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Fusion Using Sonic Compression
The Only Druid writes "Scientists have confirmed the use of sonic waves to create the necessary compression in plasma to achieve nuclear fusion, far more effectively and cheaply than any other method. Val Kilmer was unavailable for comment."
In any event, it's not Mr. Fusion. The amount of actual fusion is tiny, and well below any commercially or societally interesting level.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
Isn't this a very old story (the date on the press release is last spring...)? Does anyone know if anything new is happening in this work?
It's not supernatural. Just because no theory explains it fully does not mean it's not real. We still don't know how superconductivity works exactly, for example.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
This article is dated March, 2004. Hope that provides some context as the mentioned article should allready be published. Further, I imagine there has been more recent research into the field in the last year.
I can't find in the article whether or not it released more energy than they used to start the fusion. I've heard this has always been a problem so far with using fusion practically.
Does this make the bazillions we paid for ITER (http://www.iter.org/) useless?
See pictures of tits
what does Keaneau Reeves have to say about this?
not everything is a science experiment!
electron coupling?
"You don't believe in any of this cold fusion mumbo jumbo, do you?"
I loved that movie. Mindless, flashy fun. That, and Elizabeth Shue is teh hottie
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
While this is a good piece of science, by itself it is not a step towards anything economically useable as they had to do a lot of work just to verify that there was energy released. In a viable fusion reactor this should not be difficult to prove. This might one day lead to something, but there is no obvious application at this point.
Its old news that its possible to use soundwaves to create extremely high temperatures, however controlling it has been very hard, i first read about this about 10 years ago. You need a bubble that is almost a perfect sphere via evaporation and then apply the sound waves, this causes the material to implode very aggressively. Its great to se a promising method have developed further, because the JET project (Joint European Torus) is not new at all, and with a proper "spark plug" hot fusion seems to be closer than ever.
Please people, this is not for cold fusion use - its for starting a hot fusion process. That needs millions of degrees celcius, high material density and so forth. This is one promising solution for the hot fusion "spark plug". http://www.jet.efda.org/
The key to hot fusion is material density and temperature, containing the plasma is extremely hard.
You don't? Here's a good article: "superconductivity is caused by a force of attraction between certain conduction electrons arising from the exchange of phonons, which causes the conduction electrons to exhibit a superfluid phase composed of correlated pairs of electrons." Check out Wikipedia sometimes, you will be surprised how many interesting things you can learn there.
High temperatures are important. You can't run an efficient heat engine off a small temperature difference; the lower the input temperature, the more of the total energy has to be discarded as waste heat. If you can't convert enough of your fusion energy to work, you can't power your ultrasonics and thus cannot even run your plant on its own output power.
If you could form bubbles of deuterium vapor in a bath of liquid metal it might be something else, but that's a bit beyond what they're doing here.
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Scientific method is about the gathering of evidence of the processes occuring in nature, then understanding them. Please do tell me what part of the article conflicts with it.
What has he got to do with physics?
Um...
;)
Woah!?
...but could someone explain the Val Kilmer reference? I have a feeling there's a funny I'm missing. =)
1. place glass of water in front of ghettoblaster
2. crank up the volume
The only thing that fused, though, were the speakers...
Simon Templar[Val Kilmer] - a fictitious name a young orphan boy invented for himself in a Hong Kong orphanage years ago - is now a suave, debonair, international thief who needs to pull-off just one more exuberant heist to put him at the $50 million mark in his Swiss bank account (his goal amount for retirement). An easy job: simply steal Dr. Emma Russel's formula for cold-fusion, and deliver it to a Russian billionaire bent on sending Russia back to Communism - no problem, Right? Wrong! There's one thing Mr. Templar, master of disguise didn't count on ... falling in love.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120053/
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120053/
As a young orphan, a boy[Val Kilmer] refuses to accept the name given him by priests and instead chooses to take on the name of Simon Templar after the Saint of magic. Speed ahead and the young boy is now a master thief in bidding wars with countries for his services. Using his skills of master disguise, he eludes all pursuers as he assumes names associated with the various Saints. In this role after stealing from a Russian industrialist, the industrialist hires The Saint to steal a formula for cold fusion being developed by a young female scientist. Cold fusion is said to permit a nation to heat its citizens with only a few gallons of water. However, on this case The Saint falls in love with the scientist placing him in a quandary of fulfilling his professional obligations or staying with the innocent young scientist. When she becomes threatened by the Russian Mafia, he has no choice but to go ahead with his job. However, she follows him to Moscow, setting off a chase across the City and through their sewers.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
The Val Kilmer reference is from this movie.
Here's my naive idea for fusion confinement. How about a giant container filled with some liquid. And this container is spinning in such a way that a bubble of hydrogen/helium whatever fuel is kept in the center. Could you then initiate fusion in the bubble and rely on the liquid around it to contain it?
... you know, the movie where he outruns the shock wave on a motorcycle?
Val Kilmer built a giant death-ray laser.
Keanu Reeves.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Psuedoscience is inherently not reproducible in carefully controlled, well designed experiments. This certainly seems to be reproducible, hence is not psuedoscience.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Does anyone else find it really sad that about half of the comments on this important scientific discovery are about Val Kilmer, Keanu Reeves, and Elizabeth Shue? This is supposed to be News for Nerds and yet even we are obsessed with vapid celebrities. That's really pathetic.
The paper was published: Taleyarkhan, R. P. et al. 2004, Phys. Rev. E, 69, 036109, with an erratum this month (2005) Phys. Rev. E, 71, 019901.
There comes a time to forget the nuclear phobia and go with plutonium RTG's or even a small fission reactor. An RTG is also capable of handling small power requirements, and either will get the job done.
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This last year's news.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
In theory, a 300 K heat source and a 150 K heat sink can yield 50% thermal efficiency. In reality, you're going to be lucky to get 20%. Consider the case of your typical steam-cycle electric powerplant. Its boilers run at approximately 1500 degrees R, and the condensers at around 540 R (depending on time of year). The Carnot efficiency limits you to 64%. What do you actually get? Try 33-35%, a bit more than half. In a small heat engine the consequent high conduction losses, plus the requirement to trade off efficiency for reliability, would hit you even harder.
Then you've got the issue of breakeven, which fission and radioisotope power don't have. If the conversion hardware yields 20% when new and the sonic fusor gets a 6:1 multiple of its input power, your net output is (0.200 - 0.167) = 0.033, or 3.3% of the total thermal output. If the efficiency of either the fusor or the heat engine decays a bit due to wear or malfunction, the whole thing stops working. I wouldn't want to bet my mission on that.
I could see something like a micro-proton accelerator generating high-energy neutrons (via spallation) to create fission in a chunk of depleted uranium (metal or oxide). It would be small, it would be relatively light, it would be harmless until launched, and it would be a lot easier to make into a working spacecraft than sonic fusion in acetone.
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Did anyone notice this on the top of the page?
FOR RELEASE: IMMEDIATE
March 2, 2004
Why wasn't this posted 10 months ago? More importantly, why is it being posted now?
There was an article on Slashdot almost a year ago pointing to this exact same press release (dated March 2, 2004).
Chain Reaction is much more replated to this story...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
- We've made dozens of atomic batteries, both RTG's and reactors, and launched them into space. They work. Making one work for a century is just a matter of engineering.
- Making a sonic fusor get even to technical breakeven (let alone engineering breakeven) is uncertain and may not even be possible.
Let's keep looking at the physics by all means, but it's not the time for bets. If I were in charge of NASA at the moment I'd be asking nuclear scientists for power technologies based on the micron-thick solar cells for inner-system missions and nuclear reactors for trans-Jovian missions. The only way to get a look at bodies like Pluto and beyond for more than flyby missions is with nuclear power and ion propulsion, and it's silly to think about sonic fusors until we have at least had something running in the lab for a few years. (Reactors had their engineering tests before the end of WWII - they're mature.)Sustainability and energy independence essay
Did you fail to notice the emphasis on the difference between the Carnot efficiency and the actual efficiency? Change the test case and the numbers also change. Heck, look up the combustion temperature of the UHT turbines used in combined-cycle plants and calculate the Carnot efficiency for that case yourself. Is 60% good or bad?
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I couldn't find anything about it on Phys Rev E yet.
Yeah, well Bob Park shat all over it when the experiment was first reported, as he's want to do for anything not involving big-budget tokamaks.
There's a difference between being professionally skeptical and being openly hostile towards unexpected developments in science. I'm afraid APS/Park fall on the side of being high-priests of high-energy. A scientist must be both completely open minded and rigorously skeptical - those two qualities are not exclusive and if you lack one you're not really in it for the science, you're in it for your agenda.
In this case he impuned the veracity of the ORNL group and was wrong about it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The material used in RTG's decays at a fixed rate. Confusing the two may account for your misconception.
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Also, how the universe works is still wrapped up in a lot of hypothesis, dark matter etc. That doesn't mean that we aren't real, well maybe you, but I'm pretty sure I'm real.