Posted on 03/02/2002 4:54:40 PM PST by aculeus
Yep!!!
"Work smarter, not harder" is my professional motto.
Odd how many people are so resistant to that idea.
Especially lawyers -- always trying to make a mountain out of a molehill...
Lawyers... harumph!
Oughta hang 'em all!!!
Makes sense...the idea is to get things jumping around in there. Question is -- what frequency? Probably way up there --- past microwave. Pons was passing a current through the probe....
But.....where's the beef? I haven't seen this anywhere on the web. There was a brief "perpetual motion" clip on NBC a month ago......in the UK....but I've seen no followup.
Hydrogen has an amazing tendency to burrow into metals. When it is driven into palladium by electochemical means (a few volts), the palladium shifts to a less dense crystal phase: it gets noticeably bigger. You can hold in your hand two samples of palladium with identical mass and see the one that has altered.
Metal hydride processes have been studied since the 1970's as a possibility for safe storage of hydrogen. If hydrogen will pack into palladium at room temperature and pressure without cryogenics or pressure pumps (or danger of combustion) at the density of liquid hydrogen -- then great.
All this was going on long before Pons and Fleischman.
I've been able to do that for decades:
I sincerely hope that cold-fusion is more promising than THAT!!!
Under a ring of water in a sealed chamber in the middle of the New Mexico desert lies the heart of a machine that could change the world.
At 90, the floodgates open: a pulse of electricity surges out of the Marx generators toward an inside ring of giant capacitors and then through a series of gas switches. The current is compressed by the Machine into a wild whitewater of electricity that charges toward the vacuum chamber at a speed of 60 million feet per second. On its way, it passes through painted sharks' mouths, drawn there by the men in white and blue jumpsuits in the way that fighter pilots sometimes draw on their warplanes to show their prowess - or hide their misgivings. The electricity pours past the sharks' mouths, is redirected downward, along the Z axis, into the vacuum chamber, blitzing and bombarding from all sides a three-dimensional target in a gold-plated can, a delicately strung array of tungsten wires the size of a spool of thread, hanging in black space like a tiny chandelier.
Driven so furiously in the Machine, and then storming the array, the pulse of electricity - enough juice now to light up America like a birthday cake - instantly vapourises the tungsten wire into plasma, a superheated ion gas. The ions hover and dance along the invisible circumference once described by the array, while a relentless magnetic field keeps pressing on them, shoving them from behind. Thrusting and squeezing and ramming until the ions can no longer resist, the centre cannot hold, and in that hot nanosecond - Boom ! Everything becomes one.
This is not a gentle conjunction but a Pandora's box suddenly ripped open by nuclear passion, an orgy of ions. Boom ! Lightning fills the Machine, veins out over the surface of the water. Temperatures flare to those inside the sun. The earth rocks once again. And in few billionths of a second, 290 terawatts - 80 times the power generated on earth at any given time - roar to life inside the Machine.
Its 36 Marx generators are set in a ring like a metallic Stonehenge. The 20 Rexolite disks of the vacuum chamber look like flying saucers. Its vast, concentric pool of five-weight oil and deionized water seems bottomless - real oil and real water, in half-million-gallon tanks that sit one inside the other like a wheel within a wheel. Even now, there are depths in the Machine, invisible worlds revealing themselves, the secret body of the universe floating up. Deuterium, tritium, helium.
The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion. The idea is to take two isotopes of the hydrogen atom - deuterium and tritium - and mash them together with a little energy, which in turn releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of a single neutron. Contrarily, fission, the method widely employed by today's nuclear reactors, splits heavy uranium and plutonium atoms, creating lots of energy but also tons of dangerous and everlasting radioactive waste. Fusion offers a clean source, borne out of the material of roughly a handful of water and a handful of earth, with its only by-product being an easily disposable helium-4 nucleus.
What would fusion mean? Endless, cheap energy. Amazing Star Trek , space-travel possibilities. Fame, fortune, and undoubtedly a Nobel or two for the lucky scientists. For the better part of five decades, the race has two separate approaches: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Most researchers - those from Japan, Russia, Europe and America - focus on the former: big accelerators called stellarators, spheromaks, and tokamaks (a machine designed partly by Andrei Sakharov) use huge magnets to contain and compress hydrogen isotopes that hover in a kind of reddish-blue plasma inside the huge torus-shaped tubes until implosion.
On the other hand, the idea behind inertial confinement is that tiny fuel pellets of deuterium and tritium are bombarded by lasers or X-rays. In the case of the Z Machine, the explosion that occurs when ions are released by the vapourised wire array, and then when ions are pinched together, creates a huge X-ray pulse, one that scientists hope can be used to heat the tiny pellets and, in turn, create a small thermonuclear explosion. As it is, fusion has never been achieved for an extended time outside the explosion of a hydrogen bomb.
The first time scientists attempted to shoot an early incarnation of the Z machine, in June 1980, there was bravado and false bravado and downright fear. At Sandia National Laboratories on Kirtland Air Force Base, in the same New Mexican high-desert landscape of America's greatest, most frightening nuclear discoveries, they'd been working on the Machine for four years. Yet there were still unknown variables, a scientist's nightmare. First, it was so much bigger and more powerful than any of its predecessors. What if the Marx generators blew up before it could be shot? What if residual X-ray radiation contaminated people in the area? Or a fire destroyed the complex? And what if everything worked perfectly and they got a huge energy release that blew up Albuquerque itself? It was a scenario that had been considered at the highest level. As had something worse: what if people later wished that it had been only Albuquerque that blew up?
Over the next 15 years, the Z Machine gradually improved its output, packing an astonishing wallop - 20 trillion watts' worth of electrical output, as compared with the mea gre 100,000 amps of the first machine - but it wasn't enough. Scientists and theoreticians estimated that for high-yield fusion to be achieved inside the Machine, it would need to generate something over 1,000 trillion watts. A factor of at least 50 of Z's output.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the chop shop. Maybe it was 11th-hour desperation, or some invisible bolt of providence visited on a few overworked scientists, a couple of whom lit on the simple idea of stringing the wire array, the spool-sized target at the centre of the Machine, with double, then triple, the tungsten wire. All of a sudden - Boom ! Forty trillion watts! No one believed it. They reconfigured the Machine, boosting its X-ray production. Then someone, Melissa Douglas, thought to stack the arrays. Boom ! Two hundred trillion watts in a single pulse! Short of a nuclear blast, it was the most energy ever released on earth, and suddenly, in 1998, after five decades of chasing the illusion of high-yield fusion, of regarding it as some far-off Atlantis or dark galaxy's edge, the Z Machine was a third of the way there.
In science, if you do something once that's never been done before, it's considered a mistake. Do it twice, and it's simply a mirage. But the third time it becomes the truth. With Z's new, seemingly impossible results came the first flickering sign that some deep, unknowable power resided in the Machine. And so today, the Z Machine is considered one of the world's best hopes for achieving fusion. 'We may not understand how we get these huge pulses of power, the meaning may still elude us,' says Yonas. 'But it's still a fact.'
Since the 1950s, the US government has invested nearly $15bn to find out, always with the promise that fusion is just around the corner - two, three, five years away - and, with it, a fusion revolution that would hurtle us to the centre of the earth, the deepest trenches of the ocean, and the farthest reaches of space. A revolution that would morph the Third World into the First World until we are simply One World.
After all, how many wars have been fought over oil? And then, with oil reserves expected to reach full depletion by 2050, how many more will be? Remove oil as a vital component of our speed-driven, chip-fitted age and, sure, people would find things to brawl over, but energy wouldn't be one of them.
The science geek in me was so excited after reading the first few posts, that I couldn't wait to share that article on fusion that I have been saving since December 2000. Once a geek always a geek.
And it always seems to be the high-temp fusion guys who're saying it.... Couldn't be an agenda lurking there, eh?
Electronic computers. Lasers. Radar. Rockets. Satellites.
Might as well toss in railroads.
The early choo-choos would have gone nowhere without government land grants for right-of-way.
Beat me to the punch. Also, the highway system, not to mention the interstate highways.
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