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Combining New/Old Approaches for Nuclear Fusion
L2 writes "Sandia National Labs are looking at some old military tech for a shortcut to nuclear fusion. Still the odd little detail to be worked out, such as how to keep the fuel from melting everything during the reaction. " Interesting approach. While much of the recent fusion work seems to have centered around tokamak reacters, from what I've seen, this one harkens back to a different school of thought. The bottomline, IMHO, is that the sooner we have fusion - or another cheap, environmentally clean energy source, the less likely we are to destroy the rest of this planet and hence ourselves.
has the alpha-decay in the RAM in your computer caused your computer to gain evil sentience yet?
yeah, it was called "BOB" and was real friendly. It kept on smiling as it sucked my soul out the parallel port. Ran in only 1 Meg of RAM too!
Then I traded my 386 for a leather jacket and bought a Mac.
My Willow desktop picture keeps evil at bay as I wait to install LinuxPPC.
All is going according to plan...
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Seriously, I would like to once and for all get the notion that FUSION is ANY safer than fission out of your head. First of all to "leonbrooks" I would like to point out that uranium is NOT the same as plutonium. Plutonium is the byproduct of the nuclear fission of Uranium-2##. (I forget the number). Uranium by itself is no big whoop. My mother used to work for Westinghouse on the Nuclear breeder reactors, and she is who explained this to me a while back. The high energy states that result from nuclear reactions will, be it either fission or fusion, will cause any surrounding material to become radioactive. I don't know all the specifics, but think about it. The world was scared by fission when it came out, scared by the nuclear waste, the near-meltdowns... So what does the scientific community do? It declares fission a lost cause and presents Fusion as the holy grail of nuclear reactions. A clean, efficient source of energy. What they dont tell you is that there will still be the same radioactive waste that so scared you with Fission. We've believed fusion to be clean because they said so. They're keeping us in a cage and feeding us what they want us to see as reality. Sure you might not polute our air, but by no means is Fusion any better of a choise than Fission when you compare it to coal. Heck, look at the massive heats involved in fusion, think of the damage that could happen if something went wrong there. (first post ever, yay)
Okay, read the parent message incorrectly, and didn't hit the preview button. First two mistakes on my first post.
Gotta love newbies! =)
Man,
You'd think that pysicists would think about how fusion happens in stars. Heat is incidental. Pressure is what makes atoms fuse. Hot fusion is a waste of energy. Sure, if you make atoms move around really fast, some of them will fuse. There are other ways to create pressure among atoms, and they take a lot less energy than a giant donut shaped oven.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
It is a plasma.
It is not fusion.
Fusion is a nuclear thing, not an electronic thing. You have to smash atoms into eachother so that the nuclei combine, not so that the electrons get excited. If the point of your comment was that it's difficult to control said reaction then you're absolutely correct. If you were trying to suggest that one can do fusion in a microwave oven then you've been misled, I'm afraid.
---------
To hell with you, I never liked you, you are no friend of mine...
Long, but not too long.
Yes, we do have a great source of fusion generated power: the Sun (or more specifically solar-power, wave-power, bio-mass, ...) but it isn't enough to meet projected energy requirements. There's a report by the EU (sorry, can't remember a source off the top of my head) that looked at all the available sources of energy (including fission) and there just won't be enough to go around without something happening. The report was pro-fusion so it recommended that the "something" be the development of fusion reactors.
| What, you were expecting
-O_O- +---- something witty?
well, all military technology isnt necessarily ahead of civilian technology. The military uses a lot of "proven" technology. technology that has withstood the test of time and gets the job done. Also technology that is battle tough ie. durable and reliable. This technology tends to be a little older than what is available. If you went to a fission plant you would be surprised at how low technolgy the devices they use are. they use things like magnetic amplifiers, which were invented in the late 1800's. they also use A lot of hardwired analog control verses using the more unreliable digital computer controls. Sometimes old technology is better than new technology for the design requirements. As far as what they are doing in Sandia, sometimes old solutions can work for new problems. Sure, this idea is an elctro-mechanical device instead of a being a device that has no moving parts. But It might work if they can come up with some creative solutions to some of the other hurdles.
We are taking the wrong approach by encouraging fusion; it is too high tech, too central, and too capital intensive to be the solution for the imediate future. "Unlimited energy" just encourages unlimited consumption, which is not something this planet needs more of. We'd better off promoting appropriate, evironmentally concious technology, on a local level. This encourages resource conservation, something unknown in the US. The answer is to become more efficent with the current renewable/low environmental impact technologies we have, not to create new, more complicated technologies that will just casue more problems.The point is that there needs to be a shift in values toward conservation and appropriate technology, and away from the constant need for growth and more complicated, environmentally destructive technology. -Brian
Both of you seem to believe that the military gains nothing from fusion research, in the area of nuclear weaponry. That's quite wrong. The calculations for nuclear reactions using lasers, ie. Nova, NIF, and older lasers, transfer quite well to weaponry. ne of the key points with NIF is that you can basicly the same experiments as a nuclear blast inlab and with far less radiation (and cost, etc). As the stockpile stewardship programs decrease the ways of research and the materials that can be used, the military funds this research so it can always be ahead nuclear ready. To keep others from conducting nuclear tests, much of this research is available to ally nations, which is why the Nova laser was copied in all but paint color (except for France, which the U.S. built for them).
Well, at least this is what I remember being told, and might have it a bit mixed up. Fairly often I can talk to a lead engineer on the NIF (LLNL) project.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Everyone seems to think that fusion energy will come free of dangerous radioactive byproducts.
Every fusion scheme mentioned on this thread has problems with radioactive waste. Period.
The current batch of 20-year olds will burn up all of the remaining fossil fuels in their lifetime. Long before that fossil fuels will become too expensive to use. We need to begin developing massive solar and hydrogen gas economies now. If they are not on-line when the Carbon based fuels run out we won't have enough trees in the entire country to keep us warm one whole winter.
JLK
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
plants, would the waste production be higher or lower?
Sure.
In fact, it's easy to show that fission produces _less_ waste - the question is how much less.
DISCLAIMER: I AM MAKING LIBERAL USE OF "FERMI" ESTIMATES. NUMBERS QUOTED SHOULD BE WITHIN AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE OF REALITY, BUT THAT'S ABOUT IT. THIS IS NOT A DETAILED ESTIMATE.
Both fission and fusion produce secondary waste, in the form of the reactor housing, which becomes radioactive. The housing won't last forever - pieces wear out, as with any device. Let's assume as a rough approximation that the entire thing has to be replaced once every 20 years, and that it is all filed as low-level radioactive waste.
Let's assume that we have a moderate-sized reactor core - a 10m cube (30 feet for the American audience). This isn't a solid structure; in a fission plant, it's a framework holding reactor rods, and either a containment vessel (American reactors) or a network of pipes (Canaadian reactors), with ample amounts of radiation shielding. Let's say it's equivalent to a shell 2m thick. This gives us a volume of about (10^3 - 6^3) = around 800 cubic metres. Assuming a density of around 5 (metal, concrete, and lead), we get about 4000 tonnes of waste every 20 years, or an average of 200 tonnes of waste per year (1 tonne = 1000 kg = about 2200 pounds, so about the same as a US ton, before you object to my spelling).
Now, a fission reactor also produces a fair bit of high-level waste in the form of spent fuel rods. This represents extra waste that a fusion reactor doesn't produce. We have to see how much it is compared to the (roughly) 200 tonnes produced on average per year by our hypothetical reactor.
Let's assume that a reactor with a core of the quoted size produces about 500 MW of power. Let's assume that this represents about 2% of the fuel in the reactor (typical of fission reactors that don't use reprocessed fuels). Let's assume that this fuel converts mass to energy at an efficiency of about 0.1% (typical for fission reactions, IIRC). 500 MW over one year gives us about 1.5e16 joules of energy produced per year. At 100% efficiency, this would correspond to about 0.17 kg of fuel. We're operating at 0.1% efficiency, which means about 170 kg of fuel burned. This represents about 2% of the total amount of fuel, which means about 8.5 tonnes of fuel burned in the reactor per year. This fuel is filed as high-level waste when its finished burning.
So, we find that, unless I'm off by _more_ than a factor of 10 in computing the _relative_ amounts of each type of waste, and assuming that you consider high-level and low-level waste equally bad, both fusion and fission produce about the same amount of waste, most of which is just parts of the reactor that wear out and have to be stored safely.
CAVEATS:
A few notes about fission, that might be confusing people:
A conventional fission reactor has two fuel sources; U235, which is present from the start, and Pu239, which is bred from U238 within the reactor (any reactor containing U238 does this whether you want it to or not). Both of these fission to produce many light byproducts. These byproducts occasionally absorb neutrons, and almost never give them out. After you've left a rod in the reactor for a while, enough of these byproducts accumulate that reactions are not self-sustaining within the fuel rod anymore. It is absorbing neutrons without contributing much energy. This is after somewhere around 2% of its mass has been fissioned. At this point, you can either throw it away or send it to a reprocessing plant, which strips out the light, absorbing components so that you can use the rod again. Nowadays, we throw the rods away and lose 98% of its mass.
Reprocessing isn't done any more because it involves running what amounts to high-level waste through a chemical processing plant. Despite precautions, this resulted in unacceptably high exposure to radiation for people working in the plant. Neutron radiation from the waste also transmuted anything that the waste was in contact with (including whatever you dissolve it in for processing, and so forth), producing a lot of low-level waste. The result of all of this is that reprocessing fuel rods safely is a hassle of monumental proportions. There's enough uranium lying around that we can afford to throw away 98% of it, so we do.
Horrid typo.
That should read, "fusion produces _less_ waste".
Eh, whatever. I keep forgetting to do that. It's not like the option's always been there, but I've been using slashdot for well over a year now and the simple 'type and hit submit' mentality dies hard. :) I'm trying to remind myself to check it when appropriate these days, but it usually just slips my mind.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Oh yeah, its so much worse than coal plants that fill the atmosphere with CO2 and is a major cause of global warming. Fusions low-level and small amount of radioactive waste which can be controlled safely is worse than all of the toxic material that can take 1,000s of years that is just 'let out' for humanity to enjoy.
Most power sources are not a boon to the enviroment. Many fusion reactors are also poorly built, using designs that are fundalmentally flawed. Reactors can be made to never melt down, though most are cheaper and a more 'popular' style choosen by politicians. I really doubt that the heat from nuclear reactions will drasticly hurt the enviroment, though I'm not sure about the changes in heat output. You might find something when looking at the laser projects over at llnl.gov, where they have resources on fusion and fission.
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
How about more efficient usage, solar plants, and a li'l bit o' fission of to the side? Or orbital solar plants? (Y'know... the ol' microwave transmission principle. Mars is a big place; a miss wouldn't damage anything if you plan properly.)
We dumped a lot of money into magnetic confinement and it didn't really go anywhere. Sometimes the path looks promising at the start but leads to a dead end.
These towers would essentially contain permanent thunderstorms. I haven't re-done the author's numbers, but he claimed that the mass-flow rate of such a tower would conservatively be in the thousands of tons per second, and the air leaving the tower would be moving at upwards of 200 MPH. He calculated such things as the fresh water yield of the "rain" inside the tower and the hydropower available from letting it fall down pipes, but the real yield is the airflow itself. I calculated the power available from the moving air, and with (what seemed to me to be) reasonable assumptions about efficiency I got the number of 22 GIGAWATTS. From one tower.
For reference, the total nameplate generating capacity of the generators in the USA is a mere 754 GW, according to the Department of Energy. This means that 40 of these towers, arrayed along our coasts or around the Carribean, could replace every watt from every generator currently feeding the US electrical grid... and then some. They'd also make a hell of a lot of fresh water, and cool off the surface waters somewhat (a boon for heat-stressed coral reefs).
There's a lot more ocean out there than just our coasts, and it's all getting warmer. Tapping energy off it would not only replace fossil fuels directly, it would also do some global-warming abatement by dumping heat above some 8 miles of atmosphere where it has an easier time escaping. I think we could do a lot worse than checking this out in detail again, and if it would work, pushing it like hell.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Think about it, nuclear subs aren't just about nuclear weapons, they can also be nuclear powered, meaning you don't have to haul all this diesel fuel around.
I'm picking nits, but the advantage to nuclear-powered submarines is that they do not need an air supply to run their diesel generators. Thus they can stay under for weeks at a time.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The current batch of 20-year olds will burn up all of the remaining fossil fuels in their lifetime. That's been a truism for quite a while, you know. Intelligent life evolving on other planets? Out of millions some should be xmitting right now. Yes, but in which direction? Anyway, who says that intelligent life will keep a capacity to use high-energy radio for more than a century or so? Stone age, here we come...
Hey man...you didn't say anything about Dan Kaminsky's mom :( This makes me very upset as I love to hear people speak about that whore. Hey, did you know that greasy forehead Dan works for Cisco? Yep, he spit shines the CEO's cock every morning.
The discussion of the "symmetry problem"---i.e. how to guarantee uniform compression of the fusion fuel---is a common meme in popular discussion of fusion.
What's interesting is that much of this confusion has to be intentional misinformation.
Why? Because it was the solution to the symmetry problem which was the key to the H-bomb. The complete discussion of the concept remained officially classified for decades after the H-bomb was invented. In contrast, the basic physics and outline of the engineering behind the A-bomb was made public in the 1940's already.
Some details had leaked out in one way or another by various 'exposes' but nothing really got it right. I believe it was finally declassified in about 1994 or so---I remember the article in the New York Times. By that point, intertial confinement fusion civilian researchers had already figured it out.
The trick is 'radiation driven implosion'.
The soft x-rays from a fission explosion are diverted down to a hollow tube (hohlraum {hollow room} in the German used by the early researchers). There is in fact a barrier, usually
of tungsten or some other heavy material directly in between the fission primary and the fusion secondary. This is to prevent the explosion of the fission material itself (the stuff) from getting to the fusion part and ruining it. You just want the photons, and if you block the shrapnel, the photons get there first.
The primary is basically many spherical layers---the secondary is a long cylinder with a few coincentric layers, with a gap near the outermost layer for the photons to flow into.
This form a 'photon gas'---but this fluid equilibrates at the speed of light and not the speed of sound, like normal fluids. Which means that the density and energy of the photons gets very uniform quickly. Although you don't normally feel it in every day life, photons carry momentum and can exert a pressure.
The A-bomb uses chemical explosives to precisely compress the fission fuel, but that isn't powerful and even and fast enough to work with fusion. The description in the article, putting the fusion fuel in the center of the bomb, is mostly incorrect. There is a little bit of fusion fuel in the middle of the a-bomb section but it does not make the really big BANG of the true H-bomb, it is just a booster to make more neutrons to make more fission from a given amount of plutonium or uranium.
Back to the photon fluid. This photon gas has enough energy to very very evenly and violently compress the fusion fuel. This is basically a 3-layered hot dog. The outermost layer is a heavy 'tamper' of lead or U-238 or something else. The middle layer is the fusion fuel. Then, there is a rod in the center with fission fuel like U-235 or Pu-239. The photon gas ablates the material on the tamper---the pressure from the photons and momentum from the ablation compress the fusion tube very severely. At the same time, it is magically arranged for just enough neutrons from the primary fission explosion to start a chain reaction in the fission stuff inside the fusion fuel, known as the 'spark plug'. Thus the fusion fuel is compressed from the outside by the photon gas and ablation and squeezed from the inside from the second fission explosion. This is how much work you need to do to get fusion. The fission material, normally very light, is compressed to a density near that of a white-dwarf star, where it reaches quantum mechanical Fermi degeneracy. That is really really really compressed. Not quite a neutron star (that is even more dense, being a giant atomic nucleus) but still thousands of times more dense than any conventional material.
Then, Boom.
The symmetrical lasers in the Livermore fusion experiments do NOT directly shine on the fusion pellet. That would not make sufficiently even compression. They shine on an outer metallic sphere which ionizes and releases X-rays, and these X-rays equilibrate inside the metallic shell (even though it's now totally vaporized it's still heavy compared to photons) and this compresses the fusion fuel.
This is why the intertially confined fusion program is always more classified than the magnetic fusion, because it is in large measure H-bomb technology. The "national ignition facility" being built for the DOE in the United States is yet another really big ICF project. Unfortuantely for political reasons it is being designed entirely from the point of view of military bomb research and not for any energy research. I think that's a shocking waste but there's a gazillion dollars to test the most obscure things about nukes when we already have thousands of bombs that work way way too well for our planet's and species' good.
The lasers are very power inefficient, but better for getting clean data for bomb research. Ion beams, and probably this Sandia machine are much more power efficient and the likely technology for a power plant, but less is known about them because it doesn't fit in the military application as well.
In any case, it is almost certain that this Sandia machine described in the article uses "indirect drive" {as the x-ray compression method is known} instead of "direct drive" and that is how they plan to work on the symmetry problem. So they probably do have an idea what to do about it, contrary to what the article says. It is still a very challenging problem, but not hope is lost.
The best information on the web about Big Bombs is Carey Sublette's archive. Just about everybody who Really Knows what's going on {and I'm not one of them} has said that the technical details are accurate. In fact, some of the information about the W88 warhead that the Chinese supposedly stole can be found on this website, and the Chinese showed this in their defense.
High energy weapons archive
I am a physicist, but not a nuclear physicist or involved in fusion research in any way whatsoever.
Heat pollution is indeed a problem, both at the reactor and in the cities where the power is used (most power eventually ends up being converted to heat). However, there is a safe place to dump the heat if it becomes a sufficiently bad problem - the sky.
Space has a black-body temperature of about 3 kelvin. Use heat pumps to concentrate your heat in a working fluid. Run the fluid through pipes. Put the pipes in mirrored channels, open at the top. Most of your heat goes into space, by blackbody emission from the pipes.
The problem with this is the rate at which heat is dumped. This is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature of your working fluid (and hence your pipes). The bad news is, you need a very hot fluid. The good news is that, because of the fourth order relation, your fluid doesn't have to be _insanely_ hot. The heat pump that performs the concentration will produce heat itself - you're working against entropy when concentrating heat like that. However, if all components are efficient enough, you should be able to dump this heat out with the rest.
This requires power. I am blithely assuming that if you have enough power plants that heat pollution is a problem big enough to do something about, you have enough power to run the heat pumps.
This doesn't work on cloudy days. I am blithely assuming that you have a heat sink large enough to store heat in until the next clear day. This would probably be a moderate-sized body of water.
Assuming that you can afford a one-hectare area per GW of heat for your emitter array (100m squared, or _roughly_ 100 yards by 100 yards), and that one quarter of this is actual emitting area (area of the pipes), your working fluid would have to be at a temperature of about 1600 kelvin, or about 1330 degrees centigrade. This is readily buildable. The only concern is the heat pump, which is working against a very strong temperature difference. Scale up the area - to, say, 1km by 1km (about 0.6 miles by 0.6 miles), and you need a temperature of about 515 kelvin, or about 242 degrees centigrade. Building the heat engine for this is much easier, though more of the resulting radiation will be absorbed by the atmosphere in that frequency band. Maintaining the array is more expensive in this scenario, too.
In conclusion, I think that heat pollution is a solvable problem. It just requires enough of an investment that we aren't likely to build heat-dumping plants until they become absolutely necessary.
sadly, you're right, but it's heresy to say so...
I can just see the FBI pasing you by and alowing
:)
you to keap that "dangerus thingy" running.
PS : Do you think they wold not shut down your
private lab if they found you were equiped to
build a TNT or C4 based bomb ? Eaven if you
didn't actualy build that
The way to deal with waste is to bury it in third world countries. The third world countries would be paid in exchange for accepting the waste. Then the countries could use the money to buy food, education, and Internet infrastructure. Many third world countries are little more than barren wastelands anyway. By choosing a suitably remote location, side effects could be minimized completely. It certainly would be a win-win situation for all parties, and provide much needed dollars to cash strapped countries.
Okay, I guess this IS different from ICF. Of course, since it isn't MFE, it's probably still bogus.
This is awesome! Technology is moving so fast now! I just hope that we do not destroy ourselves in the process!
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
Firstly, atmospheric attenuation isn't *that* much. Even a factor of two power loss still leaves 500 W/m^2, which is respectable.
Secondly, regarding storm damage and cost of solar power facilities. If a solar facility was built as an array of photovoltaic panels, then it would indeed be very expensive to produce and to maintain (at least until very good thin-film photovoltaics get here). However, there are a couple of workarounds.
Both workarounds involve using concentrators. The idea is that mirrors are quite cheap, especially if they don't have to be of laboratory quality. Run a set of metal troughs aligned to be parallel to the sun's course (on average). Make them out of aluminum so that they won't rust, and put drainage holes in them in case it rains. Run a strip of photovoltaic cells down the channel, suspended at the focus of the mirror. This reduces cost substantially, and may also increase efficiency (several types of cell work better in brighter light).
A variant of this dispenses with photovoltaics and runs black pipes down the channels, again suspended at the focal point. Put a working fluid in the pipes, and run a conventional heat engine off of them. You need somewhere to dump the heat, but if you're near a body of water that's not a problem (heat pollution is another issue).
For space-based power, you can do much the same thing. Most of the area of your power satellite is made of cheap aluminized-mylar reflectors. Yes, they'll be shredded after a while, but you can replace them (or the entire satellite, if you want). At the foci of these reflectors are either photovoltaic panels or heat engines. These are small enough that you can put some micrometeorite shielding around them to extend their lifetimes.
This gives you a lighter satellite, that might even last longer, and is certainly much cheaper to replace.
The main problem with power satellites is that you have to beam the power back down to earth. This does not present a terrorism hazard - the most popular schemes use the receiving antenna array to control the phase of the beams produced from various parts of the satellite. Without this control, the satellite would emit in all directions, resulting in harmless power levels reaching the ground. This control takes a big array, and the resulting beam is targetted _at_ the array. So to fry a city, the terrorist group would first have to put an appropriate antenna on the roof of every home... Maybe offer to clean their eavestroughs while there...
The real problems with beaming power back are that your emitters have to be a fixed weight no matter what - which puts a lower limit on the mass of the satellite - and that you need substantial levels of microwave energy coming down on your receiving array (i.e. more than 1 kW/m^2). Any bird flying through this will get warm, and anybody camping out underneath will get warm also. They won't be flash-fried - but they will receive the equivalent of standing under light several times brighter than the sun.
Lastly, as this represents energy imported to earth, power satellites will contribute to the heat pollution problem. OTOH, the same applies to any other power source that releases energy that would otherwise not be released on earth.
The final way to (efficiently!) use solar power on earth is to grow crops and ferment them to produce methanol. This gives you a flammable liquid that can be used as fuel, mulch to supply the hydrocarbon/chemical industries, and takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as fast as fuel-burning puts it into it.
The problem is that the crop method takes up a fair amount of space, and (like other forms of solare power) is limited by the amount of sunlight falling on to the collectors/fields.
This is correct, but even deuterium-deuterium fusion will produce neutrons. The problem is that a nuclei formed by a collision almost always has excess momentum to the point where it will spontaneously blow up. Therefore, deuteron fusion has the summary formula:
3H2 -> He4 + p + n
and the reaction formula
H2 + H2 -> H3 + p
H2 + H3 -> He4 + n
No neutrinos are formed; that is only true for proton fusion (where some protons get converted to neutrons, releasing an positron and a neutrino.)
You can get it dirt cheap, but won't be so cheap after taxes.
>The general rule is that military tech is at least 10 years ahead of what the public has access to.
I've been in the military, I think that should be rephrased to
'10 years ahead of what the GENERAL public has access to.'
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
as far as research goes the military is about equal with the public communities, maybe just a little ahead. Where the pentagon falls behind is in the implementation process, and all of thier beurocratic bs.
The general rule is that military tech is at least 10 years ahead of what the public has access to. The corrolary(sp?) is that the military never declassifies something until it has developed a countermeasure for it.
Does the military already have fusion?
Don't look now but there is a fossil fuel shortage looming. We will have a net natural gas shortage within two years as it is a local market. Oil will take a little longer - about 2008 - 2010. This is especially true if East Asia goes back into a boom as it seems to be doing. Oil demand is projected to increase 50% over the next 20 years for what that is worth. I suggest we get cracking on fusion ASAP. BFM
Track down the Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine, December 1998 issue where they published an article which demonstrated how you could generate actualy fusion using a very high electrical field (the sort you would need a Neon Sign transformer to generate).
/philo.htm
Without tracking my copy down (It's somewhere on the bookcase of Analog's that goes back to 1953), it uses two spherical frames of wire to repeatedly accelerate ions through a series of orbits around the centre of the device, and as the ions fall towards the centre (very fast) a few will collide and fuse, and emit energy.
Warning - this actually does emit enough neutrons to be a health risk. And you are messing with 15,000 volts, which will not make you a happy person if you mess up.
It doesn't have anywhere near the efficiency needed at this time, but it doesn't require high temperatures, instead it uses high electron-volts to do the work.
Links to people who know more about it than I :
http://shoelace.digivill.net/~se raphim/theory.html The original Author of the article
http://www.ticnet.com/bertpool/philo
Background on the inventor
The more resources people have, the better off they will be. Sure, cheap power and goods will not bring spiritual fulfillment to all, but better resources can keep people from starving to death! Yes, people in "unconventional places" might be able to enjoy sanitary living, medicine, and better education. Rather than practice subsistence agriculture, they might then spend their time putting that education to use for everyone. Think of the good things people do with the resources they have and remember that ignorance is wasteful.
Power is the ultimate resource. It gives people the ability to modify the world around them in any way they see fit. It mines raw resources, processes them and assembles the results into the things you and I enjoy every day. Let's try to make more to share with everyone!
If you don't like cheap power, try trading places with some poor bastard living in a cave. In no time, you will learn that other people have greater problems than dull food. You have the choice to live where you will, most people don't. That choice was given to you, pass it on.
The problem with helium is that it is a very limited resource. If we use it all up we will have to rely on dangerous hydrogen gas to fuel our airships and fill our party balloons. Already each year, more people are killed in house fires and airship disasters than are killed by nuclear reactors. By using the remaining supplies of helium, our reliance on highly flamable hydrogen will rise to unacceptable heights. The death toll from hydrogen accidents will sharply climb, but there will be no easy solution. Once all the helium is gone, you can't bring it back.
Anyone know what the best figures so far for the ratio of energy in:energy out in fusion are as of now? Last I heard, they hadn't even reached 1:1, though if I read this article correctly that should be a largely irrelevant figure shortly...
Kinda reminds me of the time they wanted to bore a few miles deep into Kansas, set off an H-bomb every hour and trap the heat.
"Is it an earthquake? Is it the Godless Ruskie Commies(TM)? No! It's the power plant!"
Once we have "unlimited energy" things would be safer?
Somehow that seems unlikely. People will find other things to fight over. Heck they can still fight over the same old things which they are fighting over now, which have little to do with energy.
And there's always power to fight for.
Link.
p.s. no funny jokes on how power corrupts (and as energy/time = power....)
Why must there be perfect symetry for a fusion reaction? It was shown that black holes need not have symetry to reach singularity, and the big bang was not symetrical (or else matter would never have clustered randomly and we wouldn't be here). My reasoning here is more philosophical than practical of course. Maybe there's no correlation between those events after all.
I ROTFL'd on that one.
Well, at least nothing bad happens!
(Wake up on the wrong side of nobody this morning?)
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Weren't cars, phones, computers, _____ (fill in the blank) supposed to solve all our problems?
No. For that matter, the (wo)men who invented the aforementioned were far, far, too bright to naively assume that they would. But you'd be a complete fool to argue that they haven't improved the quality of life.
Try to get a little historical perspective here: a hundred years ago you would (statistically) most likely be working well over 70 hours a week, six days a week, with no class mobility, and you would have done it since you were eleven. Your job requires an amount of tedium and manual labor that you can't comprehend now because you work in crowded, dangerious conditions doing things like grinding meat, forging steel (the old way), lifting giant, heavy objects, or any one of the millions of things that no one does anymore because _____ (fill in the blank) now does it automatically, or more easily, or less dangerously. In terms of today, your quality life is subzero. You have no car, and even if they existed in cheap enough forms would do you no good because you will probably never leave the urban area where you work and live. Telephones are a novelty, and the easiest way to communicate with relatives is still the postal service, which is unreliable and slow.
Think of any modern invention, and I can guarantee you that it hasn't solved our all problems. But I can also guarantee you that more than a few of them have solved one or two, and that adds up over the years. Will fusion power eradicate all pollution, bring back the wooly mammoth, and provide limitless, waste-free power? No. Will it provide a huge leap towards helping the environment? Yes.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Well if anyone read carefully the article then it may note how "clean" this approach could be :) .
:)))))))))
Imagine tons of disposed wires. Radioactive ones btw. Plus some other secondary equipment among this messy caroussel. Sincerly would not call it this way. I would better call it the Gatling gun scheme... Ra-ta-ta-ta...
Now for the point.
Self inflicted scarcity is backward! Efficiency is a means, not an end. Your self loathing is a waste of personal energy. Your desire to punish others for perceived waste is awful. It will be a dark day if the US ceases to research reasonable potentially world benefiting research for fear of success!
Focus on the positive things people do with their resources and try to contribute. You were raised, educated and drive a Honda... don't you want such things for others? Like that 40 watts per square meter the sun throws? That's great, work on it make it cheaper and better. Not a rocket scientist? OK, the economy needs all types so just do what you can. The rest of the world will follow as it is able. People come to the US from all around the world to learn how we do things. Some surpass their teachers and contribute here, all are better off. Only more freely available resources can lead to better living conditions and education that prevent waste. The evil actions of some are no reason for you to give up.
It is the wealth of this country that have allowed you to the time to reflect on these things. That wealth is built on ever more efficient utilization of resources. The world needs more, not less, for others to enjoy what we do.
Do not limit your thoughts to the present level of production or the current relative wealth of the world. The entire world's population could be housed in a suburb the size of Texas. People in some places are indeed murdered by their supposed leaders who feel compelled to compete with them for a surplus of scarce resources. Most people, however, succumb to ordinary shortages of food and medicine. Changing this takes time, but it is happening. The Earth's resources are immense, and the resources of the universe are unlimited. The only real limit is our ability to manipulate these resources.
What's wrong with "melt"?
Sorry, what I meant to say was low activation materials in the plasma facing components (molybdenum vs. carbon) and fuels that don't release as many neutrons.
The juice comes out in 100-billionths of a second, resulting in a 290-trillion-watt pulse. That's about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity, but it only lasts a few billionths of a second.
One way to do this:
Connect an LC circuit with huge capacitance (and inductance to match) to a lighning gap in parallel. Charge up the capacitor. Discharge it into the inductor. At the moment of maximum discharge, remove the capacitor from the circuit with a very fast switch whose "off" resistance is a _lot_ higher than that of the lightning gap.
The energized inductor has no choice but to discharge its energy, in a very fast rise time pulse, through the lightning gap.
My MicroSim runs show it is easy to get discharges that spike in under 100ns this way. Building the huge capacitor, huge inductor and fast high-open-resistance switches may not be so easy, of course.
Seastead this.
While much of the recent fusion work seems to have centered around tokamak reacters...
if'n nukyaleer reacters is outlawed, only outlaws is gonna have nukyaleer reacters.
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Duh. That should be, "destroy the world," in case anyone's wondering.
At lower sustained plasma pressure (one tenth that of p-B11), you can trade off energy against cleanliness with Helium-3 and Hydrogen-2 (deuterium). By varying the ratio between the two within the reaction mix.
Lithium-6 has a similarly low neutron reaction.
Techniques that produce extraordinarily high plasma pressures, even for a few miliseconds, are particularly valuable because they get into the regime where these aneutronic cycles are achievable.
Seastead this.
So we'll be able to take remodel a fusion or fission reactor, dump all the radioactive stuff into the transmuter, and get non-radioactive stuff. Sure, some of the radioactive iron may no longer be the same iron isotope or may no longer be iron, but it can be separated and processed using ordinary chemical and manufacturing methods at that point.
We're already doing transmuting in the lab but energy is too expensive to do it routinely. But then we're talking about after energy is cheap...and the high-energy plasma available as a side effect of hot fusion will allow interesting engineering and manufacturing.
The official Department of Energy (DOE) Fusion program is in real trouble - trouble it deserves. Fifty years ago usable controlled thermonuclear fusion was 25 years in the future. Now it is 40 years in the future. They brought it on themselves.
A short bit of history. The Princeton University research team always dominated the program. They area brilliant but stubborn group. No idea that wasn't invented by them had a snowball's chance in hell. The problem is very tricky, heating a plasma (ionized gas) to tens on millions of degrees, and confining it with a magnetic field - as no material could withstand the heat. The Princeton Plasma Lab (PPL) came up with the concept of a Stellarator, a figure-8 shaped magnetic confinement field. This never worked. In the sixties it was scrapped in favor or the Tokamak. - a doughnut shaped field. While this was not invented at Princeton, it was accepted there because it came out of the Soviet Union, not from a rival US group.
The Tokamak was a great advance, and it has been the center of the US, European and Japanese programs for the last four decades. In spite of its improvement it is fatally flawed for a number of engineering reasons. Note that the last three Tokamak projects have been scrapped as unworkable in the design stage, the latest being the ITER project mentioned in the Fresno Bee article ).
The prime damage the Tokamak has done over the decades, besides eating billions of dollars, has been the suppression of research into alternative fusion technology. I can comment on this from two points of view. First I did some of the alternative research before we were de-funded. Second, I was later a Program Manager at the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy for a year before I was let go as part of the massive cutback of the Fusion program.
During the 70's , after receiving my degree, I assisted Dr. Daniel Wells in his TRISOPS project at the University of Miami. The TRISOPS concept was that instead of trying to confine a hot plasma in a magnetic field (which is the mathematical equivalent of confining a ball of angry Jell-O in a cage of rubber bands), we should let the plasma form its own stable vortex structure and then compress it. An example of a stable vortex structure is a smoke ring. The equipment, by fusion standards, was simple. The lab was the size of a small suburban house. We were getting impressive results. See refs (1) at the bottom for a summary. Our funding was cut off because we were out of the mainstream. Also, Dan Wells, the principal investigator, was not good at the politics of science. I understand that the Wells' equipment has been recently moved to Lahnam MD where the experiment is being re-tried (by John Brandenberg under NASA funding - not DOE). I do not what results he has reached.
Another alternative project is being done by Paul Koloc (pmk@plasmak.com ), a plasma physicist formerly at the University of Maryland. He is looking into another stable plasma structure, ball lightning . Ball lightning has been witnessed for millennia, can sometimes last for minutes, and has killed people. Paul creates and measures ball lightning in a lab in a garage in his back yard ( no kidding ). The stable plasma structure lasts several milliseconds (It's is small so it has a short lifetime). He plans later to heat the plasma to fusion temperatures by compressing the atmosphere around the ball. His work is self-funded, with surplus equipment from the national labs, and some volunteer help from scientists there. He has presented several papers, the most recent at the 6th International Symposium on Ball Lightning. It has a small chance of working out, but at least as big a chance of the multi-hundred-million dollar DOE program. The abstracts are at http://home.wxs.nl/~icblsec/pg_abstracts.html under Koloc 1 and Koloc 2 You can write to Paul for the papers themselves.
I have described two alternative research schemes that I know of directly, I'm sure there are many others going on. Now that I have left physics to become an Internet geek, I no longer follow the field carefully. For I time I tracked Cold Fusion, until that fizzled out. As a final note: I do not believe that fusion energy of any sort will be able to compete economically with wind or solar power. There are many good comments and questions on fusion in this Slashdot thread that I will be glad to address on or of line if requested.
Ref (1) "High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" D. Wells (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" J. Davidson (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
I'm sure Nicholas Copernicus was told the same thing.
Think you can accelerate this plasma down a tube and aim it at some target, a la plasma rifle from Quake?
This has nothing to do with the current disscusion, but the Plasma Rifle was in DOOM not in Quake.
Fission fuel reprocessing is more expensive than the current high burn up cycle, but it could provide nearly limitless energy. The component of "Nuclear Waste" that lasts for thousands of years is fuel! The other nasties only have to be contained for a couple of hundred years before they are safe. Several schemes for seperating the two have been proposed and proven. The current US nuclear policy, and Propaganda, however has the potential to burn up the worlds Uranium deposits before the world runs out of petrolium. Thanks Jimmy Carter, non proliferation was a dismal failure!
There's no free lunch but there are better things that can be done. Fision produces the second cheapest and safest power in the US. Natural gas is safer and cheaper, but the CO2 people have really done this in. As several people have pointed out here, fusion plants don't last forever and are radioactive when finished. Let's hope that US education does not continue it's dismal descent into social policy propaganda oblivion, reasonable leaders are elected, and the real pros and cons of various energy scheams are wheighed correctly.
Don't give up. Keep saying what must be said.
Can anyone authoratively guestimate how much waste will be produced per energy unit?
In other words, if the energy consumption changed the same, and all fission plants were replaced with fusion plants, would the waste production be higher or lower?
This could be done with an environmental tax keeping the price of fusion energy at the same levels as other production methods. (Obviously this wouldn't work in the US, where it's the right of every man to destroy the work as long as he doesn't harm anyone else in the process, but it would be nice to know in the hypothetical case nonetheless.
Conceptually, he may have had classmates.
What is the correct linguistic description of phrases such as "Keep making an ass of yourself again"?
Idiot. If solar power is too "inefficient" for you, you must be paying far too much for your sunlight.
From what I know, and this may be incorrect, of basic physics it is impossibile to get energy from a reaction where you put two particles together. It takes energy to put things together. Since fusion is actually the "fusing", combining, of two atoms(or atomic particles or whatnot) then wouldn't you actually have to put energy into it an therefore be wasting energy. I am just curious as to where the energy comes from, the energy that everyone is talking about. Now this isn't to say I know I am write but could someone tell me what the real deal is, and I mean someone qualified. Not some college student that has taken a couple of physics classes like me.
Nah... they just want to sound like exotic metals. What's the Merced being called? Iridium? I've heard the person who thought of this reffered to as Intel's marketing guru... would that be someone who sits in a cave and has little contact with the outside world?
Politics don't change reality. Breeder reactors work, and can produce enough power to be considered limitless.
It's foolish to throw out what works today for something that might work in the future. With this attitude, we might as well go back to slash and burn agriculture until aliens come and save us from our selves.
Why would anyone want to build nuclear weapons if they were actually planning to kill people? Chemical and biological weapons are much more practical and cheap.
The comprehensive test ban treaty has a lot more to do with NIF than national missile defense programs (star wars). Those programs aren't exactly black, and account for over $1G in the DoD budget. From what little work I've done on NIF I think it is likely to reach its goals (the US isn't the only country persuing ICF, there is a lot of interest in its potential). Whether it can be scaled to a power plant is questionable.
Fission byproducts that are not FUEL have short half lives as well.
It would seem that the inside of the planet is already pretty hot from radioactive decay - where the heat is close enough to the surface, such as in New Zealand it is used for power production.
Anyway, the bombs should be exploded under France, not Kansas.
see, they are easy to spell. Just remember Pentium.... which reminds me... when Intel decided for the name Pentium, did they have in mind the Hydrogene nucleus with 4 additional neutrons? And what happened to the Quartium ;o)
Sigged!
Just say energy gets abundant and cheap. And everybody goes zooming around with electric motors. I doubt you're going to strap on a fridge to your vehicle to pump heat out to space. So the resulting heat generated would be distributed to ambient. Not nicely organised heat.
Your proposal would mean airconditioning our environments, e.g cities, parks etc, leaving everything else rather warm.
The good news is that this would still eliminate _most_ heat pollution. By far the largest sources of heat are cities (consuming electrical and fossil-fuel energy), and power plants (producing electrical energy at imperfect efficiency). Both of these can be cooled without *too* much additional expenditure (electricity and fossil fuels double in price due to taxes for the increased infrastructure needed).
Build this into the infrastructure in smaller population centers like towns, and you're left with highways and small villages as heat sources. Somewhere between 90% and 99% of heat production is accounted for, which dramatically reduces the environmental impact of heat pollution.
From space, the 1300 degree radiators would look like yellow-white glowing patches that show up even during the day. The 230 degree patches wouldn't show in the visible spectrum (they'd glow quite brightly in the intermediate IR spectrum, though).
They're just using fusion as a screen to develop powerful laser and particle beams for star wars weapons.
What the frag are you talking about? I'm absolutely terrified that a dictator might get a cheap and efficient energy source, oh yeah...shaking in my boots here.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Is there any good reason why fusion can't be achieved non-thermally, by bringing nuclei (or atoms) together with sufficiently high velocity ? For example, why not two beams of hydrogen ions meeting at sufficiently high energy ?
You could indeed produce fusion by firing two particle beams at each other. The problem is that particle accelerators are very inefficient; you'd wind up putting in far more energy to accelerate the particles than you'd get back from fusion events. Particle beams are also very sparse; you might only get a handful of nuclei even hitting each other, out of all of the nuclei in each of the intersecting beams. Lastly, when two nuclei collide, most of the time they bounce off of each other. Only a direct hit produces fusion (or other interactions, for higher-energy accelerators).
You can eliminate the tenuousness problems by firing a single beam at a target made of lithium or frozen hydrogen, but the other two problems remain.
Now, the fundamental issue - the "temperature" of something _is_ just the average energy of all of the particles in the object/gas/whatever. By accelerating particles to energies sufficient to overcome electrostatic repulsion... you've increased the temperature, as that's what temperature is a measure of.
As an interesting bit of trivia, fusion produced by a particle beam striking a target _is_ used in some applications. Certain types of nuclear warhead, for instance, use this type of device to produce a precisely-timed neutron pulse used to trigger fission. However, this is still done at a horrible energy cost (the object is to produce neutrons, not to get out more energy than they put in).
THIS IS SO COOL!
I light a splint, start the microwave, and watch for a few seconds. Nothing's happening, I'm skeptical and then (wait for it...)
BZOWN! BZOIN!
Two yellow flashes of...something. My adrenal glands kick into overdrive and I reflexively hit the Clear button. The splint still burns in the darkness of the microwave, so I nuke it again. Same thing! Too cool.
I'm not sure I buy the explanation that I'm seeing a plasma discharge - got a scientific reference on this?
People don't like starving. If we don't get fusion, we'll try something else.. like, perhaps, using the methyl hydrates. (Talk about you potential problems!)
Fusion has lots of (potentially) nice features.
It doesn't have many known downsides, outside of the fact that we can't do it yet. And eventually we will *NEED* it.
If we use the methyl hydrates first, we stand a good chance of melting the ice-caps. If we start starvation-based population control we stand a good chance of starting WW III. If we get cheap power we stand a good chance of starting workable colonies in space and on the moon. MacroLife is the obvious next step, and that can take too many forms to be reasonably predicted. But it *IS* a way forward.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually, solar is more like Windows, a useful technology for some purposes, but having lowered availability and reliability.
Workers can be shielded and fuel can be reprocessed. It's more expensive, but better in the long run to seperate the longer lived "waste" also know as fuel, from the shorter lived fision procucts that only have to be stored 200 years or so to be safe. Sure, it's not easy but it has been demonstrated.
I thought the primary reason Jimmy Carter killed reprocessing was non proliferation. Well, that worked great...
Thanks for the nice waste compairison. One of my proffesors worked just this problem, among others, with a planned fusion reactor. He concluded that both kinds of plants produce equal amounts of waste.
Especially by ACs who don't understand the posting mechanism for karmas >20.
:-)
I'm really sorry for mentioning this in this thread... but that +1 is somewhere above Karma of 23...
This really is not your thread...
Damn..I replied to a bot...
/.
:P
Oh, well. I don't feel so bad after seeing so many
of you morons getting all screedy about fusion despite demonstrating that
you don't even know what it is!
After all, I'd hate to have something small like a complete lack of knowledge
on a subject interfere with a peoples lengthy analysis's of the same.
"Let me tell you all about brain surgery!"
I'm beginning to see a lot of pseudo-intellectual babel here on
Similar to the talking heads on TV who will comment on everything,
even though they are rather stupid about most things.
I gave a little cheer when the guy who actually
worked in a reactor posted a comment.
It was like the voice of reason ringing clear
through a colcachaney of shrieking chickens.
Moderate me up, down, sideways...LIGAF
Personally, I like solar cells in orbit with microwave transmission to the ground. Silly, perhaps, but Mars would be a good place to test it (nobody would be claiming that you killed their cow). OTOH, I'm not certain about reception through dust storms. That might cause some interesting effects.
I expect the early fusion reactors to be much too expensive to use as a power source on a small base. Also, too heavy to transport and likewise too fragile. They would be better suited to powering the launch laser (rail gun? What's your choice for a launch method?) There they could be reused for powering the national grid when nothing was being launched. In space, I prefer space based methods (like solar powered steam engines).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I sure hope NIF meets its goals. Last I heard basicly $300 million was stolen from the project (3 investigations are underway), the project is understaffed, management loves to screw everything up (ie, created lots of delays by not actually conducting the research), etc. Origionally it was to be ready for initial operation in 2001 or 2002, now the hope is 2004. LLNL is full of problems because everyone except the scientists, from my understanding, are fools. The security people don't do their jobs, steal equipment, have lied under oath when accusing personel, etc. Its just so messy I'd be surprised that anything gets done, but all the real scientists I've met from there are really smart...
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Cool stuff, thanks for the explanation.
> that get a *very* high portion of their yield
> from fusion, as opposed to fission, there
> probably wouldn't be that much radiation to
> worry about in the first place.
It turns out that there would be.
Fusion reactions, like most other nuclear reactions, produce copious quantities of neutron radiation. This would make anything nearby (in this case, the surrounding rock) radioactive by transmutation.
The main benefit of fusion power isn't that it "doesn't produce radiation" - it does. It's that fuel is virtually unlimited. You also don't produce any _primary_ waste - spent fuel rods and the like. Just secondary waste (reactor structures made radioactive by transmutation).
I just love these lines of reasoning. Nanorobots and genetically-engineered bacteria are two very different things. Get this straight.
There IS a consequence of irradiating nanobots. They crumble into silicon powder. Nothing more. No scary "mutation". Seriously, has the alpha-decay in the RAM in your computer caused your computer to gain evil sentience yet?
Oh, and mutation requires reproduction. Nanobots, in general, are NOT designed to reproduce. (self-replicating nanobots is a fairly stupid idea actually...) You will find that no matter how much radiation you throw at a single organism, the only thing you're really going to do to it is kill it. The offspring are generally where mutations happen. (this is not ENTIRELY true for bacteria though...)
Regardless, nanobots are just small robots. Jeeze.
The info to build a fusion bomb has been published for about twenty years. There was a court case, United States vs The Progressive, about a journalist who was able to piece together the secret of the H bomb using public sources. Andy: Joe, your name is Joe.
I agree completely that wheels are a good thing, but the problem is that if you can build wheels easily, so can the tyrants of the world. That's why it's a darn good thing the horse and cart thing a few years ago was a mistake. It could have meant the end of the world.
It might take longer than that. Read the recent Scientific American article on methyl hydrates. Of course this may do interesting things to the green-house effect...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
the sun provides unlimited energy but we can only absorb in small amounts. Fusion energy will be much more intense. We don't just want to find a more powerful energy source because people need electricity but also for research perposes. A more powerful source of energy can be a great cataysis toward scientific advancement.
fus.x0r.com
More on the Inventor: Philo T. Farnsworth
The man was another one of those ahead of his time - right up there with Tesla and Tucker, IMHO. His main invention was that of fully electronic television (there is a very interesting and largely unknown story about this - see the second link).
In his later years he came up with the Fusor technology - I haven't heard any "qualified" opinions about the tech - there just isn't much info about it (most of what I have found is at that first link!). But it IS a very interesting concept and idea...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Nuff said.
This is a great posting - extremely well written, interesting and exactly on topic. It's been up (as of writing this) for over 4 hours now. Does anyone moderate it up? No... Instead at the topic we have an "insightful" poorly written comment on how pointless the search for fusion is. You have to love moderation... mbkennel, if I had any moderation points, I'd slap your posting up to the top. Thanks for the information.
A couple of errors here. Neutrons are what causes surrounding material to become radioactive, not "high energy states".
... heat, light, x-rays, and it won't become radioactive. Such material may be damaged by the energy ... that is, heat, light, and x-rays can break ordinary chemical bonds, but it won't make the material radioactive.
... the same problem as in a fission reactor.
You can bombard material with as much energy as you want
But when you carry out a reaction that gives off neutrons, such as in a breeder reactor, then the surrounding material will be bombarded with those neutrons. This is what causes the reactor itself to become radioactive. The reactor itself absorbs neutrons, and the otherwise-normal atoms that make up the surrounding material are changed into unstable isotopes, and break down. The result is that nearly anything that is bombarded with neutrons will itself become radioactive.
The "holy grail" of fusion would be to construct a reactor that fuses hydrogen into helium. This reaction does not give off neutrons, and would not turn the reactor radioactive. This is the theoretical promise of fusion. An ideal fusion reactor would use pure hydrogen as fuel, and emit pure, ordinary helium as a byproduct, along with energy.
Turns out that no one has been able to make a fusion reactor work with ordinary hydrogen, but it is possible to "cheat", and create a fusion reaction using deuterium or tritium. These are hydrogen atoms with either one or two extra neutrons. It's much easier to fuse deuterium then it is to fuse hydrogen, and even easier to fuse tritium, but the downside is that you get neutrons as a side-effect, so the reactor itself becomes radioactive
Even this is better then a fission reactor though, because the major waste product of a fission reactor is the used fuel rods. A "dirty" fusion reactor would not generate used fuel rods, but would still become a large, radioactive building over time.
As far as the massive heat released by fusion, this isn't an issue because a fusion reactor works on a tiny, tiny amount of hydrogen at any time.
A fusion reactor is basically a vacuum chamber, with a small amount of hydrogen floating around inside. The vacuum chamber is surrounded by an arrangement of electromagnets. When the electromagnets are turned on, the hydrogen is forced into an extremely thin ring. This is called magnetic compression. In theory, if the magnetic field can be made strong enough, the hydrogen atoms will be compressed together so tightly that they will fuse.
The only way to raise the hydrogen to fusion temperatures is to use a vanishingly small amount of hydrogen at any given time. This makes a fusion reactor safe against meltdown.
When a fission reactor overheats and malfunctions, the core -- all the fuel -- can melt together. When this happens, the nuclear reaction continues, uncontrolled, and the result is Three Mile Island.
If a fusion reactor were to become overheated, and malfunction, it would simply break down and stop.
If you were to try and explode a fusion reactor by dumping a lot of hydrogen into a running reactor, the excess hydrogen would quickly absorb the reaction heat, and the reaction would stop. If you were to try and overheat a fusion reactor, you would burst the vacuum chamber, air would rush in, and quench the reaction. In short, a fusion reactor is meltdown-proof, and explosion-proof.
However, the practical problems of building a fusion reactor were discovered in the 50s and have never been surmounted. The biggest problem is that you can compress the hydrogen into a thin ring, but the ring quickly becomes unstable and flies apart. No one has been able to solve the problem of keeping the fusion reaction going once it has started, hence no fusion reactors.
Fusion reactors do NOT have the dangers you describe, however.
> on mars. How else would they get all the power?
> AFAIK mars has quite a few clouds and storms
> regularly, so that would rule out solar as a
> sole source of power
AFAIK, weather on mars is mostly clear. That's why we get such nice views of the surface via telescopes. The atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, which means that dense clouds would be difficult to produce. Also, Mars's ambient temperature is below the freezing point of water. Dust storms happen, but aren't terribly frequent in most locations AFAIK.
Solar power would work fine most of the time, and power storage in batteries or fuel cells would be adequate during the occasional dust storms.
That's why you are very careful what you build them out of. I believe that Lithium is often mentioned, but I can't believe that this is reasonable.. As I recall it spontaneously combusts even without the provocation of a radiation induced fever.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The October "Physics Today" (not available online as far as I know) reported Sandia was shutting down it's fusion-related research to turn to more materials-oriented (nanostructures etc) research. I don't recall the details, but this news report may be some desperate attempt by the Z machine staff to keep the thing going. It did look very promising, but as the article says they really are still a long way from practicality. But I'd be disappointed if the approach was abandoned just because the lab got different priorities. Hope they find some funding somewhere.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Can any of the physicists who have been posting here take a look at this so-called "Farnsworth Fusor" concept, and tell us if it's BS or not?
Actually, the effeciency of modern nuclear reactors today are pretty close to 33% . In other words, if you put in 30 joules of heat, only 10 can be converted to useful work. Damn entropy... :-)
I heard that there may be a fair amount of 3He on the moon.
This has even less to do with the curreny discussion, but the plasma rifle is back in Quake 3 and quite possibly, when this poster said Quake, he meant Quake 3 just like when I say Quake, I actually mean Quake 2.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
except cold fusion is a joke. It never happened, a scam. Some scientists claimed to have done it in a mayonase jar, unshielded, at extreemly low temperatures (this is fusion here, extreemly low == room temp). Yet they refused to publish any results, or how they did it. That and there were huge inconsistancies in their claims, like the one that if they had actually produced the energy they claimed to have done, the radiation would have killed everyone in the room.
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
I keep hearing this stuff about how we're about to have a fossil fuel shortage, and how we're going to run out of oil and natural gas and such in "just a few years," and it leads me to ask a question:
How do we know we're running short of fossil fuels?
Granted, the amount of fossil fuels on this planet is finite, but how are we coming to the conclusion that we're almost out? Is there a giant gas gauge somewhere? Perhaps a monstrous dip-stick jutting out of the earth?
To know that we are about to run out of fossil fuels would require knowledge of the exact amount left on the planet, and *no one can possibly know that*! There are projections and estimates on the total amount of fuel, but no one can know with absolute certainty the exact amount of fossil fuels contained by this planet! New sources of fuels are still being discovered, and new technologies are allowing us to harvest from oil wells that 10 years ago would have been abandoned as "non-productive". Therefore, we cannot possibly know when all the fossil fuels will be depleted, and your doomsaying is a waste.
Quote: "We will have a net natural gas shortage within two years as it is a local market." How do you know that? Where did you get this 'fact'? What is your undeniable proof?
Quote: "Oil will take a little longer - about 2008 - 2010." Again, where is your proof? Show me your figures, and prove to me that your figures and facts are, indeed, truthful and accurate.
To say that you know exactly how much crude petroleum is left on this planet is like saying you know exactly how many star there are in our galaxy. You can guess, but you have no way of knowing.
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
I've never figured out this "limitless supply of energy" thing either. The last time I checked, there is only a finite amount of usable material to for Uranium 238 left on earth. And since treaties have banned breeder reactors, there really isn't any way to recycle the used nuclear waste. Finite amounts+inefficent heat engines -> finite amount of energy.
Whether fusion is cleaner at all or actually generates more waste would remain to be seen; it depends on how a working fusion reactor can be constructed. Since none has, we don't know what kind of containment it needs.
I think solar energy is a more worthwhile investment...
We also have 100,000 spent fuel assemblies weighting about a half ton each, stored around the country, waiting to be driven to Nevada for burial.
Is anybody looking at non-hydrogen fusion? Doesn't most of the actual power of the sun come from the "Sodium cycle"? (I could be wrong about the element, but I know it's around there somewhere). I know the threshold is much higher, but so is the yield. It should be a lot easier to do...
The coal-fired Muja power plant, 200km SSE of where I sit, releases 12 TONNES of uranium every year (3ppm x 4Mt/a).
Whether this goes up the stack directly into the atmosphere or accumulates in filters to make those filters a radioactive disposal issue, has not been made clear - but either way, how many tonnes of waste does a typical nuke produce every year?
Bear in mind that this is just the Uranium - stuff like Radium is released by the mining activities as well as by burning, and there's no figures for that.
And cheaper - how much cheaper is it going to be to NOT have to deal with the problems caused by the pollution, strip mining etc necessary to support a coal-fired plant? Not to mention side issues like the greater number of industrial deaths, the larger transport infrastructure, loss to industry of a greater number of workers through their dedication to the task, and so on.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Actually, not many people are aware ICF (inertia confinement fusion) even exists, much less that they're building a reactor right now, which is more than can be said for ITER. Basicly, you take a frozen pelet of hydrogen 2 and 3 (i'm not even going to try and spell them). put it in a chamber, then give a huge burst of laser power from all sides (solving the symmetry problem). Similar to what these other scientists are doing right now, except this concept has been around for many more years, and a test power generating facility is being constructed right now at los alamos. Very cool. While the ITER concept many sound cool to a reporter (ten story facility that generates super hot plasma dougnuts), its grossly inefficent, is still questionable if it will ever work, and has too much internation diplomatic squalbiling for it to get anywhere usefull. (strange beaurcratic rules like: a meeting of the four contries involved must have an equal number or representatives from each country, AND the total number must be a power of two: 4, or 8, or 16...).
Vote Technocratic! Government by killer robots!
Actually the reason we have radioactive waste was because the government(s) wanted a plentiful source of weapons grade material. If we had designed clean reactors in chain the amount of radio active waste would be much smaller. Though this would still only be a stop gap measure maybe 300-1000 years. Likely we will have to use more non-fossil fuel sources before we have fusion, actually the more the better likely at this point. (Global warming, need lubricants, etc.)
Grey (Chris Lusena)
It is not clear yet how the Sandia researchers plan to attack that problem.
So basically everyday, usable fusion is about ten years away.
Nothing new there.
I shouldn't be cynical. There hasn't been an innovative research project in the history of the universe (afaik) that hasn't taken years with a steady stream of mishaps. And the great thing about science is that bad results provide data as well as good ones.
But I still think we'll have a base on Mars before we see workable fusion.
There have been reports of rampant drunkenness, performances by strippers, public nudity, and other licentious and mindless behavior at every gathering of Nuclear Fusion's henchmen
HA HA HA! For those of you too lazy to actually read that crap up there, this is the funny part. Or it was to me and the guys in my dorm. Eh. If you feel you need to spend moderation points on this, crank this post down.
Demona's Law - "User data expands to exceed available bandwidth." ("User data" being pr0n, mp3's, vob's,
The general rule is that military tech is at least 10 years ahead of what the public has access to. The corrolary(sp?) is that the military never declassifies something until it has developed a countermeasure for it.
Ok, I'm not too quick sometimes, so I'm wondering: what would be a countermeasure to something like the "Z" machine? (what a dumb name)
I'd also like to add that, you said that the military doesn't declassify something til they have a countermeasure for it. Which, if they released the "Z" machine, then that means they would, according to your rule, have a countermeasure for it, which is _not_, I might add, fusion. Yet, it is a thought: one must wonder what the military's hiding from us. Maybe they have fusion, or maybe they're just a lot closer than "we" are. Hmm........
Insert mind here.
As it's clear that very few people are still throwing money at "cold fusion" setups, the "hot fusion" variation described in the article seems like the only way to go right now. Once they lick the symmetricity problem - possibly by setting up some positive feedback in the plasma to keep the reaction shape spherical in the crucial nanoseconds - there should be more progress.
Getting parts of the reactor chamber destroyed at every pulse is relatively the easiest part to get around...
I'm obviously talking about tyrants using "cold fusion" to build bombs, not to produce electric power! Was that not as obvious as I thought it was, or are you just a moron?
Hmm... after reading this article, this one came to mind. It tells of microrobots that are to be used to repair power plants, anyone else see the possibilities? If people would give nano technology the attention it deserves ;) and get a few buckets full of nanobots on the rotating wheel of lids for the fusion generator, it would be nearly maintenence free (by humans) and pretty cost efficient!
Go nanotechnology!
It's pretty clear that no cold fusion will be invented until the planted is 'nearly' totally wasted.
As soon as such device can be made, it will eventually be possible to integrate this into cars and home heaters. If this development would for example be introduced withing 10 years, a whole lot of country's economies will collapse, if not the world's economy.
So basically what I'm saying is: Don't hold yer breath.
> article seems like the only way to go right now.
> Once they lick the symmetricity problem -
> possibly by setting up some positive feedback in
> the plasma to keep the reaction shape spherical
> in the crucial nanoseconds - there should be
> more progress.
It turns out that symmetry is extremely difficult to achieve.
This approach to fusion has been tried before - there is a whole class of fusion reactor that tries to induce fusion by running strong electric currents through a plasma (which is what this is - you just get your plasma by zapping a pellet).
From the first approximation, this looks very good - the magnetic fields created by the current flow act to compress the plasma, bringing it closer to satisfying the Lawson criterion. The problem is that variations in the current and in the density of the plasma/pellet cause assymetries, which tend to magnify themselves (the electric and magnetic effects of turbulence cause more turbulence). Because of the way that plasma behaves, there is no magical way to elminate this.
All fusion approaches encounter this problem. One approach to solutions - the one that it looks like they're using here - is brute force. It takes more time for turbulence to muck up a larger volume of plasma, which means that a larger device can come closer to satisfying the Lawson criterion. Also, dumping more energy into the plasma can help; fusion in conventional reactors occurs only among the hottest particles at the tail-end of the temperature distribution. Greater average energy means more particles of sufficient energy to cause fusion.
A second approach is to modify the design of the reactor to either reduce turbulence or to be less sensitive to turbulence. For magnetic confinement reactors, a lot of study has gone into different field geometries that stifle certain types of turbulence. For electrical discharge reactors - like the one described in the article - different electrode geometries have been tried. However, in the case of electrical reactors, this hasn't been enough to match the capabilities of magnetic confinement and inertial confinement (laser) fusion.
A hybrid reactor was recently built that used an electrical discharge to produce a hot plasma that was used as an X-ray source, which in turn was used to heat a fuel pellet in a chamber that reflected X-rays. This proved to be a very promising approach; for details, check back issues of (I think) Scientific American. This does not appear to be the approach described in this article, however.
Laser fusion's main problems aren't turbulence, which is why I haven't mentioned it much in this response.
> produce fusion is at extremely high
> temperatures. No one has suggested a meachanism
> (that works!) that would allow otherwise,
> possibly no one ever will.
Actually, muon-catalyzed fusion works at much lower temperatures (something like 800 degrees in the test rigs I heard about).
This is completely different from "cold" fusion. Completely different principles, well-understood, and well-tested.
The idea is that if you displace an electron in a hydrogen _molecule_ with a muon (its heavier cousin), the molecule will suddenly become much smaller, because the wavelength of a muon is much smaller than the wavelength of an electron. The hydrogen nuclei are now close enough to have a significant probability of fusion by tunnelling.
The problem with this is that muons are energy-expensive to produce, and don't stick around for very long (they decay into an electron, a muon neutrino, and an electron antineutrino). The energy released by the fusion reactions that the muons catalyze has so far been far, far less than the energy required to produce the muons in the first place.
Just a typo, sorry ;)
Somebody found the complaint-bot link over on Robot Wisdom
When something like this which was generated with a program gets "Score: 1, Insightful" is when you are absolutely sure the Slashdot moderators don't actually read the comments.
first this is a not a fusion reaction. fusion spawns in very hot compressed pools of plasma, but plasma is not fusion. Second you can also just look at a florescent lightbulb and see plasma, we use it everyday and so few people realize it's plasma. so that when someone mentions plasma on /. everyone gets all excited.
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
Thats what Fusion means. If we get fusion cheap enough, the potential exists to literally have hydrogen powered cars. Through hydrolosis, which is running an electrical current through water, you can split the hydrogen and oxygen. If electricity were cheap enough, this would me that you would have a car that runs on the by products of water. You could make your own fuel to power your car.
This also means that you can purify water from the ocean and irigate an entire desert with it. You wouldn't hydrolosis for this, you'd simply boil the water to steam and condense it to remove the salts.
Can you imagine if the Sahara desert was able to bear fruit? Not only would that mean an end to hunger in the continent, but potentially the world.
I'm not saying that this can happen overnight. All I am saying is that if we have cheap enough electricity, which is what Fusion promises, then life will be a whole hell of a lot easier for everyone.
I can't imagine why anyone would want anything but this.
No matter what, power needs will increase -- it's a function more of increasing population than of technology. Thus, an emphasis on reduced power consumption is a very important parallel to research into new power sources. Besides taking some of the pressure off, this approach will be far more useful to those people who won't be able to afford fusion plants even when they are possible.
The second problem that occurs to me is the increasing centrality inherent in these plants. Building fusion plants means that one facility can power maybe millions of homes. Which means that one technical glitch or terrorist attack can knock out power to more people.
I've always been a fan of more distributed systems. Combinations of technologies -- wind turbines, solar power, natural gas, gerbil wheels -- can be arranged very skilfully for a system with greater redundancy and reduced complexity that can greatly alleviate the need for fusion power.
It's easy to sound like a nut when suggesting courses of action like this, but it's really pure practicality. Expertise in more distributed forms of power production will be applicable to a wider range of situations. Further, there is no such thing as "clean" power. Right now we've decided that coal power is too polluting to continue to use much longer. When fusion power becomes a reality, then more people will consider fission plants to be too polluting to continue using. What happens when the consensus is that the smaller radiation from fusion is too much? Will there be another expensive search for new technology? Or will we have a mature back-up plan?
- The most powerful nuclear devices yet invented are fusion-based; they get the majority of their energy by assembling atoms of helium from isotopes of hydrogen.
- All nuclear bombs have uranium or plutonium in them. "Atom" (fission) bombs go no further, while "hydrogen" (fusion) bombs use the energy from the fission reaction to initiate a fusion reaction.
- Fission bombs are pretty easy to make, if you have highly-enriched uranium. All you need is to make a sub-critical mass with a slug missing from the middle, such that the mass is prompt-supercritical when the slug is added. You fire the slug into it with what amounts to a zip gun, and it goes boom. This is how the "Little Boy" bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki worked.
- Plutonium is much touchier stuff, and requires an implosion design (collapse of a spherical shell of fissionable material to form a supercritical mass) to get things to work well. Implosion designs require precise timing of the explosive charges which do the work of assembling the mass. The "Fat Man" bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was an implosion device.
- Making a hydrogen bomb not only requires you to get a healthy fission reaction going, you have to somehow couple the energy (and a bunch of the neutrons) to a mass of lithium deuteride. Li-6 captures neutrons and forms helium-4 and tritium. The tritium can then fuse with the deuterium, forming helium-4, a very high-energy neutron, and about 18 million electron-volts of excess energy overall. Unlike a fission bomb, you don't have to worry about exceeding any "critical mass" threshold so you can make a fusion bomb just about as big as you like... once you have figured out how to do it at all.
Note, the fusion energy available from a molecule of lithium deuteride is about 18 MeV, and it has a molecular mass of about 8. The fission energy from an atom of U-235 is only 191 MeV, and it is almost 30 times heavier. Fusion has a lot more punch for the mass.--
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
> vacuum, then not as much heat is required to
> sustain the reaction as stated in the article.
Um, not quite.
It takes a very hefty amount of energy to heat the plasma to the required temperatures - about 1.0e8 degrees centigrade. At those temperatures, plasma cools quite quickly by radiative emission, regardless of whether it's in vacuum or not. This is one of the reasons that the reaction only lasts nanoseconds.
> Only about 100,000C is needed before the atoms
> can become ionized and begin to transfer energy.
Um, not quite.
The plasma doesn't just have to be plasma - it has to be plasma of high enough energy that the nuclei can overcome their mutual repulsion. Hence, the 1.0e8 degrees figure for most terrestrial reactors (stars use lower temperatures, higher densities, and longer confinement time).
> At this stage things get a little fuzzy, because
> some of the normal laws of physics don't work
> because the atoms are in a plasma state.
Actually, they work just fine. You're just dealing with a conducting gas.
> The good news is the are electrically charged
> and can be controlled by magnets(as mentioned in
> the article). This should help keep the reaction
> in one spot.
Correct. This is the principle behind magnetic confinement fusion.
Other approaches exist. Both the approach described in the article and laser fusion rely on inertial confinement instead - the particle is suddenly compressed, and by the time it disperses the reaction has finished.
For more information on fusion and many other interesting things, browse your local university's bookstore for physics texts. My personal favourite is "Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Extended Version", bt Paul A. Tipler.
ERM, tell me I'm wrong if I say: This is a standart text with the words Nuclear Fusion pasted into it.
Pluck the mote out of your eye, Tau -- Little Boy hit Hiroshima; Fat Man hit Nagasaki.
As for the energy/mass calculation you provide; that's correct but irrelevant in most cases. In most cases, your primary interest is in releasing a large amount of energy There and you have a ready way of moving a large mass from Here to There.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
So basically everyday, usable fusion is about ten years away. Nothing new there.
:)
Exactly. Usable fusion has been about ten years away for the past forty.
Who was it that said, "Atomic power will be too cheap to meter?"
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
...for cold fusion. Hot fusion still a just a pipe dream.
this is clearly a TROLL. mODERATE IT AS SUCH!
What about TFTR and JET ? How is 16 megawatts of fusion power considered to be not going anywhere ? MFE has made steady and consistent gains without handouts from defense. Claiming that ICF is research towards fusion energy and not weapons is less than honest.
Just about any fusion reaction we're likely to produce without really exotic techniques is going to spit out neutrons. Neutrons that will be absorbed by anything in the vicinity of the reactor. Stuff that will then contain neutron-activated radioisotopes.
Ergo, fusion reactors will still produce radioactive waste -- just not the fission products we're used to.
First of all, I doubt that the military has fusion. Really the only product to gain from fusion is energy, not any components for nuclear weapons. Second of all, if the reaction takes place in a vacuum, then not as much heat is required to sustain the reaction as stated in the article. Only about 100,000C is needed before the atoms can become ionized and begin to transfer energy. This only happens if the density is great enough. However this only needs to have a density a little over that of a vacuum. At this stage things get a little fuzzy, because some of the normal laws of physics don't work because the atoms are in a plasma state. The good news is the are electrically charged and can be controlled by magnets(as mentioned in the article). This should help keep the reaction in one spot.
> set off an H-bomb every hour and trap the heat.
And since evolution doesn't exist in Kansas, so it's not like anyone should worry about an increase in the mutation rate should the seal on the underground chamber ever break! Woo-hoo!
More seriously - since you can build H-bombs that get a *very* high portion of their yield from fusion, as opposed to fission, there probably wouldn't be that much radiation to worry about in the first place. Also consider that since the bombs would be built free of the size/weight/shape constraints imposed by weapons platforms, you could likely achieve further increases in the fusion:fission energy output ratio. My snarky comment about Kansas' creationist lobby aside, I hadn't heard of this idea until now, but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
I never said that it *is* fusion that we are seeing. If all fusion is is burning shit in a microwave, then we'd be there already.
::
It *is* a plasma, and it does illustrate some of the difficulties in fusion reactor design (namely, the Tokamak, which, if I understand correctly, utilizes a toroid-shaped container and a magnetic field generated around it to confine the plasma into a ring. And the flamin' flint in a microwave demostrates precisely the difficult nature of containing a plasma effectively. Besides, it looks cool! 8-)
I am not too sure if florescent lightbulbs contains plasmas either. Inside the glass tube is evacuated and filled with mercury gas. When we turn on the light, we bake electrons off a cathode (much like the CRT tube in your monitor) and this exites the mercury atom, causing it to fluorese (sp?). Mercury's emission spectra is in the UV series, so we coat the tube with phosphor which absorbs the UV and emits white, visible light.
:: shrug
I'm a chemist by training, I just thought the demo looks cool. 8-)
-=- SiKnight
As far as I can tell with normal fission we go and ruin some of the planet every few years when some stupid idiot(s) does something completely against the rulebook and causes a accident.
With this new fusion we go and distroy a whole bunch of trashcan lids every second.
I'll take the trashcan lids thank you very much. :-)
There are so many sites dedicated to that topic that it seems pointless to repeat that subject here. Also, we wouldn't want to make you feel inadequate in comparison to what might have been displayed. Sorry.
The bottomline, IMHO, is that the sooner we have fusion - or another cheap, environmentally clean energy source, the less likely we are to destroy the rest of this planet and hence ourselves.
Yeah, right. And computers will lead to a paperless office hence saving the rainforest.
Cheap power will only lead to increased production capacity and will intensify the demand for raw materials.
People will be able to live in places where it is currently uneconimical to live. The use of said power will also generate a lot of waste heat.
The government will build huge roving automatons with fusion reactors in their bellies to control the population.
All life will be consumed by nanobots which will turn the entire surface of the planet into grey goo which resembles an as yet uninvented flavor of McDonald's shake.
Or something.
For those with an interest in the scientific mainstream of Nuclear Fusion work internationally, check out the IAEA Nuclear Fusion journal at http://epub.iaea.or.at/fusion/
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Such a machine would generate huge amounts of highly radioactive waste.
We already have a fusion reator running that provides nearly unlimited amounts of free and polution free energy. It is called the sun.
We need to learn to harness this energy source while making our computers, vehicals and appliances more energy effecient by an order of magnitude.
Unless energy is inexpensively available to everyone, there will be wars in the coming years that make us long for the days of WWII.
The above posts said it all. Kudos. Thanks for the link--it was very informative.
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
I don't profess to know a great deal about Fission or Fusion, but every time someone says "limitless supply of energy" I get skeptical.
Wasn't Nuclear energy supposed to be that? Until we realized there was no place to put the radioactive waste generated.
They are working on this new technology, and while there are still some bugs to work out, I believe human inginuity will prevail, and we will see this technology working within my lifetime (before 2050).
I predict however that there will be unforseen problems, such as disposal of waste... weird kind of pollution generated by the explosions... things that can't be accounted for until a working model is built. Of course when the working model is built, all will bow down before the solution to all the world's energy problems, and nobody will think to listen to anyone with a negative word to say.
Just a thought... might not happen.
Weren't cars, phones, computers, _____ (fill in the blank) supposed to solve all our problems?
I don't think the worlds problems will be solved until there is a significant change in the organization of authority and government in the world. That probably *won't* happen in my lifetime.
Reality has a liberal bias
Are you sure? I thought that most of the yield from large thermonuclear devices (fission-fusion-fission) came from the fission of the U238 jacket in the fusion stage. A "clean" but much lower yield device can be built by using a lead jacket.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How exactly does exposure to high energy states make something radioactive? You could x-ray something for thousands of years, and still not make it radioactive. The only way I can think of, of making some elements radioactive, is by shooting high energy particles into the nucleus.
Technical enough to keep us geeks interested, and informed about a wide range of subjects, and unlike Nature it's articles are not too technical for the non specialist geek to stay awake reading them. Too bad Schientific American is so expensive here in Europe.
it's the lack of scientists, like bohr, planck, heisenberg or the guy from the photo above. our generation's scientists mess with black holes and the mass deficit in space
even better than the aforementioned demo is one in which you put a dozen birthday candles in a ring with diameter of 10cm. light all, make sure the flames are touching. Nuke. The ring of fire acts as an antenna (10cm is the approx. wavelength of microwaves) and you get something that looks a lot like ball lightning. It's really cool. But it's hard to get right. It may take a few tries.
Well, one of the ACs mentioned this earlier, but your post seems to contradict itself:
"Uranium by itself is no big whoop." - But it is still radioactive. So you're saying here that not all radioactive substances are a big deal.
Then you say that fusion will create radioactive byproducts and hence is as dangerous as fission - Yes, it will, but as far as I know, all of those byproducts are even less dangerous than uranium. Either they have minimal radioactivity, or have extremely short half-lives. Either way, the waste disposal problem is nowhere near as bad as for fission waste. In the case of short-lived materials, it may be "cool" by the time you can even remove it from the reactor.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
of course, that should be energy out less than or equal to energy in.
Actually it's still Hydrogen fusion only by a process called the Carbon-Nitrogen cycle in which the other two elements are used as catalysts, renewed at the end of the cycle. Only problem is that we simply can't recreate the conditions neccessary artificially.
Anyhow, the farther you get from hydrogen, fusion requires greater energy to startup and yields much less in return. At Iron or above, the process requires more energy than released
BTW, I mis-stated a number above. The fission energy of U-235 (under thermal neutron bombardment) is 194 MeV. U-233 is 191 MeV, Pu-239 is 201 MeV according to the CRC.
--
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Uh, the point of all of this is to convert matter to energy. The energy used to start the fusion is merely the catalyst. The energy gain happens when hydrogen is fused into helium (and thus destroying a small amount of matter. Or converting it to energy, whichever you prefer). It doesn't take much in the way of matter to get a considerable amount of energy in return. The beauty of this process is that it's major reactive by-product is some sort of isotope of nitrogen. Which has a half-life of 8 seconds. I've got a fusion magazine from at least twenty years ago :) I'm getting impatient...
Fission is the thing that has F'd up our planet with radioactive waste.
Fusion doesn't have such a side effect. The only by-product of Fusion is Helium.
Technically you're right, the 1:1 ratio of current fusion attempts are in reality not reached. That is , afaik, because it takes lots of energy to create the proper "environment" for the fusion to take place and then they only set of a small fusion "burst".
which is already unstable. The end result is Plutonium. Even worse.
Control is not too difficult if you can get enough hydrogen.
Once you get enough it will just collapse on itself and fuse.
With the right amount you can have it going for billions of years, maintenance free!
---
BTW if cold fusion really works, we should hook it up so as to produce ATP for our cells. Talk about having unlimited energy.
Wow, wouldn't that look really interesting from space? I wonder how that would look from our satellites. Or an aliens for that matter ;).
Yes your proposal could work but the implications don't look that neat and nice.
Just say energy gets abundant and cheap. And everybody goes zooming around with electric motors. I doubt you're going to strap on a fridge to your vehicle to pump heat out to space. So the resulting heat generated would be distributed to ambient. Not nicely organised heat.
Your proposal would mean airconditioning our environments, e.g cities, parks etc, leaving everything else rather warm.
Not necessarily that desirable. But we're heading that way anyway.
Cheerio,
Link.
The physics behind cold fusion was always pretty unlikely, virtually no physicists on the planet believed in it even at the height of the excitement.
The simple fact is that the only known way to produce fusion is at extremely high temperatures. No one has suggested a meachanism (that works!) that would allow otherwise, possibly no one ever will.
Forget cold fusion, it will most likely never happen.
Atomic bombs use fission, Hydrogen bombs use fusion. You didn't read the article, did you?
Here's a quick plasma physics demostration that you can do at home:
Take a wooden splint, like one of those things used to stir coffee.
Stick it into something that will stand it up, say a pencil eraser, or a piece of bread.
Light the tip and stick it into the microwave. Nuke for 1 minute.
Voila. what you will witness is a plasma being formed at the flame. A redox reaction is occuring, with atmospheric oxygen oxidizing the wood. The microwave energy is somehow disrupting the flow of the ionized particles (electrons and all) and forming your plasma.
Now, generating this plasma is one thing (Try it! It doesn't damage the microwave) but controlling this plamsa is a totally different story. Think you can accelerate this plasma down a tube and aim it at some target, a la plasma rifle from Quake? If you can do that, gimme a call 8-)
This demo illustrates the precise nature of fusion research. While generating a fusion reaction isn't difficult, it's controlling the reaction that's being a pain in the arse...
-=- SiKnight
...that nuclear fusion can either be the ultimate in helping human civilization, or the ultimate in destroying human civilization.
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
This is bogus. Inertial confinement is just the DODs way to continue funding Star Wars technology development. If the funds spent on ICF were put into an MFE burning plasma experiment, we would be decades closer to a working power plant.
sorry, I don't watch much t.v.
Insert mind here.
Fusion is nothing but sex misspelled.
After so long, the fusion reactor itself becomes radioactive and must be replaced. No way around this. And I'm sure this is "orders of magnitude less waste than fission reactors produce"; BUT it's still "high level" waste. The U.S. still hasn't had the guts to find a solution to dispose of said waste (and there are many good ways to do it but, are no-no'd by NIMBYs).
So until we do find the disposal solution, I say keep on researching all you want but don't start building them until you find a solution to the waste problem.
I think being a plumber is a noble chore. When the toilet overflows you don't need Dostoevsky coming to your house.
D-T pellet fusion research already has major funding and is under construction.
The NIF (National Ignition Facility) is based on the pellet explosion approach.
Fairly failsafe, since both the pellet transport *and* the lasers would have to runaway, and at a rate at which they don't function.
Learn about it:
National Ignition Facility
my four-assed monkey doesn't like it.
"It is a kind God that made yams both inexpensive and easy to prepare"
We've been had once again by the perl-speaking slash-bot!! woo hoo These AI attempts are getting better and better every day...
That's not totally true, If we can use Helium-3 in the fusion plants, there will be no radiation. However, it's a bit harder to fuse.
Back in the early 90's, I got together with a bunch of the fusion technologists who were pursuing alternative technologies. We drew up some legislative language to better serve innovation in fusion energy. Bob Bussard took it upon himself to send that legislative proposal to every Senator and Representative in the US Congress. I figured if it was good enough for Bob it might be good enough for Slashdot fusion-fans 'lo these many years later
THE FUSION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INCENTIVES ACTSec 1. Congressional findings and declaration of policy
(a) The Congress hereby finds that --
(1) the United States is founded on the nobility of the creative act,
(2) this respect is enshrined in the Constitutional provision for patents of invention.
(2) in theory, the fusion of light atomic nuclei can provide the basis for such energy sources;
(3) the concept of fusion energy based on the confinement of high temperature plasmas has been the subject of ongoing government-funded research and development for over three decades;
(4) during these decades our understanding of high temperature plasmas has progressed to the point that, with appropriate government incentives, the tradition of diversity and risk management in our free enterprise system can expand the frontiers of fusion energy technology at a rate far greater and at a cost far lower than centrally planned programs funded by the government alone;
(5) progress in fusion energy systems is currently limited by the lack of a diversity in technical approaches being explored;
(6) to ensure the timely commercialization of fusion energy systems, the United States Government must create an environment in which the inherent commercial rewards of fusion energy technology are leveraged by supplementary Federal funds so as to motivate many diverse inventors and investors in the private sector who will freely and rapidly develop the frontiers of fusion energy technology;
(7) it is vital that the Federal Government continue its direct financial support for scientific research in the physics of high temperature plasmas as this creates fundamental new knowledge of immense value which cannot be patented or reasonably treated as intellectual property;
(8) it is a proper role for the Federal Government to stimulate accelerated commercial investment in the development and demonstration of fusion energy technologies; and
(9) the stimulation of commercial investment in the development of fusion technology can be accelerated through the award of cash prizes to entrepreneurs achieving significant technical milestones and the granting of funds matching those put at risk by private investors.
(b) It is therefore declared to be the policy of the United States and the purpose of this chapter to stimulate commercial investment in the development and demonstration of fusion energy systems and continued scientific research into the physics of high temperature plasmas. Further, it is declared to be the policy of the United States and the purpose of this chapter that the objectives of such a program shall be --
(1) to promote an orderly transition from the current research and development program to a new one in which the private sector capitalizes and manages risks inherent in the development and demonstration of fusion energy technologies under the disciplined diversity of free enterprise while the government continues to directly fund plasma physics research;
(2) to stimulate private sector investment in fusion energy technology by awarding substantial prizes for significant technical achievement and matching private investment with public grants;
(3) to, over time, systematically remove public support for private investment in fusion energy development and demonstration commensurate with the removal of barriers to commercial deployment of fusion energy systems;
(4) to continue international cooperation in plasma science for the benefit of all nations;
(5) to give preferential treatment to aneutronic fusion cycles;
(6) to give preferential treatement to fusion cycles that make use of readily available fuels;
(7) to stimulate the commercial deployment of competitive fusion energy sources; and
(8) to demonstrate that United States science in partnership with commercially financed technology development and operation continues the tradition of world leadership in science and technology.
Sec. 9302. Definitions
For the purposes of this chapter --
(1) "fusion" means a process whereby two light nuclei, such as deuterium and tritium, collide, forming a compound nucleus, which subsequently separates into constituents which are different from the original colliding nuclei, and which carry away the accompanying energy release;
(2) "energy system" means a facility designed to utilize energy released in the fusion process for the generation of electricity and the production of hydrogen or other fuels;
(3) "Secretary" means Secretary of Energy.
(4) "scientific research" means activities that discover knowledge about natural phenomena, which, under existing statute, cannot be held as intellectual property via patent;
(5) "scientific knowledge" means knowledge acquired or discovered through scientific research;
(6) "development" means the acquisition of knowledge or reduction to practice of an invention which does not exist in nature and which has some practical value or which has value as intellectual property under patent law or other statutes;
(7) "engineering break-even" means the production, by a fusion energy device, of a fusion burn which consumes at least 5% of the confined fusion fuel and which produces at least twice the energy consumed by the fusion energy device during the burn;
(8) "commercial break-even" means the self-sustaining operation of a fusion energy device by feeding its power output back to its power input without the need for any outside input except its fuel;
(9) "commonly available" is any fuel whose dollar (1992) per ounce commercial price multiplied by the number of tons of plant and equipment required to burn it per million watts sustained power production is a quantity less than 10,000 dollar-tons per megawatt-ounce;
(10) "energetically aneutronic" means any fuel which, when burned in a fusion energy system, produces neutron radiation carrying away less than 10% of the produced energy;
(11) "environmentally aneutronic" means any fuel which, when burned in a fusion energy system, produces neutron radiation carrying away less than 1% of the produced energy;
Sec. 9303. Program activities
(a) Scientific research in areas where lack of knowledge limits the development of fusion energy systems;(1) The Secretary shall periodically survey commercial participants in fusion energy technology development or potential investors in same, to determine critical gaps in scientific knowledge;
(2) The Secretary shall initiate scientific research emphasizing gaps in scientific knowledge as determined from the survey of commercial developers and investors;
(3) The Secretary shall fully disclose to the public all discoveries made in the course of government funded research under this program;
(4) The Secretary shall, on an annual basis, convene an independent panel, no member of which may have received Federal funds for fusion-related research or development in the last 5 years nor served on the panel in the last 5 years, to review scientific research activities to ensure Federal plasma physics funds are not being used for patentable fusion technology development purposes instead of unpatentable scientific research into plasma physics;
(5) If the independent review panel determines an activity is development rather than research, the Federal funds used for such development must be repaid to the United States Treasury to reduce the federal debt;
(6) Physicists receiving income from government-funded fusion energy research or development prior to the enactment of this legislation are to be awarded an annual grant for the next 5 years equal to their average annual income derived from Federally-funded fusion energy programs over the last 5 years, up to a limit of $60,000(1992) per year, the purpose of which is to recognize their committment and contribution to the field and to aid in their transition to the new funding environment; and
(7) Commercial Fusion Enterprises, as defined in 9303.b.1 may enjoin the government from continuing to directly fund scientific research in plasma physics which they believe to be in competition with their efforts to develop fusion technology.
(b) The stimulation of commercial investment in fusion technology development;(1) Any private, for profit, business owned or controlled by United States persons which is primarily engaged in the development of fusion technology qualifies as a Commercial Fusion Enterprise.
(2) Every U.S. citizen possessing a patent for a fusion energy system is to be provided with full reimbursement of all tax-deductible expenses incurred the pursuit of their patent, up to a maximum of $100,000; the purpose of which is to assist the inventor the expense of pursuing private capital of further development of the patented technology, under the incentives of the current Act.
(3) Any facility owned or controlled by United States persons generally used by Commercial Fusion Enterprises and primarily used for the development of fusion technology qualifies as a Commercial Fusion Center and also as a Commercial Fusion Enterprise.
(4) Commercial Fusion Enterprises shall receive matching funds from the government for each private investment they make toward the development of fusion technology.
(5) Funds provided by the government, as well as the private funds they match, shall be used to develop fusion energy technology. Failure to use such funds to develop fusion energy technology shall render the Commercial Fusion Enterprise liable for such damages and criminal penalties as are warranted under the existing statutes against securities fraud currently enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
(6) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate engineering break-even shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund, which is hereby established, and whose contents are to be invested in 30 year Treasury instruments and whose disbursements are to be administered by the National Academy of Engineering.
(7) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate engineering break-even using an cycle burning an energetically aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(8) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate engineering break-even using an cycle burning an environmentally aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(9) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate engineering break-even using using a cycle burning a commonly available energetically aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(10) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate engineering break-even using using a cycle burning a commonly available environmentally aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(11) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate commercial break-even shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(12) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate commercial break-even based on a fusion cycle burning an energetically aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(13) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate commercial break-even based on a fusion cycle burning an environmentally aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(14) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate commercial break-even using a cycle burning a commonly available energetically aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(15) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate commercial break-even using a cycle burning a commonly available environmentally aneutronic fuel shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(16) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate engineering break-even at power densities above 1 million watts per ton of equipment shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(17) The first Commercial Fusion Enterprise to demonstrate commercial break-even at power densities above 1 million watts per ton of equipment shall receive a $100,000,000 prize from the Fusion Energy Trust Fund.
(18) Interest income on the Fusion Energy Trust Fund shall be used to increase the value of all prizes according to the Producer Price Index. Excess income shall be returned to the United States Treasury used to reduce the national debt.
(19) One year after this bill becomes law, The Secretary shall hold a series of 10 monthly publicly advertised auctions. At each auction 10 kilograms of Helium-3 will be sold to the highest bidder. The winning bidder must:
a) be a Commercial Fusion Enterprise.
b) not have already won a previous auction.
c) not have cross-ownership with any other Commercial Fusion Enterprise that has already won at a previous auction.
d) have a board of directors and officers that do not overlap with the board of directors and officers of any other Commercial Fusion Enterprise that has already won at a previous auction and;
e) not have more than 10% of its ownership in common with any other Commercial Fusion Enterprise that has already won at a previous auction.
20) The Secretary shall make 100 acres of the Nevada nuclear test range available to Commercial Fusion Enterprises. This land shall:
a) cost no more than $1000 per month to lease per acre, including all user fees.
b) be remote enough that the instantaneous release of 1 gram of tritium gas per month will pose no significant health risk to those outside the test range.
c) be located on land suitable for construction.
d) have paved access to the center of the 100 acre area.
Sec. 9304 International cooperation;
Scientific research, as defined specifically in this act, being of a limited and nonproprietary nature, shall be conducted in a spirit of academic freedom and openness wherein scientists shall freely cooperate and communicate with other scientists without regard to national boundries. It is the intent of Congress that the State Department take action to facilitate the free international exchange of such purely scientific information and work.
Sec. 9305. Dissemination of information
(a) The Secretary shall take all necessary steps to assure all scientific knowledge relevant to fusion is made readily available to interested United States persons: Provided, however, that upon a showing to the Secretary by any person that any information or portion thereof provided to the Secretary directly or indirectly from such person would, if made public, divulge (1) trade secrets or (2) other proprietary information of such person, the Secretary shall not disclose such information and disclosure thereof shall be punishable under section 1905 of Title 18.
(b) The Secretary shall maintain an aggressive program in the United States for the provision of public information and educaitonal materials to promote widespread knowledge of fusion among educational, community, business, environmental, labor, and governmental entities and the public at large.
Sec. 9306. Annual report
As a separate part of the annual report submitted pursuant to section 7321 of this title, the Secretary shall submit to Congress an annual report of activities pursuant to this chapter. Such report shall include --
(a) a list of recent scientific discoveries in plasma physics as funded under this chapter;
(b) a list of Commercial Fusion Enterprises, their levels of capitalization, Fusion Energy Trust Fund prize applications and Fusion Energy Trust Fund prize awards;
(c) an analysis of the progress made in commercializing fusion technology; and
(d) suggestions for improvements in the national fusion program, including recommendations for legislation.
Sec. 9307. Authorization of appropriations; contract authority
There is hereby authorized to be appropriated to the Secretary, for the fiscal year ending September 30, 1993, such sums as are provided in the annual authorization Act pursuant to section 7270 of this title.
Seastead this.
To me, this looks like a last gasp effort by the old defense establishment to avoid obsolescence and irrelevance, and perhaps to squeeze out a bit more dual use research. I hope we won't waste more time or money on that kind of research.
We have an excellent fusion generator in the sky. It uses gravitational confinement and works at a safe distance. Research into how to take better advantage of it is likely to be more successful. We can make incremental progress without hoping for big breakthroughs. And with the expenditures and subsidies invested in the nuclear industry, we could easily establish a thriving solar and hydrogen-based energy infrastructure.
Do you know who sings that song? I have had it stuck in my head for ages, we used to play it on the campus radio station when I worked there but I can't remember what it was called and who sang it. (Btw, for those of you that are lost, I'm referencing the line "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace..".
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I'll be posting the correctly formatted document to my URL within the next couple of days.
Seastead this.
Does the word dystopia mean anything to you?
I see someone finally found the CORRECT use for the automated complaint generator.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
These evil scientists are meddlings with things of unearthly power. Things we do no -cannot- understand. If God had intended us to harness the power of the Deuterium, He would not have invented the burning bush.
Unholy black holes will form, that will devour the earth. The end of times is nigh.
I agree completely that cheap energy is a good thing, but the problem is that if you can harness fusion easily, so can the tyrants of the world. That's why it's a darn good thing the cold fusion a few years ago was a mistake. It could have meant the end of the world.
So far, I've seen a lot of posting saying that fusion is not worth it and we should try to focus on solar power, but I recal that solar power is extremely inefficient due to the simple fact that so much is lost to the atmosphere, etc, etc. I my physics class in college last semester, we caluculated a theoretical maximum of something like 1 Watt/m^2, or thereabouts. This was solely base on the amount of energy that hits the atmosphere minus the amount absorped. It didn't take into account the collector's efficiency itself. How can solar be used on such a large scale then with a relatively low maximum?
It just seems that solar is not some magical super-energy either. Super-large scale power facilities (like about the size of Rhode Island!) aren't effective because of the sheer size and maitenance - a strong storm would damage may collectors. Practical orbital arrays are also impractical due to launch/contruction costs, and the damage they would recieve from radiation and micrometeorites. It seems to me that regardless of the fact that fusion produces neuton radiated by-products, it produces more power/input than current systems, is theoretically safer than fission by a large margin, and is more environmentally friendly than coal/oil. Yes there is waste, but honestly, name a realistic deployable power infrastructure that would NOT create by-products harmful to man or the environment?
IMHO, large solar power seems to be just as a pipe-dream, if not more, than fusion. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct my estimations with facts I may have missed (and no immature flames like Mr. Porcupine seems to be unfairly getting in this article). As far as I can see fusion is the only current way to go in the long term.
Respectfully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@wm.edu
from "Deep Thoughts"
I think we should make the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex
I always liked that one.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I haven't really thought much about this, but I'm
concerned that an unforeseen problem of fusion
would be "heat pollution." Already this is a problem with today's nuclear reactors, which
typically use lake or river water for cooling.
Fusion offers vastly more energy than fission;
will it make proportionally more heat pollution?
The African dyoung stays cool in its burrow during the daytime, coming out only at night to forage for food.
ya hear man!!!! blow that sheet out yo ass nowww and quueeet been a mutha fuckin tro!!!
What is needed are more fission reactors. The clean electricity produced by nuclear fission reactors will bring an end to global warming. The current reliance on fossil based fuels not only causes global warming but is the major source of smog, acid rain, and pollution. Instead of wasting money on fusion research, we should be investing in in engineering projects to perfect nuclear fission reactors to make them cheaper, safer, and even more efficient. At least for the next 100 years or so, nuclear fission is our best bet for a brighter cleaner tomorrow.