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A Step Closer To Cheap Nuclear Fusion
ewsnow writes "The Focus Fusion Society reports that the scientists and engineers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics have finally built an operational Dense Plasma Focus device. While still at less than half power, they were able to achieve a pinch on their device. The small company that Eric Lerner started recently gathered enough funding to start a two-year study on the validity of his theory regarding fusion-inducing plasmoids. If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes. In contrast to the billions of dollars spent on Tokamak fusion (think ITER), LPP is conducting their research on a budget around a million dollars. Yet, if it works, it will provide nuclear fusion with much simpler equipment and much less cost. Eric Lerner and Focus Fusion have been discussed on Slashdot before."
Sorry but the reaction "H + B -> 3 He" is nuclear fission -- the fission of boron.
Apparently, he's against cheap power AND cheap food. The poor should starve! That'll solve the problem.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Which is really not all that checkered considering building hydroelectric dams have killed more people than Chernobyl did.
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Folks, can we pretty please think of another name for this stuff? 50 years worth of misinformation is, I fear, holding us back. People here the word "nuclear" and immediately start shitting their pants with fear.
Folks, can you all stop reacting to stories regarding nuclear power on slashdot by falling over at your computers, foaming at the mouth, and shrieking about how the general public are all so stupid that they oppose any use of nuclear power because they're luddites and they're not as scientifically informed as all of us blah blah blah.
There are 104 nuclear reactors in this country. They provide almost 20% of the country's electricity consumption. They are not thronged by those hordes of sign-waving hippies that most of you seem to think are keeping nuclear power down. There have not been any new nuclear plants built in this country in a long time not because of protesters, but because they are insanely and hideously expensive to build. They are for the most part not cost-effective.
There are groups who argue against nuclear power for a variety of reasons, some environmental, some political, and some were formed to protest the operation of specific plants that have a track record of environmental damage. Some of these organizations are led by or advised by nuclear physicists and engineers, who know a hell of a lot more about the technical aspects of nuclear power than 99% of the people reading this.
Which, just as with Inertial Confinemenet Fusion, means they just traded confinement time for Temperature and density.
There's this neat little thing called the triple product which relates to the power output of a fusion plasma.
n*T*tau
n is the number density, T is the temperature and tau is the confinement time. In Tokamaks n is low and T and tau are high. In other fusion schemes tau may be low, meaning they need higher n and T to make up for it. Thus while this particular machine may not need to increase the confinement time, they will then simply have to increase either temperature or number density instead.
An important facet of LPP's research is that they are pursuing aneutronic fusion. This is truly clean nuclear energy. Explained well here. and here. Nuclear Power without Nuclear Waste: It's Closer Than You Think
Nuclear fusion has the potential to generate power without the radioactive waste of nuclear fission, but that depends on which atoms you decide to fuse. Conventional fusion approaches work with deuterium and tritium, while focus fusion works with hydrogen and boron. When a boron-11 atom fuses with a hydrogen atom the result is three helium atoms and energy, but no radioactive waste. This is because: the fuel (boron and hydrogen) is not radioactive, the reaction product (helium) is not radioactive, and the reaction releases no neutrons (it's "aneutronic").
If I remember correctly from seeing watching the tech talk on youtube about a year or so ago, the idea is not to produce a continuous, stable fusion reaction, but to produce an unstable reaction that lasts for only a moment. By creating reactions many times per second, substantial amounts of energy are produced. (Hopefully more than is needed to initiate the reactions in the first place.) The device is in some ways similar to a spark plug.
Let's I am going to cut your break lines in your car, and rig the throttle so that it goes to full and stays there. i will then call it a test to see and call what happens an accident.
Chernobyl had it's safety systems bypassed, and then had the reactor put into a dangerous configuration which ran out of control since the safety systems were bypassed. Fact is very few nuclear reactors use the type of reactor that this can be done with. Also Chernobyl was 4 reactors and at least until recently the 3 that were undamaged were still outputting power for the region. Not to mention that American reactors, have a secondary containment shell around them something the chernobyl reactors lacked.
To avoid t happening again all one has to do is use an american or chinese reactor that is designed to turn the reaction off as it fails, instead of requiring a second stage to actually force the reaction to stop.
yes there is more than one kind of nuclear reactor. Some are safer than others. Some are designed so that they only produce power under certain situations and turn themselves off when those aren't present.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You're miseducated about nuclear to the point of hilarity.
Some point on your comments:
- "Lots of waste" - Jimmy Carter's ban on reprocessing means that we produce lots of waste. If we allowed reprocessing, we could take the stuff out of the ground, burn it to the point where there is no energy left in it, and put it back within 50 years.
- "Containment issues" - Huh? If you reduce the amount of waste through reprocessing (see above) and glassify the rest, there is no issue.
- "50-100 years of uranium" - completely wrong. We have 100 years worth at current economic recovery levels. Because the fuel is such a minor part of the total cost equation of a plant, we can sustain a 1000x increase in the cost of uranium and it'll still mean we should use the fuel. Combine thorium breeder reactors, and we have something like 10,000 years of energy assuming 5% demand growth per year.
- "have to mine a mountain" - The coal the US burns for power has more available energy in the uranium & thorium deposits within the coal than can be obtained by burning the coal. It doesn't take mountains to mine for coal.
Seriously, do some reading that didn't come from Greenpeace.