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Desktop Cold Fusion Reconsidered
Armchair Anarchist writes "Nature.com reports on Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is once again claiming to have achieved ultrasound-induced fusion in deuterium-enriched acetone. Other experts are sceptical, but Taleyarkhan is keen to have other scientists check his results."
Modern Alchemy.
I'll be more interested when either the results are confirmed or one of them gets radiation poisoning. Although potentially safe by nuclear standards fusion should result in a lot more radiation than any of the cold fusion tests have so far. Good ole Mr Fusion is still going to require some serious lead shielding. There have been some intriguing results but by science standards until it can reliably be reproduced it doesn't exist. The problem is it could be a whole new effect they are seeing and not actual fusion. Even if it is if it can't be scaled up it'll wind up a laboratory curiousity and not the savor if civilization.
A byproduct of this research has led him to create the variable velocity bullet. You can read more here: http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventors/a/ve locity_bullet.htm
http://religiousfreaks.com/Here's the most important part of the article: "There is one big problem, however: the experiment doesn't always work, and the group is not sure why." Until they figure out what's going on, the group really hasn't advanced much beyond what is already there.
Also I'm interested in seeing other try to replicate their experiment. That will be the ultimate test as to whether their methods are valid or not.
This isn't cold fusion, it's just a sneaky way of achieving hot fusion without huge x-ray lasers and giant magnets and such.
Bingo. And this is one of 50,000 articles that Slashdot has had on Sonofusion. The long and short of it is, there's lots of light and neutrons when some tiny bubbles pop. Some scientists think it's fusion. If it is fusion (as predicted), there's no current way to make it energy positive. However, it will make a nice desk ornament right next to your Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. (Which is also table-top, BTW.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Every school that discovers tabletop fusion has a Division 1 football team.
There's no current way to make it energy positive
It's currently six orders of magnitude from breakeven.
* The addition of tritium into the mix should automatically make it three orders of efficiency better. In fact, even starting with deuterated acetone, it would eventually breed enough tritium to make a difference.
* There is no reason to believe the current starting conditions (the solution used, the temperature and pressure used, the frequency of the ultrasound, etc) are anywhere close to optimal.
* There is potential for faster than linear scaling. The more efficient it gets, the larger the bubble clusters you have; the shock waves from multiple bubbles in a cluster interact to produce stronger shocks.
* There is potential for criticality in theory, in which neutrons from one reaction seed bubbles at its acoustic anti-nodes at the time in which they're under maximal tension.
So, no, there is no reason for your fatalistic attitude. *Will* it pan out? Who knows, but it is definitely worth investigation, just like the concept of fission criticality was early this century.
The *special* hell.
Is this "Desktop" Cold Fusion like the ENIAC is a Desktop PC?
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Even if it doesn't reach breakeven, it still has weapons potential. This thing gives off neutrons. If it's portable, it could be set up someplace and used to spray neutron radiation in a city. At low levels of efficiency, it would just be a weapon of terror. At high levels, it's a dirty bomb.
Thankfully, one can't simply ask Harry Osborne for some deuterium-enriched acetone. This isn't quite the "Mr. Fusion" of back to the future -- which is a good thing!
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
>>There is potential for faster than linear scaling. The more efficient it gets, the larger the bubble clusters you have; the shock waves from multiple bubbles in a cluster interact to produce stronger shocks.
>>
Well, or they interfere and diminish the shock wave, thus reducing the effect.
Even before getting to any goal of practical power generation, the most important thing in a scientific investigation is to structure it to avoid doubts -- meaning either proving or disproving it completely. There's no dishonour in disproving it, if it helps to clarify what the remaining fusion possibilities are. Dr Taleyarkhan should have specifically monitored the neutron outputs to see if they had any cyclicality that coincided with the bubble oscillation cycle. If you get neutron spikes when the bubbles implode, then that's a very helpful sign consistent with acoustic fusion occurring. Why a big scientist like him didn't do such an obvious thing worries me. But the article says that Putterman et all will be working to duplicate his experiments. Duplication is really the essential thing for proving something. After all, if it only works when Taleyarkhan does it, but not for anybody else, then you know something's wrong.
... and he's a freakin' genius. He taught us very briefly about his work, but was hesitant when I took the class to go into a lot of details because of the pre-publication nature of the work. The TA for the class, Adam Butt, is also a very quick guy. Although I recognize the possibility of fabrication, all the people I know around the project were hesitant to make claims until they had better proof. They are still hesitant to proclaim victory. All things considered, I think this is the most promising energy work since the Manhattan project.
This is true in a pretty strong sense. If it was possible to extract large amounts of energy by inserting pins into effigies of (say) Britney Spears or Tom Delay, and we didn't know why it worked, that wouldn't erase the basic fact that you could get energy out of torturing dolls.
The infuriating thing about "economic" is that it periodically annoints technologies which all Right Thinking Persons know are blasphemous, such as: Windows (compared to Mac OS or Gnu/Linux), or VHS (vs Betamax), or Infix Notation (vs Postfix), or MKS (vs CGS), or Vi (vs. Emacs), or Visual Basic (vs. Lisp), or the Dallas Cowboys (vs. the Green Bay Packers), or GSM (vs. CDMA), or Complex Numbers (vs. Quaternions), or the Hummer (vs. the Prius), or the body image of Kate Moss (vs. that of Scarlett Johansen), or that of Brad Pitt (vs. that of Jack Black), or ABBA (vs. Silkworm), or Old Coke (vs. New Coke); or George Bush (vs. George McGovern).
For all you nerd-kings and nerd-queens out there: ignore "economics" at your peril. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't ignore economics; it just means that you should ignore it at your peril. Occasionally weird things happen, involving (say) quixotically charismatic Finnish grad students. Some of them become cellists http://www.apocalyptica.com/home/, or hackers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds, or radar waveform designers, http://www.eiscat.no/EISCAT/boards/discuss/0081.h
You just never know.
The scientific comunity is more like the Mafia an anything else. The idea of cold fusion is not a theory it is a fact ( this is why helium is minned ). Cold fusion happens every day inside the earth, people just don't know why or how it happens. The real problem is that the scientific community is more like the Mafia, it is not and open minded industry for enlightenment it is more like the Catholic church during Gallileos time. When pons and fleishman published their experiment they essentially threatend all of the very expensive plasma and laser bassed fusion projects and because of this it was shut down, instead of investigating the phenominae of cold fusion it was instantly ostrisized. Plasma and lasers will never work in the arena of fusion and they will just continue to suck up money and resources but the scientific comunity is backing that technowlogy and they will never acknolege any other method of fusion until the money has run dry and they are considered the fools that they are. we should be investigating and trying to replicate what is happening in the earth, but doing so wil kill your carreer.
from the article: " Imploding bubbles, caught on film emitting light. Are they emitting energy too?"
errrrr.....
Who said anything about violating Lawson's criteria? If the sonoluminescent fusion is actually occurring significantly above breakeven, then you've already exceeded Lawson and the critical ignition temperature somewhere! The trick is to make use of that. At that point, it's engineering. Is that engineering going to be easy? There's no guarantee, but the possibility has already inspired folks long before Pons and Fleischman became household names.
Lots of things give off neutrons. They're useful for a controlled nuclear reaction like a power-plant, but not that useful when what you actually need is more pressure than the surface of Jupiter.
I switched topics and you didn't. The second case was an example of what might be done with something that doesn't exceed the breakeven point. Again, think it through. We're not talking about a fusion bomb now, but rather what destruction can be done with a very good source of neutrons. Let's say someone achieved sonoluminescent fusion in a normal pyrex beaker. How close do you want to stand to it?
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....