New R&D Direction "Hot Fusion in a Can "

Discover Magazine ^ | Feb 2002 | Kathy A. Svitil

[The Raven]

Richard Siemen, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, thinks he's found a way to harness the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun— and do it with a device not much bigger than a beer can. The long-standing obstacle to fusion power is that atomic nuclei strongly repel one another, and it takes some heavy-handed technology to bring them together. So far, after spending decades and billions of dollars on warehouse-sized reactors, researchers have yet to extract enough energy to power a flashlight. Siemen hopes to succeed where others failed by injecting heated and magnetized hydrogen into a 10-inch-long, 31/2-inch-wide aluminum cylinder and then shooting a 10- million-amp current into the can, which collapses and crushes its contents. Under those conditions, Siemen theorizes, the hydrogen should fuse, producing helium and a flood of high-speed neutrons whose energy can be converted to electricity. So far, he has imploded a can but has not achieved nuclear burning. "Within 20 years, we could have a demonstration unit that would cost less than a billion dollars," he says. In the fusion world, that would qualify as a real breakthrough.

[RightWhale]

"The time between now and the advent of fusion power becomes twice as constant every 18 months."

A corollary of Steno's Law of Conservation of Interfacial Angle.

---

Commercial nuclear fusion power: The endless summer of my career in science.
-Prof. Perpetua, Ph.D.

[RLK]

What is needed is a new theory of light and matter needed to explain what happens at very high energies and temperatures?

--------

I'm working on it.

[Gorzaloon]

a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, thinks he's found a way to harness the nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun— and do it with a device not much bigger than a beer can. ...by injecting heated and magnetized hydrogen ...then shooting a 10- million-amp current into the can, which collapses and crushes its contents

The poor national labs are as starved as private R&D, and actually compete with Industry now. Some have become quite famous; For example, we all know that if you send Livermore a white paper, you will, in 2-3 years, get to read it, published as some staffer's original research.

So like all the miracle inventions we read about _exactly once_ in the UK papers, the national labs have learned that it is easier to pretend to be relevant, than it is to actually expend the cost and effort of doing peer-reviewed research. Publish Science Fiction, everyone feels better about their collapsing technology base, and the beery masses forget the details, as if they ever understood them in the first place.

So we have a casual mention of "a 10- million-amp current"; And what does the infrastructure cost to dump this current through a plasma? Oh, _maybe_ the group will get some funding for it.

The peril of releasing stories like this is that some of us went to school when 5 credits were not given for Womens' Studies.

Some of us were educated in Hard Science. One reason it is called "Hard" is that it is more difficult than "learning" MBA jargon.

A reading of even a single issue of _NASA Tech Briefs" will abundantly illustrate to anyone with a High School General Science Education just how far our R&D capabilities have been gutted.

To Wit: "This reaction has been performed previously with calcium compounds. We used strontium".

Anyone who has seen the periodic table once could have predicted that!

It is painful for me to see a country that ran the Manhattan Project descend to this. I fear for the next generation.

[The Raven]

This device is called a burrito

Been there

[lafroste]

What is needed is a new theory of light and matter needed to explain what happens at very high energies and temperatures?

--------

I'm working on it.

So am I.

[Vince Ferrer]

Make that "Can O'Fusion"

Or "Mr. Fusion." We can power our flux capacitors with it.

[RLK]

So we have a casual mention of "a 10- million-amp current"

--------------------

It's probably a collection of particles stored in an injector and released during a ten microsecond period. It's very doable.

[okie01]

"I crushed a beer can against my head and saw a brilliant flash of light."

[okie01]

"I crushed a beer can against my head and saw a brilliant flash of light."

Did you empty it first...???

[eno_]

Can't remember.

[El Gato]

A massive power source with the by-product of helium. Maybe we will be able to avoid another Yucca mountain if this thing is for real

It also produces hot neutrons, which induce radioactivity in whatever they hit. Oh most of the energy would be capture in something that just got hot, but inevitably some would hit the walls of the chamer, the "beer can" etc, transmuting the elements which comprise them into somehting else, most likely an unstable, that is radioactive, something else. Still it would likely produce alot less R waste than a fusion plant..hopefully anyway.

[freebilly]

Hot fusion in a can. Ten years ago there was cold fusion in a bucket. Another ten years and we'll have warm fusion in a mug.

[monkeyshine]

LOL. Still walking along the edge I see...

[d4now]

ROTF...I didn't think it was that bad...maybe I should be more careful...we still don't know what happened to classygreeneyedblonde.

[Some hope remaining.]

Nowhere in this article do I see the other critical requirement about getting up to 88 miles per hour first.

[Lancey Howard]

Years ago, in my days of haze, I remember a guy at Kenny's Bar taking all bets that he could break a beer bottle over his head. The ante got up to a couple of hundred bucks and rumors started that the guy had a steel plate in his head. Nobody ever saw the guy before. The crowd gathered in the parking lot (this was around 1:00AM after an hour or more of taking bets and a lot of build-up) and the guy proceeded to mightily smash himself in the head with the bottle and knock himself out cold. The bottle never broke. It was hilarious.

[El Gato]

Nowhere in this article do I see the other critical requirement about getting up to 88 miles per hour first.

You must learn to pay more attention. The 88 mph requirement was on the flux capacitors ability to tranport the DeLorean in time. It had nothing to do with the Mr. Fusion power source, as shown by the need to get up to 88 mph, when using the lightning bolt as a power source.

I have often wondered though why Doc Brown didn't just wind an electric motor to power the DeLorean and tap into the Mr. Fusion to run it, or failing that a steam engine powered by the Mr. Fusion. But that doesn't keep me from enjoying the film.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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