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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."
The idea is interesting- creating a self confining toroid of plasma instead of relying solely on external magnetic containment but from what I've seen of the "tech" it looks to be unfortunately the work of crackpots. Don't get me wrong, I really hope that they actually succeed in doing what they're claiming they can but I sincerely doubt it.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to halt growth in most biological systems it to balance supply and demand.
Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Hitting any resource barrier is painful. Wars happen, things die. Right now, we're living in a blessed time of growth and relatively little competition for resources. Sure there are a few spats, but it's not an all out war for survival.
Ever seen the movie "Soylent Green"? That's the image that comes to mind if we "fix" the energy problem. Billions of people with enough to eat, but no room to move.
Agreed. Every joker who builds a farnsworth fusor in his basement thinks he is going to be producing commercial power some time next year, and when they make a noise about this, and idiots with money buy into their promises of more for less, it can take funding from genuine research. When you are doing something that is inherently slow, costly, and prone to overruns, you've constantly got some bullshit artist nipping at your heels claiming they can do the same for less money, in less time, with big fucking bells and whistles on.
I'm involved in a cubesat project, and we recently had to explain why we were spending 100k on a launch when some random jokers on the internet with new-age mysticism and off-the-shelf amateur rocket motors claimed to be able to do the same for 10k "some time next year".
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
When two or more isotopes fuse together it is fusion, neutrons are not isotopes of anything.
By that reasoning Uranium + neutron is fusion because you're combining a neutron with something not specifically breaking Uranium by its self.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
nonsense. The public is afraid because of two reactor accidents; the first one was caused in large part because the reactor in question was little more advanced than the graphite/uranium pile we used in the 40's and that the reactor's safety mechanisms and proper procedure were ignored by a quota happy communist state. The second was contained. The incident at three mile island was also caused by ignoring the safety mechanisms in the reactor *again*. You want an example of an industry with a checkered past? Try Coal for once. The number of people killed mining coal and all the mercury, uranium and thorium release not to mention that it's fraking up our atmosphere and climate with excess CO2 and you're worried about nuclear energy? Where the only problems with nuclear power involved two incidents with 30 and 40 year old reactor designs where even then didn't come close to the kill score that coal has. Not even an order of magnitude.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Imagine owning a swimming pool with porous walls. In order to use it, we either have to build a new swimming pool with non-porous walls (or hack it somehow), or constantly fill it up with more water. Which makes more sense? Do we have a water efficiency problem, or a water shortage? To improve the analogy a bit, let's say that we live in a very dry area and get new water from an aquifer.
Energy efficiency vs energy shortage is analogous. And when these ultimately short term methods of energy production are exhausted, the poor will die in droves.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You may want to take a closer look at this one then - they don't require any higher confinement times because they're setting this up like a piston not a turbine. It creates fusion in a microsecond pulse, the field collapses and then they start all over again. You set the sucker up to rapid fire (or line them up in series with one powering the generation of the field on the next) and you're in business.
Now of course we need to see if they can take that final step, but so far they're close enough to their predictions that I'd be willing to invest some money in these guys (assuming I had enough to invest...).
Cheap energy like nuclear fusion is much more than social justice. It means no more CO2 emissions from coal power, no more oil dependency from undemocratic countries, it means hydroelectric cars for everybody, cheap desalination and therefore cheap fresh water and irrigation. Energy is everything. Once we get this done, it might actually save the planet.
Both you and the GP should go watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760# . Eric Lerner presented at Google, presumably looking for funding a couple of years ago. I've watched it a few times - very interesting stuff.
This one http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#, by the now-deceased Dr Robert Bussard, is also very interesting
as he was involved in nuclear research for over 50 years. He jokes that the Russian gave us the Tokamak to make sure we'd never get fusion.
"100 billion stars in the sky and not one is toroidal"
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Your model omits some readily available data that would seem relevant. Population growth among non-immigrants of advanced, wealthy nations such as the US, Japan and parts of western Europe has plateaued at or below replacement. The "western" world has, despite an abundance or food, energy and space (in the case of North America,) tamed its population growth. This has occurred without coercive government control of breeding behavior.
Apparently there are more factors involved in the growth curve than Malthusians such as yourself choose to allow. It is certain that our international governance is equally blind; the next global treaty on the environment that acknowledges this success and, heaven forbid, incorporates population growth into its protocol bean counting will be the first.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I have information that supports an iron and nickel rich sun model. According to the model, fusion reactions occur within the molten metal when it cycles through the deuterium absorbed from water vapour. (Water vapour detected in sunspots) . A possible explanation for sunspots; deuterium and hydrogen loading should also mean less activity in the local area. In this model, most of the sun's body is liquid metal with a surrounding plasma and the real magic happens when D2 transmutates into He4.
D2 fusion results in He4 atoms + additional heat (See Arata fusion experiment). As the gas atoms are expelled they are further excited by the plasma and nano-flares in the atmosphere. If the model is accurate, it should be possible to replicate easily.
To my knowledge, no one has experimented with molten metal / deuterium loading. In the spirit of open source I hope someone here will find this information useful. As a simple experiment I have devised an apparatus consisting of an inductive coil with a sphere of nickel which are submersed in deuterium liquid. When power is applied to the inductive coil, it will levitate and melt the nickel sphere within it to initiate the desired reactions. In order to prevent oxidation, Sulfur is added to the deuterium liquid.
There are 104 nuclear reactors in this country.
No, there are ten reactors in use in this country.
Oh wait, you just assumed that anyone with access to a computer, an internet connection and reading slashdot was from the US, I'm so sorry, your bad (no, I wasn't the one who screwed up, you did).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
That's the beauty of the thing: If we stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be creating less of a heat-capturing blanket around the planet, which will compensate at least in part for the greater amount of energy released by us.
Long-term strategies will be needed to balance the whole thing out, but fusion would help give mankind a few more decades in which to get their act together.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Good call. The energy price spike in 2007-2008 caused a global food crisis; modern agriculture provides food as a function of how much energy is put into each unit area of land, so there is much more at stake than whether you can have incandescent light bulbs and leave your TV on standby.
Even if low-energy agriculture could somehow feed the world, that isn't our only problem. China and India have shrugged off imperialism, modernised their economies, and thats 2.5 billion people demanding western-level lifestyles and we don't have the political clout (nor the moral right) to say no to them. With our current energy sources, the planet simply can't handle it though.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods). A better world is a higher energy one.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
As someone who lives near a nuclear plant that's trying to have a new unit built, let me be the first to say that they have been "thronged by hordes of sign-waving hippies" before.
I'm all for cheap energy, but the second law of thermodynamics means that any energy you've got is spilling heat pollution, and the advocates re not claiming that heat is the only thing to deal with.
As for those "towel-heads," a word which should get you about the same reaction as "nigger" or "faggot:" a punch in the face, you might want to look into just exactly what actions we've taken and policies we've got in place that we could reasonably expect have made them, "hateful." One of the most repressive regimes on earth, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is an entirely Western creation. It's there because they're more convenient to get petroleum from with an unaccountable autocracy doing the deals.
We are not innocent victims in this mess.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Sustainable fusion has been acheived for a long time. Easy example is the farnsworth fusor. But it costs more energy to run that it produces.
All good points. The difference between a coal accident and say Chernobyl? People can move back into the area where the coal accident happened within weeks. How long before people can move back into the area with Chernobyl? I personally think people are being over reactionary though just as you point out. But would you want the same people who are in charge of coal plants in charge of reactors? As that is exactly what would happen. Its not the designs I have a problem with its the people who run them.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods).
And educate, for the love of God, educate!!!
weinersmith
The public needs to be shown that the word "nuclear" is not cause for panic.
Two nuclear weapons ended the biggest war of human history. Two. And then the threat of even one more being used kept two alliances with far starker differences than that war's adversaries from ever entering into direct conflict -- because they were afraid of nuclear weapons.
Find a new word if you want -- "fission" and "fusion" are perfectly serviceable -- but the public's fear of the word "nuclear" is warranted by history, and will not go away anytime soon.
Let's talk back in 4.468 billion years, when the uranium waste used today is half as dangerous as today. People aren't scared of nuclear power, they generally wonder how we would solve the waste problem.
And before you start about "breeding reactors", consider the secondary waste (gloves, suits, irradiated concrete, ...) which composes most of the waste.
When I look up Eric Lerner on Wikipedia, I can see that he is an activist who has been campaigning against things like the big bang - shouldn't this alone warn us to be bit skeptical? So why do we see this being taken serious again and again?
The fact that he has completed a scientific education is not in itself proof that he is right; there have been many brilliant scientists who have proposed theories that were later proven to be false - this is the way science works - but once a theory has been dismissed, it is time to move on and leave it behind. Perhaps the most well-known, and rather sad, example of this is Fred Hoyle, a brilliant cosmologist, who until his death clung on to his steady-state theory, while everybody else had accepted Einstein's theory as the best working model.
Particularly with the p-B reaction, you lose all the net power to brehmstrahllung.
The design is supposed to mitigate this ; the magnetic fields involved are allegedly strong enough to prevent enough of the electrons hopping up to the quantum state they need to get to in order to emit X-ray photons. In addition, the design includes a photoelectric collector to harvest the X-rays that do get emitted (supposed to be 40% of the energy yield).
I'm no expert but I'm watching this keenly. Out of the fusion approaches this one seems the most elegant to me ; no heat-engine step to reduce it's efficiency, solid-state energy collection, reactors that are a sensible size and not some enormous aircraft-carrier sized construction of doom. And the fact that it isn't founded on the impossible conceit of containing the uncontainable in a steady state helps it image a lot in my eyes.
And if it turns out to be impossible... well, you could probably pay for the whole project out of the tea and biscuits kitty at ITER. They should fund a new project like this every year, just on the off-chance that one of them works.
I can't really see how it is even relevant in a discussion about nuclear safety.
Because if you performed an analogous test with a coal or oil you would not end up with a few hundred square kilometers of your country permanently evacuated.
This is what makes fission power problematic: not that it kills anyone, but that the kind of routine stupidity that humans engage in all the time can result in extremely high economic costs. Three Mile Island was the same way: no danger to life and limb, but a very expensive, very complex machine was written off by a relatively trivial design error in the coolant control system (an incompetent engineer designed a system in which the position of valves was based on integrated current running to the motors controlling them, so operators were told that certain valves were closed that were in fact stuck open.)
Human beings behave like idiots all the time, and fission power is particularly susceptible to idiotic behaviour. Ergo, Chernobyl is relevant to nuclear safety because it demonstrates that design errors of a kind that would be no big deal in a coal or oil plant are a big deal in a fission plant, and no one anywhere has any idea of how to ensure that design errors of that kind do not happen (if we did, we'd be able to build systems that were robust against idiotic behaviour we haven't thought of yet.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
hey look - it's an coal lobbyist
There's no such thing as a 100% efficient scrubber. Emissions from coal plants are way down compared to the 70s, but we burn a lot of coal, so even a very high efficiency scrubber still lets a lot of pollutants through. And then there's China - who's emission standards aren't all that rigorous.
So once the scrubber is done taking the bulk of the pollutants out of the flue gasses, where does the contaminated water go? I'm not worried about mercury that's buried in a lump of coal in Pennsylvania, I am worried about mercury that goes from flue to scrubber to holding pond to water supply to salmon farm.
Oh, and incidentally, I'm more worried about 1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry somehow breaching containment than I am about the 20 ci of I-131 that was released from three mile island.
Then when you start considering CO2 as a pollutant (as SCOTUS has ordered the EPA to do) coal power starts looking very grim very fast.
But hey Pennsylvania is an politically important state, so as long as special interests run ads during election season promising vaporware "clean coal" I'm sure you have nothing to worry about - after all those EtOH ads in Iowa are working great too...