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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...
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.
Well,actually, it doesn't break even, according to the article. So I suppose that even though you can get a thousand years worth of energy out of that gallon of heavy water, you'll actually have to put MORE energy into the system. It would be more efficient just to use the gas right now. However, maybe this will lead to more people researching fusion and possibly help bring about a simmilar system that will produce more energy than you need to trigger the reaction.
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.
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.)
Yes it is way more powerful than a nuclear power plant. The lasers will produce over 500 terawatts of power, far more than the entire electrical generating capacity of the world. Though only for 5ns or so. And I dont think it's a monstrosity, a debacle maybe but not a monstrosity :o). It's actually quite a beautiful machine I think; it will compress and heat its tiny hydrogen fuel capsule to temperatures and densities greater than those in the core of the sun, igniting the plasma in a self sustaining reaction. While the capsule will reach ignition (where alpha particle heating of the plasma dominates) it will not reach breakeven due to the abysmally low ~2-3% efficiency of the Nd:glass lasers used to compress the pellet and the less than perfect laser\plasma energy coupling.
That said, I must comment on the article at hand. This company and its ceo "Mark Ludwig" seem to be pure BULLSHIT. The claims of Impulse Devices cross the line from speculative/specious and would be aptly described as fraudulent. Sonoluminescence has not yet conclusively been linked to fusion and most scientists remain highly skeptical of the claim that it has, as other posts have pointed out. Even if it IS real the rate of fusion reactions is so incredibly low it's just above the threshold of detection. The rate will have to be scaled up by trillions of times to attain anything even nearing ignition scale no one has a clue how to do this and he says this will happen in 5 years??! Yeah I'm sure we're all holding our breath Mark. Oh, and another thing, the reporting on this article is a joke, for starters they're using a photo of NOVA which they apparently don't even know was totally dismantled like 5 years ago....
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"