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Cold Fusion in a Breadbox Instead of a Bottle
rawbytes writes "For the last few years, mentioning cold fusion around scientists has been a little like mentioning Bigfoot or UFO sightings. After the 1989 announcement of fusion in a bottle and the subsequent retraction, the whole idea of cold fusion seemed a bit beyond the pale. But that's all about to change. A very reputable, very careful group of scientists at the University of Los Angeles (Brian Naranjo, Jim Gimzewski, Seth Putterman) has initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature. This time, it looks like the real thing." From the article: "Scientists have gotten fusion to occur in the laboratory before, but for the most part, they've tried to mimic conditions inside the sun by whipping hydrogen gas up to extreme temperatures or slamming atoms together in particle accelerators. Both of those options require huge energies and gigantic equipment, not the sort of stuff easily available to build a generator. Is there any way of getting protons close enough together for fusion to occur that doesnt require the energy output of a large city to make it happen? The answer, it turns out, is yes."
Thursday April 28, @16:57
It was reported on in the press (MSNBC) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website.
That's a pretty heady group.
Putterman is particularly famous for his work on sonoluminescence.
Funnily enough, this is not really the core research of Putterman, his earlier work has largely been in the area of blackbody radiation, sonoluminescence and certain related quantum phenomena.
More technical details would be nice.
First: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/2 7/1930218
2 8/1518226
0 7/1635251
Second: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/
And now Third: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I know that I would give more weight to the CSM's coverage of this story than I would, say, Fox News, The Washington Post or Slashdot.org.
Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.
...
Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?
If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built?
Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up
If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).
Or, a wholly different approach --
I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.
Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?
Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.
The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:
http://www.focusfusion.org/energy2.html
Being without modpoints ill just reply.
Yes thats correct. Fe represents the balance point in the order of things.
As a star dies (runs out of H) It begings fusing the He and then Lithium... and will as it gets older, fuse heavier and heavier elements. this is responsible for the swelling of the stars size. Its a 2 stage effect. The difference between the required energy for H fusion and that required for He fusion. Once the H is used up the star begins to colapse, upon reaching the required temp/pressure for He fusion it suddenlt expands out as a new supply of energy is found to counteract gravity. Its outer layers get less dense and expand. While the inner core contracts getting denser as it fuses heavier nuclei. A "middle-sized" star will stop this reaction at Carbon. as there isnt enough energy ftom gravity to compress past this from the stars mass. But with large stars whis continues right up to Fe (Iron-56) and this reaction absorbs energy. And the inside of the star suddenly stops working and the whole star, no longer supported by the output of energy from its core collapses in on itself and goes Supernova.
Ahh Nuclear physics... such fun
XML - A clever joke would be here if