Or as Krazy Kat marvelled, "It's a wonderful think from the New clear fizzyits.
Posted on 08/01/2004 9:48:34 AM PDT by ckilmer
Dude, it's Laz. That should go without saying.
Know, its troo.
Its how they mayk radioactive carbon that they yooz in those number 2 pencils!
Their hevier, but at leest they work reliablee.
The problem is that splitting those itty bitty hydrogen atoms means splitting those ittier, bittier protons - which gives me a splitting headache! I recommend reading a high school physics text for clarification - I have to get back to work and can't spend more time on this.
Know gneed. I half a Fisiks degrie from colij.
Yeah, he's retraining for a career as an airline stewardess,
so keep that in mind when you read his comments.
I think it has been a case of trying to tdentify a laboratory method which preents some promise of steady progress toward a controlled, sustainable reaction. (I don't think it's a matter of more money.)
I don't see how you can know in advance whether a method will work until you spend some time with it. That's why certain methods (e.g. diodes) were abandoned.
It appears to be a problem whose solution can only be obtained through painstaking laboratory evolution. I personally am confident that the class of nuclear engineers working this problem are bringing the physics along as quickly as knowledge will allow.
Oops! preents=presents
The private sector would be willing in return for a monopoly. The private sector has the smarts to accomplish the feat, it just does not want to take the risk of the technology and investment being confiscated by the government.
The ONLY reason the Manhattan Project was a success is because of the "Iraq Factor". We didn't know what atomic bombs Hitler had, or when he would them. So we got them first.
It would, indeed, be a shame to not move forward on the development of a fusion reactor. Having written a term paper on fusion versus fission, energy of the future, back in my college days (circa 1973), I have followed the fusion debate with great interest.
Great strides have been made since that time. Back then, the biggest obstacle was containing the reaction long enough to reach the break even point, energy expended versus energy created, which entailed containing the reaction within a magnetic bottle long enough to harvest the energy. They have since then, exceeded and overcome that obstacle, the hurdle now is to build a big enough reactor to create the huge potential a fusion reactor provides for energy.
It is the amount of energy that a fusion reactor will create that makes it's location, other than for geopolitical reasons, irrelevant. I do not understand the choices of France or Japan, as the reactor should be located in a sparsely populated area. One, because of the large size this reactor will have to be, and two, safety, should an unlikely breach occur. While there is no radiation involved, as with fission (nuclear) reactors, there is incredible heat (50 million degrees), basically, the temperature of the sun being confined within that fusion reactor. As there are no materials on earth that can contain that heat, thus inertial or magnetic fields are the chosen methods of containment. Laser fusion appears to be the most promising method for creating a sustainable fusion reaction.
Why is fusion the energy source of the future ? Because the fuel used for it is plentiful, renewable and inexpensive. What is this fuel ? It is water, specifically heavy water, also called deuterium (exists naturally) and tritium (created, does not exist naturally)). Below is an explanation and description of these fuels, their availability, and their energy output.
Deuterium: One gallon of water contains 1/8 gram of deuterium. If fully burned in fusion reactions, the energy output would be equivalent to 300 gallons of gasoline.
In other words, the available energy supply of fusion fuel is equivalent to filling the Atlantic and Pacific oceans 300 times with gasoline. If fusion can be successfully harnessed, it could satisfy the entire world's electrical energy needs for millions of years. Fusion can also produce hydrogen which may be useful for transportation.
Tritium: This nucleus has a half-life of 14 years. Thus tritium does not exist naturally. To make the tritium component of the fuel, one combines a fast neutron with a lithium nucleus: lithium 6 + neutron => tritium + helium
http://other.nrl.navy.mil/LaserFusionEnergy/fusionfuels.html
The above site will provide you with you valuable information on fusion technology that will bring about the end of dependence on fossil fuels.
Why fusion over all the other choices for energy creation ?
Compared to coal, gas and oil:
- Fusion has no carbon emissions and no risk of global warming
Compared to fission:
- Fusion can't blow up; can't melt down
- Fusion has (ideally) very low radioactivity; waste can be shallow buried
- Fusion has a low risk of nuclear materials proliferation
Compared to solar and wind:
- Fusion is a concentrated energy source
- Fusion is always available, without storage
- Fusion is an abundant fuel, available to all nations:
- Coal will last a few hundred years; natural gas about a hundred years; fission thousands of years; fusion million of years
The hydrogen powered engine is an off shoot of this fusion technology. The benefits to the environment and making the world energy independent is immeasureable. Fusion energy is completely clean, no pollutants, and the amount of energy it creates would leave no shortages anywhere that was connected into the grid.
You don't no no fisiks, do you?
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just because you quack like a duck doesn't mean you are one. I'd have to see you walk & flap.
Certainly, but not in areas that involve personal risktaking, or in areas that tread on some crackpot's sensitive little toesies. This is why NASA has brought us pretty good unmanned probles, while manned programs have languished. This is why, after having come up with the basic idea underlying the Internet, actual implementation of an idea that threatened government control verr information was left to the commercial sector.
There is one "loophole". If you can sell a new technology to the military and have it developed as a black program, hazardous research can be jammed ahead away from public scrutiny.
and remember... it is "thermonucular."
There are too few working on the problem. That is because there are too few projects being funded. If we want to make some serious progress we need to employ more thinkers. A $ billion a year might sound like a lot, but for a problem like this, where they are at the edges of science and materials engineering all the time, it is laughable.
The big picture is that Fusion energy offers only one advantage over fission: no nuclear waste.Well, who says that nuclear waste is a big problem? Oh sure, it is a *political* problem, but in the grand scheme of things it's simply toxic garbage, of which we already make plenty every day.
So all of the money spent pursuing fussion technology will simply buy us less nuclear waste. We don't get more energy. We don't get cheaper energy. We don't get safer energy.
Just less waste. That's all that fussion gives us.
So all of this talk about spending BILLION$ on fussion is the same as trying to spend Billions on waste disposal.
...Because nuclear fussion simply means less waste.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
Sure about that? How sure?
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