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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."
YAMOANF: Yet Another Method Of Achieving Nuclear Fusion
Or in short YANF: Yet Another Nuclear Fusion
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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.
Really? Have you done the equations for how powerful those methods are? Geothermal is probably the most promising, but the others simply don't generate that much juice. For example, the most powerful windmill in existence can climb to about 10 megawatts. In comparison, we've got quite a few nuclear plants up in the Gigawatt range.
Basically, none of these "alternate energy technologies" has sufficient power density to be a replacement for existing powerplant technologies. I realize that many people are wowed by the impressive size of some of the solar and wind farms, but it's very important to put them into perspective. As power density goes, they suck in comparison to a real powerplant. As power production goes, they simply don't have enough power generation area to produce an output similar to that of existing plants.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
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.
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).
Then you need to kick-start the reaction and keep it going until it becomes self-sustainable.
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.
Mr. Kelvin would be dissapointed too because you post isn't the first. Mr. Celsius is already 273.15 posts ahead.
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!
... am still waiting for my fusion powered flying car.
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
When you're talking about billions of degrees the temperature scale is pretty irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Yeah, because hydrogen bombs require so much more energy than they put out. Not.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
And at least one of the devices mentioned, using sonoluminescence, has never been proven to actually produce fusion.
The work done by Taleyarkhan with deuterated acetone is highly disputed and later papers have argued that the neutron release was consistent with random coincidence.
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
The point of anuetronic fusion is that they are *not* planning to transfer the heat to a steam turbine (who the hell wants a steam turbine - that's why current powerstations cost so much to build and maintain - and why they're so inefficient).
In a neutronic reaction such as D + T -> He + n high energy neutrons are transfer their energy to water and a steam turbine takes a little bit of that energy back out and coverts a little bit of what it takes into electricity. This is very bad for the environment as it releases huge amounts of waste heat.
In an aneutronic reaction such as p + B11 (5+) -> 3He (2+) high energy helium ions (alpha radiation) is released. This is a large current (moving charge) which can directly induce a current in a coil.
pB11 reactions don't seem to be expected to acheive ignition (ie become self sustaining), the are expected to be pulsed reactions, where a portion of their output is immediated consumed to prepare and force another reaction. All that is needed then to be a useful power source is break even.
However, p + B11 -> 3He is not the only reaction to occur, but I don't know what consequences to expect from that.
"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.
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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.
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.