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Ultra-Dense Deuterium Produced
Omomyid was among several readers writing in about the production of microscopic amounts of ultra-dense deuterium by scientists at the University of Gothenberg, in Sweden. A cubic centimeter of the stuff would weigh 287 lbs. (130 kg). UDD is 100,000 times more dense than water, and a million times more dense than deuterium ice, which is a common fuel in laser-ignited fusion projects. The researchers say that, if (big if) the material can be produced in large quantities, it would vastly improve the chances of starting a fusion reaction, as the atoms are much closer together. Such a D-D fusion reaction would be cleaner than one involving highly radioactive tritium. Many outlets have picked up the same press release that Science Daily printed pretty much verbatim (as is their wont); there doesn't seem to be much else about this on the Web. Here's the home page of one of the researchers. The press release gives no hint as to how the UDD was produced. Reader wisebabo asks: "I can easily imagine a material being compressed by some heavy duty diamond anvil to reach this density, the question is: what happens when you let the pressure off? Will it expand (explosively one would presume) back to its original volume?"
Woo-hoo, warp drive, here we come!
Oh, only "cold fusion here we come"? Fine, lets just solve our enrgy crisis then. *kicks rock, wishes for holodeck*
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Sounds like the university of gothenberg should just go walk nibbler.
"I can easily imagine a material being compressed by some heavy duty diamond anvil to reach this density, the question is: what happens when you let the pressure off? Will it expand (explosively one would presume) back to its original volume?"
Simple answer, known by all: Duct Tape.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"Highly Radioactive Tritium" - I'm assuming they meant something concerning the very energetic neutrons produced in D-T fusion. Tritium by itself can't be considered highly radioactive by any stretch of the imagination. They put the stuff in my watch with thin glass for a shield, for Pete's sake!
Imaging putting a little bit of that in ones shoe...a great laugh!
FIRST - there is no claim for an observable amount of matter in the D(-1) state. It isn't "microscopic amounts" - for "microscopic" means "visible in a microscope". Do the math, fellow NBF visionaries: 2.3 picometers ... if it were a lattice compound ... would be about 440^3 units per cubic nanometer, or 440,000^3 (about 85E15 or 85 quadrillion atoms in a cubic micrometer box. Nothing doing. They're measuring the energy (~600eV) spectroscopically, from the FRAGMENTS of the supposed union. This is not a union-of-deuterons lasting nanoseconds, or microseconds, or milliseconds, or seconds. No, these are the fragments that lasted just long enough for the D(-1) state to hold together in a laser beam for ATTOSECONDS. (That's what those little "as" annotations are on their viewgraph).
SECOND, while it is nice to foster the conjecture that such matter IF microscopically attainable, IF stable enought to survives the time-of-flight from source to fusion reactor, IF the energy-cost-of-production is far less than the increased odds (and useful energy return) of the attendant fusion exists ... THEN it is a great and wonderful thing.
THIRD, single D(-1) pseudonucleons may well exist for nanoseconds per KURT9's thesis, but again ... nanoseconds is very much too short for deeply sub-relativistic ballistic particles to traverse a source (the laser-and-"compression" chamber) to the fusion reaction chamber. Even if they only exist as single diatomic particles, lifetimes have to be raised at least into the microseconds. For practical energy production in the reactor proper (let's say, 250 MW thermal), 4.88E20 diatomic Rydberg nucleons would have to be created (assuming 3.23MeV per fusion of D(-1) to get to 4He) ... and remembering that 4He is the least likely product produced.
FOURTH (per last part of Third), the 2D + 2D = 4He reaction is well known to be very improbable in a single step, since there are LOWER ENERGY intermediate products that bleed off the excited spin-state fusion reaction (one of the key 'first principles' of fusion physics). Per the excellent if brief article in WikiPedia,
50% ... D + D = T + p ... D + D = 3He + n
50%
Researching further, D + D = 4He occurs about one in a dozen million fusion reactions nominally.
FIFTH, summing goatse.cx guy's "facts" together and this looks like yet another fruitless (for fusion) avenues of research. There is only hope, and not a shred of evidence that the D(-1) Rydberg CAN be made in 1E20 nucleons/second quantities, no reference to the overall energy-of-formation, no evidence that the diatoms can exist for more than attoseconds, nothing but speculative wishes that such a material holds promise to D+D=4He reactions (which is just an uber-popular topic, anyway). Therefore, it gets a 3 star SnakeOil award, coupled with 2 stars for the actual science, the novelty of the discovery, and the fine department of Physics at Gothenberg for letting these two obviously talented, and quite frankly queer, researchers have their limelight.
So, in summary, I have to say: "Sorry, dude, I just don't think it'll work."
=smudge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Out of curiosity I looked up the density at the center of the sun and got an answer of "150,000 kg/m3 (150 times the density of water on Earth)" which to me is less than "100,000 times more dense than water" So my question then became how does this not spontaneously fuse?
Time to offend someone
There has been a long search for metallic hydrogen, which is supposed to be (once made under high pressure) possibly both stable and superconducting at room temperature.
Given that metallic hydrogen is also supposed to be quite dense, I have to wonder if they haven't made metallic deuterium.
I don't think they could do much better than claim a major breakthrough in Hot Double-D Reactions.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
We're talking about density here. Besides a single atom of helium weighs more (than a single atom of D). It has two protons and two neutrons.
The FA says a 10cm cube, i.e. 1000 cubic centimetres, would weigh 130 tonnes.
you had me at #!
Deuterium + Deuterium = Tritium + Proton (50%) or Helium 3 + Neutron (50%). Must be an unusual definition of "not involving".
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I'm trying to imagine what would happen if you threw a 35000 lb soda can of UDD into the campfire.
each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds.
It's so dense that a single pound of it weighs over 10,000 pounds!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess: Physics!
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If it doesn't move and it should: WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't: duct tape.
No clue here as to production, but possibly in the references below. Anyone have access to these?
"A much denser state exists for deuterium, named D(-1). We call it ultra-dense deuterium. This is the inverse of D(1), and the bond distance is very small, equal to 2.3 pm. Its density is extremely large, >130 kg / cm3, if it can exist as a dense phase. Due to the short bond distance, D-D fusion is expected to take place easily in this material. See Ref. 179 below!"
183. S. Badiei, P. U. Andersson and L. Holmlid, "High-energy Coulomb explosions in ultra-dense deuterium: time-of-flight mass spectrometry with variable energy and flight length". Int. J. Mass Spectrom. 282 (2009) 70-76.
179. S. Badiei, P. U. Andersson and L. Holmlid, "Fusion reactions in high-density hydrogen: a fast route to small-scale fusion?" Int. J. Hydr. Energy 34 (2009) 487-495.
178. L. Holmlid, "Clusters HN+ (N = 4, 6, 12) from condensed atomic hydrogen and deuterium indicating close-packed structures in the desorbed phase at an active catalyst surface". Surf. Sci. 602 (2008) 3381â"3387.
176. S. Badiei and L. Holmlid, "Condensed atomic hydrogen as a possible target in inertial confinement fusion (ICF)". J. Fusion Energ. 27 (2008) 296â"300.
I don't see the necessity for brute force compression. H can be highly compressed while trapped in metal crystal lattice, such as in H saturated palladium. The individual energies are still high but due to being already in close proximity much of the squeezing has already been done. Such a lattice that can then be removed, dissolved, etc. might leave high density H droppings.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Please, please, please don't let them call it deuterium ore .
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You're right -- just think of what a boon this will be to the mining and drilling industries.
Because you know, that's all it's going to be good for. It's dense enough to fall through granite and limestone like they were tissue paper. I'm getting a figure of mechanical pressure that's about twice what hardened steel can take.
Fill a soda can with this stuff and watch it shoot down into the center of the Earth, with nothing you can do to stop it. If it's any consolation, after that it will probably fuse and explode.
I, for one, welcome our new swedish doomsday weapon.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Burn it? It has no electrons, just nuclear particles held together very very tenuously. No electrons means no oxidation means no burning. This is an exotic state of matter whose existence is barely detectable. Too many posts here confuse it with ordinary fuels, of which it is not. It is not even similar to fuels in fission reactors, and as a few posts have pointed out its feasibility as a fusion fuel is not at all clear.
I'm having fun imagining him trying to lift and lightly toss 35 thousand pounds of anything.
Because the addition of a single (or even multiple) neutrons has a negligible effect on the chemical properties of a material. Just because the nucleus has approximately double the mass, doesn't mean it can behave that differently from hydrogen. Case in point: Noble gases. They've got enormous nuclei (especially by comparison to hydrogen and deuterium), but are still gases because they have very weak interactions with nearby atoms.
In short, deuterium is a gas at STP.
That's not to say they can't make UDD, but the pressure/temperature stability of the material is suspect.
The closer you get to the center of the earth, the more mass is above you. After getting about half-way to the center, there would be quite a bit less force pulling you to the middle.
While that would be a bad thing as far as fairness goes, it would still be an improvement over what we have today.
Plus, in the long haul, all it takes is for the tech to miniaturize to the point where you can install it at home and go off the grid. Failing that, if the technology is cheap enough, smaller utilities might be able afford the start up costs and enter the market, which will introduce competition.
That being said, "cold" fusion is very likely a pipe dream. Fusion power generators will almost certainly be inertially or magnetically confined - "hot" fusion in other words. However, since the tech in TFA is applicable to inertial confinement fusion, the cold fusion debate is not applicable here.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Fine, lets just solve our enrgy crisis then. *kicks rock, wishes for holodeck*
If we really wanted to, we could solve it quite easily. There's many centuries of Uranium and Thorium to burn in fission reactors, and nuclear waste is solved technically. (Again, the problem is political.) We haven't taken more than the first step to tapping the potential of wave energy, there's a lot more wind to harness. Solar Thermal could benefit from economies of scale and improved distribution, and there's tremendous potential untapped in the world's deserts.
There's even a market for Orbital Solar Power Satellites -- namely for remote military outposts that would otherwise need to truck in fuel for generators. (An order of magnitude greater cost is acceptable in that case, but this would start the cycle of industrial innovation and reduction of costs from economies of scale, and would lead to widespread Solar Power for civilian use.)
We could stop using fossil fuels right now, from a technical standpoint. It's just that we don't want to, for a variety of economic, political, and superstitious reasons.
Well, hydrogen is a gas at STP, STP being about 250 Kelvin above the boiling point of hydrogen, and while the higher atomic weight of deuterium does have an effect on some of its physical and chemical properties (and in the biological effects of heavy water), it is not so significant that it wouldn't be a gas under standard conditions. The assumed violent expansion has less to do with the normal phase properties of deuterium though, and more with the notion that the unbelievable promiximity of deuterium nuclei suggested here cannot be stable without gigapascals of applied pressure.
Leif Holmid's page claims this material has a bond length of 2.3pm. Picometers. 10^-12 meter. Now, the normal bond length of dihydrogen is about 74pm, so if these claims are true, the spacing between atoms has been squashed down by about a factor of 30. This distance is still too small for the strong interaction to pull the nuclei together- the effective range of the strong force is on the order of a femtometer, or 10^-15 meters. If you do happen to get the nuclei closer (by dumping in more energy), fusion would be expected to occur. Absent that, this means the predominant force at 2.3pm is going to be electrostatic repulsion between protons, which would only presumably be countered by applied force, like pressure from a diamond anvil cell. Take the pressure off, and the deuterium atoms should energetically move to increase their distances.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I'm not sure where you are in the world, so my comment may or may not be applicable. But my general experience with electric companies doesn't suggest they have to compete to stay in business.
In many parts of the world, the local electric company has a monopoly. In other places, there exist cartels (official or otherwise) that avoid competing with each other. In neither of the above cases do prices get driven down by competition.
Doubtlessly some people would blame this on state-sponsorship, and that is part of the problem. A larger issue underneath however is the high cost associated with building a power plant and the infrastructure to connect it to your paying customers.
Competition occurs most readily when start up costs are low, and customers can freely chose which source they want to get their goods and services from. When the barrier to entry is this high, no new companies come into being, and some of the existing companies would never have existed in the first place if they weren't founded or propped up by the local government.
OTOH, cheap fusion would probably drop the bottom out of the energy market, which might be a good thing. Realistically though, fusion won't be cheap until a long time after we have a working power generator.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
If they replace the electrons with muons the nuclei will be much closer together, therefore the matter will be much denser. That's the only way I can imagine this could work.
Running the calculation for our weight yields 101,000 ft/sec., or about 19.2 miles/second.
Except that the Earth's escape velocity (from the Earth's surface) is only 7 mi/sec, so it cannot fall faster than that (into Earth).