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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
...when I see multiple peer-reviewed articles reporting that others have been able to duplicate this experiment. :P
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
More info here: http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/
- 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.
The article clearly notes that this is nowhere near break-even. Yet, as it notes, there are many applications beyond positive energy production. If it is a good source of neutrons, then it is well worth the effort.
I am optimistic. We have a slightly-puritanical mindset that we have to work for everything. Well...we are coming upon an easy and elegant solution to our energy problems. Even fission needs to be explored more as we find newer ways to contain the radiation (nuclear batteries lasting years could come soon if we get over our hangups).
Transcend Humanity. Please.
is that an accredited research institution?
google doesn't seem to think there is a "University of Los Angeles"
Need to get away?
Adirondack Vacations
it took me a second to figure out why a macromedia product was even coming in a bottle in the first place
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.
Apple -> Intel
Transmeta go out of business
Cold fusion
What the hell can happen next? My money's on Bill Gates being found dead with a grapefruit up his arse up a crack whore alley...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
It's not super clear, but I don't think it's a contradiction. Saying "don't expect fusion to become readily available" doesn't mean that it won't, just that you shouldn't expect it. Saying "it really may not be long" doesn't mean it will happen soon, just that it could.
The summary of that is, "readily available fusion could happen soon, but don't count on it."
I expect an even greater number of such clowns hitting the news any time now. It's only a shame that each will get far more than the 15 minutes they've already used up.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
you forgot the most important part: "For the time being". That means that, in the future (perhaps not very long), things could change. She doesn't contradict yourself unless you take words out of context. :]
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.
OMG, I'm on slashdot!!
/sorry
//had to
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
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.
McGuyver did this in Ep. 26 with a matchbox, two cotton buds, a filling from his tooth and some scotch tape.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
From the article:
Instead of using high temperatures and incredible densities to ram protons together, the scientists at UCLA cleverly used the structure of an unusual crystal.
That crystal wouldn't happen to be Dilithium would it?
And here I thought pyrofusion was what happened to a slashdotted CPU...
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
I don't mind dupes. The whining about dupes I could live without though.
:)
Seriously. If you see a dupe, don't read it. I didn't see this the first and second times, so this is cool for me
My other car is first.
The socio-economic earthquake would be 11.0 on the Richter scale. The oil companies would go bankrupt. 99 out of 100 'service stations' would be abandoned, dilapidated blights on the landscape. The Middle East would be all of a sudden much less important to the western world, and Israel would all of a sudden have no big body guard named Uncle Sam. All cars would be electric and have 1000 HP at the wheels (ok, some things would be good!).
Be careful what you wish for!
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
You'll never get the electric field strong enough to bring protons together - it is the same crap as bottled fusion.
Real cold fusion is about meso-atoms that are much smaller because muons are heavier than electrons. And so they could be moved closer to each other while being still neutral. Use Google - http://www.google.com/search?&q=mesoatom+fusion
...and I knew I was in trouble when I missed hitting the 'preview' button! :(
I'll go back to not posting for a couple months again...
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Duke Nukem Forever goes on sale?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I too tend to wince when I hear the words Christian and science so closely together. But I read the article and some other articles on the site and I find the reporting at CSM to be quite cogent.
Is this the first tripe article ever!br>br> No, most of the articles on slashdot are tripe. Yet for some reason we all keep coming back.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The problem was that it was unrelyable, impractical and highly dangerous. (A researcher at SRI was killed when a hydrogen cell exploded.) But it did work.
This isn't cold fusion, in the region where the fusion occurs there are very high temperatures. This basically just increases the hydrogen gas pressure in a very small region thus "emulating conditions in the sun" by using electric forces rather than gravitational or magnetic. It's very cool, but it's not cold.
I would have to grant that "amature nuclear physics" is something that is widely discouraged by the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, as is "amature chemistry". In other words, somebody who is not a part of the mainstream research community studying the subject but rather somebody who litterally tinkers in their garage trying new things just because knowledge is cool.
Other scientific disciplines have numerous amatures involved, notably astronomy, and to a lesser extent biology, and even computer science. Having a telescope in your backyard, while still making you a weirdo or a definitive "nerd", is not going to get you on the Dept. of Homeland Security's "watch list". They might raise an eyebrow if they think you are a "hacker", but that is peanuts compared to if they think you are making explosives. Or even hint that you are manufacturing pharmaceuticals without DEA permission (choose your poison on this comment).
Nuclear material experimentation is just over the top, and sure to get police involved. Unfortunately, the energies involved with nuclear energy are so large that a single individual can create a huge mess, and potentially cause a lot of radioactive debris, if not take out a small corner of the city they are living in.
In some ways this is too bad, as it is the amatures that come up with the really cool things, and a small group working in their basement or garage that often come up with new ideas that traditional research departments overlook. It is also a sad statement that some areas of knowledge are considered too hazardous for "ordinary people" to study and understand.
RE: Oil
The petroleum industry has a weakened influence in the USA, and becoming less over time. Part of this is because so much is imported that now oil reserves are considered a matter of the State Department rather than a Department of Energy or some other more domestic agency. While "big oil" is still influential in Washington D.C., I do see an end in sight for their influence, and that the petroleum industry will be focused more on lubricants rather than energy sources. The key to look for is how motor vehicles are taxed, and when you no longer pay for highway construction on a per gallon basis, you know that "big oil" is dead.
This is already a consideration and subject of debate in many state legislatures, as well as in the U.S. Congress.
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