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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."
Is it just me, or is bubble fusion a really cool concept?
This is the kind of thing real progress comes from! Not the big nasty brute force machines we've been trying to coax a usable fusion reactor out of for decades, but a clever application of the laws of physics to get tiny pockets of fusion at much more sane average temperatures and pressures. Temperatures we can work with without having to contain them in giant magnetic toruses, temperatures we don't need petawatt lasers to generate for a fraction of a second.
I can see this development panning out, but even if it doesn't I'm still in awe of it's elegance.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
It's actually the better link. Not sure why the submitter chose to relegate it to second-class status.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I was curious to see everyone's response to this (well, everyone that has a better idea of the implications of this working, that is) and i'm surprised there aren't more posts!
Is this a sign that we've stopped caring about "cold fusion"? Is the fact that this field has had a less-than-credible past hurt this discovery? Is this a discovery? Have movies like Chain Reaction spoiled us into thinking that this is a pipe dream?
Somebody help me out.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Personally I think there's some interesting phenomenom in at least some of that "cold fusion" stuff (see the Wired article on it). Whether or not it is cold fusion, there's evidence that there's something interesting enough that's worth at least a few millions to be pumped in.
The hot fusion folk have spent billions so what's a fraction of that to investigate something new and interesting?
Sure Pons and Fleischman screwed up - but it seems like the scientific community was not very objective about it - rather emotional in fact.
I don't know if it would work any better, but good luck getting the poloticians that run the major space programs to launch your inconvineiently large laboatory complex into orbit so you can try it out.
Anyway, if it could work in microgravity, I'd have to wonder what it would matter? It certainly could power a large space station if we ever build one, but what about power on the ground? About the only way to get the power back down to earth would be something like microwave transmission, and I'm assuming that at least some of the aforementioned politicians have played SimCity, and won't let you run anything involving microwave power transmission or Godzilla in a populated area.
Who says it has to scale up that much?
What if the scale up is so you can have something the size of a mini fridge in your cellar that creates energy for just your house?
Plus the reactors created thus far have been to study the principles, not attempt to harness them.
Any production reactor is going to be designed to maximize it's efficency, not maximize the viewability of the reaction.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Here's an extremely lazy way to estimate it. Assuming the bubble collapse time is 100 ns (article only says "Within nanoseconds"), the top of the bubble will fall an extra 5x10^-8 microns during collapse, using the .5*g*t^2 formula. Even if I'm off by many orders of magnitude (and I'm guessing I overestimated), this is quite insignificant compared to the .06 micron size of the bubble at its smallest.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
First, I am not a physicist, but I suspect that "break-even" is defined as the TOTAL power output of the system!
All the energy put in comes out again (as heat, light, sound, etc), plus some additional energy released by the fusion. Since the total energy output must be greater than the input, but they haven't "broken even", they must be referring to the usable energy.
Human/Ranger/Zangband
In this case there is a viable mechanism since the bubbles potentially can generate the high instantaneous pressure and energy that is known to be necessary.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."