Posted on 04/27/2005 12:18:08 PM PDT by AntiGuv
LOS ANGELES - A tabletop experiment created nuclear fusion long seen as a possible clean energy solution under lab conditions, scientists reported.
But the amount of energy produced was too little to be seen as a breakthrough in solving the world's energy needs
For years, scientists have sought to harness controllable nuclear fusion, the same power that lights the sun and stars. This latest experiment relied on a tiny crystal to generate a strong electric field. While falling short as a way to produce energy, the method could have potential uses in the oil-drilling industry and homeland security, said Seth Putterman, one of the physicists who did the experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The experiment's results appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Previous claims of tabletop fusion have been met with skepticism and even derision by physicists. In 1989, Dr. B. Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of Southampton University in England shocked the world when they announced that they had achieved so-called cold fusion at room temperature. Their work was discredited after repeated attempts to reproduce it failed.
Fusion experts noted that the UCLA experiment was credible because, unlike the 1989 work, it didn't violate basic principles of physics.
"This doesn't have any controversy in it because they're using a tried and true method," said David Ruzic, professor of nuclear and plasma engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "There's no mystery in terms of the physics."
Fusion power has been touted as the ultimate energy source and a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels like coal and oil. Fossil fuels are expected to run short in about 50 years.
In fusion, light atoms are joined in a high-temperature process that frees large amounts of energy.
It is considered environment-friendly because it produces virtually no air pollution and does not pose the safety and long-term radioactive waste concerns associated with modern nuclear power plants, where heavy uranium atoms are split to create energy in a process known as fission.
In the UCLA experiment, scientists placed a tiny crystal that can generate a strong electric field into a vacuum chamber filled with deuterium gas, a form of hydrogen capable of fusion. Then the researchers activated the crystal by heating it.
The resulting electric field created a beam of charged deuterium atoms that struck a nearby target, which was embedded with yet more deuterium. When some of the deuterium atoms in the beam collided with their counterparts in the target, they fused.
The reaction gave off an isotope of helium along with subatomic particles known as neutrons, a characteristic of fusion. The experiment did not, however, produce more energy than the amount put in an achievement that would be a huge breakthrough.
UCLA's Putterman said future experiments will focus on refining the technique for potential commercial uses, including designing portable neutron generators that could be used for oil well drilling or scanning luggage and cargo at airports.
But fusion isn't a replacement for oil. It's just a new source of (presumably cheap and renewable) power.
Industrial power we got. If domestically sourced, industrial power were all we needed, we'd burn coal and have done. But it's hard to run a car on coal. Doable, yes, but hard. What we really need is a better way to store energy on a small scale. Nothing touches gasoline right now.
Tut, tut! The Farnsworth fusor is a hot fusion device. It works by getting the nuclei to move fast enough to overcome their electrostatic repulsion.Ah, true. I was thinking of that one fusor that they wheeled around on a serving cart. "Desktop fusion" is more like it.
The connection to the Illuminati is rather obvious.
My guess, without running all the numbers, is that it is a net endothermic process.
Now I'm assuming here that the sun's fusion reactions produce mostly He-4. Is there some reason why we can't, or it that just way beyond our capabilities here on earth?
We can create He-3, but it takes too much energy. We would spend more power generating the fuel than we'd get out of the resulting fusion reaction.
It would be like chemically synthesizing gasoline...we could do it, but gas would cost us $50 a gallon and it would take 5 gasoline gallons worth of energy to create one. It's possible, but pointless.
These are some of the reactions that occur in thermonuclear devices, but I wouldn't want to make the 3He that way, either. Much too messy.
We'd have better luck mining it from the moon, as some have suggested. But I don't think we'll see that happening for a while yet. For now, aneutronic fusion isn't going to happen. If fusion happens at all, it will be with some neutron production, which leads to activation, embrittlement, etc. Plus some of this reactions (one is noted above) produce tritium, sometimes in sizable quantities, so there goes the "no radioactive waste" argument. Granted that tritium is a low-energy beta emitter and thus not too difficult to manage, but it is awfully mobile in the ecosphere, and can cause certain groups of radiophobic individuals to freak out (just ask the people who used to work at the High Flux Beam Reactor at Brookhaven Lab, that my old pal Bill Richardson had shutdown).
Okay. I misunderstood.
Thanks for the ping.
Thanks for the ping!
I have He-3 in my watch. :-)
And E coli in your gut.
(no, I don't mind taking the Gullibility Award if it turns out you were just being facetious)
Yuppers.
I have tritium in the hands and numbers (for night use) that decays into HE-3. :-)
So is this a standard feature in a lot of watches, or something that only scientist-types can get?
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