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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/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.
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.