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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'..."
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.
And you're right: it is primarily accoustic in nature and can operate on a *much* smaller scale than your typical plasma-type reactor.
From http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/0400302
Some suggested reading to help bridge the gap between reality and "Mr. Fusion" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence
Also, googling for the above topics yields a plethora of results.
They're not clear about it, but I suspect that "proprietary technology" means that they own a bunch of patents that are realized in this device. Which means that if you make a major step, they don't own it, but if you include their device in your setup you're going to have to buy it from them or license their technology.
That's actually roughly the way the patent system is supposed to work: you invent something, then you make it public in return for a guarantee that nobody else will make the same thing. The next guy improves on it, but has to pay you part of what he sells it for. It makes more sense with big, heavy, manufactured things than with software, where the "advances" are usually fairly simple and readily reproducible.
The shown picture has nothing to do with the article.
The article talks about a fusion reactor using soundwaves and the picture shows a laser based fusion (experimental) reactor. It's in the pictures description.
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch_Fus or
These genuinely are small, portable, and genuinely fuse hydrogen atoms in an entirely unkooky way. (They're produced industrially as neutron sources.)
Alas, it seems doubtful that they'll ever be useful as power sources, due to the design, but hot damn, with a bit of knowledge and some TV repair equipment you can build one yourself.
(You know, I suspect sometimes that the big fusion research programmes are, one day, finally going to build a working fusion power plant... and at roughly the same time, one of these alternative approaches will finally work and do exactly the same thing.)