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."

Comments

Re:Interesting

[Jesrad]

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.

And can it release it usefully?

[Engineer-Poet]

Adding heat to a lukewarm bath of deuterated acetone is one thing. Even making bubbles in a truly hot fluid (such as water in a high-pressure boiler) is quite another. The bubble phenomenon appears to depend on there being a large enthalpy and density difference between the liquid and vapor phases; as you get toward the critical temperature and pressure, this difference decreases until it finally disappears. Supercritical = no more bubbles.

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.

Re:And can it release it usefully?

[WhiplashII]

What you say is true, but less true is deep space. Out beyond Jupiter or so, there is very little energy available. Everything is very low temperature, and radiation cooling very quickly gets you to extremely cold temperatures (40 K is reasonable, as I remember).

Something like this could work as a Mr. Fusion for deep space probes - it sounds like a perfect match. Deep Space probes typically don't even need that much power!

APS as arbiter of truth

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.