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'?"

Comments

Your question can't be answered so simply.

[subreality]

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.

[Tackhead]

> 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'?"

"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!"

1.21 Gigawatts!

[xCepheus]

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?

Fusion is the Future

[Fortress]

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).

Uhhh...

[algae]

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?

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."

Environmentalists Caused the Grenhouse Effect

[robbak]

(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!!

Re:Environmentalists Caused the Grenhouse Effect

[geekoid]

I wouldn't say enviromentalist per se, but more of the anti corporateist that took over the large envirmental groups years ago.

The founder of green peace is NOT anti nuclear. How ever he left as it becamme more about stopping corporation, and less about making them become enviromentally friendly. Which nuclear power is.

Frequent Slashdot readers

[Rescate]

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.

Re:End of the World

[AdamWeeden]

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.

The Fusion Prize Legislation

[Baldrson]

Back in 1992 I worked with a number of hot fusion (and "cold fusion") energy entrepreneurs to come up with a set of prizes that they considered a fair contest -- each for a major milestone toward environmentally benign and cheap energy. Although I submitted it to Congress that year and sought the support of a variety of people who had been active in legislation to reform NASA, I didn't have the political traction to make much headway. Robert W. Bussard, one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, submitted this legislation to Congress a few years later along with a letter detailing some rather astounding admissions of subterfuge during the founding of the Tokamak program.

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.

Reminds me of that bash.org quote.

[ikkonoishi]

(Bismarck) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes!!!!
(Bismarck) France is going to house the new nuclear fusion reactor!
(Bismarck) If it suceeds, cheap long term energy. If it fails, BAM! France is gone!
(Bismarck) It's win win!

Caused & Greenhouse Effect

[wytcld]

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....

Re:Caused & Greenhouse Effect

[tbo]

We've had one meltdown in the commercial reactors in the US that was due to not following procedure and about ~30 something things going wrong simultaniously. Radiation released to the public was about the amount you'd get on a couple cross country flights. We don't have a problem with this in the US.

No, we have not had any meltdowns in the US. A meltdown is when the reactor core overheats, and you get molten fissile material burning a hole through the bottom of the reactor.

Three Mile Island was not a meltdown, it was a fairly small (intentional) release of radioactive gas*, done to avoid the possibility of an explosion of hydrogen that operators thought might have been generated by high-temperature steam that was released through a series of other problems and errors. Even if the operators hadn't released that gas, and there had been an explosion, it almost certainly still would not have lead to a meltdown. Unlike reactors designed by Soviet communist fools, American reactors do not operate in or near a regime with positive feedback. Canadian CANDU reactors are even safer, as the moderator required for the reaction to happen (heavy water, or D2O) is also the coolant. If something goes wrong, it boils off, and the reaction stops before anything gets too out of hand. Pebble bed reactors are even safer--as I understand it, they operate in a regime where Doppler broadening at high temperatures decreases the neutron capture cross-section enough to stop the reaction. The point is that Three Mile Island wasn't actually a very dangerous failure, and that it wasn't close to being a meltdown. It was bad, but probably also a worst case for a US reactor.

As others have pointed out, it is true that nuclear is more expensive than natural gas-generated power, however the cost of natural gas power depends primarily on the cost of natural gas (whereas uranium is a small portion of the cost with nuclear power). If you also include a reasonable carbon tax, nuclear can start looking pretty good. It's the only serious non-CO2 producing candidate for baseline electricity production. Wind and solar can effectively be used supplementally, but as a baseline source, you'd have to factor in the cost of storing power for use at night or during cloudy or calm periods, and that's going to be extremely expensive. Most reasonable proponents of wind power will tell you it's not ever going to make up more than 10 or 15% of US power, even in a best case. With solar, you can do some simple calculations based on the solar radiation flux and realize that the land area required for it to replace most or all of our energy needs would be absurd (as in, by a couple decades from now, we'd have to cover an area larger than California with solar). Hydro is great, but there are a fixed number of rivers around to dam, and it's very hard politically. There's no way, for instance, that Hetch Hetchy could be dammed today--in fact, that dam may eventually get removed for environmental reasons.

*the amount of radioactive material released during the Three Mile Island incident was such that, if you were standing immediately outside the power plant's outer fence during the whole thing, you would have received a dose equal to a normal year's worth of background radiation in the US, or about 3 months' worth of background in France. Background radiation varies subtantially by geographic region due to naturally occuring radioactive elements in the soil.

One more thing for the spelling Nazis who were picking on someone for spelling Chernobyl as "Chernoble": since Russia and the Ukraine use a different alphabet than we do, English translations of place names are just transliterations. For some names (such as Chebychev, aka Chebyshev, aka Tchebychev), there are several common English spellings. It may well be the case that Chernoble is simply a less common transliteration. I don't know, and I suspect you don't, either, so give the guy a break.

Coal mining-related deaths

[SysKoll]

So, we continue to mine, ship and burn coal, a procedure which, incidentally, kills Chernobles of miners every year. (maybe I exagerate: figures, anyone?)

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.

hmmm, yeah, doubt it.

[deglr6328]

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