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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."
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
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.
Let's assume they can increase efficiency enough orders of magnitude they get much more heat out than they put in. Clearly they won't be able to run the "reactor" at super high temperatures, since it depends on the liquid phase of the water to work. So how will they extract enough electricity out of a relatively small temperature gradient to make the whole thing worthwhile?
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.
PWRs only work if the water is in a liquid state, too ;) Now, pressure may end up being bad here, but still, it's just an issue of how quickly you can draw off heat from the core. Also, since the neutrons contain most of the energy of the reaction, you could have them tend to be absorbed in a different chamber than the core.
The *special* hell.
... 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.
During the first cold fusion flap, back in the 1980s, I went to a talk by a physicist at Stanford who was trying to replicate the experiment. He mentioned that when they first started, they had radiation alarms set up around the equipment, but after a while, they moved those back. They measured neutron levels around twice background on occasion, but realized that people around the experiment were acting as neutron reflectors for background radiation and affecting the results. So the whole experiment was moved into a cube of lead bricks, after which no neutron emissions were observed.
Bear in mind that it's not that hard to generate fusion. There have been fusion lab setups since the 1950s. There are many ways to force large amounts of energy into a small volume and thus create the conditions for small-scale fusion. The hard part is getting out more energy than you put in.
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.