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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."
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.
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.
Why did you bother making this post? This is in the original topic, fleecebrain.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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!
Warning, we have a clueless environmentalist on the loose!
Kidding aside, as I like to help he planet I live on stay green, I see absolutely nothing wrong with nuclear energy in either form, fission or fusion. They yield a hell of a lot more power than any of the other solutions, as you could (in theory) extract a thousand years worth of power out of just one of the rods we're currently using, but fail to due so out of the now genuine concerns of nuclear power plant terrorism, ad nauseum.
What we need to do is take one of those old "Areas" out west, designate it as dangerous area, build the powerplant below ground, and have it produce energy enough for the nation. Transport the energy as far as you can with power lines, microwave transmissions if you could figure out how not to kill us with it, hydrogen power, gravitational pumps, etc.
(the above is partially a joke.. I know that power plant would be ridiculously huge, I know that power could never be routed economically that amount of distance, etc).
At least nuclear power keeps us off the need for oils for anything other than lubrication, and we can generate lubrications through synthetic processes now. Hell, there are a few places on earth where all of their oil comes from a synthetic oil opeation (I'm sure someone could post the wikipedia link).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
It's also wrong. The pyroelectric technique for making fusion may well be scalable to a desktop size, but a petawatt laser is not something you can fit on a kitchen bench!
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.