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Piston-Powered Nuclear Fusion
katarn writes "General Fusion is a startup proposing they can create commercially viable fusion using acoustic shock waves, triggered by 220 precisely controlled pneumatic pistons. Their approach is based on a US Naval research concept called 'Linus' and old research done by General Atomics. They feel we now have the high-speed, digital processing capable of pulling off this feat, where decades ago the technology was not available. I think we can hold off on the 'vaporware' claims for a bit; everyone is aware of the horrible track record for turning fusion concepts into reality, but they don't claim to be the first with the idea or that there are not substantial challenges in the way. If nothing else, it is a fascinating concept."
Los Alamos National Laboratory has further details on this type of fusion, and longtime LANL researcher Ronald Kirkpatrick did an external assessment (PDF) of General Fusion's plans. Popular Science had a lengthy story about the company a while back. The reason they're back in the headlines now is that they've secured enough funding to begin work on a prototype reactor.
If the government did research that proved it is possible... Why aren't they following up on it? I'll believe it when I see it.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
I mean, come on, this is just begging for some steam punk artwork!
Soon everyone will be asking hey.. Does that reactor run Fusex?
I think you get the point
Skimmed the article, they're planing to do with pistons what would be done explosives in a normal nuclear bomb.
Wouldn't it be funny if it worked?
...with the fission component replaced by good old fashioned pistons? I bet it sounds great. There has certainly been a lot of modelling in this direction.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Colonel Fission is pissed and has vowed to crush General Fusion's puny attempts at creating nuclear energy!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
There's been some modest interest in actively stabilized fusion for a while, but this is the first mechanical scheme.
The basic problem with fusion reactors is that the plasmas aren't stable. Most work to date involves trying to come up with some geometry that produces an inherently stable plasma. So far, nothing works, although some geometries almost work. But it's not that hard to build a small machine that has an unstable plasma. The original Stellerator, in 1951, did that.
The instabilities occur on the order of milliseconds, not microseconds or nanoseconds. That's slow enough that some kind of active stabilization scheme to nudge the instabilities back in line might work. Something with a large number of sensors and actuators. But I'd been expecting electrostatic deflection plates or magnets, not physical pistons.
The research team's other concept, which created fusion by enticing atoms with footballs only to pull them all away at the last second, was named 'Lucy'.
I am become
You could attach four smart mechanical arms to someone's brain stem (with an inhibitor chip of course). Those extra arms could make the millisecond adjustments to keep the instabilities in check. I have to admit this sounds familiar ...
Perhaps if the D-T reactor does really well they can redesign it to handle a fuel composed of hydrogen ions (protons, in other words) and Boron-11 ions. The products of this reaction are helium-4 ions, which are not radioactive and do not induce radioactivity in their containment vessel if they are captured electrically. Electrical capture also avoids the losses associated with converting heat to electricity.
I really hope General Fusion gets this to work, but if I had any money, my money would be on EMC2 Corp, which is working on inertial electrostatic fusion. This or this should get you started on a search for more information.
I wonder if this is related to the suspected fusion that occurs during ultrasound induced cavitation.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Startups, by their very nature, do not succeed on a bet that the technology will be invented. Venture capitalists do not support fairytale wishes.
Startups use existing, proven technology and package it in new ways to serve a need of the consumer. Startups are about commercializing a technology, not inventing it.
What startup does breakthrough research? None.
Research is the luxury of universities (with infinite time horizons) and monopolists like Microsoft .
They're not going to stabilize the plasma at all, if I understand this right (IANANP). It's a pulse fusion model: put your hydrogen in the middle, surround with a working fluid that they refer to as "liquid metal" (made of lead + lithium), fire off pistons to make a pressure wave in the liquid metal and make a burst of fusion in the middle, generating heat. This makes the molten lead even hotter, and it's circulated through a heat exchanger. The cool part, I thought, was that the lead also absorbs radiation so the casing and equipment doesn't fall apart after a few months because the neutron flux made it brittle. That's a neat trick.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Perhaps this is a better link for Polywell Fusion.
I don't know about their fusion reactor, but as far as web servers go that startup appears to be way ahead of LANL.
Well, it looks like they're finally going to hammer out fusion power.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
1. A bit too colorful and garrulous website for a honest poor startup.
2. Butt-ugly font at that.
3. Relocation to Canada will be required. Are you kidding me?!!!
"General Atomics" Sounds like a company from a 1950's Robert Heinlein novel.
But that's never going to fit on a DeLorean. Why don't these guys ever plan ahead?
that the Batmobile had a 220-cylinder engine?
It builds on work done during the 1980s by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, based on a concept called Linus
... does it run Linux ?
Life is complex, with real and imaginary parts.
I've lived in the area for a long time, and never heard a good story about the VSE (RIP 1999), it's remains, but not the lingering stench, since composted into the CDNX.
Wikipedia just provided me with a funny story about the VSE I didn't know, but find all too typical.
The history of the exchange's index provides a standard case example of large errors arising from seemingly innocuous floating point calculations. The index was initialized at 1000 and subsequently updated and truncated to three decimal places on each trade. The accumulated truncations led to an erroneous loss of around 20 points per day. Over the weekend of November 25-28 1983, the error was corrected, raising the value of the index from its Friday closing figure of 524.811 to 1098.892
Are these the same people who are proposing to solve the fusion problem with 220 synchronized penises? Good god, I hope not.
For the record, here's what $500m typically buys you in British Columbia.
Fast Ferry Scandal
Amazing, just eight hours ago, a local newspaper is reporting that these vessels have been flipped for $20m.
PacifiCat ferries resold overseas
The Washington Marine Group sold the three ferries the company bought from B.C. Ferries for $19.8 million, to luxury yacht builder Abu Dhabi Mar.
Four cents on the dollar. That beats the old VSE hands down. Vancouver has a world-class ethnic cuisine, has enjoyed some decent success in video games and film production, but has a terrible track record with anything that floats.
Ballard Power being one of the more buoyant exceptions. I just did a search on "Ballard Power profit" and was pleasantly surprised to get a hit.
Ballard Power reports modest profit in Q2
I suppose if General Slammer raises $500m to build the commercial scale reactor, they'll use our excellent BC shipyards to fabricate them. We're good. We can weld aluminum into structures less valuable than the original metal.
While I've never met a lumberjack I didn't like on a personal level, I have to say as voting collective, they're dumb as stumps. We inevitably get the government we deserve. Our big project always make work, but rarely make money.
In rural areas of BC, it's easy to spot the people with jobs at the local mill or the local mine: they've got more equity sitting in the driveway than in their shit-box house (4x4 trucks, boats, campers, skidoos, jet-skis, ATVs, etc.) Big nature, eh? You can't govern in this province without earning this vote.
We do have some nice mountains. Vancouver is planning a party to show this off. You might have heard of it. I think the plan is to lose a lot of money proving we're world class and shrewd at business.
The website looks just like a startup's website to me. The copy has been written by the MD (or the MD's marketing friend) and the layout is exactly what you get from someone technical who can do html but does their best to minimise their contact with it. The fonts in particular are using the "verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" list straight out of "the manual" and the layout is a dead simple table layout copied from before everyone got conned into trying to do all the layout using CSS.
As for 3, I imagine it's got something to do with the US having a sue happy population with stupid laws about anything with the word nuclear in it. You know like Nuclear magnetic resonance scanner ...
Maybe we should just move all companies and their fusion experiments to one, single 'fusion science park', with each building next to each other in a ring. We then use large bulldozers to smash all the buildings towards the centre at the same time and see what happens?
It's an idea? No?
AT&ROFLMAO
FTA : "half used to create steam that spins a turbine for power generation"
Why do we still pursue solutions that end up relying on 19th century technology?
It's like a space ship's hyperdrive being powered by coal. Even Douglas Adams wouldn't have put that in a story.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Plus, if they blow up a sizable part of Canada, who cares? :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"I think we can hold off on the 'vaporware' claims ..."
Wouldn't this be plasmaware?
In other news, Naval research has noted ongoing changes in dolphin behaviour, six days after Linus Torvalds shouted at Alan Cox.
All plasmas are in a non-equilibrium thermodynamic state. Different configurations just have different dissipative mechanisms, many of the most important ones poorly understood for typical magnetic confinement experiments. I used to be a plasma physicist, and got out after realizing that the anomalous transport made you something like 600x off in your theory predictions, and if you dumped in all the possible corrections theorists had imagined up to that time (never mind the conditions for most of these were in conflict with each other) you still wound up a factor of 50x off.
If you wish to look into this you will find the problem is the Boltzmann equation--Boltzmann is simply wrong with his invariant measures for phase space in the case of non-equilibrium physics (hyperbolic measures are required then). Foundations of statistical mechanics stuff, nasty math, etc. Plasma physics was pretty hopeless 20 years ago and probably still is, unless you have "gravitational confinement" like the stars or build things big enough (ITER) that the losses are offset by enough gain. The laser fusion process can be fast enough to stay ahead of the losses with a smaller system than the magnetic confinement stuff (ITER), but would at that time still have to be large enough to supply half the North American continent with power.
A series of financial shock waves squeezed my retirement plan into the size of a helium atom, so I don't see why sound waves can't do the same for a couple of deuterium atoms.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Nice to see that Piston finally gets the recognition it desserves!
{{.sig}}
This reminds me of bumper stickers from the `70s. "Fusion Power by 1990". I'm not saying that this is more hand waving to mesmerize investors into another ten years of fruitless research, but...the track record for fusion power research is not that great.
The NIMBY crowd would likely have reason to fear this one. There is lethal explosive potential. Even assuming that safety to an acceptable level enough not to blow up the neighbourhood could be maintained, can anyone imagine how loud this thing would be? 200+ pistons powerful enough to enable fusion calibrated to pop every second would have to make such a hell raising sound that you would likely hear it a kilometre away. Although it may make for a great rave, I guess there might be visuals as well.
"Somebody described it as a thermonuclear diesel engine," Laberge says, perhaps undervaluing a potentially awesome marketing phrase. "We compress the fuel. It burns."
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel would be proud! Really, what human with a Y chomosome wouldn't want to drive a big-rig with a freakin Thermonuclear Diesel Engine!? Steampunk, but with 3 orders of magnitude more available enthalpy! We're talkin locomotive to the stars, here!
I instantly thought steampunk too. Now you've got an image in my head of a master engineer with steampunk goggles pulling a lever, custom brass components whirring and chugging, and then a train silently roaring across the frame, occluding the stars, and disappearing in the distance toward Jupiter.
Uh, I think so, Brain, but I don't think the octopus would be very happy with it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Only problem is, you need an atomic bomb to start (ignite) the engine every morning...
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- aqk
F U
Shades of the old anime Galaxy Express 999, repurposed as the equally obscure laserdisc game Freedom Fighter
There's a lot of really difficult issues with this one that they seem to be politely sweeping under the rug. First of all, they have to pre-heat this reactor core material to get it into liquid form. If the core is mostly made of lead, with a melting point of around 600 K or 330 C, then that takes a heck of a lot of heat. It's also pretty dangerous and difficult to contain that within a huge ensemble of actuating pistons. I'm not really sure how they plan on containing it so nicely, but it's not going to be a piece of cake. Second of all, they plan on compressing this liquid core with mechanical pistons? This is pretty incredible. Water, for example, is generally assumed to be incompressible, because it is so difficult to get it to decrease its volume under pressure. I could be mistaken, but I would assume that lead is also practically incompressible. So if they are relying on liquid lead compression, then their pistons will have to be enormously powerful and well balanced. That's no doubt why they seek to use so many pistons, but still it seems like it will be a massive engineering difficulty. It could be that they don't rely on compressing the liquid lead, and instead, they are just using the lead as a vehicle to transmit the acoustic compression wave. However, that's still pretty damn difficult because the lead is so dense and heavy and the pistons will have to move so fast that it will still act locally incompressible, to some degree. This is more speculation on my part, here. Finally, they also need to spin up all this reactor liquid metal, which seems like it will also be extremely difficult. There's no easy way to spin up some massive spherical tank of 600 K, heavy as hell metal, surrounded by a huge number of actuating pistons. Maybe they plan on using something clever like spinning the liquid up through some electrodynamic interaction, but this definitely won't be trivial, either.