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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."
wtf?
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 place.
Step 3: Wait for the gravitational effects to compress the hydrogen.
Step 4: Enjoy your new self-sustaining fusion reactor as the compressed hydrogen begins to trigger fusion events.
See? Isn't that easy?
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.
The reason why stars work is that they are using fusion as a method of harnessing another energy source in the Universe: Gravity.
As gravity crams the atoms together, eventually the atomic bonds are overcome and some of that gravitational energy is released as high energy particles. That's why tabletop fusion *can't* produce surplus energy.
So if that's the case, why does nuclear fission work? The answer to that is quite simple. The common conception of creating nuclear fission by destroying the atomic bonds is wrong. i.e. We don't "smash" anything to produce energy positive fission. Rather, we take a radioisotope that is already in an unstable condition due to a misbalancing of protons to neutrons, and/or a tremendous atomic weight. We then add particles to those atoms until the atom becomes heavy enough to overcome the atomic bonds. The strong nuclear force holding the atom together is then converted to kinetic energy as the atom disintegrates.
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?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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
Atomic BONDS in FUSION and FISSION?! Please...
- Obtain dilithium
- Set it on fire
Okay! Now you've got your nuclear fusion! Happy? Can we move on to something more difficult please??"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.
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.
..are always nice to be heard from scientists..
now, where's my foil...?
No more I say.
How many times are we going to post this article?
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!
... am still waiting for my fusion powered flying car.
When you're talking about billions of degrees the temperature scale is pretty irrelevant.
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.
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.
Tell me more about this laser-irradiated Borat.
--Pat
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?
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:
So when can we expect a finalized product? Say a laptop battery?
nt
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
Your sig defines identical twins as not human beings...isn't that a little unfair?