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'?"
Wasn't the quality of life in Pre-WWII Nazi Germany relatively high?
Not at all. After WWI ended the germans were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles that severely crippled them economically. It was mainly through the level of dissatisfaction people had with their quality of life (which was caused by the Treaty), that Hitler was able to gain power.
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
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
Don't forget the tons of uranium being pumped into the atmosphere by the coal plants. Coal contains quite a bit of uranium.
There is no way for us to generate more plutoniam or uranium. Once it's gone.. that's it.
Hmmm... How to put this. All plutonium in the universe decayed out to something else about a billion or so years ago. The reason we have it now? Well, there's this thing called breeder reactors. We usually start with uranium and make plutonium. However, there is no reason we can not start with Thorium (of which we will probably never run out of) and work up to uranium. Good luck getting rid of all the fisionables on the planet.
Also, geological processes create uranium. It just takes a really long time.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I don't get any of your calculations. Shouldn't your units be in KWh? And, having asked that, wouldn't a single 75W light bulb left on all the time consume 54KWh/month? I think an average household consumes a LOT more than 20KWh/month. Also, your household estimate may be a bit high -- there might still be 8M people in NYC, but I don't think they each live alone with only a single 75W bulb to keep them lit/warm/company.
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!"
You are confusing KiloWatts with KiloWatthours, 14 KW per month would have no meaning unless you were talking about a rate of change of energy use.
1KWh is another way of saying the transformation of energy into waste heat (or maybe a useful form, but less likely) has occured at a rate equivalent to 1KilloWatt for one hour. The SI unit of energy is the Joule; not the Watt, which is expressed in Joules per second and means the rate of use or transformation of energy.
Just for reference 1KWh = 1000 x 60 x 60 Joules or 3.6MJ
In SOVIET RUSSIA the hot grits profit you!
Everyone knows that the automotive and oil conglomerates have a car that runs on nothing but dreams and sunshine, and they've been keeping it under wraps because they don't dare compromise their energy monopoly. Also, Dick Cheney.
It probably didn't help, though, that the poverty of pre-WWII Germany was imposed from outside. That doesn't tend to develop warm feelings toward your neighbors...
Expensive to develop and deploy with little return means no vested intrest in providing it for industry. To go heavy at fusion right now means they get squeezed from both ends. IE it costs more to research and then implement but they have to charge less than the tech they replace otherwise nobody wants to use it. Its a Chicken or the Egg kind of problem. How do you get cheap plentifull fusion power if it dosn't exist already. More importantly, how do you make money making it happen?
As for why the government hasn't made bigger strides? Hmmm a Bush has been president or VP for 20 of the past 28 years (well by the end of Dubbya's current term that is). Major Oil family in a position to influence or outright determine energy policy for most of 30 years, during which time alternative energy research was limited at best. Coincidence ? You decide.
We could probably get off the middle east oil tit with Fission a hell of a lot faster than Fusion. Such a Shame NIMBY has done such damage to that possibility.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
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.
Not all - below the equivalent of a modern $3000 - $5000/yr per capita a country's life expectancy drops like a rock, whether now or 150 years ago. Above that amount makes almost no difference in life expectancy. Yet even in antiquity, above a certain wealth, modest by today's standards, anyone who made it to the age of seven and didn't birth children or engage in battle had a good chance of living to seventy or more.
There is relative poverty, but there is also absolute povery, where one cannot obtain food, protection from the elements, hygene, or basic medicine. The former hurts, but the latter tortures and kills.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry