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Alternative to Tokamak Fusion Reactor
Sterling D. Allan writes to tell us OpenSourceEnergy is reporting on a "far more feasible and profoundly less expensive approach to hot fusion". Inventor Eric Lerner's focus fusion process uses hydrogen and boron to combine into helium which gives off tremendous energy with a very small material requirement. Lerner's project apparently only requires a few million in capital investment which is a far cry from the $10 billion being spent on the Tokamak fusion project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner
Some simple checks can prevent this sillyness from perpetuating. Bob Park's "What's New" column http://www.bobpark.org/ is an amusing and up to date reference for this kind of thing. Here is what he has to say about the "Integrity Research Institute" (the name alone should have raised a red flag): http://www.searchum.umd.edu/search?q=%22integrity+ research+institute%22&site=&btnG=Search+UM&output= xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&ie=UTF-8&client= UMCP&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=UMCP
The correct response to this article is,
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(a) yes, H-B fusion (aneutronic) is possible, but...
(b) it requires very high temperatures, and suffers from a variety of energy loss mechanisms which make getting usable energy from it difficult. This is similar to when I was in grad-school, and everyone was whispering about Muon-catalyzed fusion, which turned out to be impractical for energy extraction as well.
IANA(N/P)P (i am not a nuclear/plasma physicist), but the papers I skimmed suggest that you could use this method, mixed with a conventional Deuterium/tritium mixture, to get cleaner fusion and better burn rates. Of course, not being a physicist, it's possible that the journals I found the citations in are the physics equivalent of Journal of Pointless Chemistry.
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleU
Probable Translation: Another backyard inventor who can read enough of the literature to be encouraged, but not enough to admit the drawbacks.
Secondary Translation: I canna' change the laws of physics, Captain.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Wow Baldrson this must only be what, the 500th time you've posted this nothing letter here as being something that "blows the doors off" the government's past projects in fusion energy? Goodness, are you perhaps hoping to get a better response here this time than you did when you posted nearly the exact same nuttery to the hyper-racist "Stormfront.org" where you apparently tried to tie the "inhibition of pioneering culture in the US" to..... wait for it.... yep THE JEWS!? Hat's off to you! You truly are a first rate interweb whackjob!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
A teeny bit of fact checking is in order.
The glowing praise in the article comes from the Integrity Research Institute,
which doesn't even have its own domain name: http://users.erols.com/iri/>
The web site lists three directors:
Director 1: (also President and Chairman) Dr. Thomas Valone
Physics, engineering, and teaching background
Sounds good.
Inventer of the Photonic Rejuvenation Energizing Machine and
Immunizing Electrification Radiator
what the fuck?
Director 2: Jacqueline Panting Valone
General Manager of M.A.M.S.I., a representative of several suppliers of
microwave components and subsystems to OEM, military and commercial
companies.
Could have a solid technical background.
Ms. Valone is also a strong advocate of holistic health, including
electromagnetic medicine and is responsible for the Health programs
of our Institute.
Holistic health seems respectable. I am more than my symptoms.
But "electromagnetic medicine?" Give me Maxwells Equations,
not new-agey energy-fields-surround-us.
In her spare time, she volunteered for The Hospice Program of Broward
County where she assisted patients in their transition and helped family
members cope with their loss.
Very important work. She sounds like a good person.
Ms. Valone is a doctorate candidate of Naturopathy at Trinity College of
Natural Health and is certified through the College of Natural Health
Professionals, CNHP.
Never heard of them. What does this have to do with physics?
Director 3: Wendy Nicholas
EDUCATION
2001 Johns Hopkins University Rockville, MD
* Continuing Education student in Telecommunications
May be a wonderful, capable person. Why is she on the board of directors?
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Why is it that slashdot's editorial process is so bad?
* "The Tokamak project" - a tokamak is a type of reactor, not a specific project. The specific project is ITER.
* "Open Source Energy Network". Yeah, that's either A) a prestegious indedpendent journal, or B) a news source that has reviewed such a journal.
Fusion is a very complex topic, and this article doesn't even begin to discuss it. Currently, fusion research projects are divided between the "big guys", such as ITER and NIF, and the "little guys" such as sonofusion, focus fusion, and interial electrostatic confinement. The "little guys" are jealous (somewhat rightfully) that the big-ticket items get funding, and their more long-shot but cheaper concepts don't get the little money that they need.
Lets back up a bit and discuss the basics. The critical forces that we're dealing with are electrostatic force and the strong force. Since you're trying to ram nuclei together, the electrostatic forces between the protons in the nuclei are going to make it incredibly difficult for you. Once you get close enough, however, the strong force (which only acts over short distances) takes over, and dominates. Thus, there is an energy barrier that you have to get over - the coulomb barrier. If your particles aren't moving fast enough, or are angled incorrectly, you just bounce off, or worse.
Worse? Well, we're not just talking about nuclei - there are electrons, too. The longer you spend in the vicinity of electrons, the more likely you are to hit them. A high energy particle that hits an electron wastes its energy as bremsstrahlung. It's also possible to lose energy from the core through synchrotron radiation.
By the numbers, it looks like it'd be almost impossible to do. Thankfully, you have to big things working to help you out. One, particles in the core do not all share the same energy level; in fact, they'll vary by orders of magnitude from each other. So, while most of your core will be well below the required energy level, a few particles will be very energetic. The other thing that helps you out is quantum uncertainty - basically, since the positions can be uncertain, you can effectively tunnel past the coulomb barrier.
Even still, it's an incredibly difficult problem. Stars cheat - they have gravitational confinement, making the problem quite easy to keep a tight, hot core. However, for us, all of the energy of the particles (and new energy released by fusion reactions) is incredibly hard to keep close together.
The energy barrier depends on what reaction your looking at. Dt-Dt fusion is pretty low; so is Dt-T. Fusion involving helium takes a lot more energy, and wonderful fusion methods like B11-P (you can capture almost all of the energy released) take a huge amount of activation energy.
Inertial confinement, like ITER, uses strong magnetic fields and fast-moving plasma. Charged particles moving through a magnetic field experience a force perpendicular to the direction of motion and the magnetic field, called Lorentz Force. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to scale up well; the downside is that scaling up means massive devices. Things like B11-P fusion are really right-out for now because of how much you'd have to scale up. But there's good confidence that it will work.
Inertial electrostatic confinement fusion involves spherical acceleration of ions in a near vaccuum. If they miss colliding with other ions, they just bounce outward then fall back inwards for another pass. There are few electrons in the fuel to waste through bremsstrahlung. The problems are getting density and stopping collisios with the inner coil that attracts the ions to the center. Whether it's possible to overcome is a big question. As a note, these are popular for amateurs to build - see "Farnsworth Fusor". Since the devices are inherently small, they would scale to B11-p fusion.
Focus fusion involves trying to get magnetic vortices that are incredibly intens
"He's a god; it'll take more than one shot." â" Lady Eboshi, Mononoke Hime