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Amateur Scientists Seek Fusion Reaction
ElvaWSJ writes "A small subculture of amateur physicists and science-fiction fans — fewer than 100 worldwide — are building working nuclear-fusion reactors at home. The designs are based on the work of Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television, from the 1960s. Some of these hobbyists hope similar reactors can one day power the planet, but so far they consume more energy than they create."
People do not build the reactors to get energy. One of the reasons they are built is to see a fusion reaction, which is quite impressive. There are some videos on youtube.
Despite the fact that this is a link to a non-technical publication's website, the Farnsworth Fusor is a real fusion device and works basically how they describe it. What it is not, however, is anticipated to ever be a viable power source, and there are significant theoretical hurdles to prevent it from being viable relative to other approaches (and when you make any kind of fusion reactor seem plausible in comparison, you're probably not going anywhere). In my experience, most hobbyists are well aware of this and just enjoy the tinkering.
The primary functions of a fusor are 1) Generate neutrons 2) Look really cool 3) Kill you with extremely high voltages if you screw up.
Solar fusion works by extreme compression due to the gravitational force... and if you were referring to the orbits themselves, it's ridiculously well-established that you can't gain free energy out of a gravitational system.*
*Arapidlyspinningblackholesayswhat?
I don't think anyone building these expects to ever have a net power output from them -- that's not the point. The point is to be able to say you built a fusion reactor, or as others have said to generate isotopes for other experimenting, etc.
IMO, a more important area of amateur and admittedly fringe scientific research around fusion and fusion-like reactions is the several hundred teams that still continue to this day to investigate what the heck is going on with low temperature fusion. Tons of progress is being made in the field, and some reasonable theories are starting to form. There's a lot of unknowns, but helium is regularly produced, neutrons are regularly produced and more interesting from a theoretical standpoint, lots of atoms are changing from one element to another...
Its like the 1700's experimenting with chemistry. Lots of people doing lots of very cool and interesting experiments and getting lots of very interesting results, even if we (humanity, not me personally) still don't quite get it.
IMO, its an aspect of science we miss in the modern world. These days we just assume we understand things pretty well and experimenting is about engineering or proving a theory. Its cool there are still areas of fundamental science experimentation going on where we just don't get what is happening and have no idea what might happen with the next variant.
Except this has nothing to do with violating conservation of energy. Tell the sun you can't get a surplus of energy out of fusion.
Yeah, but "more out than put in" is shorthand here for "more power generation from the fusion than power needed to start and maintain the reaction", not "find a loophole in the laws of thermodynamics"
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
No, no, no. It's not "almost" fusion. It is fusion. It is almost a fusion generator. That doesn't mean fusion isn't occurring. It means that the reaction is not self-sustaining. There's a huge difference. Saying that it isn't fusion is like saying that a match placed in a sealed jar and set ablaze using a laser isn't really fire because it consumes all the oxygen and burns out and there's no way to add more oxygen....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Homemade fusors are not likely to have really dangerous levels of neutron radiation.
The principal danger in fusors is X-Ray radiation. It's produced in generous amounts and can kill you just as good as another types of penetrating radiation.
Right! No plastics, no chemicals, no lubricants !!!
Idiot!
No, no, no. Seriously. It's a limitation of the design, not the idea of a fusion reactor.
Bussard's "whiffleball" reactor design looks promising, and there are a few others which may succeed, but building one of those which will actually generate power is (unfortunately) financially out of the reach of any mere hobbyist.
...but building one of those which will actually generate power is (unfortunately) financially out of the reach of any mere hobbyist.
Right! Which is pre-cise-ly why mere hobbyists were totally unimportant when steam engines were superseded by explosion/electric engines, when electricity superseded town gas, or when heavier-than-air craft superseded dirigibles, or when modern biochemicals/genetics/pharmaceutics took off after the '70s. And to the whole transistor -> chip -> microcompting discontinuity thing.
No 'amateurs' there, no sir-ee. No bycicle mechanics either. Or cofee plantation heirs engineering in Paris. Nooo-sir !
What's more, personal fortunes were much greater and lives-of-leisure more common (and acceptable) in those days than in our own more proletarian and democratic (or board-cratic) era.
So its quite improbable that anyone nowadays will have enough money and free time available to turn these 'hobbies' into 'serious' research. No free time. No wealthy patrons. And resistance is IR^2, damn!, I mean : futile. :)
having said that, what these guys are doing is still important in terms of awareness and getting the good word out. we NEED fusion power. to save us from pollution, global warming, petrodollar funded russian neoimperialism and islamic fundamentalism, etc.
We have plenty of fusion power.
We've got a 1.989e30 kg fusion reactor producing approximately 386 billion billion megawatts of power.
We just don't harness it very efficiently at the moment.
What he is doing is real science. All the time you see arguments that people should believe in Science because it's real and tested, and that you shouldn't believe the bible because it's just a book. But how do many scientists operate? They read stuff in books and believe it. Do they do the experiments themselves to verify the science? Or do they just read in a book about somebody else who did an experiment?
Then you get somebody like this who gets out there and does his own experiments, actually tries things out to see what happens. He's a real scientist. So if you wanna be a scientist, get out there and do some experiments! And if you want to believe the bible, do some bible experiments! Try reading a book, and doing what it says, and see what happens. Real science.
Yes, you are correct about exceeding critical mass, but keep in mind that simply having a supercritical mass is still a long way from having anything that will do anything spectacular like explode. A supercritical mass would be much happier to simply melt itself (and everything it's in contact with) into a molten and highly radioactive goo. It can take a long time for this to happen if the mass is not far above critical, plenty of time to disassemble or disable it.
Not to say it's particularly safe, either, you'll probably die of radiation poisoning not too long afterwards, like the two scientists who accidentally let the "demon core" go supercritical back in the 40s.
Random and weird software I've written.
No work is being done, so therefore no energy consumption is required.
By the same token glue would be producing energy by making two things stick to each other...
MP3 Search Engine
There are some hard limits to what a typical IEC fusion reactor can produce... as the "grid" that encloses the fusion core also tends to absorb some of the particles that are needed to sustain the reaction.
What the IEC (Internal Electrostatic Confinement) reactor does really well is produce a stable neutron source that can be turned on and off with a switch. There are some very useful applications for such a device in terms of nuclear physics research and medical treatments where this would have tremendous value even if you can't reach anything even near a break-even energy production for the device.
For a medial device, it is really nice in terms of being able to have a neutron source that can be turned off, pulled apart for maintenance, and when the equipment is de-commissioned or surplussed you don't need to get deal with radioactive waste disposal. It can also be installed without having to get special permits from the Atomic Energy Commission.
I don't see anything in that link except typical Greenpeace alarmism confounding ridiculously trivial releases of radiation with "millions of litres" of radioactive water. Sure, the water might be slightly radioactive, but so is the carbon-14 in your bones -- what of it? Why don't they give us a calibrated measurement of the radiation in the released waste and put it into perspective relating to other forms of radiation? My guess is because that wouldn't serve to advance their anti-nuke FUD agenda.
Gah!
gravity energy?
Gah!
the energy comes from changing hydrogen into helium. Gravity is not needed for fusion.
Hmm... I wonder which people would prefer to have, 10 square killometers of expensive solar pannels which have to be replaced regularly and block all the light from the ground below them making it useless for much else or a single reactor burning a remarkably clean fuel we have in almost unlimited quantities.
Now look at a float glass plant, a steel continuous casting and rolling mill, or any likely practical fusion design. They simply do not work at small scales, therefore they cannot be developed by cottage industry.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Well, X-rays aren't good for you, true...but nothing is worse than neutrons. It's like the old physics test question - if you have an alpha source, a beta source, a gamma (similar to X-rays) source, and a neutron source, all of similar "intensities", and you can eat one, put one in your pocket, hold one at arm's length, and throw one away...what do you do? You put the alpha source in your pocket, since the cloth in your pants will stop alphas. You hold the beta source at arm's length, since a foot or so of air will stop betas. That leaves the neutron and the gamma...well, you throw away the neutron source, since neutrons will activate and make radioactive any material it is close to, this making more radiation over time. You swallow the gamma, since its range make that just about as bad as the other two alternatives.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.