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First Plasma on the Levitated Dipole Experiment
deglr6328 writes "In light of recent, somewhat disappointing news in the world of nuclear fusion research, it is worth noting that there are still reasons to keep up hope that some breakthroughs are yet to be made. At 12:53 pm on the 13th. of this month the Levitated Dipole Experiment achieved its first plasma. The Levitated Dipole Experiment(LDX), built at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a joint project of Columbia University and MIT, is a magnetic confinement fusion research device, that unlike all previous stellarator, reverse-field pinch and tokamak like experiments, uses a superconducting levitated torus to confine its plasma. The LDX's achievement of first plasma is, in a way, about 17 years in the making even though it has only been in construction since 1999. The concept for LDX was first considered by Akira Hasegawa as he was studying the data coming in from the Voyager missions which flew through the (dipole) magnetospheres of the outer planets. He noticed that unlike laboratory confined fusion plasmas which tended to be unstable, difficult to control, and which lost energy quickly, the plasma of a magnetosphere is intrinsically more quiescent, stable and actually reacts favorably (increases its density/temperature) to outside perturbations such as ie. bombardment by a solar storm. A highly informative and interesting video of operations on the day of first shot can be found here. Congratulations to the scientists and engineers who have worked very hard on getting the project to this point and here's looking forward to the possibility that LDX will reveal fundamentally new physics in the arduous quest for clean fusion energy."
Researchers were stunned on Saturday as they discovered that the key component of the new fusion bottle has gone missing. A late-night janitor reported hearing someone say "Mmmmmmm...levitating superconductive plasma donut" shortly before the crucial torus disappeared.
Now we can all keenly anticipate the first episode of Enterprise to mention the almighty superconducting levitated torus that has powered Federation impulse drives all long.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work. Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
is it just me, or does anyone else get a tad nervous when they see 'nuclear fusion' and 'akira' in the same context of an article discussing real world scientific research?
No matter how well it will work. No matter how safe they can make it. No matter how efficient it will be. No matter how clean the process is.
Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse.
Just as they do with nuclear power. Such a horror. Clean energy replacing coal/oil plants spewing hundreds of metric tons of fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere each and every year? Surely it must be evil.
it's nothing like the cool sun like plasma ball they showed in the spiderman 2. No indestructable antimagnetic hands with AI attached to some guy's back and head. I just watched the video and all they showed was some blue light through a looking glass in some ridiculous cylinder. They should take some pointers from the Hollywood producers and start making plasma balls in open space and have people with gigantic robot arms controlling it. Then maybe the will get more funding.
You can't handle the truth.
Yum, video! They should have asked the /. crowd for help. If we can just get a few more people, their molten server would become plasma!
Why wouldn't you live through it, the better question is. What would happen if all the atoms in my entire body phasesd out of existance at the same time? Oh course they would all eventually phase back in, and retain they're states, so, no one would be any wiser....
WOOO I'M THE INVISIBLE MAN (on certain time scales)
Too afraid to RTFA with a summary that long. Brain hurts, must go lie down now.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
We have no reason to believe otherwise.
The only clear way to do this is via Focus Fusion, which means one is working with the natural instabilities of Plasma rather than attempting to straightjacket them with massive Magnetic Fields. Nothing more really needs to be said about Focus Fusion from me so I'll just paste what they're saying here:
Focus fusion is the only known method that can achieve hydrogen-boron fusion. It also has other advantages over tokamak based deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. Focus fusion reactors will be much less expensive for the same amount of power. Tokamak reactors generate electricity by boiling water for a steam powered generator (high energy neutrons provide the heat.) This is the same method that coal power plants use. The only difference is the heat source. In a coal power plant the steam generator is the most expensive part of the plant so replacing the heat source will not result in a lot of savings. Also, this method of generating electricity is limited by the fundamental efficiency limits of heat engines. Focus fusion reactors do not require a heat engine. They generate electricity directly. After all, electricity is just moving charged particles. The particle decelerators in a focus fusion reactor merely transfer the electricity of charged particle beams into a wire. This process does not face the efficiency limits of heat engines.
A focus fusion reactor should be able to economically generate power in quantities as small as 20MW from a power plant the size of a two car garage. This means they will be useful for powering individual villages in the third world where regional electricity grids are not as well developed. And in developed nations focus fusion power can be generated near where it will be used to reduce transmission losses and can be owned by the communities it serves to reduce dependence on speculative energy markets.
If there are any financiers out there who have the backbone to do what is right in this world and do what is right for mankind, I urge you to fund this research to banish forever the specter of Fossil Fuel shortages and associated ecological damage and begin a new era in Human History.
If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.
No we wouldn't. Nobody is going to throw money at trying to do in practice something which doesn't work in theory. There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
Paper and pencils don't cost much. Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible, and you can bet they'll get money.
The great physicist Richard Feynman once said that he didn't see any theoretical reason why cold fusion would not work.
Do you have a source for that? Besides which, that isn't relevant. There is a huge difference between showing something is possible and showing that it is not impossible.
Feynman himself also made a lot of good statements about pseudoscience. Perhaps you should read them? Unlike you, I provide a reference.
Tritium is a byproduct of the process. The neutron flux from the reactor would need to be blocked by a moderator like lithium. This produces tritium.
I must admire your long term view though. I had never considered the possibility of running out of hydrogen in the solar system.
For those unfortunate slashdot readers of lesser ISP fortitude, slashdot is proud to offer the following descriptive video summery.
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Brought to you by The Undergraduate Research Assistants Pool - a statistically significant proportion of particle physicists agree, only Undergraduate Research Assistants can stand up to the kind of abuse a particle physicist demands.
[TITLE SEQUENCE]
[lively tour of facility]
[8 minutes of reality-show-finally like filler including:
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with female research assistant]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant in blue hard hat]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with Physicist]
[clip montage of scientific equipment]
[uncomfortable in-your-face interview with research assistant in blue hard hat]
]
[nasa tv style clip of scientists congratulating each other over inscrutable data on distant CRT's during and after triumphant success]
[replay of triumphant success, this time with wholly satisfying video of glowing blue science goodness]
[obligatory fade out to historical prospective text that scrolls by too quickly]
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming
"Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse."
The bile spewed by supposedly intelligent people when it comes to atomic energy is simply staggering. Greenies don't object to nuclear power on principle - the problem is safe transport and storage of fuel and waste. Take away that problem (as future fusion reactors could do, correct?) and I'm all for it.
Enjoy your karma, whore.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Then again, there is no theoretical reason why every subatomic particle in your body could not simultaneously jump one foot to the left.
Oh yeah? Sure there is! Everyone knows that subatomic particles use the metric system not English measurements, and a displacment of of 3.048 E14 just isn't a round enough number to be likely.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
>If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.[emphasis added]
[...]There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
[...]Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible,
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Suppose the variation in Mercury's orbit had been dismissed as observational error or some drag effect of the solar atmosphere? Or that the odd lines and steps observed in hot-body spectra were dismissed as some filtering effect of the atmosphere or the spectrographic apparatus. They didn't fit within a Newtonian universe, after all.
Enough diverse experiments that involve packing deuterium nuclei together in a metal crystal lattice (whether by electrolysis or high pressure) have showed odd results to be worth pursuing further. Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
-- Alastair
Perhaps I miscalculated in thinking that slashdot would be a good place to submit this news to. I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than, judging from comments here, it clearly is, and who would be a group which would enjoy hearing detailed news of an albeit small step toward a possible clean and infinite energy source of the future. Here we are ~150 posts in, and most are along the lines of "why are we wasting our time on this", "cold fusion is being suppressed", "it'll never work, we're wasting money", "ugh, too much reading" and all manner of other pseudoscientifically inclined rubbish. It's not merely that these posts exist that's depressing, it's that it's being MODDED UP.
Is this truly the state of disaffection and ignorance that exists in the general public (and this is slashdot!) today toward fundamental scientific research and technological achievement? I simply can not imagine that this is actually the case and I stronly hope that what is seen here is not merely a product of intellectual laziness but is, instead, a result of a deep failure on the part of the scientific community to excite and educate the public about its pursuits. At least I HOPE this is the case, then perhaps something might be done to remedy the situation.
Though, a small part of me suspects that this is not the case and that in the ever richer and more comfortable "west" we truly are slowly but surely slipping down a slope of scientific indifference and even hostility; and that subsequent generations may curse our graves for allowing a wide margin of the public to consistently indulge in such shameful, wilfull ignorance.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
In the case of LDX, however, tritium is completely unnecessary for operation, as it makes use of the Deuterium-Deuterium reaction.
And there's a lot of Deuterium in the oceans. I believe the estimate is that we could run our entire civilization off of the Deuterium present in just the first centimeter of the oceans for one or more years. And we'd put most of that water back, so you don't even have to worry about the oceans being taken away from all the little fishies. :-)
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Well then you're going to have to explain to me why you don't think the laws of physics "as we know it" is a sufficient model for fusion. It certainly has provided us with relatively good models of the Sun, as well as predicted the Hydrogen bomb, and it also has shown to work with tokomak fusion.
Newtonian physics did not correctly predict the orbit of Mercury. There was no real reason to assume it should.
However, Newtonian physics did correctly predict,for instance, the motion of billard balls.
Now say someone walks along and says billard balls don't work at all in the way Newtonian physics says they do. Yet noone is able to make the billard balls act that way. Would that grounds for abandoning Newtonian physics as a model of billard balls? Abandon for what?
There is no alternative theory which allows cold fusion. If there was, people would be testing it.
In the same way that physics "as we know it" 150 years ago provided an accurate model for billiard balls, we have every reason to believe physics "as we know it" today provides an accurate model for fusion.
It is not the final model and it is probably not an accurate model for say, the inside of black holes and for sub-subatomic particles and the large-scale forces in the universe.
OK, I'll bite (I am a chemist :-).
Those guys indeed knew how to use their calorimeter, but they did not concern themselves with any other part of science, and, hence, in the interpretation of their measurements (not in the measurement results per se) they have made several trivial mistakes. Sadly, that is the way many scientists who are in possession of some exotic/expensive piece of equipment behave. I've seen it many times.
Now about cold fusion... Unfortunately, it is physically impossible, and for a reason. The Coulomb barrier to bring together 2 hydrogen nuclei is enormous, and it is the reason why 10^6 K (or maybe even hotter) temperature is normally needed to start the reaction. At more human conditions, nuclei could, of course, tunnel through the Coulomb barrier and fuse as much as they want. Problem is, this tunnelling is extremely slow (rate is actually easy to calculate - I think it will be in any college radiochemistry course), and it won't be sufficient to sustain the reaction, or even measure its heat on the macroscopic scale.
The mechanism proposed by Fleischmann did not take into account the extremely high activation energy for fusion. They did have a vague concept that there should be an activation energy, and that it is probably high, but they did not realize how high it is...
Just about every power plant uses steam to power turbines, thus this accident could have happened at any of them.
Only types that don't use steam that I can think of off the top of my head is wind and hydroelectric. Most solar plants use mirrors to direct the light to a central point, using the collected light to make steam...
A better link would be Don't Mix Uranium in a Bucket
This was not a power plant accident, but a processing accident where the workers were, in my opinion, darwin award candidates. "Let's bypass safety procedures and rather than using the machine provided and doing it in small batches (to keep the uranium from going critical), we'll hurry it up by dumping it in a bucket and stirring it!"
It should be noted that more people die each year in coal mining/transportation accidents. But since these deaths happen so regularly, they're not reported in the news. It's like the fact that flying is safer than driving, but people pay lots of attention to plane crashes, because they're unusual.
I should be noted that the BBC makes some scary statements, like more than 300,000 people in the surrounding area were placed in danger. Other articles point out "Hundreds evacuated", which makes me think that the BBC is exagerating in their statement. Like most industrial accidents, the dilution needed to reach that many people would render it mostly harmless. The workers were harmed because they were right there.
Anytime industry gets big enough, accidents will happen occasionally. Especially with the universe conspiring to come up with bigger fools...
I don't read AC A human right
IANANP, BIWARPFMEAC*. I'd like to elaborate a little bit on this point:
Fission occurs when a heavy radioactive nucleus (in the control rods) absorbs a neutron and splits into two smaller nuclei and a few extra neutrons. These new neutrons can be absorbed by other heavy nucli, and more fission occurs.
Now most of the neutrons released move too fast to be absorbed by a nucleus; instead, they just bounce off. In order for a sustainable reaction to take place, a material - called the moderator - is required to slow down the neutrons so that they can be absorbed.
Most modern** nuclear reactors are pressure-water reactors. This means that they use water as both a coolant and as a moderator. If the water excapes, then the reaction fissles out.
However, Chernobyl was initially designed with a solid moderator built into the reactor vessel. (I think it was graphite, if I remember correctly.) It used water purely as a coolant. So when the coolant leaked, the reactor kept on fissing atoms and the reaction got out of control (although not fast enough for a thermonuclear reaction).
That wasn't the only problem. The reactor's personal paniced and tried to send the control rods in too quickly. While the control rods were halfway in, neutrons bounced into the bottom of the reactor and formed a critical amount for a chain reaction. At the same time, the heat of the reaction and loss of pressure from the origional malfunction turned the leftover water into steam pockets also in the bottom of the reactor. Soon after, an explosion ruptured the reaction vessel.
Perhaps the primary cause of the accident (and of TMI) was the confusing interface to the equipment! Some devices used red lights to signify emergency conditions, while others used green or another color. Instruments were hard to read and slow to respond. An ergonomical failure contributed to the accident.
Today, most control rooms have learned from the mistakes at TMI and Chernobyl. They are easier and more consistant to use. However, even more improvements are possible with new designs. It is a pity that nobody will allow the old workhorses ot be retired.
* I am not a nuclear physicist, but I wrote a research paper for my Engineering Analysis class.
** "Modern Nuclear Reactor" is somewhat of an oxymoron. Due to NIMBY feelings among the general public, most commercial nuclear reactors are old (60s-70s era) and modern designs are never given a chance despite the improvements in efficiency, safety, and (less) waste production. :-(
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than
The lack of serious comments might in part be due to skepticisim. I'm coming from more of a medical perspective, but I'm sure in all fields that getting 'too' excited about promising initial results is a sure way to spend a huge amount of time severly let down. Aside from that, as the AC below mentioned, it's Saturday. I think many reading are doing so as a quick fix, rather than getting ready for serious reading.
And for someone lacking in background on this, such as myself, it looks like a significant amount of reading to get the background needed to really appreciate this. You provided ten different links, some of which themselves require additional reading to first determine which links there need to be read in order to grasp their significance to the topic. The general information link on the Stellarator page didn't even work. Yes, I just proceeded to look up Stellarator on wikipedia. But I'm also blessed with an abundance of free time today. That said, I know it is difficult to properly gauage the amount of background information any group is going to have. Assume too little and it can come off as insulting 'plasma is a really hot thing, and would burn you if you tried to eat it!', too much and the audience might wind up too intimidated and just crack jokes instead of doing a little background reasearch in order to catch up. Also, while slashdot does have a scientific nature, it's 'very' heavily skewed to computer science. The further away from that, the more the main audience is going to be out of the area they have the most confidence speaking about. Many people won't speak up if they find themselves in a topic where their lack of knowledge is very apparent.
That said, I hope you don't become too disheartened. While I came to this with very little understanding of the topic, I found a preliminary read of some of the information quite interesting and intend to look further into it. And if I am, I'm sure many others who are as ignorent of physics as myself will be doing so as well. We'll probaly just not comment, as there's little someone in our situation could really add to the discusion.
I in part agree with your view of the moderation. I loaded the comments up hoping for additional clarification by people knowledgable on the subject, and instead most of the moderation was for funnies. I wouldn't be too disdainful of the cold fusion moderation though. Personally, I'm grateful it was moderated up just because it also brought the conflicting replies to my attention as well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
After producing two rings at the opposite end of a vacuum tube, they were guided by a magnetic field until they collided. At collision they repelled each other, and then were compressed. The rings heated up and stayed stable for 30 microseconds under compression ( which by plasma standards is a long time). The funding was cut off in 1978 because the concept was too far from the mainstream.
In 1999 John Brandenburg received a grant from NASA to move the experiment from Miami to Lanham MD (near NASA Goddard). He moved it and reassembled it, but never received an money to operate it. It stands gathering dust.
Right now, Paul Koloc is doing something similar in his garage, producing ball lightning ( a stable plasma structure that has been documented since Roman times). His project, Plasmak, has received some sbir funding. For more details on the Plasmak, look here.
From reading the white paper, I do not think the Trisops plasma is the same configuration as in the levitated dipole experiment. I do not have a clear idea of the structure of the Plasmak.
I list the Trisops papers below for anyone who wants to follow up.
Daniel R. Wells, Paul Edward Ziajka, and Jack L. Tunstall. Hydrodynamic confinement of thermonuclear plasmas TRISOPS VIII (plasma liner confinement). Fusion Tech., 9:83, 1986.
Winston H. Bostick and Daniel R. Wells. Azimuthal magnetic field in the conical theta pinch. Phys. Fluids, 6(9):1325, 1963.
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
E.g. Global warming not caused by so-called greenhouse gases, but by waste heat generated by inefficient energy (esp. electricity) utilization..
Every day or two, the earth receives as much thermal energy from the sun as humans have harnessed in all of history. Any conceivable waste heat generated by humans would be an insignificant drop in the bucket.
Where we do have a measurable affect on the earth's temperature is changing the reflectivity of the ground so that the earth absorbs more of the massive solar influx, adding pollution to the atmosphere to change its transparency and cloud cover, and adding greenhouse gasses which slow the radiation of solar energy back to outer space. All of these effects work by throttling the balance between the unimaginably large amounts of solar energy that arrive and depart from the planet each day. Our puny addition of waste heat is lost in the noise.
And the reason money gets wasted on fusion is that the program is on continual life-support due to being cronically underfunded. Sure, if you pay the absolute minimum you can get away with over a long time, you can spend an impressive sum without getting very far. The vast numbers of americans who struggle with credit-card debt could tell you as much. It says nothing about the value of the program.
At the end of the day, we need fusion if our civilization is going to survive. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out in a relatively short timescale. Fission is nice, but there isn't really all that much in the way of fuels sitting around on Earth, so we'd just run into the same problem. Alternative energy sources like wind and ground-based solar are stopgaps at best, and are ultimately limited in the amount of power obtainable from them. even if you could create a closed system which supplies our needs for today, the 2nd Law says there will always be losses and wastage, and the end is that we all live in little thatch huts. If we haven't nuked each other out of existence earlier than that.
Bottom line, if we don't get fusion working in 50 years or so (and we probably will, at the rate we're going), you're going to see the nastiest wars over diminishing oil supplies you've ever seen, followed by population collapse, and if we're not lucky, the collapse of whatever passes for civilization these days.
If we fall now, there won't be any second chance for our descendants in a few hundred years --they won't have the easy access to oil that we enjoyed. We'll be back to pre-industrial days, with whatever tiny bits of tech we can hang onto and keep running with 'renewable' energy sources until it all breaks and can't be replaced because the assembly plant doesn't run.
So yeah, I think fusion is important.
Tritium is rare, in the sense that it makes up 1 ppm of the hydrogen in the oceans. This has however proven to be a self-sustaining solar-powered equilibrium, ie. sea water will always reorganize itself to contain 1/1000 deuterium and 1/1000000 tritium. Which means we would have to use more power than the amount of solar power absorbed by the earth's entire ocean before we would even begin to see "squandered resources". So "artificial" fusion energy is in fact indirect solar energy.
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
> The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily.
Not all of quantum physics can/has been seen. For example tachyon particles.
>mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe.
Yet do we discount what mathematics is saying just because we can't experiment it in some lab?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Not everyone does think it would be good. Amory Lovins once said what he would think if a truly cheap, abundant and clean source of power was discovered. He said it would be a disaster.
His problem was not with the energy source itself, but with what he thought it would be put to use doing. His preference was to limit what mankind could do with it by going for only relatively limited sources of power.
I strongly disagree with him, as you could make the same point about advanced medicine leading to biowar agents. Giving up what we've learned about antibiotics and containing epidemics because that information can be (and has been) misused seems misguided to me.
But, there certainly are people who feel that way.
There are larger numbers who are willing to accept the existing level of technology, but are very nervous about further discoveries.
Again, I personally feel this is misguided. We've largely made our Faustian bargain with technology, and going back or stagnating now would lead to truly massive suffering when the current pyramid game of our fuel sources run out.
I see more advanced power sources as a possible way for the masses of the third world to raise their standard of living greatly without the massive environmental impact that more primitive power sources would bring. We can argue about what sources to use (any of several might work), but trying to bring China and India to even a fraction of the per capita energy availability of the west with coal, for example, will have a huge impact.