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Low-power table-top fusion
SEWilco writes "Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists described Tuesday producing fusion with a mere million-dollar machine. It was described at this APS Centennial session.
Bursts of neutrons are detected, the hallmark of fusion that
`cold fusion' was missing" Update: 03/27 02:27 by S : In somewhat related news,
muggs wrote in about
a new laser-based method for
watching atoms bond. It relies on using X-ray diffraction
patterns to locate the moving atoms.
Phil Farnsworth, who invented TV, sold out most of
his interest in TV and went on to be a borderline
crackpot with something called the Farnsworth
Fusor well into the 1960's -- it was a
similar-sounding fusion device. Others thought
that he was on to tomething. (See "The Farnsworth
Chronicles" somewhere on the web) Anybody know how
much connection there is between Farnsworth and
this project?
GE demonstrated fusion at the NY World's Fair in
1964. They had some giant device that would charge
up all kinds of coulombs, and then k-blamm -- a
big flash and a bang -- and they would announce
that fusion (but probably only a half-handful of
nuclei or so) had taken place. Same story, lots
of energy in, little energy out. But still there
are scientific uses for the neutrons.
A while ago, when I was a lad, doing 'A' level physics (16 to 17 years old), I did some research into renewable energy sources, to discover that some people consider the holy grail of renewable energy lies in the field of genetic engineering, and since hearing their ideas, I tend to agree. Some may consider it a `Frankenstein science', but just for a moment imagine a world where a photosynthesis reaction provides the decomposition of water to its base elements, hydrogen and oxygen. These may then be re-combined in an exothermal reaction to provide heat. Bearing in mind that it is heat which powers almost all continuous electricity generation to this day -- granted some hydro-electric power (eg. the Dinorwig plant in Wales) provide extra energy to the National Power Grid during eg. the cup final -- whithout which there'd be no WWW, no /. and I'd never have found out that it was researchers not far from home who discovered cold fusion.
Oh yeah, I mentioned a derivative of fusion energy. Well it's the Sun that fuels the plants that would energise the reaction, and we all learnt in school that the Sun is only the solar system's biggest ever fusion reactor.
PS. Why the nick? Well it's the mutt's nuts!
Of all things...fission.
Currently, fission requires a critical mass of fissionable material. This is because you need the neutrons that a fission reaction gets to hit other fissionable material to keep the reaction going.
If tabletop fusion becomes cheap enough, you could put it in the center of a subcritical mass of fissionable material and stop relying on the fission reaction to supply its own neutrons. It would be fail-safe as well, because you stop the reaction by turning off the laser.
And the above may result in tabletop _fission_. Usable as a power supply or a weapon. Atomic-powered airplanes, or nuclear SAMs to shoot them with. Either way, I'm scared.
--The basis of all love is respect
How many people would like to see more articles like and less on Linux, the latest OSS flamefest, star wars, katz, etc.? I'm not saying do away with those topics, but geez, if I want the Linux Today, I know where to find it. (On the right hand side of my /. screen, of course. :-)
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Well, I just got back from Atlanta and the meeting about an hour ago. It was great. Stephen Hawking spoke on "The Universe in a Nutshell" and I saw many friends, mentors, and even my thesis advisor running around.
As a friend would say, it was a "geek fest". I spent the plane ride back with an acquaintance talking about his research. Funny how much interest there is in this stuff... only if there were... ya know... JOBS in it?
Ok... ok. Most of the stuff talked about would put the most hardy computer geek to sleep. I dont think anyone here cares much about floppy modes of macromolecules, or CCSD calculations, or non-uniform sampling of distributions in Monte Carlo simulations in order to examine rare events (some of the talks I went to). But on the other hand, there were some very cool talks, and a large number of nobel laureates, not to mention some really cool exhibits.
How does any of this tie into the slashdot effect?
In a nutshell, think of the slashdot effect (SE) as an avalanche, or a statistical mechanical critical exponent problem. Once a link is posted, it is only a matter of a short time (tau) that this information gets out, and in short order you get a polynomial in tau times something like exp(-t/tau) people following that link. Thus, the target of the link, with a server that is not configured to deal with recognizing the first derivative of this number of people as a function of time, falling over and coughing uncontrollably until it starts doing things like
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda bs=65536
Properly set up servers frequently check slashdot for existance of links, so they have measurements of tau, and estimates of the polynomial. With this in hand, they can detect a slashdot avalanche, and quitely disconnect the port...
Ok, its been a long day, with one canceled flight out of Atlanta...