Posted on 03/07/2004 12:14:07 PM PST by UnklGene
Atomic fusion in a cup? - It's hard to believe -
By STEPHEN STRAUSS Saturday, March 6, 2004 -
Double, bubble, boil and generate energy like the sun? It may not scan into Shakespearean prose, but U.S. researchers will soon publish strong evidence of a recipe to generate fusion power with tiny bubbles, which does sound like a modern witch's brew.
The power source is ultrasonic noise aimed at a clear glass canister whose size would qualify as a grande latte in a coffee house. The sound waves rattle through a liquid solvent in the glass and, as they do, create minute (on the order of a thousandth the width of a human hair) bubbles. Further sound causes the bubbles to expand, compress and then collapse. When they do, some of the hydrogen atoms in the liquid seem to fuse and give off light and energy.
This is potentially revolutionary, because atomic fusion is exactly what the sun does to generate its gigantic outflows of energy, and the search to create energy through a fusion reaction on Earth has been the dream of physicists for the better part of half a century.
"What we are doing, in effect, is producing nuclear emissions in a simple desktop apparatus," says Rusi Taleyarkhan, a professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue University and a co-author of a paper on the research. "That really is the magnitude of the discovery -- the ability to use simple mechanical force for the first time in history to initiate conditions comparable to the interior of stars."
If this all sounds vaguely familiar, then you may be recalling that an earlier form of the experiment was announced in 2002 to loud scorn from other nuclear physicists. "The paper's kind of patchwork, technically, and each of the patches has a hole in it," one critic said at the time. The uproar was so heated that officials at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where the experiments were conducted, wrote to Science magazine urging its editors to delay, if not kill, the controversial paper.
The new data were generated with what is reported to be a bit less than $1-million (U.S.) provided by the U.S. Defence Department's Advanced Research Project Agency. The money allowed for the use of much more precise instruments that could gather more data over a longer period of time.
The researchers have estimated that, to create fusion, the energy inside the imploding bubbles reached 10 million degrees C and pressures equal to 1,000 million times that which Earth's atmosphere exerts at sea level.
While nobody is saying sound-wave fusion is proved, the new research, which will be published in the journal Physical Review E this month, is turning at least some former critics into agnostics.
"I think it [the phenomenon] is difficult to ignore; it is still improbable that it is right, but is becoming increasingly difficult to say that it is wrong," says Lawrence Crum, a University of Washington physicist who was one of the reviewers on the 2002 paper and a strong critic of it.
However, it also must be said that despite the new, peer-reviewed publication, some of the original critics of the research remain as intransigent as ever. "All I can say is that the same set of characters are doing the same thing all over again. What should be done is someone independent should look at it. . . . I don't think it is true," says Dan Shapira, another nuclear engineer at Oak Ridge who had been unable to replicate Prof. Taleyarkhan's research.
While they are clearly ebullient about what looks like a validation of their sketchier, early findings, Prof. Taleyarkhan and his U.S. and Russian co-authors are not saying we will see usable fusion energy generated in a big coffee cup any time soon. This is largely because they have not achieved fusion's breakthrough nirvana: a system that generates more energy than energy that has to be put in.
"I don't know it will happen, but I am hopeful it will," Prof. Taleyarkhan says.
Failing the grand advance, the scientists suggest that some day their findings might still lead to security detectors that use neutrons to probe the contents of suitcases or devices using the neutron emissions that follow from fusion to manufacture new materials.
Stephen Strauss writes on science for The Globe and Mail.
Also, Jones appeared at the ICCF-10 meeting this year and again confirmed cold fusion
(including in volcanoes [see link above]).
Were you wondering,
perhaps, if alchemists played
with crucibles and
mercury so much
that maybe centuries back
they saw hints of this?
Physicist, could you explain how kT near room temperature
can supply sufficient energy to attain the neutron emission manifold
located a more than an MeV about the excited 4-He(*) state?
 |
And, let's remember, an Establishment writer put out this strange book and its central theme is that high-ranking Nazis cut a post-war deal with the US Feds around weird technology that they called "the Bell" which somehow involved glowing liquids, strange sounds and some radiation . . . |
"I was excited about this line of research when you asked me about it some time ago. Not only is it possible, but it seems relatively easy and in the domain of our current science and technology to understand. (Such as, we can use sophisticated laser pulsing techniques to know exactly what is the chemical/physical environment within the collapsing bubble...) If it is valid, it would take some time before real good gov't money is thrown at it because of the overall skepticism and the difficulty to make practical.
The ability to take relatively cool coherent energy and channel into a very small point to acheive high energy densities and temperatures is exactly the type of mechanism that can make fusion possible. Although I haven't done the calculation nor read the articles, I presume the energies involved are high enough...
Amazing stuff. I think I will look into and do some calculations to see if it's really making sense.
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