Posted on 07/14/2021 7:55:22 PM PDT by dynachrome
Hundreds of times every month, a British scientist sitting in a high-tech control room in an industrial park in the Thames Valley near Didcot clicks his computer mouse.
Each time he does so, a high-energy beam of subatomic particles is fired into a dark, swirling cloud of superheated hydrogen gas, known as a plasma, contained within a spherical steel tank about 6 ft in diameter.
The plasma immediately sparks and glows and at that point has just become the hottest place in the solar system, hotter even than the core of the sun — that is to say, more than 15 million degrees Centigrade.
Only a system of immensely powerful electromagnets prevents the vessel containing the plasma from being vaporised instantly.
The scientist, who works for the high-tech start-up Tokamak Energy, is part of a team of world-leading experts trying to recreate nuclear fusion, the process that makes stars burn — for the fusion of two atoms of hydrogen to make one of helium, releases vast quantities of energy.
Harnessing fusion on a commercial scale has been the energy technology sector's holy grail since the 1930s.
Now, that goal is no longer sci-fi fantasy but fast approaching science fact. And the good news is that Tokamak, a British company, is a world leader in the race to develop a commercially viable fusion device that will revolutionise the energy-generation sector.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
And for the monthly “cold fusion” is just around the corner, we have: ......
They have yet to get more energy out of it than it took to fire it up. Long way to go.
This is what will end fossil fuel use. I can envision toaster size units powering homes for a hundred or maybe a thousand years or a phone booth sized one also powering a neighborhood that long and with advances in battery technology all the cars could also be charged. Might even make these to power cars (that fly?) using tech we can’t imagine today.
The cool thing is they are completely safe. If the fusion reaction doesn’t occur it just goes cold and stops working. No risk of blowing up or spreading radiation like current nuclear energy plants.
Figure with infrastructure install; most of the world could be fitted within 30-50 years. Kids today will see it but anyone over 50 probably won’t unless it gets developed and installed much faster. Still; it is something to cheer about.
By Noel Sheppard | November 18, 2009
[snip]
CONAN O'BRIEN, HOST: ...to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?
AL GORE: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy - when they think about it at all - in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot ...
[snip]
The physics and astronomy website Physlink contests Gore's absurd claim:
It is approximately 4000 degC [7230 degF] at the centre of the Earth.
She’s con’fused’
Not with this technology, but by fusing anti-matter with matter. Much of the mass of an atom actually comes from the anti-matter inside, in a wild entanglement with the matter. Someone will eventually figure out a cheap way to throw in a monkey wrench.
I've never heard that before. Do you have a source?
Where will they get the energy to power the immensely powerful electromagnets that keep the vessel from blowing up?
Great fleas have lesser fleas on their back to bite um....and so on...ad infinitum....
Was that “How dare you?”
I find it near impossible to believe how they can actually probe entities so insanely small as that.
A single hydrogen atom, is ridiculously small. Obviously the proton in its nucleus is even smaller. And the “pieces” that make up that proton, ferget-about-it!
In any case, if most of the mass of a proton is anti-matter, how is it that one of the biggest mysterious in cosmology is the whereabouts of most of the universe's antimatter?
Below, from a (linked) scientific paper referenced in the article you linked to above...
Abstract
The fundamental building blocks of the proton—quarks and gluons—have been known for decades. However, we still have an incomplete theoretical and experimental understanding of how these particles and their dynamics give rise to the quantum bound state of the proton and its physical properties, such as its spin1. The two up quarks and the single down quark that comprise the proton in the simplest picture account only for a few per cent of the proton mass, the bulk of which is in the form of quark kinetic and potential energy and gluon energy from the strong force2. An essential feature of this force, as described by quantum chromodynamics, is its ability to create matter–antimatter quark pairs inside the proton that exist only for a very short time. Their fleeting existence makes the antimatter quarks within protons difficult to study, but their existence is discernible in reactions in which a matter–antimatter quark pair annihilates.
In this picture of quark–antiquark creation by the strong force, the probability distributions as a function of momentum for the presence of up and down antimatter quarks should be nearly identical, given that their masses are very similar and small compared to the mass of the proton3. Here we provide evidence from muon pair production measurements that these distributions are considerably different, with more abundant down antimatter quarks than up antimatter quarks over a wide range of momenta. These results are expected to revive interest in several proposed mechanisms for the origin of this antimatter asymmetry in the proton that had been disfavoured by previous results4, and point to future measurements that can distinguish between these mechanisms.
Will they call it the Tera?😏
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