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Bubble Fusion Inquiry Under Wraps
hubie writes "Purdue University launched an investigation last March into the questionable research behavior and actions by Prof. Rusi Taleyarkhan following his controversial claims of achieving bubble fusion. The investigation has completed but the results are being kept secret. The alleged behavior is remeniscent of another tabletop fusion incident from a number of years back.
Coincidentally, Purdue University has just secured Federal money to open up a new energy center. A more cynical person than I might suggest that there is a connection between the two."
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060121/fob7. asp
Fusion reactions take place in the vat because clusters of bubbles form and then violently collapse, explains nuclear engineer and team leader Rusi P. Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. A neutron or another energetic particle triggers a bubble to form in a low-pressure trough of the ultrasound waves, he says. Then, high pressure from the wave crushes the orb to an enormous density and temperature that fuse some atomic nuclei of the bubble's gas.
In layman's terms: You take a speaker, dump it in a vat of (heavy) water, and fire it up. Bubbles are produced by the soundwaves (with temperatures that reach many thousands of degrees in their interior), and hence fusion occurs. Duh!
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To be sure, 'tabletop fusion' is not the sensation here, compact (power-hungry) fusion devices have been used for decades as neutron sources. What's exciting here is the way the researchers claim to achieve 'fusion' and the huge energy savings such methods, if true, could lead to.
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Mod parent up. As odd as it sounds, the poster is pretty much correct. I've tried to do normal sonoluminescence in a lab, and mostly it just doesn't work. Everything needs to be precisely perfect to create the standing waves that cause the bubbles to "implode" and release light, so god only knows how much harder it is to actually cause fusion. Of course, when you do get it perfect and working, it's pretty damned cool. I wouldn't write this one off just yet.
From last semester's Intro to Nuclear and Particle Physics textbook, The Physics of Nuclei and Particles by Richard A. Dunlap, 2004: According to a plot in the book, magnetic confinement projects (tokamaks, stellerators, etc) have just barely entered the thermalized breakeven region. It is not clear from another plot where inertial confinement projects stand, except to say that they are still quite far from the ignition region.
Anyway, all that to say that even if the Purdue claims are correct, it isn't anything to get too excited about, merely yet another technique for producing extremely endothermic fusion.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
About the rest of your post: You seem to be confused about Popper's statements. An assertion of the form "If A, then (every time) B" cannot be proven true by experiment. However, a single experiment in which A is known to have occurred, but B is known not to have occurred, proves that the assertion is false. This is the sort of thing Popper is talking about. Of course, experiment always introduces some error, so we must bring in the ideas of statistics, uncertainty, etc. If a hypothesis says "Under conditions A and B, C will occur D percent of the time", and sufficient experiments are done that the occurence of C is established with a high confidence not to occur D percent of the time, then the hypothesis will be generally rejected by the scientific community. For instance, if C occurs, under conditions A and B, 10% of the time, with a standard deviation of 1%, and theory predicts that it will occur 30% of the time, then it is extremely unlikely that said hypothesis is true. Fleishmann and Pons' explanation for their experimental results boils down to "If you follow our experimental procedures, then cold fusion will occur". AFAIK, they did not assert any rate of occurence, so presumably the rate is close to 100% (if their explanation is true).
So, if your "object floats in the air" hypothesis fails to include the requirements of being structured as a kite, and being sustained by an air current, it is an incorrect hypothesis. Furthermore, if you release the most accurate and detailed accounting that you can of the conditions under which your object floated, and many others recreate the same conditions in their laboratories, but fail to observe the levitation, then your explanation of the phenomenon (presumably based on those conditions) will be called into severe question.
Similarly, the debate was not primarily whether or not room-temperature fusion could happen (it can), but on whether or not Fleischmann and Pons had in fact acheived it. That is, given that their experimental results were correct (which is and has been in quite a bit of doubt, given their unnecessary secrecy in the matter), it is still not demonstrated that their explanation is correct, particularly given the extremely high rate of failure of attempts at verification. Or would you suggest that the large number of experimenters who failed to reproduce F&P's results were under a mass hallucination?
I'm curious as to your field, sir.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Which fusion byproducts were you thinking of? Helium? Not particularly deadly or radioactive. Shielding from the radiation produced during the fusion reaction itself is trivial, and as I said, you don't really get much in the way of dangerous byproducts. d+t fusion gives Helium-4 (perfectly safe), and d+d fusion either gives Helium-3 (again, safe), or tritium. The tritium is radioactive, true. Most of it will likely be consumed in d+t reactions, and whatever is left over (if any) is enormously less problematic that fission byproducts. The halflife is ~12 years, compared to halflives in the thousands or millions of years for fission byproducts. Aneutronic fusion is not necessary. Desirable, perhaps. The aneutronic reactions produce significantly less energy than d+t, but on the other hand, it is much easier to capture and use. But certainly not necessary. And the fuels for neutronic reactions are available in enormously abundant supply. FUD.
Yes. Yes you would think that. For a very good reason. It is very nearly true. The danger is nearly zero (in an accident, the machinery necessary to sustain the plasma would be destroyed very quickly, and the remaining plasma would not last long enough to do nearly any damage at all.), the pollution is nearly zero (see what I said about byproducts and radiation shielding above), and the fuel is nearly inexhaustible (The sun is likely to go nova (thus ending the possiblity of, say, solar power...) before we use up the fusion fuel available in our oceans).
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Experimental protocol.
Fankly who modded that insightful ? It ain't even a good thougth experiment since the protocol would have inside "incredible when I add a piece of paper in such and such form now the piece of wood float in the air for a few second. And if in addition there is such and such wind condition it can stays in air for hours !" that is what experimental protocol are for : to enable other to reproduce under the same condition the experiment.
There are good reason to not ignore negative result in science : because those are NOT failed experiment. They are *RESULTS* in themselves. I do not want to do an ad-hominem, but frankly, Your propention to plaid for and beg to look at positive result more than negative means that you should stay away from any experimental lab.
Negative and positive experimental results are both as important.
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Since I stated that the waste is buried beneath the bedrock, I think it's safe to assume that I understand that it's stored underground ;).
The shielding is a few hundred meters of rock, so it will take a while to decay. And there is plenty of stable rock around the world - don't put the darn thing near a geologically active area. Finally, while bad things can happen with nuclear power, bad things are happening with coal and oil constantly, killing at the very least thousands of people each year - that's just from emissions, not from accidents.
Besides, even if some catastrophe tore open the burial place, we are still talking about heavy solid or liquid substances on the bottom of a hundred-meter chasm. They aren't going to fly out of there on their own, so you can simply reseal the chasm. Naturally you don't want to place a nuclear dumping ground underneath a habitated area, but neither do you want to place any other kind of dumping ground or power plant there.
A hundred meters of solid granite is surprisingly good at keeping water from getting to the surface. Especially if you make the walls of the burial chamber from rustproof steel or some other suitable matter.
Well, since a nuclear-powered rocket has enough raw power to make a powered landing, as opposed to dropping from the orbit like a meteor, and doesn't need to save weight everywhere it can, meaning that it can be built with lots of safety margins everywhere, I'd say that if the shuttle was nuclear-powered, Colombia would have landed safely and been carted to receive repairs - assuming it had been damaged in the first place, since, like I said, a nuclear-powered rocket could have a lot stronger structure - while the crew went to their homes.
Instead, Colombia was chemically-powered, and operating with almost no safety margin, so it blew up as soon as something went wrong, killing everyone onboard and spewing dangerous chemicals over the whole area.
Hmm... A few tens of kilograms of radiactive material, spread over millions of square kilometers. Not healthy, of course, but hardly something to get worried about either. And propably a lot less radiactivity than is released as a byproduct of mining each year, or created in the upper atmosphere by solar radiation, or simply background radiation.
Radiactivity is a natural occurence. Your body also has natural defenses against it. It is only when there's sufficient concentration to overwhelm those defenses when it becomes dangerous. It is good to take precautions if you have a reason to, for example if you are working in a nuclear power plant or using an x-ray machine in a continuous basis; but thinking that a single nuclear reactor is going to cause a significant amount of damage to either the US or the whole world is simply ludicrous.
Or you could simply use some of that increased weight envelope of a nuclear-powered spaceship to put a proper steel casing around the radiactive materials of the engine, keeping them from spreading anywhere. Colombia was broken, not powdered, in the accident.
And finally, you could simply locate the launch site farther from the densely populated areas. Si
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Are you talking about the EV1?
Do a little fucking research and you'll find out exactly what killed that.
One hint: It's exactly what everyone is still focusing on.
The batteries sucked ass. They were such high voltage the company was deathly afraid to let anyone near them, and to keep the weight down so it got what was still an absurdly low range of at most 150 miles (Most people didn't get that much, and that's the second version of the car, the first got 2/3rds that.), the recharger had to be installed in a garage, you couldn't just plug it.
The EV1 worked if you commuted to work in it, if you lived within 40 miles of work. It was absurdly expensive and didn't work anywhere else because of the, say it with me, batteries, and no one had any way around that in 1999.
Solely-battery powered electricity cars do not work, or, at least, they didn't work then. And, incidentally, the idea that GM would spend billions of dollars on research and then kill the project itself, or let someone else kill it, is insane.
And, the fact that there was a waiting list to lease at the time they shut the program down is not that useful, considering that GM lost something like 45,000 on each EV1 it produced and leased.
However, if you want a fucking electric car, well, buy a damn hybird, get conversion to enable the electric only mode and wall charging, and stop bitching. Those cost less than an EV1, which cost about 80,000 to make. And, as an added bonus, if you actually need to drive a useful distance, you can use the gas motor.
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