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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.
Isn't that what they use on the sun!? I don't want that sort of thing in my backyard! what if the reaction gets out of control and it annihilates the entire solar system!? What are we going to do with all of the nucular waste?
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.
I vote we call it "Hydrogen Energy". After all, hydrogen is 2/3 of the ingredients in water!
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I really hope this works. I get more excited about science for cheap and clean energy production than I do about efforts to raise the cost of energy consumption as a means to drive conservation. Too much emphasis on conservation will lead to a world where only rich people have the freedom to consume large amounts of energy. Access to cheap and clean power must be pushed down to today's poor. This will offer lots of ways for them to overcome their systemic poverty.
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.
This is great news! If this works, I'll be able to install a Mr. Fusion device on my DeLorean, which should be able to generate the 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity that I need to run my flux capacitor! I'll no longer need to steal Plutonium from the Iranians! ;-)
I hear Fusion has moved from "Always being 10 years away" to "Always being 5 years away." Great progress!
once it gets working, it will provide abundantly cheap energy with relatively few side effects.
I would call not having to fork over a trillion dollars a year for foreign oil a pretty major side effect.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Earth has moved one step nearer to the Sun?
In fusion research it always look good when you do low-energy tests or low density etc... It is relatively easy to confine plasmas that don't "burn". A penning trap will do the job quite nicely. The problems always show up when you try to push your design to operate close to the lawson criterion, at which point many otherwise promising designs just fall short ( taking the penning trap as an example the required magnetic field for any practical confinement time exceeds that at which modern superconductors stop beeing superconducting ).
Now I admit that I don't know the details of this particular scheme, but I can say with almost certainty that when they try to get closer to break even the higher temperatures, densities and confinement times required will turn the thing into a massive headache.
I can't help but remember all the talk about nuclear fission doing the same thing- energy too cheap to meter and all. Fusion as it is currently is dependant on Deuterium and Tritium fuel for the most part and Tritium is mostly produced from the Li6+n => He4+T and Li7+n => He4+T+2n reactions both of which must occur in a high neutron flux environment (conventional fission reactor) which makes the first fusion plants very dependant on fission reactors for fuel production. What is worse is that you'd have to produce about a dozen Tritium nuclei for every Uranium atom fissioned just to make fusion produce as much energy as the fission reaction that was used to synthesize the fusion fuel in the first place. The future of fusion that *may* approach what you're expecting of it will likely involve aneutronic fusion reactions such as the B11+H1 => 3He4 reaction among several others. THe problem is that they are much more difficult to get working than D+T fusion. The B11+H1 reaction requires a roughly 10^9 degree core to work which is nearly ten times what D/T does.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The words don't really have any meaning among actual scientists, who are extremely sloppy with the use of the classifying terms. Apparently the elite take the quote, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" as license to not bother trying to be consistent.
Instead, ideas are classified by whether they appear in papers, conference proceedings, journals, peer-reviewed journals, the peer-reviewed journal of note for the particular field, Ph.D. Thesis, Masters Thesis, and textbooks. Any of which can trump the others depending upon circumstance except papers and textbooks, neither of which is reviewed, and both of which MUST contain ideas which no longer have support, or were built on faulty assumptions.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Your point of view is common, but not correct. From dictionary.com:
Theory: "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity."
A theory is a group of explanations for something, NOT a hypothesis that has been confirmed. Theories are generally formulated, then hypotheses (otherwise known as "predictions") are generated from them, then these hypotheses are tested. If a hypothesis that is supported by the theory is shown not to be true then the theory needs to be revised or discarded.
To use the example in the definition, Einstein's theory of relativity was always a theory. It became an accepted theory through repeated testing of it's predictions, including the hypothesis that light should be bent by a gravitational field.
This guy's idea sounds like it's technically a hypothesis - a prediction made by a theory, or by his interpretation of a theory (such as plasma dynamics).
Are you sure about that definition of theory? Is a theory really verifiable?
I always thought that in the physical sciences, a theory is a falsifiable statement about the mechanism of some natural phenomenon, rather than a verifiable statement. That is, the best you can do is to say that your theory is not inconsistent with observations or experimental results, but you can never say that you have verified it to be "true", because there is always the possibility that advances in technology, or new discoveries will end up disproving the theory, or requiring some modification to it, in light of new knowledge.
No, if it happened in China, we'd just steal it from them and use it, like they steal patents from us and use them. We'd tell them to get fucked if they wanted royalties. If Japan developed it, we'd probably license it for a token amount, since we want to stay friendly with them, and they want to stay friendly with us.
Look at it on the reverse side. Imagine if we found the technology and built plants for it. Guess where a lot of parts would come from? Yeah, China. Either they could piece it together like a puzzle, or just send some grad students over to help work with the technology and have the specifics within a few years anyway. Then there would be fusion plants in China, never mind the patent.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Newton's theories were shown to be accurate under the conditions which he had experience but fell apart under unusual conditions of strong gravity and high velocities. They were replaced by Einstein's theories of relativity under the conditions where Newton's were no longer adequate. Both described behavior of natural processes accurately under many conditions but Newton's theories inevitably needed to be extended by Einstein's to better explain those natural processes.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
... now we admit it's a dupe *in* the summary!
That's a silly summary - it's not like we've achieved sustainable fusion at any cost, cheap or expensive. Right now the goal is still the same one we've been pursuing for a few decades.
#DeleteChrome
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.
I'm afraid I must (respectfully) disagree..
A "theory" is an attempt at giving a rational explanation of an observable.
For example, Newton's universal gravitation "theory" gave an explanation for what could be observed. It was relying (upon other things) on the hypothesis that space was universally cartesian.
A couple centuries later, some other guy proposed another "theory" - General Relativity - that explained the same effects using a different hypothesis - that the structure of space itself is altered by the presence of a mass.
What I am saying is that "theory" is indeed an attempt at explaining what one can observe. The hypothesis is something you assume to be true. An hypothesis may or may not be verified - and the theory makes assumptions - that the proposed hypothesis are true.
Note that "theory" is not the same a "theorem" and "hypothesis" is not the same as "conjecture". Hypothesis is closer to an axiom.
As a last example, the GUT (Grand Unified Theory) requires the existence of a specific particle : the Higgs boson to account for mass. The theory is there, the hypothesis is that the particle exists. So even though it is a theory it *still* needs to be validated (hence the LHC) by validating the hypothesis.
So to me : Hypothesis x Observation -> Theory
--Ivan
Nuclear magnetic resonance? God man don't you know how dangerous that is, it's got nuclear right in the name. You can only guess how many extra limbs you'd get from that. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get ready for my MRI tomorrow:)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Western countries have by far most access to cheap energy and cheap food. Yet their population diminshes and they (we) import immigrants to fill the gap. It is true for all advanced economies. Once a nation gets sophiscated enough to have people educated and equipped with birth control means, growth halts as people can "trade" number of children for economic conditions. Emerging countries will see the same thing once their societies will get sophiscated enough.
It's a shame that western nations keep so much countries in 3-rd world rank by manipulating/corrupting their governments, stealing their natural/energy resources and making them debt slaves. Excess population growth of many countries is actually an effect of those shameful actions. Cheap energy source and help in achieving real advancements (as opposite to this shameful circus performed by Bono, Geldof and other idiots) would solve the problem.
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.
Your definition of theory sounds nice, but I find it leaves the definition of hypothesis hanging rather. I was so intrigued by what a hypothesis was that I went to your same source and looked up the defniition:
"A proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts."
Uh, OK - so using these definitions it sounds as if, a theory effectively the collective noun for a group of hypotheses that play nicely together. Then I saw the note at the bottom:
Synonyms:
1. Theory, hypothesis are used in non-technical contexts to mean an untested idea or opinion. A theory in technical use is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena: the theory of relativity. A hypothesis is a conjecture put forth as a possible explanation of phenomena or relations, which serves as a basis of argument or experimentation to reach the truth: This idea is only a hypothesis.
(itals are mine).
So from this section, it seems that theories are more-or-less verified, while hypotheses are conjectoral. I hypothesise that these dictionary writers have their knickers in a twist.
That's why we're having this discussion: Unlike the current majority of energy sources, fusion is a potentially limitless source - or as limitless as the water in our oceans. Limitless energy also makes it a little easier to grow more food. For example, given cheap energy, it becomes simple to desalinate seawater.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Theory x Experimentation = Law
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.
note to self: be rich.
So what you're saying is don't build swimming pools in dry areas?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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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
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").
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?
I always thought that KDE had a tendency towards including a bit too much in the desktop environment but this is extreme. Come on Kdevs, leave the fusion to physicists.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
"They are not thronged by those hordes of sign-waving hippies that most of you seem to think are keeping nuclear power down."
Actually, it's not the sign-waving hippies that are the concern. It's the government petitioning NIMBYs that have the attitude "nuclear power, sounds good,but... OMG WAIT, DON'T PUT THE REACTOR NEAR MY CITY"
I really hope this works. I get more excited about networking technology for posting on /. than I do about efforts to raise the cost of /. posting as a means to drive bandwidth conservation. Too much emphasis on conservation will lead to a world where only rich people have the freedom to make large numbers of posts on /. Access to /. posting must be pushed down to today's /. impoverished. This will offer lots of ways for them to overcome their systemic /. poverty.
If anyone would like a one hour pass to tour my futuristic, union-produced, cruelty-free, pollution-free/carbon neutral, class- and socially just utopian flying machine, please, feel free to ask. Thank you. And, no, I'm not being sarcastic (please see my parent post).
sigfault (core dumped)
This means fusion is now 9.5 years away?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
More specifically, a good hypothesis explains all previous data. It becomes an accepted theory when it predicts new data.
I am a science fantasy fan
Another interesting thing about 'aneutronic' fusion is that you can do direct power conversion.
As the previous poster said, D-T fusion releases much of its energy in the form of fast neutrons. In order to convert this energy into electricity, you have to get the fast neutrons to heat up a fluid and then run a turbine or run some other thermal process.
If your energy is largely in fast He nuclei, these are charged, and you can convert the energy directly into electricity in several ways, like just running these charged nuclei up against a high voltage. (There are other better schemes).
That means you can get power with no expensive steam generation cycle--though since you probably need to cool the reactor anyway you may as well extract some power from the coolant as well. However, the whole cycle can be more efficient.
--PeterM
I think there is a high chance China would have it fusion plants before the US, and the American won't bother to steal the patents, as they are too lazy to build one. :)
Alternative (not ITER-like) Nuclear Fusion technologies are mushrooming all over the world. We are one step further for fusion energy.
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.
So let me get this straight: You have a budget of _three orders of magnitude_ less and the technology you are developing cheaper tech?
I am not saying this is not a good thing, but ewsnow sure has a funny way of putting (or thinking about) things.
Please sprinkle some grammar over the above :)
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.
Plus, with all that Helium being produced, the cost of party balloons will fall dramatically.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Its also 100x harder to do than DT fusion with a fraction of the power density. So if it cost 1 million to build a 1MW B-p plant (which, by current theory and experiment is quite impossible) I can get a 1GW out of a DT plant with the same reactor design and probably 10MW with DD fusion.
Neutrons will probably cheap enough to deal with.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
in charge of this, instead of Eric Lerner.
Even if the primary goal of aneutronic fusion fails, and even the neutronic reaction is not net-positive, you can still use this design to generate neutrons to burn nuclear waste at sub-critical fission plant.
Except all the cars, trucks, and homes that run on gasoline/oil aren't going to be converted to run on electricity over night. Plus the US gets most of its electricity from coal, not oil.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
And speaking as a woman, I'm not over-impressed with Sharia Law.
> Fusion is difficult, REALLY difficult. But once it gets working, it will provide abundantly cheap energy with relatively few side effects.
Yeah... the thing is, I remember saying the same thing in the seventies.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Actually the term "towel-head" would most accurately refer to the Sikhs and they do not hate our guts AFAIK. And anyone hating our guts should not be a concern anyhow unless it leads to violent action.
Happy people make bad consumers.
I like that definition. A lot
On one hand, the nuclear crowd wants to point out that although we've had some near misses, we've never had a really serious nuclear accident. True enough. They also like to point out that all this safety is expensive, which is also very true. And somehow the conclusion reached is: we need less of that expensive safety stuff so nukes can be cheap! I'm sorry, but WTF? The expensive safety stuff is what's actually PROVIDING the good safety record. In fact, experience has shown that it's pretty carefully crafted to neither be over- nor under-safe - we have occasional near misses, but nothing too serious.
Insisting on having high safety standards isn't just the domain of dirty fucking hippies, and it's hardly insane. It's a result of people's perfectly rational desire not to have a serious nuclear accident in their hometown. And yes, that means nuclear energy is always going to be expensive. Sorry.
I think the real issue with nuclear plants isn't the cost-effectiveness, it's the (economic) risk. From the same Wikipedia article:
In other words, you really don't know in advance whether you'll be able to make a profit. It should also be noted that for alternative energy sources like wind and solar, both the capital costs and the fuel costs are lower than nuclear. And given that wind/solar have a much warmer and fuzzier public perception, for an investor, the decision to go with alternative energy is a no-brainer.
So in other words, although a nuclear plant may be marginally more cost-effective over it's lifetime than another form of energy, there are still economic reasons why these plants are not being built. It's not simply a matter of NIMBYism.
No, I'm saying if you must build them, make sure that the environment they are in is near enough to being hermetically sealed. E.g. indoor, with walls that don't leak.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Wow. I was modded down 'overrated'. I've gotta start using sarcasm tags.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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