes manpower difficulties for the project when it finally gets into gear, which then suffers more delays and overruns, etc, as postdoc researchers are trained up.
In short; expect progress when ITER is build, but don't hold your breath.
200 Hz pulses of neutrons and tuned ultrasound create cavities and grow bubbles in deuterated acetone which grow from 60 nanometers to 6 millimeters. At this point, they implode within nanoseconds, reaching estimated temperatures of 10^7 Celcius/Kelvin and 10^9 atmospheres (sea level) and releasing energy: tritium (hence fusion), light photons (sonoluminescence), gamma rays, and more neutrons. "Because the bubbles grow to such a relatively large size before they implode, their contraction causes extreme temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the interiors of stars." "In future versions of the experiment, the tritium produced might then be used as a fuel to drive energy-producing reactions in which it fuses with deuterium."
Also, fusion is not the wonderous clean energy source it's made out to be, because any type of fusion that's realistically possible outside of a star also produces neutrons, which activate the reactor materials leading to significant amounts of radioactive waste. That said, the waste problem is not so severe as with fission plants because generally isotopes with short halflifes are produced.
For more information about fusion in general and amateur efforts in particular - I'm building a tabletop reactor - check out http://www.fusor.net/
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