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Mr. Fusion Comes Closer
doktoromni writes "The first experimental, sonofusion-based, table-top fusion reactors are now being commercially sold. Although those reactors are not breakeven (yet, would say an optimist), they are by far much cheaper than other fusion approaches, like magnetic and inertial confinement. Also, they open the possibility of portable fusion reactors, along the lines of 'Back to the Future'..."
Hey, I'm going to lunch; anybody spot me $250,000?
If you have one Hell of a table. Have a look at the picture in the story.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Using proprietary technology, the IDI reactor is a stainless steel sphere filled with heavy water and, at its center, a small bubble of deuterium (heavy hydrogen). Sound waves cause the bubble, first to expand greatly, followed by its collapse to a fraction of its original size, all at the rate of thousands of times a second.
How, exactly, is this "proprietary technology" supposed to help with research into new fusion methods? I know they have to make money, but does the $250k price tag include a license that if the researcher finds an improvement that builds on the proprietary part, the improvement belongs to Impulse Devices?
Well, it's not as bad as some bozo patenting my DNA, I guess...
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
What a day on /. -- first an article on the hydrogen economy, now fusion... I'm on the edge of my seat anticipating the personal hovercraft story that CowboyNeal is probably proofing as I type this...
I can have a car that will last on my commute (assuming a steam engine that is at least as efficient as my Escort's 4-cylinder gas engine, and my current driving habits) 961 years? Something tells me that this simply won't be that efficient- or that the car will be wrecked LONG before the Mr. Fusion runs out of power.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
How is this thing supposed to work?
If I read the text, I get the impression that is by means of sound wave. This reminds me of cold fusion, which seems impossible as far as I know.
If however, I read the caption under the photo, I get the impression that it uses lasers, as in inertial confinement fusion. I can't imagine a table top version of something like that. Pictures or schematics I saw from something like that suggested a huge (size-wise) setup for lasers or condensor banks.
So what is it?
sonoluminescence has not been proven to actually be fusion. It's just a lot of light and some heat in water that's been compressed by sound. much more interesting than that though.
And they claim that this process that isn't fully understood yet will get break even fusion in 5 years? Doubt it seriously.
does this mean we can pull the plug on this monstrosity.
Seriously. Look at the pictures, does anyone else get the idea that this thing is WAY more powerful than any nuclear power plant..... (sans radiation of course..)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The picture that accompanies the article does not appear to have anything to do with IDI or their alleged new product.
It appears to be a device used for general ICF research at LLNL.
This has already caused confusion in a few posters.
Here at Purdue, I have seen the sonoluminescence lab, and although the "Mr. Fusion" part of it could be loosely deemed tabletop (no dining room table, but maybe a table in a lab), the rest of the equipment for calibration and whate have you bring this whole experiment to just that. An experiment. You're not getting as much energy out as you're putting in. In fact, how much energry can we actually capture with one of these things?
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
This could be the best thing since sliced bread if it's not a fraud. But a little searching in Google and Wikipedia gave me a bad feeling that this can be another cold fusion fiasco.
Bubble Fusion
For the lazy who don't read links, here's my digest:
This kind of fusion is, according to what the researchers claimed, a side effect of another not well-understood phenonmenon called sonoluminescence. By passing ultrasonic sound waves into a water body with tiny gas bubbles, researchers observed the bubbles emit EM waves of frequencies well beyond the UV range, which, according to black body radiation theory, indicate a very high temperature (>10,000K) inside the bubble.
The picture gets interesting when you can get the temperature inside the bubble to well beyond the million, or tens of million degrees range, and when you fill the tiny bubble with fusable material (like deuterium). If you succeed in doing that, you get a fusion reactor without all those monster lasers and magnets - a tabletop fusion reactor.
All the daydreaming apart, there are only a handful of researchers buying this idea. There's one researcher Rusi P. Taleyarkhan claiming to have achieved bubble fusion, a similar experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory had failed to confirm his resutls.
"The technology could produce energy on a break-even basis in five years and enough net energy for electricity production in 10 years."
Yeah, that must be the day when hell freezes over. Seriously, these 'predictions' never become true so why do people always put them in articles like this? I find it really annoying. Think about it: the only time you can say something will be finished or ready in so many years is when all the necessary technology exists and has proven its usability and reliability already.
-- Cheers!
Ok, now as I understand it the sonofusion only fuses the deuterium at the center. So this $200 gallon of heavy water having the equivelant of 40,000 barrals of oil's worth of energy, what does that have anything to do with what they are doing?
with about the same possibilities of getting your investment back,
What you've got here is a basic piece of research gear, which keeps a team from wasting time building up equipment and backtracking through technology where others have already gone. Depending on exactly you get for your quarter-click, this might be a screaming deal for some university research department.
Not sure I would call it "commercial".
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
That's heavy!
Well, it doesnt look like my brother has posted but i just thought you might want to know that he built a fusion reactor in our garage. If you read http://henryhallam.cjb.net/~henry/fusor/ it it shows how he made it, and shows some pictures. It does seem to be about table-size.
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped