Posted on 09/19/2004 1:20:29 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
Arguably the most accessible and incontrovertibly important applications problem currently confronting the experimental physics and energy technology communities today is fusion power. Little understood in terms of its current state and immediate potential for development, fusion power is still largely a dream.
Notably, a recent alumnae event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a world leader in fusion power research, featured an "alternative energy fair" yet omitted fusion power. Similarly, a recent article in the Boston Globe on "cold fusion," a controversial and entirely unproved concept, omitted any reference to "hot fusion" and burning plasma whatsoever.
Yet, as is largely understood in the physics and technical development communities, burning plasma represents the first, best hope for meeting the world's future energy needs. This can be said with certainty for a number of reasons, including the current state of the art, projected cost for devising a prototype device, and our capacity as a nation to support such an effort.
Burning plasma -- star power -- is composed of the same stuff of which the sun is made and when ignited within a magnetic containment or inertial, laser-driven device regularly achieves temperatures of upward of 100 million degrees under laboratory conditions.
Sustaining such temperatures for ever-increasing amounts of time -- a thousand seconds is the estimated duration necessary for commercial power generation -- is the current goal of researchers in the field. Under such circumstances fusion devices are projected to produce up to ten times the energy put into them, an astounding result.
As of this writing -- September 2004 -- most of the scientific work and early technical development necessary to the ignition of burning plasma is being carried out in university laboratories. An international "experiment," really a shared-cost collaboration between nations directed toward burning plasma ignition, is stalled in negotiations over project location.
Recently, the United States Government quietly canceled an independent initiative with the same objective. While the executive branch has publicly espoused support for fusion power, US efforts are largely confined to experimental work carried out on a very tight budget.
Part of the challenge confronting fusion power advocates is the lack of a general understanding at the public level of the need for large-scale, low cost energy sources other than those available from fossil fuel or small-scale alternative power technologies.
The debate over global warming and diminishing supplies of oil, while widely joined and increasingly directed toward conservation, has yet to result in public demand for accelerated action. While most Americans happily consume billions of kilowatts of electric power, only a minuscule number are concerned with the source of that power and its costs.
Further clouding the debate are the attractions of a wide range of alternative energy technologies. Solar, wind, tidal, hydro and biomass systems, in many instances well developed and commercially viable, draw the popular imagination and a flurry of investment dollars for numerous reasons. Nuclear power, while much reduced in cost, is encumbered with environmental and security concerns which foreclose its long-term development.
Yet when compared with fusion power, none possesses the safe operational characteristics, robust capacity and economies of scale necessary to meet the needs of growing urban populations and substantial industrial consumers -- the central forces in global development.
The potential of fusion power is also made ambiguous by limited options in those technologies that must accompany it if its early potential is to be realized. Lack of progress in power storage and distribution means that the virtually limitless electrical energy available from fusion will be constrained from delivery to consumers, where domestic and industrial applications will revolutionize life, as we know it.
For those interested in pricing such an exercise, the bill, even when discounting the pie-in-the-sky estimates of the research community, is remarkably modest. For the price of a new aircraft carrier or a few hundred miles of new highway, the technical means now appear to exist sufficient to achieve sustainable, man-made burning plasma.
One can imagine, just as was the case in the early development of electricity generation, that once a working prototype is made the commercial marketplace will pile on. What one day is a huge, costly kluge of a device, the next, if not available at Walmart or Costco, will rapidly diminish in size and cost while showing dramatic gains in efficiency.
And therein lies the great promise. What today is only to be found in the laboratory tomorrow becomes commercialized and the day after is a commodity. Linking the rapid progress now being achieved on the science front with a defined development schedule under the sponsorship of the American people is the next big step. It is time to take it.
Peter Golden writes about public policy, the environment and technology. He can be reached at pg@goldenpr.com.
At some point, theory is an insufficient guide. We need to design hardware (and OVER-design it, at that, much as we overdesigned the Hanford pile in WW2), build it, and hit the big red "ON" button so we can find out what happens.
Excess Heat:
Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed
by Charles G. Beaudette
and David J. Nagel
intro by Arthur C. ClarkeNuclear Transmutation:
The Reality of Cold Fusion
by Tadahiko Mizuno
tr by Jed Rothwell
foreword by Eugene MalloveFire from Ice:
Searching for the Truth
Behind the Cold Fusion Furor
by Eugene J. MalloveUndead Science:
Science Studies and
the Afterlife of Cold Fusion
by Bart Simon
BTTT
---a "must" read---Philo Farnsworth was my son-in-law's first cousin, three times removed----
I agree, with the exception of one minor quibble.
"ON" buttons should be green.
The red ones are usually "OFF" or "STOP".
Gotta stick with the traditional color coding for safety purposes.
Don't want to get anybody confused, you know.
 |
"And these should give you the grounding you'll need in thermodynamics, hypermathematics, and of course microcalifragilistics." |
George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent
Thanks, martin. Looks like a viable option for somebody in the market to purchase one of those things. But not exactly a giant leap in rail technology. Still, every little bit helps!
Arthur C Clarke demands cold fusion rethinkThe author and visionary Sir Arthur C Clarke says society has made a huge mistake in rejecting out of hand the idea that cold fusion may be possible and mocked editors and journalists at the British Association's Festival of Science for not giving the technology serious consideration. Cold fusion first hit the headlines in 1989 when researchers Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons suggested it was possible to generate heat through the fusion of atoms at normal temperatures. But when leading scientists failed to reproduce their results and Fleishmann and Pons retracted some of their early claims, cold fusion was dismissed as nonsense. However, the research has gone on, with little funding and largely underground, and Sir Arthur said the results coming out of some labs demanded attention. Sir Arthur also said he believed we were entering the Carbon Age. He prophesised that the discovery of molecules like C60 - the soccer ball-shaped cage of carbon atoms - would lead to extraordinary new materials.
by Jonathan Amos
Monday, 11 September, 2000
BBC New Online
---right on the first and I hope right on the second---
Harnessing the Power of the Sun
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/211.fall2000.web.projects/Troy%20Orr/history.htm
"The most promising fuels for fusion reactions are deuterium, and tritium. Deuterium and tritium both are hydrogen isotopes. Deuterium is a stable isotope and is naturally found in water, while tritium is very unstable, radioactive, and must be man-made. Several methods for containment exist. They include the Tokamak generator, inertial containment, and mirror confinement."
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/211.fall2000.web.projects/Troy%20Orr/inertia.htm
Inertial Containment
"The majority of research so far involving this type of fusion has dealt with laser beams. These powerful flashes of light, with varied wavelengths and duration, are focused on the capsule to initiate fusion. However, our modern lasers are very inefficient. To be used in a commercial fusion plant, laser technology would first have to greatly improve. Another option in Inertial Confinement is ion beams instead of lasers. The ion beams are much more efficient, but are still very experimental. The biggest problem is the beam's short span. An intense enough beam to cause the reaction only lasts about 10 nanoseconds. To compensate, scientists must compress the beam and make it stronger."
Which means the "SELF-DESTRUCT" button really should be black or something instead of red. I can't tell you the number of times I've been 5 seconds from annihilation because of that. And they really should locate it somewhere besides right above all the other buttons.
That, and the red wire...
The Next Generation Z-machinePermission to prepare a conceptual design for an accelerator, X-1, has been formally requested by Sandia National Labs. If funded, the X-1 would be expected to reach initial operating capability by about 2007 and high-yield fusion by about 2010. The request was made after Sandia's continually improving Z accelerator -- the most energetic and powerful laboratory producer of X-rays on Earth -- achieved four major milestones... The Z would serve as a model for the larger X-1 machine. X-1 should produce x-ray temperatures of more than 3M degrees Kevin, when combined with enough X-ray energy and power, should be sufficient to implode fusion capsules of deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen) to achieve high-yield fusion. High-yield refers to a condition when the amount of energy produced by the fusion reaction exceeds the amount of energy used to create it. The reaction could eventually be used to produce virtually limitless electrical power.
by Arthurine Breckenridge
Last modified: 22 March, 1999Sandia Z accelerator climbs toward fusion conditionsResearchers at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM) have increased the x-ray power output of the Z machine... by nearly 10 times in the last two years. The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts for billionths of a second -- almost 80 times the entire world's output of electricity... Other experiments suggest that Z may eventually achieve temperatures of 2 to 2.2 million degrees. Radiation temperatures in the range of two to three million degrees are generally considered an essential condition for nuclear fusion... The enormous electrical pulse of 50 trillion watts strikes a complex target about the size of a spool of thread... Results show that X-1, a larger accelerator scheduled to follow Z, should be able to produce 16 million joules of energy, more than 1,000 trillion watts of power, and temperatures of more than three million degrees.
The International Society for Optical Engineering
OE Reports 173 - May 1998The Next Generation Z-machineIn Sandia's "Z" Machine millions of amps of current are passed through a tiny spool of tungsten wires, producing a flood of x rays. Essentially the most powerful terrestrial producer of x rays, the Z device recently achieved the following milestones during a test shot: temperatures of 1.8 million K, a power output of 290 terawatts, and an energy release of 2.0 megajoules. The researchers believe nuclear fusion could be attained inside the device (by bombarding a fuel pellet with x rays) if the conditions were pushed further, to temperatures of 3.5 million K and power levels of 1000 terawatts. Sandia officials have encapsulated these ideas in a proposal for a larger machine, to be called X-1. (Sandia press release, April 9.)
by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
Number 366 (Story #3), April 9, 1998
Nuclear Fusion From Bubbles Blasted With SoundThe research team used a standing ultrasonic wave to help form and then implode the cavitation bubbles of deuterated acetone vapor. The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and inside the bubbles. Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin... According to the new data, the observed neutron emission was several orders of magnitude greater than background and had extremely high statistical accuracy. Tritium, which also is produced during the fusion reactions, was measured and the amount produced was found to be consistent with the observed neutron production rate... Other fusion techniques, such as those that use strong magnetic fields or lasers to contain the plasma, cannot easily achieve the necessary compression, Lahey said. In the approach to be published in Physical Review E, spherical compression of the plasma was achieved due to the inertia of the liquid surrounding the imploding bubbles... [U]nlike fission reactors, fusion does not produce a significant amount of radioactive waste products or decay heat. Tritium gas, a radioactive by-product of deuterium-deuterium bubble fusion, is actually a part of the fuel, which can be consumed in deuterium-tritium fusion reactions.
Science-a-go-go
3 March 2004Sonic FusionThe experiments had been performed with great care by well-respected senior scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Russian Academy of Sciences. But what the authors were claiming was just so extraordinary: that nuclear fusion reactions, of the sort that power stars and hydrogen bombs, had been created on a lab bench using little more than a vibrating ring, a neutron gun and a beaker of specially prepared acetone... The phenomenon, as described by Rusi Peri Taleyarkhan of ORNL, Richard T. Lahey of RPI and their coinvestigators, happened when they were studying sonoluminescence -- light created by sound. German scientists first observed sonoluminescence in the 1930s, when they immersed sonar loudspeakers in water baths.
by W. Wayt Gibbs
Scientific American
Philco ??
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