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'..."

Comments

Well of course!

[captnitro]

Hey, I'm going to lunch; anybody spot me $250,000?

Proprietary technology?

[RobertB-DC]

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...

Re:Is this "future tech Tuesday" or something?

[Relic of the Future]

Proofing? How long have you been here. ;)

not even inefficient fusion

[i_should_be_working]

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.

Re:sound or laser?

[pragma_x]

If details seem to be a bit light, that's because it's still theoretical... and not in the way that your typical Tokamak or the ITER project is. We're talking something that isn't even proven (yet) to be fusion at all.

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. Taleyarkhan.fusion.html:

The device is a clear glass canister about the height of two coffee mugs stacked on top of one another. Inside the canister is a liquid called deuterated acetone.

[...]

The researchers expose the clear canister of liquid to pulses of neutrons every five milliseconds, or thousandths of a second, causing tiny cavities to form. At the same time, the liquid is bombarded with a specific frequency of ultrasound, which causes the cavities to form into bubbles that are about 60 nanometers - or billionths of a meter - in diameter. The bubbles then expand to a much larger size, about 6,000 microns, or millionths of a meter - large enough to be seen with the unaided eye.

[...]

Within nanoseconds these large bubbles contract with tremendous force, returning to roughly their original size, and release flashes of light in a well-known phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.

[...]

At that point, deuterium atoms fuse together, the same way hydrogen atoms fuse in stars, releasing neutrons and energy in the process. The process also releases a type of radiation called gamma rays and a radioactive material called tritium, all of which have been recorded and measured by the team.

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.

Bubble fusion

[francium de neobie]

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.