Slashdot Mirror
Lightning Fusion And Other Hot News
DumbSwede writes "PhysOrg.com reports that according to calculations by B.M. Kuzhevsky, the head of the neutron research lab at Moscow State University, neutron levels far above normal background levels exist during lightning strikes. While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events. Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect. Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs. This year has also seen the final selection of France for the ITER experimental Fusion Reactor site. With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"
If we were supposed to have invented a good process for fusion reactors, Doc would have showed up by now and shown us his MrFusion plans!
There are always a decent number of promising looking new strains of scientific research, in every field. The trouble is that all of these have a huge washout rate. Each will be developed into usable products over thirty years, if we can discover how to apply what we've learned today in a practical way. The trouble is that the application will always require a whole host of other discoveries, and plenty of tedious implementation research - and if anything goes wrong along the way, the idea will wash out.
All the past discoveries looked just as promising as anything you see today. They didn't pan out yet. Today's look good today. They're worth following up on. But nobody can just tell you if these things will be workable in the end - that's what the years of research are for.
"Why, yes, we are on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be', and we always will be!"
Fusion, eh?
I live in New Zealand, I'd be content with some plain old fission, you bastards don't know how lucky you are.
From now on, whenever there is a thunderstorm; I am going to refer to it as a neutron storm. That just sounds so cool.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Dr. Emmett Brown: No no no, this sucker's electrical, but it requires a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.
So... what the article is saying is that Dr. Brown used the electricity from the lightning strike, instead of plutonium, to generate the nuclear reaction to generate the electricity to power the fluxcapacitor?
It all makes sense now?
Is it worthwhile to limit the advances of potentially destructive sciences like this one or is it an inevitability?
It seems to be that the way to keep the world safe from nuclear (or something else we may now uncover) holocaust is not to limit the technology that will be used as tools, but to increase the quality of life of any civilization desperate enough to commit mass-murder in an organized way.
World Changing - News for Humans, Stuff about our planet
Now 'ol george is gonna commit to a war against the wheather
We really shouldn't spare any resources researching and developing fusion power. It has the potential to solve many of our environmental and energy-scarcity problems in one fell swoop.
The development of fusion is more important than just about any other scientific project, as the abundance of cheap energy would enable other projects. And yet how much are governments/energy companies devoting to it? Less than what we spend securing a limited oil supply in an unstable part of the world. I wish we had more far-sighted, responsible leaders who are interested in more than lining their own pockets or winning the next election (pretty much the same thing).
Where is Nikola Tesla when we need him?
*Now* I understand why we needed to steal Plutonium from the Libyans...
And my answer for you, Zonk, as it frequently is for giant world-changing questions like these, is, "How the hell should I know? I'm a freakin' sysadmin."
Causation can cause correlation
The future can never accurately predicted. Investment in technology is a gamble, but I believe it is a worthwile one. Fusion, like some others have stated, could solve energy problems, powering almost everything (a possibility). I'll never say such and such will happen in a certain time period, because unexpected things always happen. I think I may go offtoppic here a bit, but for example, my mom had this book from the 1950's (I think) titled, "You Will Live on the Moon". It more or less predicted space travel would be like air travel was before 9/11 by the year 2000. Obviously, we're not there yet. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?
Sometimes I comment just to hear myself typing.
Hardware: Lightning Fusion And Other Hot News
Since when is lightning hardware?
Think about it - we're (the U.S.) spending $1 Billion a week to sustain our troops in Iraq. On top of that we spending a fortune here on the 'home front' (LOL) and in other places around the world where we are busy meddling around. Now, take that $52 Billion ++ and spend it on cold fusion research - voila! Five years later nobody needs to be dying for foreign oil anymore.
I know it sounds so crazy - it could actually work! But hey, all those GWB cronies wouldn't be able to buy Hummers for their 18 year old daughters anymore... Looks like we'll have to wait until after we invaded every oil exporting country on the planet... sigh...
(How's that for a trollish Subject line!!)
The theory goes like this:
Environmental lobyists successfully made nuclear power unpopular. They did this by beating up the dangers of accidents, and the difficulties of storing the waste products until we work out what to do with them. 200 years at the outside, not the x million year half-life. By so doing, they stifled the development that would have lead to much safer, more efficient systems. As an example, the pebble bed systems being developed in China.
With nuclear power out of the equation, we had to turn to other areas. This meant the only viable scheme for baseload power generation: Fossil fuels. Mainly coal. No, do not talk about renewables. Solar is far too expensive and inefficient, wind would require so many turbines it would cause climate change, and, while hydro power has proved succesfull in countries that are geographically suitable, just you try damming a river these days!
Replacing nuclear with coal was thought to be a win, as it would be a decade or so before they gathered enough evidence to prove the Greenhouse Effect. So, we continue to mine, ship and burn coal, a procedure which, incidentally, kills Chernobles of miners every year. (maybe I exagerate: figures, anyone?)
So we reach today. CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by the gigatonne, the temperature inexorably rising, and the nuclear solution still a dirty word. Well done, Greenpeace!!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"
Sure! Now it's 25 years away, and always will be.
Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect.
This obviously excludes the editors.
Most people would conclude from the above that Mosaic 3.0 sucks.
That's the same type of bs the US administration has used and is using to promote and play down development of new types of "mini-nukes" which are not physically possible and only serve to disguise their attempt of legalising a program of improving old-fashioned, Cold War style strategical warheads. Every nuclear weapon, i.e. in which fission or fusion occurs, needs to reach a certain critical mass and density of the nuclear material before anything goes off at all. While I'm not a weapons engineer by any means, "concentric shells of beryllium and weapons-grade plutonium -- just a gram or two of each" as TFA describes are nowhere near enough to trigger an uncontrolled chain reaction, a.k.a. nuclear explosion.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
30 years, bah! From now on, fusion is 20 years away, and always will be. Talk about progress!
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
"Anything you focus a huge-ass amount of energy of any kind on a little-bitty tiny amount of pretty much anything, like, the shit blows up and it goes nukular."
[-patiently awaiting Nobel comittee letter-]
David: Yeah. How about Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
David: Later. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.
Joshua: Fine.
*ducks*
The fair contest idea seems to have been picked up around that time by the X-Prize guys and taken to resounding success, for which we should all be grateful. The need for fusion prizes remains.
Seastead this.
For decades now there's been talk that the secret to cheap fusion might be ball lightning. This recent finding would seem to bear that out.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We keep hearing that it takes enormous amounts of energy to initiate fusion... Could lightning be a cost effective way to make fusion mainstream? I've seen videos of people "guiding" lightning by using small rockets... Could you use that energy in a meaningful way?
Last I heard, lightning reaches temperatures approaching that of the sun's surface. If such is the case, then something approaching that process has to occur.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Why not tap the power of lightning directly?
Okay, there will be some engineering issues since pretty much anything that interacts with lightning gets burnt to a crisp, but fusion has some similar technical problems so this isn't totally left field.
(a) how much actual power does lightning provide over, say, the continentaly US?
(b) what kinds of structures could be built/flown to tap into the electric charges in clouds?
FTA:
the same mechanism should also work in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter where thunderstorms are also frequent and sporadic neutron streams should arise there.
Accordly to wikipedia, water in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter are far lower compared to Earth's levels (.002% for Venus and 0.1% for Jupiter), so maybe observations of neutron emissions are not so affected by the "thundery" neutrons like the article proposes.
Reading the article about deuterium at wikipedia, I found a bit strange that there's no known natural process to produce it... maybe some chemistry-geek could comment on that... the article says that there is 10^15 deuterium atoms per cubic centimeter on Earth's atmosphere, considering the 6800:1 ratio when compared to hydrogen...
Is only that 10^15 atoms per cm^3 seems like too much atoms without known origin for me... (other than the big-bang, like the wikipedia article says)
Isn't asking about nuclear fusion on an IT site kind of like asking for formula one driving tips on, well, an IT site? The only correct answer you'll get is "I have no goddam idea."
>> While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the
>> lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events.
> Now 'ol george is gonna commit to a war against the wheather
I guess there's a bit of irony in that Mother Nature could be viewed as lashing out against humans in response to global warming by hurtling hurricanes at oil platforms and refineries.
Maybe... but in that case, you'll just be contributing all that much more to the eventual heat death of the Universe.
Unless they figure out how to decontaminate the fusion chamber after they use a uranium/plutonium starter..
A more useless contribution to the eventual heat death of the universe than this AC post there never was. If /. banned AC, the energy savings resulting from prevented AC posts would certainly make fusion obsolete. And who knows, maybe it would even delay the universe's heat death by a considerable margin.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
If you'd known guys like the guys I've known who've built and operated nuclear plants, you'd realize how lucky we've been there haven't been numerous meltdowns. And nuclear waste disposal is a problem; looked around Hanford lately? But it was simple economics that stalled the nuclear power program. Hydro is cheap. Coal is cheap. And most especially virtually all new power plants built in the past couple decades in the US have been natural gas -- because we've put in a whole bunch of new wells and it has been both cheap and relatively clean-burning (although extraction can really ruin water resources in, say, Wyoming). Nuclear plants can be built more safely now than in the 50s and 60s, but up until just now they haven't been economically competitive with natural gas-fired plants. Industry makes its investments where it can make the best return.
The destruction of natural gas wells and pipelines in the Gulf has now changed that. Yes, there could have been more nuclear plants built meanwhile, if nobody had cared about safety (which is expensive to build in), either in terms of potential catastrophe or radioactive releases. You can call the people who care about standards for such things "environmentalists" -- although in reality most of the restrictions are put there by our government because it by law covers the insurance for nuclear plants, and it doesn't want to be over-exposed to catastrophic loss (either to the plants, or cities downwind). Of course, if the government were sane it would have invested more in levees....
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
We have the technology today to blanket the sunny side of the moon with solar panels and beam "free" energy back to Earth. The problem is that nobody wants to foot the several hundred billion required to make it happen. But just think how different all our lives would be if energy was practically free....
ObBTTF quote: "...the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigowatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning."
Seriously though, there has been some research done about using lightning as an energy source... Namely, the University of Florida has built equipment that attracts lightning, and the results have been pretty impressive. That said, however, they are less than hopeful of using it as a reliable power source.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Ah, but you haven't seen how the Hummer H15 wastes hydrogen at one bottle per mile. The hydrogen fields they found under Cambodia really changed everything...at least for the 15 minutes they remained on the map before the Chinese invaded. But they were a good 15 minutes! Better than dying for oil, now people die for rare gases.
Then there's also the Matrix style human farms set up to gather methane as sponsorted by B&M Baked Beans.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Consensus suggests that the Tunguska event was the result of a comet or meteor, but there is some doubt. Some of the physical evidence suggests something like a nuclear blast occurring, but there is a lack of radioactive materials on the site. Still, it would be interesting if this lightning thing somehow tied in with the event in Siberia almost a century ago.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
In order to use nuclear power in a widespread fashion, we'd relaly have to have fast breeder reactors, to extend the lifetime of our supply of fissionable materials.
The problem is that fast breeder reactors are perfect for making weapons-grade Plutonium too.
So although I very much lament how poorly most people understand nuclear power and how they don't understand how much cleaner it is than any alternative (except solar), there are other impediments too.
I have to say I found it hilarious that North Korea demanded the US build them a light-water reactor. We suck at power reactors. They should ask the French to help them build one of their reactor types instead. Better yet, get the French to make you a pebble-bed reactor.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Boring... :) Or am I missing something?
I assume you mean "Chernobyls". More than that, actually. Coal mine accidents killed about 6000 (six thousands) people in 2004, the enormous majority in China. China is also the main coal supplier of the USA. Is that why coal is considered "safer than nuclear"? Because only some Chinese die?
It should also be noted that coal's carbon structure is a natural trap for heavy elements, especially uranides (thorium mostly), which is why you register a significant radiation level downwind from a coal-burning powered plant. You can wash the combustion output, but then you have to dispose acidic, radioactive sludge. Naaah. See this article.
But most of the pollution is not even coming from coal-burning plants, as explained in this article.. Excerpt: According to Stracher's forthcoming article in the "International Journal of Coal Geology," scientists have determined that coal fires in China consume up to 200 million tons of coal per year. For comparison, coal consumption in the United States during 2000 was just over one billion tons, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Since CO2 is formed by binding two oxygen atoms (molar wight 16) on each carbon atom (molar w. 12), 200 million tons of coal at 80% carbon form about 200* 0.8 * 16 * 2/ 12 = 427 million tons CO2. So when I hear well-meaning but clueless environmentalists worrying about cow farts while ignoring this huge problem, I know that whoever feeds them this disinformation has an agenda.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
MOD THIS PARENT UP!!!!!! NOT THE GP. This one has a very insightful idea. Had I mod points, he'd be modded up.
though I thought the pebble-bed reactor was started by France in Southern Africa. Correct me if I'm wrong, PLEASE.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you wanted to put it that way, a lightning bolt alone has more power than 1.21 Gigawatts.
Seeing as heat, electricity, etc is all measured in watts, thru the amount of heat (second law of thermodynamics) one lightning bolt, (which apparently one bolt of lightning can power NYC for almost one year solid at max consumption) and you assume that per year each household uses approx.
Assume (by most estimates) that each household uses on average ~20 KW per month (with pools, or other power-consuming, lossy devices that may be installed in a house.) Let's do that by NYC's population and estimated power consumption.
NYC population : 8 Million"
20 KW/month per household * 12 Mths/Yr = 240 KWatts per household per year....
240 KWatts per year per household * 8,000,000 (approximately by census) people = 1,920,000,000 KW, which equates to 1,920,000,000,000 watts (1.92 TERAWATTS)
You're kinda far off, there.... by about a thousand times plus. And that's what a lightning bolt is rated at, around 1/3 of it's lowest potential. We've had far worse lightning strikes in other areas of the world.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?
Certainly! That time period is now down to 20 years away and always will be. See what progress we've made?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Good plan, until you account for the fact that the world will end in 2012.
Nice try, though.
Popular Science Magazine, which states that the average household consumes on average 14 KW per month..... I made a larger estimate based upon our standardly-used electronics.
My houehold, according to our power company, uses approximately 16 KW per month (That's assuming you don't run everything 24/7 like most geeks would, I actually turn off my lights/computer/stove/TV/microwave/mini-fridge when not in use.)
In my particular case, my estimate, according to MLGW (Memphis Light, Gas, & Water, which is powered by TVA, a hydroelectric plant, which may make electricity FAR CHEARPER than the region you live in) is still accurate, and Memphis doesn't consume nearly as much power as a heavy metropolitan area such as New York City.
My estimates are still feasible, by the lowest energy-consumption standards in the US. Even among Amish people, whom I've lived among for 14 months. They still use power, they just don't use technology.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yeah, I don't quite know why the question is being asked of /. but anywho, glad it is...
I don't particularly trust anything at all I read on "physorg" unless it is also published somewhere else and this search is not boosting my confidence in the article's validity. Other things which make me doubt the clam VERY VERY MUCH are the fact that lightning has a temperature usually not reported in the literature to be above 40-50,000 Kelvin while virtually all fusion devices (which are in thermal equilibrium, as this would also be the mechanism here presumably unless they are proposing some super exotically weird non-equilibrium mechanism) need to attain temperatures in the MILLIONS of K range to even begin seeing neutrons. The fact that they are also claiming that this explains why they see "100 times the background" levels of neutrons during lightning storms is, I think, bordering on the ridiculous. There is a reason it took us until just 2 years ago to discover that lightning emits x-rays, and that is because uhmmm it involves studying lightning at very close range! Interference effects in sensitive electronic equipment caused by the insanely huge magnetic and electric field pulse very close by are extremely hard to eliminate. Until I read the paper, I'll very highly doubt this neutron/fusion "discovery".
Anyway, I think the following line in the submission needs some factual clarification:
"Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs."
This is a bit of a convoluted misconception. Firstly when NIF (if they ever finish the damn thing) compresses and ignites its DT capsules, they will theoretically produce a gain of something like a maximum of ~50. That is to say, they will release ~50 times more energy than was delivered to them by the lasers which are used to start the reaction and this will result in the emission of a neutron pulse and other thermal and electromagnetic energy in the 10s of megajoules range. This is exactly a replica of a thermonuclear bomb in the lab (without the primary). They ARE "micro-H-bombs", that's the whole idea of the thing. Secondly NIF want's to use uranium and plutonium as reported recently not because they will increase the fusion yield of the micro-bombs but rather because the megabar, megakelvin conditions achievable with NIF will allow the examination of these metals at the conditions which are found at the cores of imploding primaries (and secondary "sparkplugs"). These are called "subcriticals" and they allow the examination of the equation of state" of these metals at energy regimes pertinent to A-bombs without having an actual chain reaction occur.
As for the question "With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'"...
Don't count on it. There are lots of very promising and very very exciting ideas out there, but fusion on an economic (and laboratory; ie. not H-bombs) scale is just damn hard to do. The 30 year rule, sadly, still applies. T
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Financier Roger Babson had a chat with Edison, in which he observed that most of Edison's inventions grew out of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, and posed the question, what area of science did Edison think would be next to yield important technological developments. Edison's answer was, Einstein's theory of gravitation. So Babson founded an institute to encourage research in gravitation (which is still around) (by which I mean the institute; of course gravitation is still around).
At this point it's plain to see Edison was wrong. But if you look at what was known at the time, it was an insightful guess. It's just that, as progress marched on, people discovered reasons why it's going to be very hard to make handy widgets that work based on Einstein's gravity theory -- the primary reason being that, in practical terms, it's so much weaker than EM.
Yes, from now on it will only (perpetually) be 20 years away...
Noise pollution mostly. They make this whup-whup noise, which is very low frequency, travels well and is very annoying.
Honestly though, wind turbines biggest enemy is themselves. Try as they might, it's really difficult to operate them effectively due to maintenance costs and low power output in general.
Wind is perhaps part of the solution, but a small part.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Everyone in my household turns off everything when not in use (this includes our office computer (400 W/Hr usage by power supply draw) our mini fridges (which usually hold nothing at all to begin with, except for me, who freezes drives in a mere silly attempt to make them work again {which, out of the six drives I have frozen, 3 worked, 3 went to hell in a handbasket, not like they weren't already there, but...})
Our actual usage, being careful, resourceful, and knowledgeable (We do run about 10% of our power from solar [water heater, air conditioner VIA a swamp cooler, etc.}) is probably a very small fraction higher than I'm estimating, since our power bill keeps rising every month. However, we're still paying about 1/2 as much as other richer households within 500 feet of our house, and they complain because we get a lower rate (because we use solar power to put energy back into the grid, instead of continually drawing it out.)
So odds are, you *ARE* using (maybe not 60X the electricity, but perhaps 10X {if you used 60x the electricity, in an area like NYC, you'd be broke unless you had millions of dollars}) more electricity than I'm using. Of course, I'm also using solar-powered chargers (Lots of things we have are battery-powered, like wireless headphones, wireless keyboard/mouse, a couple of speakers thanks to a couple batteries and a transceiver, guitar pedals [9 volts each] and more...)
Hell, I get on average 70 MPG with a greascar kit. Start with regular petroleum in diesel form, combust, use heat exchanger from engine to veggie oil tank, heat up veggie oil to make thin enough for combustion, get hellacious gas mileage in comparison to running pure diesel.
This is what the Radical Faeries are all about, man. And I'm one of them. Make way, or drown in the oil you're so dependent upon.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Igor, I think I'll create a human. No... a mechanical being, powered by a mini fusion reactor. All I need is some way to start the fusion process going, then the reaction should be self sustaining. But how am I going to do it...?
Igor, ready the lightning conductor. I hear a thunderstorm.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
... when I get my fucking flying car. And not a moment sooner.
Let's see. You've got your power/energy units mixed up. Watts is the power unit, and to qualiy that in terms of energy used, you need to know time. The convinent unit for our application is the kilo-Watt-hour (kWh), which is just an average of the power applied over an hour. No big deal, but let's try to see what's really going on, because I think your average Watt usage is about an order of magnitude off, just guessing. Personally, I have a mini-machine shop complete with 200 Amp 480 service, welders, compressors, plasma cutters, lights that turn night into day, enough 120V to run the entire block if I wanted and all sorts of other good stuff that I use often, and I don't come close to using 20kW on a consistent basis, or basically ever. I can only use one machine at a time, afterall. Unless I splurge on some good CNC equipment, anyway :D
From UCI, they say that the average home in 1999 used 866kWh/month, it probably hasn't changed drastically. If we call a month 30 days, that's 866/kWh/720 hours. Hours cancel out, we get 866/720kW, or about 1.2kW average over 70 days. With AC and fridges, that seems entirely reasonable, if a bit low. Also, computers rarely used the full rated output of the power supply, so if you're a geek with a bunch, you've got to take that into consideration.
I've had a hard time with finding exactly how much energy is contained in an average lightning bolt, I must admit. I've seen anything from 5,000 Amps at 2,000,000 Volts (which sounds reasonable) over 200 miliseconds to a hundred or a thousand times that (which dosen't very sound reasonable) Watts=Volts*Amps, so my reasonable sounding lightning strike will discharge 10 GigaWatts over 200ms. With 3.6 million miliseconds in an hour and a bit of division, it looks like our bolt will do 2777kWh if entirely captured, which is enough to run our average house for 3 months and some change, not bad. Shame there's no way to capture it.
Truthfully, I have no idea how close that figure is to an average lightning bolt, it seems that most of the numbers out there people just pulled out of the air. I could be off very far either direction, and likely am, for all I know. Nature is pretty fantastic, though, isn't it?
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Remember the links to the past slashdot stories.
If I recall correctly one was dup-ed and one was mentioned three times.
Prepare for the inevitable duping of this story.
It's funnier if you say "dreams and rainbows". Obviously there really are cars that run on sunshine.
Cow Cube
Currently mechanisms for generating fusion consume more energy than they generate through fusion. If someone finds a mechanism for generating fusion that allows for the recovery of enough of the input energy then breakeven could happen sooner rather than later.
As was covered in a recent excellent Physics Today article (http://www.physicstoday.org/pt/vol-58/iss-5/conte nts.html -- unfortunately contents are subscriber-only, but you can read the summary on the contents page; I read the whole article), high energy cosmic rays can play a role in the initiation of lightning strikes. Thus it seems very reasonable to expect the presence of neutrons in the consequent cosmic ray shower, and their presence does not imply anything at all about fusion!
...has many nuclear reactors that are more dangerous than the reactor that was blown by its supervisors - that of Chernobil! Will someone do something about it! No!
sex is better than war!
as seen in global warming (whether human caused or not is not the point here).
the amount of solar energy hitting earth is enormous and is more than we need, the "only" problem is to capture it, either directly with solar panels in deserts, or by tapping its effects:
- water power (sun transports water)
- wind power
i think with the billions needed to add even more energy from space to our system (bad idea) it should be possible to get a significant amount of energy from the earths deserts.
I think energy from fusion is a good thing, but it's naive to think that it will solve environmental or political problems.
What will happen is that people will come to expect what we now consider "abundant" energy from fusion, and they'll go to the limit using that as well, until they hit environmental and engineering limitations.
Environmental and other problems related to energy are psychological and social, and they don't have technological solutions. We need to be satisfied with less than pushing our energy generation capacity to its limits, and that's something we can do even today. In different words, conserve energy.
Star Wars like spaceships will only be available when we get fusion(and small enough reactors also). The major problem we have in space exploration nowadays is fuel. To send something to mercury we need to make a few fly bys, making the trip at leat twice as long as it could be with a direct travel. With fusion power we could even have a ship that could leave earth atmosphere without a launcher. The french fusion plant is planned to operate in about 70 years. If in 70 years it become a reality, it will be a huge generator. To create one the size of a ship maybe another 70 years. So we can say we will be able to travel faster and safer to space by the year 2150. Can't wait for it... :)
...all the fusion takes place at the center of the Sun, which is at millions of degrees, not thousands, and at extraordinary pressures.
So robbak... had these environmental lobbyists not dissuaded the policy makers from using nuclear means instead of coal for our energy needs, we wouldn't be seeing the greenhouse effect as we are today? In comparison to other factors, namely the oil consumption of the world's vehicles, the coal-fueled power plants are in the minority of causes for global warming. Other air-polluting industries unrelated to the energy industry are those producing such materials as cement, iron, steel, and fertilizer. These are major contributors to global warming.
Besides, nuclear power is still alive and well in the US, with most coal and nuclear-powered states averaging a 5-to-3 ratio of the energy created. Others even have nuclear power create more energy for its citizens than coal power does (e.g. Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Vermont). Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/.
Also, it is a benefit well-known by oil companies that the more consumers of oil they have, the more power and wealth they will have. Allowing the emergence of technology that allows a cheaper substitute to these consumers would be detrimental to their position. As is predictable, it is wholly within their interests to quell any such prospects of substitution and to encourage the status quo of rising oil demand. With environmentally healthy fuels being economically barred and oil-based fuels remaining economically entrenched, not to mention the other numerous factors, the idea that environmentalists are the cause of global warming looks pretty damn untrue.
We already have an enormous free fusion reactor called the Sun. We get something like 1 kilowatt per square meter, so why is so little money being invested in ways to exploit it?
How plausible does this sound?
"Scientists at Cambridge University have announced the discovery of modified polyethylene compound which can act as a solar cell with 60% efficiency. The projected cost of the cells is $10 per square metre."
In principle I think something like this is quite possible. The problem that I see is that bugger all money is being spent on solar research. In contrast governments seem happy to spend $10 Billion on Iter (a big fusion torus). Given the enormous potential of solar power, you have to ask yourself why $10 Billion is not being spent on Solar Cell research.
I think the answer lies with big business and the balance of power. As long as the world depends on oil, big oil companies can keep making lots of money, and the localised nature of oil fields enables governments to control them and wield power. In contrast, solar power would be open to lots of smaller companies and the resource, sunlight, is abundant and cannot be controlled by anyone. That's why BPs Solar Division is just a propaganda exercise, they could never make as much money with solar power as they can with oil. Someday though, dirt cheap and highly efficient solar cells will be created and the balance of power will change. Africa for example could become the power house of the world.
We've got this enormous fusion reactor in space belting down tonnes of abundant energy upon us and instead of trying to use it we prefer to kill each other over bits of black grease in a desert. How dumb is that?
Some years back, a physicist from India published a journal paper on this topic. He measured a few excess neutrons occurring during large lightning strikes, calculated the rates ( I think it was related to the naturally occurring amount of deuterium in rainwater ( a VERY tiny amount)). That paper made the point that while a lightning strike might make a few fusions, it's such a small amount that it's main benefit is the paper published about the phenomena. The paper was a letter to Nature, if memory serves.
I don't know if it was environmental lobbyists so much as a fearful public, but the general mood that 'nuclear plants are bad for the environment' definitely has had a negative impact on the environment. I actually studied nuclear fusion in grad school - and left precisely because my own analysis was that it was '30 years away, and always (would) be', and I didn't want to toil my life away pointlessly for 30 years, with the elusive carrot of a commercial fusion plant still on a 30-year-long stick when I retired.
But - one fact I remember learning is that a coal-burning plant releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than a normally-operating fission plant, because of all the naturally-occurring uranium in coal that's released.
This guy's math AND science is bunk, I think. I mean, 14kWh/month would require to not live in your house, or do much of anything at all. If he's comfortable doing that or investing in a solar farm that won't ever realistically pay for itself, that's his thing, but just to run a TV 4 hours a day almost triples 14kWh/month. So he musn't have a fridge, microwave, water heater, cloths washer/dryer, computer, etc.
The house I'm in was built in the 1920's. It had a single 15 amp circuit which ran the fridge, lights and TV, and little else. I guess if one is comfortable living that way, all the more power to them--though not literally...
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Remember the old original "cold fusion" claim. They got money grants from congress by saying "Those physicists are bad-mouthing our discovery only because it was discovered by chemists". So congress showered them with money.
The assorted current claims of cold fusion are just some "monkey-see-monkey-do" attempts at fraud.
Dear Folks:
I posted this news to Clint Seward of Electron Power Systems Home Page http://www.electronpowersystems.com/
here is his reply:
"Hi Erich,
There is another method to producing neutrons that fits my lightning model that I have described to you.
It is well known that electron beams have been used extensively to produce neutrons, above electron energies of 10 MeV, well within the voltages reported in the lightning event. (An Internet search produced several articles that reported this). I do not pretend to have researched this extensively, and do not know the actual target molecules or the process, but it appears plausible from what the papers report, and is consistent with my lightning model.
The proposed method you sent to me is a lot more complex, and I would have to say I can not agree with the article as written without experimental results.
Clint "
For a list of other alternative Fusion players and new nano-solar approaches please see my article : A new Manhattan Project for Clean Energy at http://www.sciscoop.com/main/2
Cheers,
Erich J. Knight
Erich J. Knight
What, do you think we'll generate all the power for the world?
Most reactors would have to be fast breeders, even those outside the US.
But the biggest problem is that wide-spread acceptance of fast breeders for legitimate power-producing purposes would provide great cover for those with ill intentions. Right now, if a country signals an intention to make any fast breeder it's a red flag event.
I'm very pro-nuclear power. But this is a serious issue. Honestly, it'd be less of an issue if we had a reasonable method of handling our own security other than "lets bomb everyone we are a bit nervous about". But we don't have that, and thus the practicality issue looms large.
Things are horrible now. That Bush was able to put forth nuclear energy as a canard (knowing it wouldn't fly) as part of his energy plan to fix energy "shortages" created purely for profit by his buddy Kenny Lay is an indication of how far we are away from acceptance of nuclear energy in the US.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I wonder if greenpeace will act like a corporate and sue me for trademark usage?
That would be ironic.
or how about RAINBOWPEACE (we do not accept anticorpratists MOFOs) would be our slogan
(btw whats with slash acting wierd in firefox/win.... dont they test it on it and only IE?)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I still think that solar power at the personal level would help (especially during power cuts or if you fail to pay bills)
Now if every home had 5kw on their roof, and if all those office towers used semi transparent solar panels, it would be quite usefull.
I guess the key is to SPREAD the source, just like you dont eat only ONE type of food but many many types, so use many types
of power sources. 5kw solar panels, small solar charges for batts/mobiles. Wind power in remote areas for homes to suplement solar power. Giant SOLAR TOWERS (read up on it) in places where other sources are difficult. Super cold water to normal temp differential. Just use the 50 methods in appropriate spaces. Especially in remote towns or tourist spots etc... The more decentralized power is the better. Big cities have to use big plants, but adding solar to each home can help. Making each device more efficient can too, like tvs/vcrs/etc.. with auto shutdown time logic (1am..6am) or IR detectors if no one is in the room etc... Combination of everything can help, but people are just too simple and one one big-bang solution. Again china might help solve it since they NEED massive amounts of power, they might get more desperate for efficiency and generation - which together with their cheap labour will make it worth while.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yes, I did gloss over alot of facts, and, as I stated, it was a trollish title. Still, it trolled up an interesting conversation, which was what I wanted. I believe that many of the replies deserved mod points more than my original post.
Yes, you are right: Climate change wouldn't be stopped by pulling out only electricity generation. Although it is a hugh part of the equation.
US is not the only country where this is happening: I cannot see nuclear energy in Australia. Governments are taking damage on plans to upgrade the only medical/research reactor in the country. Uranium export is also under constant threat from lobyists.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I'll make a prediction here in this forum and two years from now, you can see how accurate I was....tighten your seat belts. Cold fusion, though faced with some technological challenges has now achieved reproducibility on small scales, and some of the effects reported now include tritium (as was announced by Texas A&M in 1990), low amounts of x-rays, gammas, neutrons, betas and even alphas. Scaling these effects up to larger useable amounts will take R&D investment by the federal gov and industry. BUT ..ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEXT EXCITING MIRACLE ?? !!!!!
Prediction: The housing market will crash when folks pull money out to invest in this field within the next two years ...geat ready folks ..seriously