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Yet Another Method Of Achieving Nuclear Fusion
deglr6328 writes "Recent research has seen the use of the pyroelectric effect, the compression of bubbles using ultrasound and gas jet irradiation for producing nuclear fusion on small tabletop-scales. Yet another method can now be added to the list which uses ultraintense laser irradiation striking a borated plastic target to heat a plasma to billion kelvin temperatures and achieves aneutronic (clean) proton-boron fusion. (The PRL paper can be read online.) Though, like the other recently discovered exotic methods of attaining fusion, it does not look like a method which can be scaled up to ignition or even anywhere near break even, it still may have important use in the laboratory for the examination of such incredibly high temperature plasmas."
disagrees about there being a billion of him because of some bubbles. But he highly enjoys being related to energy production. Because this is a really lame first post, and it's not even first. Or is it? You decide, America...
With the rapid increases in solar and wind and geothermal and hot fractured rock and wave/water energy anyone searching for fusion as a way to provide power is just searching for a solution without a problem. We dont need the dangers of fission OR fusion we have what we already need right here with currence technology
If only we'd use it
The devices mentioned in the article are rather small machines, they fit on a desk.
Don't expect to have one powering your house soon though, they use far more power than they create. Most researchers use them as a source of fusion byproducts such as neutrinos.
Why does a Hydrogen Bomb produce far more energy in the fusion phase than is put in during the fission phase?
Simple answer - hydrogen fused to helium has a "little bit left over" - this is the energy released.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
YAMOANF: Yet Another Method Of Achieving Nuclear Fusion
Or in short YANF: Yet Another Nuclear Fusion
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
If the sun relied only on gravitational potential energy, then it would have burned a long time ago.
Atomic BONDS in FUSION and FISSION?! Please...
Hey? Cars that run on electrolysed water - hydrogen cars - are all about moving the energy usage, instead of burning fossil fuels in the middle of cities on a road in an inefficient motor, use hydrogen cracked from water by a very efficient fossil fuel/whatever generator somewhere away from the city.
Of course cars running on electrolysed water, that make it from the energy they produce by burning the hydrogen from said water won't work, at least until we manage to get a perpetual motion machine working.
But does any of that mean fusion is bound to fail? A lot of people who are a whole lot more knowledgable than I am don't think so.
- Obtain dilithium
- Set it on fire
Okay! Now you've got your nuclear fusion! Happy? Can we move on to something more difficult please??My question was, where does that "little bit left over" come from? You still have all the original particles in the system. The energy that was used to "squeeze" the particles together is then imparted on the remaining atoms/free particles.
So I went to look it up on Wikipedia, and it gave me an answer that was basically the same as I suggested:
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"Tabletop fusion isn't going to happen"
The parent comment sounds similar to a lot of other myopic things people have said that turned out to be wrong, (i.e.: We can't fly, the world is flat, the sound barrier can't be broken, etc). Nobody remembers the names of the idiots who said these things.
If there is anything an education in science has taught me, it is that we humans have a pretty tentative grip on how things work, and there sure is a lot that we have to learn. Speaking of the strong nuclear force as though it were some insurmountable obstacle is ignorant.
Today's insoluble riddle will be tomorrow's household appliance.
I don't care how they drive the truck... all I want are my proverbial fusion donuts.
In other words, I don't care if they generate fusion by getting adult gorillas to have steamy jungle sex with androids, I don't care. All I want to know is when I'm going to be able to get a new fusion-powered lawnmower.
When I read things like this I have to wonder if there aint uses for fusion beyond the current power station paradigm. I mean productive uses, not research uses. Maybe there's medical uses for neutrino sources or remote sensing uses. And how about fusion rockets? Surely making leaky (but directed) plasma containment is adequate to make fusion powered rockets. You don't even need ignition.. supplying more energy than you get out is fine, as long as you supply the starting energy on the ground and reap the output energy whilst in the air.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Can I make a suggestion on how to produce energy positive fusion?
Step 1: Gather a LOT of hydrogen. A few hundred billion tonnes should do it.
Step 2: Put all the hydrogen together in one
I think you're off by ~10+ orders of magnitude for the weight.
Of course cars running on electrolysed water, that make it from the energy they produce by burning the hydrogen from said water won't work, at least until we manage to get a perpetual motion machine working.
:-)
Yes, that was my point.
But does any of that mean fusion is bound to fail? A lot of people who are a whole lot more knowledgable than I am don't think so.
I certainly agree that fusion can work. My point is that fusion doesn't (and really can't) work on small scales. You give it X amount of energy and you get back out X plus a small addition. The problem is that addition is not usually sufficient to maintain the reaction in a power positive fashion. To do that, you need some way for a high enough percentage of the system to constantly undergo fusion. Gravity is one way of doing that. Adding energy from an external source is the other. So far, no one has figured out how to make the latter form work in an energy positive fashion.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You also assume that hydrogen is already available and its potential is 0 then you bring in the gravity and eventually the energy from the gravity gets emmited during fusion.
Some energy should have already been spent combining and 'creating' the hydrogen from the Big Bang soup of protons, neutrons and electrons. Of course the energy for the Big Bang should have come from some place, but that is another question [God anoyone? - *warning* lame flamebait attempt]
To release that energy you would need to break the nuclear bonds of hydrogen and then it will become helium. Think of it as wanting to get over a very tall mountain and on the other side there is a much deeper valey than the one you are on. But to get to the longer downward slope, on the other side, you need to overcome the upward slope in front of you.
In case of H and He transition, as someone already pointed out, the difference in the energy is just a little (the valey on the other side is just a little deeper than the one are on now). But when you have billions and billions of small differences -- they add up and you get the Sun (or an H bomb).
while waiting for fusion (which the reactor in France is likely going to demonstrate) the UK needs to build some more fission reactors (preferably AGRs rather than PWRs becuase they work better, are safer and burn more fissile material).
But.
We use power all over the place, a little bit at each spot. It is not obvious that generating it all in one place and then moving it is the only way to handle it, and it may not be the best way to handle some of the load.
And windmills are fun.
Then you need to kick-start the reaction and keep it going until it becomes self-sustainable.
How many times are we going to post this article?
Hmmm... a non-physicist, who admits not being completely sure how fusion or fission works, confidently explaining why tabletop fusion won't work...only on slashdot :)
Yeah. You should have been tought that in high school physics. The Strong Nuclear Force (the one which holds nuclei together) is the strongest force available to us, by a wide margin (followed by electro-magnetism, then weak nuclear followed by gravity. Someone recently figured out that the weak nuclear force can be tied into electromagnetism, and I think they actually call it "electroweak" or something like that.. I can't quite recall at this moment.. all that Grand Unifying Theory stuff's still a little vague to me).
Basically, if you can overcome the electromagnetic repulsion forces that force the protons apart due to their like charges, the strong nuclear takes over and the two protons come colliding together at emense forces. If you're looking for an answer to what actually drives the Strong Nuclear Force, well, take a ticket and get in line. Once they figure that one out, we'll have figured out what make the "fundamental forces" fundamental, and know a hell of a lot more about how our universe is put together.
It's possible that Desktop Nuclear Fusion that yields positive energy to us is just around the corner. And with all of the discoveries recently on how the internals of the "subatomic" particles work, I'd say we're closer to it than we have ever been. But these are the kinds of things that simply can't happen overnight, and I guarentee that if anyone did come up with the solution, it'd take us 60 years just to get it into service. So many industries out there who rely on this kind of technology not existing. Imagine what all of the coal refineries, natural gas refineries, solar power farms, nuclear power plants.. they'd all instantly be out of business if this thing could even pull of a 1% positive yield. But of course, this is all speculation. My guess is that we're still a good twenty years off at least, and that the positive solution will have something to do with how neutrinos work/are produced.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Why does a Hydrogen Bomb produce far more energy in the fusion phase than is put in during the fission phase? My only guess is that the extra energy is coming from the energy released by the nuclear bonds during the forceful disintegration of the atom. Any physics majors care to chime in?
Ever wonder why all those protons like to sit happily in the nucleus together even though they're all positively charged? Well it turns out that at REALLY small scales there is a force called (aptly) "the strong nuclear force" which is about a million times as strong as electromagnetism.
The amount of energy it takes to liberate a single nucleon from a nucleus is called the "binding energy per nucleon". . For different elements this value is different. The reason fusion and fission can both release energy is due to change in this binding energy per nucleon from the start of the reaction to the end of the reaction.
If you look at this graph you will see that at the begining of the graph it rises very steeply. The change from Hydrogen to Helium looks about 10MEV. This energy has to go somewhere and it's released as heat and light.
At around Iron the graph flattens out and then slowly starts to decend. Uranium sits right down at the bottom tail of the graph. Energy is released in fission because the end products sit further up the curve than Uranium.
Per reaction, Uranium fission produces a lot more energy than Hydrogen. Fission release around 250MeV and fusion releases around 17.6MeV. So why do we get so much additional power from a Hygrogen bomb? Well one mole of Uranium weighs 238 grams. In contrast, one mole of hydrogen weighs only 1 gram. The conclusion? We have a lot more hydrogen atoms per unit mass than we do Uranium. This means that we get 17 times more energy per unit kilogram than we do from Uranium . This is the reason the primary power source for the Hydrogen bomb is the Hydrogen and not the Uranium starter charge.
Simon.
His post is begging for an Intelligent Fusion Thoery reply.
There is a lot of very interesting work being done out there, but consider the ramifications of producing energy, in general. Most of the time, when we are releasing energy with an exothermic process, we are changing one thing into something else, using some leftover energy to do work. Fusion really isn't very different.
Let us assume for the sake of argument, that we have implemented a form of nuclear energy production that leaves something relatively harmless behind, such as helium. When this process is put into practice the world over, the effect on our environment could be Very Bad.
No matter how we produce energy, we are doing so at the expense of the environmental balance that made sophisticated life on Earth possible to begin with. We threaten our own existence by producing energy. Perhaps we should be putting more research into ways each and every human can live happily while consuming *less* energy, rather than endeavoring to produce *more*.
There is intriguing evidence available today that suggests that the comings and goings of living beings on Earth regularly brings about disastrous changes in climate, triggered by release and re-uptake of CO2, methane, and the like. Whether we are accelerating this natural process with our energy production is a subject about which there is much debate, but learning how we can require less energy to live certainly wouldn't hurt!
*grin* Hey, I'm up late thinking. Slashdot just happens to be where I decide to think "out loud". It didn't take long to answer my own question and find that my understanding was correct. (The strong nuclear force is the source of that "little extra" energy.)
;-)
Of course, if I wasn't simply running off at the mouth from tiredness, I might have written my post a little better, and figured out my own answers before posting. But what would be the fun in that?
Besides, the high energy physicists always have *something* very interesting to say that I hadn't considered.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... am still waiting for my fusion powered flying car.
Step 5: Profit!
When you're talking about billions of degrees the temperature scale is pretty irrelevant.
That's ok. In a few hours two-dozen, slashdot reading, tabletop funsion researchers will begin to wake and set everybody straight (If they aren't already typing out their 4-page responses)...
Unification of the weak and electromagnetic force has been around for a while.
In 1983 we had the first unambiguous experimental evidence of W and Z bosons. The Z being predicted in 1979 to unify the electromagnetic and weak forces. This discovery being so great, the Nobel prize was awarded the very next year in 1984. Now, I'm old enough to remember this, but there are people on Slashdot that weren't even born in 1983.
That's simply not true; fusion can output a lot more energy than it takes to compress the hydrogen (as is the case with a hydrogen bomb). The extra energy is not created, of course; it is also input to the reaction, but in a form that is normally useless. The extra energy is converted from the mass of the input hydrogen. You know, E=mc^2? Fusion releases that incredible energy bound up in mass, which can't normally be utilized. The end products of fusion are lighter than the inputs; the difference is converted to energy.
This is why fusion is so attractive; the supply of input mass is practically limitless, a tiny bit of mass can be converted into a huge amount of energy, and all that latent mass energy is sitting around useless until we can release it through fusion.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I think the yield from the original Mike shot was mostly from the huge uranium tamper. In the case of the Soviet "Tsar Bomb" the yield was mostly from fusion but that is because they (fortunately) left out the uranium tamper to reduce the yield from the planned 100Mt to about 50Mt or so.
burned out, rather.
True, most hydrogen weapons use a 3 stage approach, because like the thread starter said hydrogen lacks a lot of punch alone.
By igniting a fusion reaction the resulting neutrons can rapidly burn the uranium tamper (called "fast fission") and increase yield significantly. This is also a very unclean burn and results in high amounts of radiation.
Ivy Mike, and later Castle Bravo and Castle Romeo produced much of their yield from fast fission and NOT fusion. Fast fission in its early stages (and even now) is unpredictable as seen in Castle Bravo and Romeo, with yields almost two and half times predicted.
Tsar Bomba on the other hand was fairly unique in that it was only two stages, with like the above said, having its uranium tamper removed and replaced with a lead one. This resulted in a high majority of its yield (97%) coming from fusion.
I don't know much about fusion besides its uses in weapons, but I do know that it requires vast amounts of energy to achieve it.
Either through gravity, the intense heat of a fission explosion, or self sustaining reactions like that of our sun and the billions of stars in the universe, its all very "large".
I don't think we are close to getting a reliable fusion power plant or even fusion that breaks even (with out killing everyone for miles and miles) very soon.
Well - actually I have done the calculations on how much power is available. The present "spent" fuel sitting in swimming pools on reactor sites can be stuffed into CANDU reactors and will power about as big a fleet as the USA currently has of the light water pressure reactors (114 in the 1GWe range). There is enough fuel from this source to provide power for decades.
Then if we built the Integral fast reactor which was designed by Argonne labs and shut down in 1994 by the Clinton Administration - there is enough uranium already mined (its usually called "depleated") to run over 1000reactors for 6,000 years. This is without producing any long term wastes because the IFR burns the actinides. In this senerio we can also use the thorium cycle with fuel reserves in the 200,000 year range.
If we get this up to 1000 reactors then we have no need to look at coal, gas, oil, wind or anything else. But - in this senerio we would have to use a substancial amount of the power to produce hydrogen which can be tied to Carbon to produce liquid fuels. This is essentually what Germany and South Africa have done - its called the Fisher Tropsche reaction and it is well proven. By doing this North America becomes self sufficient in energy. Also this is probably the ONLY way... well - all vehicals could be banned and only bicycles and horse drawn wagons allowed and then I guess yes - the USA would be self suffcient.
So yes - I actually have done the calcs.
Also - the liklihood of fusion being useful other than as a neutron source (IE - it can be a breader) is unlikly any time over the next 20 years.
The strong nuclear force holding the atom together is then converted to kinetic energy as the atom disintegrates.
NO IT DOESN'T!
The strong nuclear force holds the nucleus together and is opposed by the electrical force. It is the electrical force that causes the atom to fly apart and some of this force is converted into free energy.
As for the fusion bomb - the high pressure causes a number of the hydrogen - deturium pairs to fuse. This releases neutrons which transmute lithium into deturium. Some of these neutrons run into the uranium tampers around the compressed cores causing further fission to take place. This releases more neutrons. A chain reaction builds up until the materials are thrown far enough apart that the density drops below that which can sustain the chain reaction. Then it dies out.
Tell me more about this laser-irradiated Borat.
--Pat
Either through gravity, the intense heat of a fission explosion, or self sustaining reactions like that of our sun
Don't forget of course that while stellar reactions are self-sustaining, it's heating/compression due to gravitational collapse that actually gets them started. Theoretically, there's no reason why we can't get self-sustaining fusion reactions through a similar process, although we're not trying to use gravity (of course!).
I don't think we are close to getting a reliable fusion power plant or even fusion that breaks even (with out killing everyone for miles and miles) very soon.
I seemed to remember reading that one of the fusion labs had acieved breakeven, but now I come to google for it I can't find any links to back me up. I do know, however, that JET has at least come pretty close to it, if they've not yet achieved it.
Incidentally, at least as of 7 years ago, most fusion experiments involved using either high intensity, short-pulse lasers or intense magnetic fields to heat and compress the target material, neither of which is likely to kill anyone, let alone "everyone for miles and miles". I've been out of the field since then, however, so I can't swear that that's still the case; I can't imagine that too many people are using fission explosions to try to trigger fusion outside of weapons research, though.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Seriously, the problem here is that you're required to input a tremendous amount of force to overcome the nuclear bonds that hold the atoms together. As long as you have to put that force into the system, you're not going to get surplus energy out of the system. Simple physics. You can't get more energy out of a reaction than it takes to reverse it. The same reason why hydrogen cars that run on electrolyzed water don't work.
Nice idea, but, I'm afraid it's not like that. There are basically two forces involved here: electomagentic forces and the strong nuclear force. The EM force tends to keep atomic nuclei apart, since they are all positively charged. In "normal" matter they stay far enough apart to allow a bunch of electrons (negatively charged) to get in between and "screen" the charges. Meanwhile the strong nuclear force wants to pull nucleons together to make bigger nuclei. It's really powerful, as its name suggests, but also really short range.
The net effect of the interplay between these two forces (and some other considerations which I will overlook for now) is that the most stable (equivalently lowest energy) state for matter in quantities of less than a few solar masses (beyond which gravity starts to play a role) is as iron-56 nuclei. This is basically as many protons and neutrons as you can squash together and stillhave them all be in range of each others strong nuclear forces. Put in more and the electrostatic repulsion starts to dominate, put in fewer and the strong nuclear force would still pull in more if it could.
So, you can, in principle, get energy from any nuclear reaction that moves things towards iron -- fusion of light elements, or fission of heavy ones.
So, why is the whole universe not made of iron already? Basically the answer is that it got stuck!. When the universe was very hot and very dense indeed, it was a see of protons and neutrons constantly smashing into one another, sticking briefly to make nuclei and then being smashed apart by the next collision. The temperature was so high that thermal motion of the particles overcame the electromagnetic repulsion. When it cooled, it did so so quickly that the protons and neutrons didn't have time to form into iron nuclei, or indeed into many nuclei at all. That's why, before stars got into the game the universe was mostly hydrogen, with a decent amount of helium and only traces of other things.
Now, at the temperatures found in most of the universse, when two light nuclei collide, the electromagnetic forces cause them to bounce before they get close enough for the strong forces to make them stick. In a star, or a hydrogen bomb, or one of the pieces of borated plastic in this laser experiment, temperatures and densities are high enough that sometimes two nuclei smash together had enough to get past the EM repulsion and feel the strong force attracting them, whereupon they "snap" together, releasing a lot of energy.
If you want a very poor analogy, consider a room with a powerully magnetic roof a vibrating floor and a lot of ball-bearing. Initially, all the bearings are on the floor. Even though it would be a lower energy state for them to be stuck to the magnets in the roof. It we turn up the vibration (temperature), initially not much happens, but eventually we reach a temperature where a few bearings get close to the ceiling and are then pulled in hard by the magnets, releasing lots of energy as they "thunk" into the ceiling. This is what we are trying to do in a fusion reaction.
If we take the same analogy and turn up the heat still hotten, we recreate conditions in the original big bang. Now the room is full of flying ball bearings moving so fast that they are as likely as not to knock free any that get stock to the ceiling.
Uhhh... Fusion is combining molecules. The end products are _heavier_ than the inputs.
You may be thinking of fission, which we already have quite a good handle on.
Masybe the most powerful windmill "only" generates 10 MW, but you can place dozens of them around cornfields, no worries. Should something go wrong for a windmill; worst case scenario is that thewings plow through the field and might hit someone or something in the vicinity.
In comparison, should something go wrong for a nuke plant; state panic.
Just how are most of these designs planning on transfering the energy to a steam turbine?
That in and of itself isn't a problem. Stating "tabletop fusion isn't going to happen" as fact when you have a hazy idea of what you're talking about is a problem, please refrain in the future.
Would you like the DIY home kit? No mystery, it has been around for some time.
1) Dig a big hole
2) Obtain stock pile of Hydrogen Bombs
3) Drop a bomb into hole and detonate
4) Drop another bomb into hole in time to be detonated by the reaction of the first.
5) Repeat 4.
Viola! A Nuclear Combustion Engine.
BTW, that Big Giant fusion reactor they're building in France to go on line in 2016? 2016! Don't hold your breath. First its Pork. Second it'll likley be dropped for cost overruns, ir. more Pork. And third, even if they managed to finish it, it is only Big Giant so ordinary folk will still lack the means to there own energy production.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I think he meant the end products are lighter than the sum of the inputs. And that would be true, since the energy comes from mass, so there would have to be a decrease in mass (a.k.a. "lighter") in order for energy to be released.
The strong force is why the lighter elements are bound so tightly together - if you ever tried splitting a helium atom you would find it takes a lot of energy to overcome the binding power of the strong force that holds the two protons together, more or less this is the same amount of energy released during hydrogen/hydrogen fusion to produce the helium, giving us conservation of mass & energy.
By the same token the heavy elements have nuclei that are very large and chunky, the distances and diamater of which exceeds the distance over which the strong force can operate, its a very short-range effect. So the electrostatic repulsion between all those positive protons bunched in together comes into play - bits and pieces are repelled sufficiently, break off and are ejected. Hey presto, we have radioactivity, giving us a lighter main atom with a few extra bits ( alpha particles/helium typically ) now drifting around on their own. This is why the larger the atom, the shorter the lifespan before radioactive decay kicks in. The heaviest of the elements known dont exist in nature because they decay to lighter elements nanoseconds after being created.
Until we can shovel matter into controlled singularities in a sustainable way, fusion looks like being the next best thing in the way of scalable and efficient power generation. There is a heck of a lot of deuterium in ordinary sea water, at least in terms of the energy output per unit of fuel. Compare this to the pollution, scarce nature, inefficiencies and political problems of coal, oil and even uranium-based energy production, and fusion is the clear winner.
Yeah, because hydrogen bombs require so much more energy than they put out. Not.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
So when can we expect a finalized product? Say a laptop battery?
nt
Is there really anything unpredictable about fast fission?
More weapons.
That directed plasma stream won't be in a rocket, it'll be in a cannon.
Don't forget, without oil where will we get our precious plastic?
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Imagine what this will mean!
No longer is there any need for Middle East oil. Now we just have to look for countries with boron mines we have to liberate.
"Some energy should have already been spent combining and 'creating' the hydrogen from the Big Bang soup of protons, neutrons and electrons."
This needs some clarification. We are talking about nuclei here, not atoms. A hydrogen nucleus is nothing but a proton (p) and thus is not 'created' from the particles listed in the quote. The fact that protons themselves are bound states of quarks is not very relevant here. The energy scale of the processes discussed here is to low.
"To release that energy you would need to break the nuclear bonds of hydrogen and then it will become helium"
Since hydrogen is just a proton there are no nuclear bonds to break up here.
Here is what happens in the sun. The first step in the suns fusion cycle is actually a weak interaction process:
p + p -> d + e+ + nu
Where d denotes deuterium (pn) and nu a neutrino.
There is more than one continuation of the cycle but the most important one is the following.
d + p -> 3He + photon
3He + 3He -> 4He + p + p
The numbers in front of the He symbol are not multipliers but indicate the isotope. 3He is (ppn) and 4He is (ppnn). This process yields about 26.7 MeV free energy.
The reaction rate of the weak interaction process in the first step is far too low to use this cycle in fusion reactors. That is why one rather tries to use d + 3H -> 4He + n which yields about 17.6 MeV. Where 3H is tritium (pnn). One could also think of d + d -> 3H + p and d + d -> 3He + n but these yield only 4 MeV and 3 MeV, respectivlely.
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
i really dont think this is a new process. i could swear i remember reading about this a looooooooooong time ago in a magazine or a physics book, like at least 5 years ago...maybe more. i think it was a Department or Energy facility that was doing this. either that or i'm experiencing deja vous....which has been happening alot to me lately...weird.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
...and someday we'll be using grapes as fuel!
Of course it will be found that neutrinos in any quantities, kills baby seals. Won't somebody think of the poor baby seals?
...because my battery life sucks now, and having that kind of power would kick ass
Your comment is the first I've heard of the IFR. Googling turns up a bunch of pages that seem to indicate that the waste it does produce has a halflife of 500 years, which still means having to guarantee waste sequestration for thousands of years. Which is a guarantee that we cannot offer. But the design, especially its sodium containment, which means SCRAM-safe failure and cheaper, more reliable casting of fuel loads, does seem much more safe that other nuke plant designs. How come other countries, like France, Germany, etc, haven't switched to this design? Is there an IFR actually running anywhere, so we can see what it's really like to live with one?
--
make install -not war
The proton-boron method using a laser reminds me of colliding beam fusion, which I first heard about in 1997. Interesting thing here is that energy capture occurs electromagnetically using a "decelerator." Read about it at:
4 2/1419?ijkey=A.zNwOzIwyrKA
7 5/307a
http://fusion.ps.uci.edu/beam/introb.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/278/53
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/53
http://www.stormingmedia.us/01/0116/A011653.html
Minor nitpick: as far as I know, the problem really isn't that the super hot plasma would melt the container walls, because the mass of the plasma is really really small (high pressure comes from temperature, not density). The real problem with solid container is that the plasma would rapidly cool down if it could touch container walls, and fusion temperatures could not be reached.
You forgot step 5: PROFIT!!!
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
Helium is chemically inert. Doesn't react with anything. (And I mean anything, not "mostly anything, but it can be catalyze other reactions like we found out the hard way with Freon and other CFCs". Helium is not merely "inert under most circumstances", it really is inert.)
Furthermore, helium is so light that most of it ends up escaping from the atmosphere in a relatively short timeframe. Most of the helium in our baloons was (and is still being) produced in the form of alpha particles from the decay of radioactive elements from the Earth's creation ~4.5 billion years ago.
By "Very Bad", do you mean "dogs and cats sounding like clowns (and not even living together)", because all I'm seeing so far is the mass hysteria.
Uh... if scaling the laser pulse duration down to picoseconds allows one to scale the power down to 10 joules and get fusion events not even dreamed of by the ITER project, then why would you talk of it being "scaled up"?
It seems the next step is to scale down to femtosecond pulses to get the yeild up and the energy input down so you can approach break-even.
Depending on the scalng laws, you could end up with micro optical electronics systems that produce net-positive energy.
A p-B11 rocket engine might look more like a solar array producing a very bright light than a nozzle spewing mach diamonds.
Seastead this.
There are several ways to keep track of this energy (change in rest mass before and after, strength of the nuclear or chemical bonds, etc.). In the end, different configurations have different potential energies, and the difference must come out as kinetic energy .
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Actually What is VERY VERY weird is that at attomic level and below the mass of an object is always slightly less than the sum of the mass of its parts.
Sometimes this can be explained, like the mass of a nutron is less than the mass of the electron and proton that it consists of because the anti-nutreno that is also needed to create a neutron is destroyed along with a msall amount of the other mass to yeild energy.
For Nutron decay the reverse happens. Energy is converted into the extra mass, while net mass is still the same because anti-particles can be considered to have negative mas for this purpose.
Similar sub-subatomic reactions occur as part of nuclear reactions, and even chemical reactions. This is actually a small part of so-called bonding energy.
I like fusion, but it needs to be scaled before it's going to become efficient. A 30billion$ plant could be efficient but there is little point in building plants smaller than that.
.01% of which is perfect for solar systems as it's not in use and would work well with solar systems (Basically desert's as approximately one-third of Earth's land surface is desert but a lot of that is in use.)). That's .01% = 75TWh /day of power or 3TW / h average vs 1.7TW (the average global electric power usage in 2001).
We already have 30+% efficient solar systems that could produce power at around 8c (or less) per kWh under large scale deployment. That's around 777MW / square mile * 5 h / day. The total surface area of the Earth is 197000000 square miles and more than
Not that I think we are going to try and cover 1/1000th of the earth in a solar systems, but I think solar is probably "next best thing in the way of scalable and efficient power generation." Fusion might be 30 - 70 years away, but solar systems are only 2-3 years from coming on strong.
I tried to say that the hydrogen (as an atom that has a nucleus) is already a system that has a tremendous amount of energy pent up as the strong nuclear force in it. The original post seemed to have assumed that hydrogen atoms are just somehow squashed by the gravity then it is that squashing potential energy that is released during fusion. (Much like a mechanical spring that is compressed then it heats up).
Actually everything is just different forms of energy and when they transition from one form to another sometime an extra boost is needed (the gravity in the sun's case perhaps, or the fission charge in an H bomb) to kickstart the transition reaction.
Thanks for clarification, you are right. The plasma wouldn't burn a huge hole in the ground, rather it will destabilize and cool. Anyone that works(ed) on the project TOKAMAK here? By the way, I found this little 'Tokamak' game, it's kind of fun if you like this kind of stuff. here.
G = gravitational constant, is it false positive? what about magnetism's forces?
v = escaping velocity (tangent)
a = acceleration working start (normal).
"F_round + F_working >= F_Gravit." by J.R. Pizarro.
I think this is an extremely distorted viewpoint. --I have met thousands of different people from all walks of life and the, "Magical Hippie" only makes up a tiny, tiny percentage of the people out there, and none of the ones I've met have been politically active. --Usually they're just stoned kids in their teens and early twenties exploring that mode of being, (i.e., being stoned and anti-establishment and talking a lot and doing little). I've always seen that the moment such people become politically active or do something to affect the world, their views are forced by necessity to become much more practical. --As are their concerns. (Working to fight the building of garbage dumps on top of the water source a city drinks from. Complaining about nuke reactors with track records of leaking radioactive toxins into the water supply. Complaining about air pollution, destructive zoning laws, food and drug laws, etc. These are not trivial or foolish things to be concerned about, and yet, such people seem to easily draw ire from ignorant, irrational and selfish conservative knee-jerk thinkers. (A group which, by contrast, I have met many, examples of in the course of my life).
The personality type, "The Magical Hippie" does, however, provide a convenient (albeit largely non-existent) group to complain about if you are ignorant, and enjoy complaining.
I think we CAN manage Earth's resources wisely and we CAN produce the vast energies that will be required for the next stage of human civilization on Earth and we CAN do it without destroying the planet if we just use our heads and rigorously apply the scientific method.
Rigorously applying scientific method, eh?
--It'd be nice if a few scientists actually did this from time to time rather than regularly provide doctored data to placate their fund providers and to avoid being laughed at by a peer group trained to both ridicule and to fear the same.
The number of people who are trigger-happy with the 'Tin Foil Hat' joke on Slashdot is an excellent working example of the fear of ridicule felt by the thinkers of our society, -and their desire to punish others as they have similarly been hurt for having been different back in school. Scientists are perhaps the last people we should expect a full scope of rational thinking from; their emotional triggers and scarring simply goes too deep. Basically, I have found that the moment an idea, -no matter how objectively rational it may be-, once it goes outside the bounds of socially accepted thinking, --and it's important to note that the boundary here is a social one, and not, as is always claimed, an objective or scientific boundary, then the average person shouting 'scientific method' will act like a frightened teen-ager with thin arms and glasses wildly trying to plant abuse and ridicule on others so as to avoid having it land on themselves.
Yes, I agree that we can work to manage energy concerns in a responsible way, but getting angry about a version of environmentalist which doesn't exist makes little sense. --As does placing a lot of faith in a scientific community which has consistently served to further the ends of the corporate fossil fuel power brokers and the military industrial complex via nuclear technology.
There are ways of doing things which do respect life and sanity a great deal more than things have been done thus far. --Why saying so upsets people to such a degree is a fascinating question unto itself.
-FL
Made in Visual Basic with a little bug.
Bah. We're always twenty years from nuclear fusion. We were in the '70s. Is there some kind of conspiracy among physicists to only develop fusion devices that are good for getting grants, but no good for scaling up to commercial power?
There's just one thing that bothers me, though. Why does a Hydrogen Bomb produce far more energy in the fusion phase than is put in during the fission phase? My only guess is that the extra energy is coming from the energy released by the nuclear bonds during the forceful disintegration of the atom. Any physics majors care to chime in?
Err... Maybe because the mass change from H+H=He is higher than neutron+U235=>U236+more neutrons?
BTW, that Big Giant fusion reactor they're building in France to go on line in 2016? 2Re:Home Kit016! Don't hold your breath. First its Pork. Second it'll likley be dropped for cost overruns, ir. more Pork. And third, even if they managed to finish it, it is only Big Giant so ordinary folk will still lack the means to there own energy production.
It's not pork! Apart from the obvious fact that in France it would be "porc", the various conuntries and organisations involved in this actually have a pretty good record on big science projcts: CERN has delivered its major accelerators pretty much on time; various big telescope projects are going well, and the predecessor fusiona lab, JET, near Oxford, has worked really well.
It is true that this approach to fusion power will not scale down to anything less than a multi gigawatt power station in the near future, but then the original steam engines wouldn't scale down to anything less than pumping out a Cornish tin mine, and now we can make them almost too small to see.
Quite right, thanks.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Flash in the pan? Do you see what I did there? Like it?
I'll get my coat.
Be nice, sponsor me: http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk
is to hold up the floating cities.
We are all just people.
You are perfectly right in critisising the concept that stars just release the energy gained in their gravitational collaps.
:)
However, this is really not about atoms. A hydrogen atom is a bound state of a proton and an electron, bound by the electromagnetic force. The energy needed to destroy the atom (i.e. seperating the electron from the proton) is only 13.6 eV. In nuclear reactions we are talking about MeV, a completely different order of magnitude.
Consequently, as long as you consider the proton an elementary particle (which is fine for the energy regime at hand), no energy is stored in a nuclear force field in the hydrogen atom. The energy yield of stellar fusion has a different reason: during the fusion cycle 6 protons are transformed to one 4He plus 2 protons and some lighter particles. The important point is that 4He is a system tightly bound by nuclear forces. This is were the energy comes from, it is just like dropping a rock from a cliff: while the earth and the rock become bound more tightly energy is released from the system.
The important role of the gravitation in stellar fusion, by the way, is not so much the ignition of the fusion -- that, telling from TFA, can be done on a tabletop. The important thing is, that it counterbalances the pressure resulting from the fusion reaction, thereby maintaining the reaction.
Ok, enough lecturing for today
617B3B7F7E7C7D7F00EOF
Perhaps we should be putting more research into ways each and every human can live happily while consuming *less* energy, rather than endeavoring to produce *more*.
Think of it this way: fusion can be used to replace our current sources of energy. Instead of *more* energy, we have *cleaner* energy. There will always be room to use less, but if we can cut down on the ecological burden of the energy we're already using, why not?
Master of Ceremonies Stephen Hawking formally requests that you meet him in the Quake arena to take on the discussions of the universe where it belongs.
Be warned: MC Hawking is a farking Quake master.
AFAIK there has never been an IFR built. This doesn't mean the nuclear community does not know about it. France has the Penix and the Super Penix. But they shut down the Super.
This is about as far as breeder and alternative fuel cycles have gone.
India is working on developing the Thorium cycle via its Candu technology. At this point I do not know how advanced they are. The Thorium cycle on the surface looks like a really good one because Thorium transmuts easily into U233. This is just as good as Pu.
IMHO the biggest reason these reactors have not been built is political. Texas oil would not have been worth very much if there were an advanced viable nuclear industry. Thus it was necessary to launch a combined many faceted campaign to discredit a whole industry. Since radiation can not be seen - Ghosts and mis-information and dis-information work quite well.
That's why I asked about France and Germany. France has, I believe, 40% of its energy produced by fission. They also have gone down the path, and I don't think they're bound by the rules of Texas oil. In fact, their own petro industry was betting pretty heavily on Iraq's return. Which would have been an excellent reason to go with a viable IFR, even before the current catastrophe - the last few years have been a nearly ideal time to build one.
So I wonder why France, with its sophisticated nuke industry, rivalry with American oil companies, and recent disenfranchisement from the Mideast (not to mention its own serious Arab/Muslim terrorism problems), hasn't built IFRs. I'm not sure, but I expect they've built non-IFRs since 1994, when we shut ours down. Maybe they learned more about the downside from their own experience than we've yet to see in the promotional materials.
--
make install -not war
that is assuming you know how long it has been running for... since age determination test "constants" have been shown to be able to change considerably in some situations, we have to start our age determination tests all over again. Yes the past 100 or so years have been wasted... :(
The above Luddite is one of a legion of obstructionists that began as Maoist economic saboteurs. He and his ilk are the principle reason that gasoline is so expensive.
I for one want to see fusion done right and done quickly for another reason. Fusion is the way to space. The first to develope it will have also the most powerful rocket booster in recorded history. You can bet the above usefull fool's Chinese mentors know this and are working as hard as they can to develope this technology. It is called mirror fusion and it does not have to be self supporting in order to confer its benefits. A fission reactor can direct feed to it. It can today be used to build a single stage to space craft similar to a large shuttle ala Star Trek. Such a ship would give its first builder control of space, and is just what the doctor ordered for current Chinese policy. I would venture to bet any amount of money that such an individual on the streets of Beijing mouthing the same half truths and old obstructionist lies and making the same legal, as in lawsuit, moves would have a short, a
very short, life. He, in China, would soon find his true calling making shoes for Nike in a Chinese prison slave labor factory. All the other Chinese there would know him for the one with the deep whip cuts on his back and the muzzle on his mouth and the death sentence hanging over his less than worthless butt. He and others like him are traitors to all mankind and sooner or later will berounded up and liquidated as a class. All it will take is for the price of gasoline to go high enough. Like Winston Churchill was referred to at the beginning of his term.."...in tough times they send for the sons of bitches!".
Now I can replace my car's internal combustion engine. And I'd thought I'd forking out lots of gas money this year.
A steady state fusion rate and power output rate is *NOT* required. We already have net positive fusion based power devices. The problem is, they put out the energy they generate in a tremendous, explosive pulse that so far we cannot harness for any useful purpose but demolition. If we could somehow capture the energy produced by your basic every day H-bomb and convert it to something that is more generally useful, we'd be in business with pulsed thermonuclear generators.
So far, the only method that seems to have any hope of success is to reduce the size of the pulses to something manageable.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Well, that's not entirely true. While the fusion phase does contribute to the output, the secondary fission, is the main source of energy.
U235 is considered "weaponable", because it can be caused to spontaneously fission. This is because it produces enough relatively cold neutrons when a large enough mass is concentrated, to sustain its own fission.
U238 is perfectly fissionable, but it does not produce enough neutrons to sustain its own fission (and requires hot neutrons as well).
But . . . the fusion of a thermonuclear device produces a huge flux of neutrons, which is plenty to fission a large quantity of the U238, which is very abundant as tamper in nuclear devices.
This is actually what produces the great jump in output, so the process is really fission-fusion-fission
You must be new here. this is slashdot 1999 is recent.
Your sig defines identical twins as not human beings...isn't that a little unfair?