The sun is 5-10 million degrees C on the surface. At the core it's supposed to approach more like 500M.
A tokamak reactor can generate about 20-30M, but this isn't near the 100M that they currently believe will be neccessary to ignite a sustainable reaction. This number keeps going up.
Right now the current best bet is a machine they call the Z-machine. The article describes everything in terms of terawatts and kilojoules, so I don't know how this translates to temperatures.
After reading the review, I have to suggest that it is a very poor piece of analysis, or is not very good at explaining itself. It purposely limits the analysis to those qualities where the Blackberry excels over the Palm, and quickly glosses over the Palm's other features.
It is fairly obvious that the Blackberry is a better remote e-mail system (price be damned), but that has always been a peripheral goal for the Palm platform. This is like suggesting that Perl is a better web scripting language than C++.
Something that this article hinted at is that you have to have a desktop machine constantly attached to the net running the Redirector. I know that most of my geek friends have DSL or cable modems, but for the average small business joe, this just isn't practical.
As an aside, I don't care if I can get double my Graffiti speed on the thing, I still wouldn't want to answer e-mail with less than my 100wpm keyboard speed - Id wnd up ansrng my mail lk ths.
In response to the idea that hydrogen combustion is the cause of the heat and light:
The energy given off by hydrogen combustion (combination of two hydrogens and an oxygen to make water) is provably identical to the energy required to split the oxygens from the hydrogens in the first place, which is registered as a usage of the electrical current. Yes, this would generate heat and light, but I can't believe that the researchers have been too sloppy to account for that.
There seems to be some confusion about what the physicists claim is going on in this cold fusion thing. It isn't exactly the same concept as hot fusion.
Basic hydrogen fusion occurs when two atoms of hydrogen get squeezed together very tightly. If the nuclei get close enough, they decide that hanging out together might not be such a bad idea, and it becomes deuterium - an isotope of hydrogen. Eventually another couple hydrogen come along, get squished into the mess and the whole thing becomes helium. No big surprises here, but that isn't usually what happens in the sun.
Solar fusion actually uses carbon for a leg up. Basically, a hydrogen gets pressed too close to a carbon and the carbon becomes an isotope (13). It then steps up to become nitrogen, an isotope of nitrogen, and then a carbon and a helium. Same energy release, but the reaction energy is smaller. This isn't what they are claiming is happening in Cold fusion, either.
Do you remember the old electrolysis experiments in high school? Drop two ends of a hot wire in a jar of water and watch oxygen bubble up one side and hydrogen up the other? Same thing, except on the hydrogen side we make the wire (or cube, or plate) out of palladium or platinum in which hydrogen happens to be soluble. (yes, a gas can dissolve into a solid). They use heavy water, so all of the hydrogen in the metal is deuterium. The theory goes that if you squish two deuterium together, they decide that they don't mind being a helium. No spare electrons to go flying off, no spare neutrons to go killing researchers.
Unfortunately, the concept of adding carbon making the thing work better sounds like hokum to me because cold fusion isn't supposed to be using that chain reaction.
This issue is complicated because the pro-cf contingent sounds a lot like snake-oil salesmen trying to sell us a panacea for our energy problems, and the anti-cf group just wants to protect their profits. You have to boil it down to hard evidence.
What I'm hearing is that there is an unexplained increase in temperature in this process. I'm not too terribly sure where the idea came from that we can't measure the energy going into the thing. Any report that didn't account for experimental inaccuracy of that kind of measurement would be laughed out of publication.
I won't state a hard view that Cold Fusion exists and works. The bottom line is that SOMETHING unexplained is happening here. Until someone can explain it, it is something that should be researched. Even if it doesn't provide us with a clean, safe form of limitless energy, it will still help us understand the world we live in, and possibly provide us with clues to make the hot fusion concept a little easier.
Slashdot Mirror
The sun is 5-10 million degrees C on the surface. At the core it's supposed to approach more like 500M.
A tokamak reactor can generate about 20-30M, but this isn't near the 100M that they currently believe will be neccessary to ignite a sustainable reaction. This number keeps going up.
Right now the current best bet is a machine they call the Z-machine. The article describes everything in terms of terawatts and kilojoules, so I don't know how this translates to temperatures.
After reading the review, I have to suggest that it is a very poor piece of analysis, or is not very good at explaining itself. It purposely limits the analysis to those qualities where the Blackberry excels over the Palm, and quickly glosses over the Palm's other features.
It is fairly obvious that the Blackberry is a better remote e-mail system (price be damned), but that has always been a peripheral goal for the Palm platform. This is like suggesting that Perl is a better web scripting language than C++.
Something that this article hinted at is that you have to have a desktop machine constantly attached to the net running the Redirector. I know that most of my geek friends have DSL or cable modems, but for the average small business joe, this just isn't practical.
As an aside, I don't care if I can get double my Graffiti speed on the thing, I still wouldn't want to answer e-mail with less than my 100wpm keyboard speed - Id wnd up ansrng my mail lk ths.
l8r
In response to the idea that hydrogen combustion is the cause of the heat and light:
The energy given off by hydrogen combustion (combination of two hydrogens and an oxygen to make water) is provably identical to the energy required to split the oxygens from the hydrogens in the first place, which is registered as a usage of the electrical current. Yes, this would generate heat and light, but I can't believe that the researchers have been too sloppy to account for that.
There seems to be some confusion about what the physicists claim is going on in this cold fusion thing. It isn't exactly the same concept as hot fusion.
Basic hydrogen fusion occurs when two atoms of hydrogen get squeezed together very tightly. If the nuclei get close enough, they decide that hanging out together might not be such a bad idea, and it becomes deuterium - an isotope of hydrogen. Eventually another couple hydrogen come along, get squished into the mess and the whole thing becomes helium. No big surprises here, but that isn't usually what happens in the sun.
Solar fusion actually uses carbon for a leg up. Basically, a hydrogen gets pressed too close to a carbon and the carbon becomes an isotope (13). It then steps up to become nitrogen, an isotope of nitrogen, and then a carbon and a helium. Same energy release, but the reaction energy is smaller. This isn't what they are claiming is happening in Cold fusion, either.
Do you remember the old electrolysis experiments in high school? Drop two ends of a hot wire in a jar of water and watch oxygen bubble up one side and hydrogen up the other? Same thing, except on the hydrogen side we make the wire (or cube, or plate) out of palladium or platinum in which hydrogen happens to be soluble. (yes, a gas can dissolve into a solid). They use heavy water, so all of the hydrogen in the metal is deuterium. The theory goes that if you squish two deuterium together, they decide that they don't mind being a helium. No spare electrons to go flying off, no spare neutrons to go killing researchers.
Unfortunately, the concept of adding carbon making the thing work better sounds like hokum to me because cold fusion isn't supposed to be using that chain reaction.
This issue is complicated because the pro-cf contingent sounds a lot like snake-oil salesmen trying to sell us a panacea for our energy problems, and the anti-cf group just wants to protect their profits. You have to boil it down to hard evidence.
What I'm hearing is that there is an unexplained increase in temperature in this process. I'm not too terribly sure where the idea came from that we can't measure the energy going into the thing. Any report that didn't account for experimental inaccuracy of that kind of measurement would be laughed out of publication.
I won't state a hard view that Cold Fusion exists and works. The bottom line is that SOMETHING unexplained is happening here. Until someone can explain it, it is something that should be researched. Even if it doesn't provide us with a clean, safe form of limitless energy, it will still help us understand the world we live in, and possibly provide us with clues to make the hot fusion concept a little easier.