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Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility
SR71Blackbird writes "European physicists have put forward a plan for a facility that uses lasers to produce fusion. From the article: 'The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.'"
It's sufficiently urgent that we can't wait for the fusion fairy to visit us. By all means, we should continue research in fusion. It's an exciting field with a lot of potential. But we don't potential so much as a workable energy policy now. We can't base them prototype research facilities that materialize "by the middle of the next decade."
My $0.02
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Nothing for you to see here, please move along.
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It was the Saudis and Iranians! Damn you OPEC!!
1. Laz-erss (and sharks?)
2. Fusion
3. Profit!!!
oil as a fuel, won't out last the decade i think. you think you have high prices in the USA? everyone else is paying 2x 4x as much as you are. consumer demand for cheaper power and transportation will drive the nails in the coffen.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I saw this in Spiderman 2, like, a year ago.
Sounds like someone got funding from combining two of the coolest buzzwords from the 1950s.
-- $G
"However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics."
Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?
(I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
inertial confinement fusion. I'ts not new, but getting better. Most labs are not trying to reach break even point. It's more of a research tool.
And to everyone who has/will ask 'when will these ever get us energy? We've been hearing about fusion for years!'. The new Tokamak being built in France right now is the first one that physicists expect to reach break even point. No other reactors were ever expected to generate more energy than they consumed. They were all for research purposes, to get them to the point they are at now. Probably the same for this new inertial confinement one in Europe.
i love you
Yes, but will there be frickin' sharks?
This sig is false.
The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion, even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that the energy released has a very substantial neutron component. Unlike gamma or beta radiation, neutrons stick to atomic nucleii and change the atoms of say, the reaction chamber walls into radioactive isotopes which in most cases, are actually far "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from fission power plants. Now, you say that you don't change the reactor vessel very often, but with most steel or other possible chamber materials, this bombardment of neutrons also makes the chamber very, very brittle. Now you are faced with the problem of changing and disposing of a very hot pile of material. Much better if you use Deuterium and Helium-3.
..until the Wright brothers built one.
A thirty, fifty, or even seventy-five year delay doesnt mean people should write a technology off!
What makes this different? Well rtfa.
the US National Ignition Facility. The NIF will be used for multiple exercises, however, the devices main roles will be nuclear weapons testing for the United States, and fusion power experiments.
With the latest research and technology, controllable fusion is now only always twenty-nine years away. We're making progress.
It reminds me of downloading a file, where the time to completion stays constant as the file is downloaded because the download speed keeps dropping. Either the file is finally completely downloaded at some point or the system hangs. No matter what it always takes far, far longer than it should have.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
You're exaggerating. Scientists have always been pretty upfront that creating a confined, sustained fusion reaction is an exceptionally difficult problem. The potential payoff is so large that we continue to study it.
What makes this different is that they are building a large test facility for inertially-confined fusion. Magnetically-confined fusion is the more popular approach. The article doesn't talk about the details very much but one of the primary obstacles to inertially-confined fusion are the presence of hydrodynamic instabilities such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov effect. The lasers are directed at a spherical shell containing a deuterium-tritium pellet and are supposed to cause the shell to implode. Manufacturing imperfections result in the RM instability and the less-than-perfect implosion causes the whole thing to fall apart without the deuterium and tritium fusing together. Does anyone know what the status of research on this is? A decade ago, there were still difficulties getting theoretical models of the RM instability to even agree with experiments, which obviously meant that the process of dealing with the instability seemed pretty far off. Are they still having problems with this?
GMD
watch this
Supposedly, they're even hoping (as the name suggests) to cause ignition -- where the process actually becomes self-sustaining (so you'll only need the containment lasers). Even more likely to reach break-even then.
The other somewhat newsworthy aspect about this unit is that it will be a civilian facility, not a weapons facility with a few weeks a year allowed for civilian research (which is, apparently, the case for many of the other fusion units).
I was originally gonna skip reading TFA, then I figured... Given how (in)accurate slashdot headlines are, I've got to presume that there's something non-boring about this 'new' plan.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Where? How? Please post where you got this info...
You're right. A glance around my house reveals that *all* my machines are heavier than air. 50 years ago who'd of thought we be at this point today.
If this method is made public, would it not mean that many (once accuring the necessary equipment), be able to easily whip up Hydrogen Bombs?
I don't know much about the way the Nuclear weapons funnction, besides that Atomic Bomb works with fission, and Hydrongen Bomb uses fusion
(and even less knowledge on the even more powerful forms of the bombs).
But wouldn't various methods for fission and fusion provide for new ways of making these incredibly destructive weapons?
We have a source of unlimited ( well, practically unlimited ) fusion power plant now.
Its called The sun.
Why not work on technologies that use what we got now, instead of wasting it on research that most scientist agree will never realize even a 1:1 power ratio?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...
The problem with AI is that it is constantly being redefined. At one point, a robot that would vaccum your house without you lifting a finger would have been considered an example of AI. Nowdays, hardly anyone is impressed by a Roomba. It used to be that a computer that could beat a human grandmaster at chess would have sufficed as AI. Today, we consider that to be little more than a clever computer algorithm. AI will always be 10+ years away if we keep redefining it to exclude any successes we achieve.
If you are talking about "strong AI", where machines can actually think for themselves and are sentient beings, I don't think you're going to find any reputable scientist claiming that is only 10 years away.
GMD
watch this
err, wasnt meant to be serious, just my lame attempt at making a funny at the slashdot error msg i got when i first clicked the link.
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Here's my impression of the fusion crowd for the last twenty years.
"We're almost there. We only need minor improvements."
Thank you! You've been a wonderful audience.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
1. Blow $4 billion
2. Only build 4 of the 192 lasers
3. Lose entire budget
4. ???
5. Fusion!
but those lasers in that picture look FRICKIN' COOL. I want one.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
I just browsed through the JET website and saw nothing about break even mentioned. Why would something that major not be listed?
is it like this?
Fusion reactions in bombs far exceed "break even."
my 2 cents
lasers? nuclear fusion? what could possibly go wrong..
Cash202:
Read a book
Thank you
NIF was a failure from the start. This is ICF (inertial confinement fusion through capsule ablation) combined with, quite literally, a "big frickin laser" to finish off the job and overcome and instability or asymmetry problems.
I didn't glance at TFA but....
I thought the University of Rochester already had one of these bad boys. Can this new one actually be used for power a town?
This project is hopeless from the go. Unless they plan on using thousands of lasers, they will never get the symmetry available in setups like pulse-powered z-pinches (which can also do fast ignition, such as Sandia National Labs Z-Machine), and lasers are far more inefficient for this purpose.
I'm so glad we stopped floating around before I was born, eh.
My UID is prime... is yours?
why cant we put some sort of probe by the sun that captures the energy given off by the plasma and beam it back to earth as microwaves?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
If perfect spheres are needed, I wonder if it's possible to meld the elements in space - like in the ISS.
Zero G's should result in perfect sphere, but would the return to Earth's gravity warp them?
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
NIF is done for. It will never amount to anything. The most we can hope from it is that they will realize they were screwed from the beginning and donate the 4 lasers they've built to somewhere like Sandia National Labs, to make some single-shot compression videos or 3D views to determine capsule symmetry.
Americans pay about 3 dollars or more right now for gas, the rest of the world has been paying 4-5 dollars a gallon for years now, but now that americans are mad about the high gas prices is anything really getting done. Just shows you how the world markets cannot change without americans changing also.
the difference is that there were heavier than air flyers- BIRDS. the only fusion mechanism we know of that produces net energy is a star.
Only problem is that ISS is not in perfect zero G conditions. Wouldn't micro-gravity conditions as opposed to true zero G still make a difference in manufacturing process of a perfect sphere ?
I see one major problem with this, if it actually works...
How do you make it work on a more-or-less continuous basis, rather than "blow one up, extract energy, reset system"?
I suppose some sort of gravity-feed would work to control the overall rate, if the exact position of the capsule doesn't matter too much, but even then this will still make "little bangs" rather than a continuous stream of energy. Internal combustion engines we grasp, but internal fusion engines? This strikes me as similar to the problem of a space elevator - great idea, if only we had something that could bear that much stress...
How is this new lab different from what these folks are doing?
OMGLASERZPEWPEWPEW!!!
It is a little under $5.00/gal here in Kyoto, Japan, and this is one of the most expensive places in the world. Back when gas was uber-cheap in the states we were paying 1/3 of what a European or Japanese was paying. Remember, however, that their taxes do not scale with the price of gas.
Ok, so lets say we get fusion working perfectly. Say a 50% NET return on the energy in hydrogen. What answers are in the wings for vehicals?
No one is going to give people tritium for plane fuel or tractor fuel.
So how do we use the new clean energy source for portable systems. Burning hydrogen cracked from water comes to mind, but is this really feasible? Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner? For anything?
Are there other denser fuels that we could make with a rich energy source that would be convenient and portable?
And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?
I really would like to see a great energy solution that makes all nations self sufficient. It would be a huge step towards reducing violence. But how does it work for the modern world and all its complicated pieces and processes.
in a multitude of stories. He usually uses the reaction to generate heat to fill an hot air bladder for lift, but I believe he has used it for other purposes as well. That guy was WAAY ahead of his time with a lot of things.
the only fusion mechanism we know of that produces net energy is a star.
Well, there's more of them than there are birds. Besides, hydrogen bombs produce net energy, albeit slightly faster than most of us would chose for domestic use.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
No kidding !
Exactly the same story, years and years ago.
Getting old.
According to nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson, it's harder to create nukes that are smaller rather than larger. Likely they want to use these lasers to develop nuclear "bunker buster" bombs that would require sub-kiloton yields. There are also efforts at reducing the radiation fallout while maintaining the physical blast, so possibly we could have "non-atrocious" super-bombs.
Enquiring minds wish to know.
...
;0)>
More seriously, following in the footsteps of the bird (which last time I checked is heavier than air) people had tried in vain to create a heavier than air flying machine.
Then there's folk like DaVinci.
And of course there's all the heavier than air (non-motorised) flight before the Wrights.
Oh, yeah and the [substantial] anecdotal evidence to suggest that others beat the Wrights to it.
How they laughed
But I agree with the general gist of what you appear to be saying.
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
They've been able to generate nuclear power without some of the damaging side effects.
Isn't this the same thing they're doing with the Z-Machine at Sandia National Laboratories? (I'd post a link, but I'm submitting this from my Sidek!ck II - just google it)
- Posted via Danger HipTop2 / T-Mobile Sidek!ck II -
They must have just seen Spiderman 2 and thought "Ya know, if Doc Ock can do it so can we!"
RTFM? FTFM!!
I'm a little disappointed, I thought Slashdot would be smart enough to know that Europe is not a country. A "European" scientist can be from Portugal or the most remote parts of Siberia.
Get it, Americans... Europe is neither a country, nor a state in the U.S.A.
We got people like this sitting around chatting on Slashdot!
I would bet that Slashdot alone loses this world 1 year of progress for every 10 years of time.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. - Douglas Adams
Bah - I laugh at these foreign scientists. Just wait until the first wave of creationists start graduating from our high schools. Then we'll show them what scientific advancement is all aboout.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Wasn't this method tried over 30 years ago? I worked with a Scientist that worked on the shiva laser system in 1990. This sounds like another revisited money sink, Since they can't get anything to break the unity barrier.
You failed, and ended up looking like someone just looking for a reason to bash someone needlessly.
Oh wait, this is Slashdot. When will Microsoft be blamed?
Laser fusion is complicated and is unpredictable and may never work.
Good for the EUROS if they want to waste their EUROS.
This isn't NEWS. The only NEWS here is that someone in Europe is trying it. Big freaking deal. Berkly and Rochester have been all over this for quite a while now. The only problem is that they haven't actually done any useful experiments yet, the test reactions last milliseconds, and the fuel used and energy released are so small as to be barely discernable.
The insane part of this is that they think 500 million pounds is going to build a meaningful facility. What are they going to return - picowatts? Come on. What's even funnier is that anyone thinks that anyone is Europe is going to get this done quickly. Just aligning the mirrors and getting the timing right takes YEARS. Just ask the folks at Berkley. It's an interesting idea, and the ramifications and implications are exciting, but probably not until we're all pretty darn old.
Most important of all, THIS ISN'T NEWS!
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
is the quote "Shiva Nova is a giant" from a NOVA documentary about Fusion research some 30-odd years ago. Of course, Shiva Nova wasn't going to break even either.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
what i'm wondering is how it ended up getting an insightful moderation...
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Ya, but $2 to $3 dollars of that is applied to taxes to support your welfair state. That argument is such bullshit. I'm sure we'll be in the same boat real soon now.
Many researchers have been able to replicate the Pons/Fleischmann experiment, and apparently SRI, have had some success... yet all we hear about is hot fusion, which appears to be a dead end.
Perhaps if the resources which get diverted to hot fusion, had been invested in low-energy fusion, we would have a workable technology in production now. Shame it was unfairly demonised...
Sounds a lot like Spiderman to me.
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
If you bother to check out the websites of most of the green groups of today, their emphasis has gone off solar and concentrates much more heavily on wind. And there's a very good reason for that. Wind comes somewhat close to cost-competitiveness with non-renewables. Solar is way, way more expensive.
Of course, even if wind or solar were available free it still isn't a suitable replacement for baseload generation. Why? Because storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity is more expensive than generating it with a non-renewable plant. Maybe some miracle energy storage technology will come along (hydrogen is the usual suspect). Slightly more plausibly, when we've all switched to pluggable hybrid cars with big battery packs, we'll have enough storage capacity in the grid to make wind (and solar, if the costs ever come down) workable replacements for non-renewables. But I'm not holding my breath.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Lawrence Livermore has a nice review of their laser fusion projects, Some stadium sized: http://www.llnl.gov/str/September02/September50th. html
Probably the biggest benefit of fusion is no emissions and no long-term radioactive waste. Is this going to be a problem to get the public to accept since the process includes the word "nuclear" or are we going to have to sacrifice 10,000 virgin physicists to appease the hippies?
This won't do much for energy generation, but the Europeans are finally cathing up on fusion bomb research and they are learning the US PR trick of declaring it an "energy technology". There may be hope for those Europeans yet.
Yes exactly and we already had natural examples of working heavier-than-air machines - birds. Its the same situation with fusion - we already have natural examples of energy-surplus self-sustaining fusion reactions (sun/starts).
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
Two agents of the Intergalactic Intelligence Agency (IIA) transferred to the higher planes as an entire solar system was consumed by a black hole this morning.
:-)
Sources from the IIA said they were monitoring a primitive race that lived in the third planet. That race was experimenting with sub-atomic particles trying to achieve sustainable fusion, which we all know can lead to an unstable black hole condition. The agents weren't able to interfere in time to avoid the catastrophe.
---
Measure your age in Hex - it'll make you look younger
Ha Ha Ha.
Fusion "experiments" have been "beginning" for over three decades, to the tune of over $60 billion dollars when last I checked. It will take an enormous amount of power to break even on that -- and every year the bar gets higher. *We're* nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!
If they ever do pass "break-even", all we'll have is hot neutrons, just like the old fission reactors. The plant will cost another $50 billion, and will only last 20 years until it's a pile of radioactive slag, and we need another one.
Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor. It wouldn't cost any $50 billion. Its energy would be extracted electromagnetically, it wouldn't wear out, each small city could could have one, and it wouldn't create a thousand tons of radioactive slag. Of course anything that might actually *work* would be bad for everybody (currently) involved.
Anyway, if it doesn't produce enough neutrons to keep the tritium bombs charged up, what the hell good is it?
Inertial confinement generates huge amounts of neutrons that create large amounts of nuclear waste within the containment vessel. Mostly radioactive carbon isotopes and a mutated enclosure. It least in the old days.
than the recently scaled back US National Ignition Facility? IIRC, this was supposed to use 192 laser beams all focused on a small pellet as well. Don't recall the substance to be used for the pellet though...
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
That was funny. :).
"In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste."
neutron bombardment will produces long-live radioactive isotopses of any material near this device. The neutrons liberated by fusion will be captured by any matter in its path. As this process occurs it causes the material to develop into unstable isotopes.
The main reason for developing fusion is that deuterium is virtually unlimited, unlike fossil and fission fuels.
Yes, and like studying the birds to build an airplane, trying to jump-start a small star in your backyard might not be the way to clean, safe power generation, either.
Sometimes discoveries which seem "right around the corner" linger just out of our reach for hundreds of years, until the right person or group of people has the vision and arrives at the right time to produce something really revolutionary.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And for the rest of us, it's still too slow. I want complete and instantaneous ( A few planks is good enough) energy release. And I want it *now* damnit!
Sig
They'll just have to make it up in volume. ;)
:)
From TFA:
However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics.
This is noticably absent from the article headlines.. I will also point out there are several thousand pefectly working fusion reactors on the planet, and I'd be willing to bet there's an excellent chance one of them is aimed at you sleeping in your bed right now!
The trick is -controlled- fusion, and FWIW, the ball of magic fire in the sky isn't controlled either.
The research is very, very young, and nobody is "Getting Serious" about it yet. Maybe when oil hits $200/bbl.
..don't panic
I want complete and instantaneous energy release.
Is that how you got to be Chrispy?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Just as the Telco industry now provides Internet access and TV programming over an RJ11 cable, so too will the Oil industry change.
Think about it... What is the biggest industry in the world? That would be ENERGY. I would bet my last dollar that rather than Royal Dutch (Shell Oil), BP, or Exxon disappear they would reinvest into other means of providing energy.
It wouldn't be surprised to find the Exxon logo painted on the side of a fusion reactor plant in the near future to be quite honest. It's that, or go out in a puff of smoke along with the last remaining drops of oil on the planet.
Life is not for the lazy.
I've stood within a couple feet of more than one research reactor that used lasers to initiate fusion.
And they used magnetic fields to attempt to contain the resulting plasma.
That was in 1972.
Your ideas intrigue me, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I'm picturing the size of the surge protector I'd need to make sure I don't fry my powersupply when that happenes.
You do NOT want a pure Fision nor Fusion reactor neither is safe, effeciant or controllable, Hybrid breader reactors all the way. Put it this was the fusion starts a reaction, fusion sustaions it, nature keeps it safe and sane, and cleen. Microwafe reactors are also safe- Diamond-laser energy is safe and simple, centriplcel force plants-even safer and simpler whats the worst that'll happen in one of them some idiots get a scared and possible someone dies-that's it nothing more to it then that. So why don't you all just cut that crap out and build a centripical force power plants! We have the materials, meens, and know how for building then,their cheep and simple, just aint all that sexy
Hey this is my uncle's project!
The main reason for developing fusion is that deuterium is virtually unlimited, unlike fossil and fission fuels.
There is about 0.5 ppm (5E-7 fraction) of hydrogen in the atmosphere, and 200 ppm of that 0.5 ppm is deuterium, so there is 100 ppt (1E-10 fraction) of deuterium in the atmosphere.
There is 1.7 ppm (1.7E-6 fraction) of methane in the atmosphere. In principle we could just extract that and burn it as fuel. It's a potent greenhouse gas in its own right, so the CO2 produced by burning it might actually contribute less greenhouse effect than does the methane being extracted, so the overall cycle could be greenhouse neutral to negative.
There is so much atmosphere (total mass 5.1E18 kg) that there is a lot of both methane and deuterium
in it: 9 trillion kg of methane, and 510 million kg of deuterium. Extracting either one, though, would be extremely difficult to do without using more energy than the resulting product would yield. And in the case of deuterium, you still have to isotopically separate the deuterium from the regular hydrogen after extracting the hydrogen.
There is also lots of deuterium in the oceans, of course.
Check my math.
Atmospheric composition
Natural occurrence of deuterium
Total mass of atmosphere
What are you going on about? SNL's Z Machine has been going at 2 Megajoules for quite some time, and ZR will easily achieve 2.7 MJ. Meanwhile, lasers are stuck down in the kJ and hoping for glimpses of even 1 MJ.
The University of Rochester used lasers to heat and compress pellets of fuel in the 1970's.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
I can no longer afford to drink and drive but the liquor store won't deliver. Will hydrogen save me?
However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics.
Strange, the priorities of politicians.
-- Cheers!
I may be stating the obvious here, but there IS a difficulty scale between the two. The stars stick in one piece only because gravity keep them together. How do you do that in a laboratory? Also, it is the incredible pressure created by the gravity that cause the middle of a star to heat up to the point it can start a fusion reaction. If we stick to the comparaison between a flying bird and a fusion reactor, it's kind of easy to see a bird fly and get to some conclusions about it. But it's awfully harder to look inside a star and understand how it works.
when we got Tom Bearden and his 10:1 producing Motionless Electromagnetic Generator!
;)
With this patent pending peer-proven cheap gadget everyone gets cheap unlimited energy from active vacuum!
I too seem to remember hearing about somewhere achieving break even, and I thought it was JET. However, the last time fusion was discussed here I googled for evidence and couldn't find any...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Enough said. By the way, i'm not European.
Right, but what about the next generation that will end up sounding like the lolly-pop guild? Granted, it'd be funny as hell.
Hot Fusion development had already taken 30 years of generous US govt funding and with mere effect. They will need next 25 years of such funding to get this technology useful.
There is another, better way. The Cold Fusion development during past 16 years lead to great improvements. At the present more than 80% of all experiments produce significant amounts of surplus energy. They are planning to build first WORKING PROTOTYPES soon.
Ubelievable?? Just check the main LENR-CANR site for more info: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
The will be international conference held November 27 - December 2, 2005, Shizuoka, Japan: http://iccf12.org/
There are pieces of tech that a lot of people think "this will be available by the middle of the next decade", so what is the point of working on it? Result: the whole decade passes and no-one researches further that tech (*), so it isn't available. That is the real reason we don't have working fusion, clean car fuels (**), flying cars, mach-4 airliners: the ones we have are bad, but they work, so we won't spend money researching others unless we absolutely need to.
(*) ok, some stubborn guys do, but they don't get as much money and they fail to come with a commercializable solution for the problem.
(**) one simple example: here in Brasil, we do have ethanol-powered cars since 1980. They were at a time 70% of our fleet, but commercial juggling with the gas vs. ethanol prices dropped their share to 10%... Nowadays flex-fuel (gas/ethanol) cars are the majority of new cars being sold. Why don't other countries follow this example?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Maybe when oil hits $200/bbl. :-)
You mean December this year? Nice!
note to the humour-impaired:
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
i guess somebody forgot to take his valium today so let me be the first to say:
SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCK GET OFF MY INTERNET FUCKING PSYCHO CUNT FUCK
There are other ways to generate power from the sun then solar panels, which i agree are not efficient at this point.
The sun generates a lot of HEAT, the same stuff we use to generate the power from nuclear and coal plants now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yeah, specially considering that neutron balloons are awfully heavy... :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You're right.. Now if only there was a way to capture pre-generated energy from an already self-sustaining nuclear reaction with a large enough gravity to hold it together... like getting power from the fusion reaction in a star.. perhaps some sort of solar energy, if you will.
and no, I am not the same AC.
What happened in New Orleans could be mitigated in so many ways, and did NOT -- would NOT -- happen in Baby Brother's Jeb Florida.
You lost it. Hope you enjoyed your tantrum.
far removed from being an expert on the subject - just an interested bystander, I remember reading some moths ago about a project in the USA designed for completion in 2007-8 that uses this very technique -- size of a football stadium in California as I remember.
Thats good news for America, because Europeans will be the "beta testers" here. Once the reaction gets out of control (as seen so many times lately) the resulting gamma flash will wipe them out. So Americans will be finally able to conquer the old-lands back.
How does this differ from work at Livermore that has been in progress (sic) since the beginning of recorded time.
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Verdon.html
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Petawatt.html
etc.
AFAIK the biggest wind turbine by now is the "5M" by (German company) Repower. It has a rotor of 126m diameter and does 5MW.
And it's in use already.
http://www.repower.de/index.php?id=66&L=1
k2r
The U.S. Military Research has been experimenting with many methods of fusion (including lasers) for over ten years now. Did an indepth research paper on various fusion technologies in 1997. Europe might be building a commercial laser-fusion facility, but just wanted people to know where the research behind it came from.
If you want to validate this, try reading some trade journals.
Petroleum is produced on earth, not a star, so there can be more produced. But what is the rate of production relative to our rate of consumption? Most people agree that our supply of oil was produced over many millions of years and will be consumed in mere centuries. So at some point in the future our current rate of consumption will become impossible.
How is this new?
http://fsc.lle.rochester.edu/
In service since the 1970s...
Obviously battery powered ground based vehicles come to mind, or H2. Someone has also pointed out that Hydrogen had a greater energy density than aviation fuel you just need highly pressurized tanks - this might be dangerous.
A easy solution would also be to use the power to help with production costs of bio ethanol - this would simultaneously reduce greehouse CO2 gases(much of the CO2 taken from the air would be returned to the ground), and produce a viable fuel for the planes.
..........FULL STOP.
Nobody's dismissing the technologies. What people are laughing at is planning the facilities for such technologies before they're built.
Yes, people were stupid to laugh at the Wright Brothers before their first flight.
But don't you agree that people would have been REALLY stupid to plan out international 'aero-port' facilities based on experiments by Bleriot?
-Styopa
It's about time someone comes up with something. Now make it reality and build some plants.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
As of January 2002 145 Ariane flights had boosted 230 satellites in to orbit.. And I hope you like the European invention called the WWW.
Russia, world's second largest exporter of oil.
Norway, world's third largest exporter of oil.
The middle of the next decade is less than ten years off; much less if we allow the middle to include year 4; still less if we include year 3 in the "middle."
This would mean we would have practical fusion energy before we had a safe and cost-efficient hydrogen generation and distribution system for fuel cells.
That's a pretty aggressive deadline. If realistic, it would definitely be worth shooting for.
Dependence on ground oil (specifically) is not really an environmental problem. It's much more of a political and resource management problem.
What environmental problems are not solved by biodiesel? Most of them. You still have to refine it in the same quantities. You still have to transport it in the same quantities. And you still burn it in the same quantities. The only environmental problem solved by biodiesel is the impact of the drilling rigs, which, in the grand scheme of things, is not a lot.
Increases in efficiency are the best solution to the overall environmental problems associated with internal combustion. Biodiesel helps but it is a much bigger deal in terms of national security than it is environmental.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I too seem to remember hearing about somewhere achieving break even, and I thought it was JET. However, the last time fusion was discussed here I googled for evidence and couldn't find any...
Well, I found something in this paper, but it's just a brief statement without any support.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! We desperately need this... We Americans don't like paying $3/gallon for gas!
- Danny
Break-even has been "just around the corner" for the past 50 years. Assuming we hit break-even within the next few years, will it take another 50 to get 1Mw over break even, or will it progress faster than that? At this rate, we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we get any reasonably useful output.
I'm just imagining having to build something the size of the JET tokamak to produce 1Mw of surplus energy.
* I'm don't want to minimize the importance of psychological milestones. I just don't know if advancement in plasma physics is linear, or if the effort to get increasing amounts of energy out of the system decreases once we achieve break-even.
--- SER
It's funny. I just flew back from a visit to one of aviation's great monuments: Kill-Devil Hills, where the Wright brothers figured out how to build a controllable aircraft and actually flew it.
The interesting thing about the Wright Brothers is that they approached the "aviation problem" with a totally different view of how the Europeans were approaching it. They studied the European data for why it didn't work, rather than why it did. They discovered, for example, that the Lilienthal tables of aerodynamic performance were far more inaccurate than anyone realized.
Perhaps, with all the effort that we're seeing toward research on the "fusion problem" we ought to ask ourselves, why this isn't working, instead of how it can. And then perhaps someone can think of something better than the brute force methods that everyone seems to enjoy funding. The turn of the last century was one where many governments were throwing money at all sorts of outlandish research projects to figure out how to aviate. Socially this feels remarkably similar to the "fusion problem" of today.
OK, so the first "cold fusion" experiments weren't the real thing. How about Sonoluminescence?
And let's not stop there-- there are many other theories about how one might be able to get fusion energy surplusses on a smaller scale. Ultimately, this may be a class of problem like the power to weight ratio that the Wright Brothers noticed.
Where are those Wright Brother types when you need them?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
It is not the middle of the next decade to a fusion power plant. It's that amount of time to the next prototype of a potential method of fusion generation -- with no assurances of break-even let alone energy production.
Big, big difference.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.