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Posted on 03/02/2002 4:54:40 PM PST by aculeus
NUCLEAR scientists will this week announce they may have achieved a controlled form of cold fusion, a technology that potentially offers humanity a limitless source of clean energy.
The researchers are to publish evidence suggesting they have successfully fused the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, so recreating the processes that take place within the sun.
Until now the only way to achieve fusion has been through nuclear weapons or in vast experimental machines that cost billions of pounds. Both depend on generating extremely high temperatures.
However, the latest research, by scientists at the American government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Michigan, was done on a laboratory bench using relatively simple and cheap equipment at room temperature.
The study echoes the work of Professor Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons who, in 1989, announced they had achieved cold fusion at Southampton University but were ridiculed when no one could repeat their work.
Fleischmann and Pons made what many now see as a fatal mistake when they released their results at a press conference rather than having them scrutinised by other scientists before publication in an academic journal.
It is understood that Rusi Taleyarkhan from Oak Ridge, Fred Becchetti from the University of Michigan and their collaborator, Robert Nigmatulin, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, have repeated their work and subjected it to extensive peer review.
If confirmed, the discovery could rank among the most important since the dawn of the nuclear age. The scientists are, however, extremely cautious at this stage, saying only that they have detected all the signs of fusion rather than categorically confirming it.
Their technique uses pressure waves to generate tiny bubbles in a solution of acetone that has been infused with deuterium, a “heavy” form of hydrogen extracted from sea water.
At the heart of most hydrogen atoms is a nucleus comprising a single proton. Deuterium atoms, however, have an additional particle, a neutron. This makes them roughly twice as heavy and slightly unstable.
Physicists have long known that smashing two deuterium atoms together can fuse them into tritium, a third form of hydrogen with a proton and two neutrons. This fusion releases vast amounts of energy. This was the principle used to create the hydrogen bomb in 1945, but ever since then scientists have been struggling to find a way to control the process.
In the latest technique, the sound waves create bubbles that expand with explosive force. As the wave passes, the bubbles implode, generating extremely high temperatures. This process is known as sono-luminescence after the flashes of light emitted.
Until recently scientists could generate only temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees, far short of the sun’s 10m Celsius. This appears to have been solved by “hitting” the bubbles with another sound wave that compresses them so rapidly that temperatures soar and the deuterium fuses.
An insider said the researchers had detected “promising signs of fusion” including the creation of tritium and, crucially, the emission of neutrons. The researchers believe the neutrons have energy levels consistent with those that would be emitted by deuterium fusion.
This would enable them to escape the fate of Fleischmann and Pons, whose readings of neutrons enabled them to claim they had achieved fusion. It later emerged that these neutrons could have been the results of contamination.
Neil Turok, professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University, said the results, if confirmed, were extremely exciting: “Cold fusion has a bad history but these laboratories are among the best in the world and they will have taken every precaution to get it right.”
The research has major implications for other fusion projects. Britain already hosts the Jet project at Culham in Oxford, where a machine has been built to research sustainable nuclear fusion reactions.
This weekend it emerged that Culham had scrapped its own research into sono-luminescence and other low-tech forms of fusion after a report from Thornton Greenland, a former senior scientist, suggesting it was unlikely ever to work.
Greenland said: “I thought there was too little evidence to show it would work, but this suggests I was wrong.”
Recently, Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, committed Britain to joining an international project to build a £2 billion fusion machine called Iter, Latin for “the Way”.
Even this, however, will be able to sustain fusion reactions for only 16 minutes. A proper fusion reactor capable of producing power is thought to be 30-50 years away.
Fleischmann, who now lives near Salisbury, still believes his results were correct although he regrets allowing colleagues to press him into publicising them before he was ready.
He said: “I hope they have achieved it. If they have, I hope people are ready for it this time.”
Right you are. In fact, the entire technology of packet switching came out of that effort.
Oughta hang 'em all!!!"
___________________
'cept for one thing. I am a physicist first and a lawyer second.
It IS illegal to hang a physicist.
Ain't sure about lawyers.
But I do know it IS illegal to hang physicists!
Because I am a lawyer.
A Freepathon Cheer
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LOL! Then we'll grant you a reprieve.
I've nothing against physicists.
I just have a personal preference for more immediately practical applications.
Anybody working a different angle on the nuke waste quandry?
Something like a nuke "incinerator" which'll burn-up the vast-majority of the waste while generating power?
I don't care if others have improved the methodolgy of cold fusion. I don't care if F&P's method was sporadic and elusive. The point is, they brought cold fusion into our conciousness. If they had gone the "peer" route, the invention might have been squashed. But as it is, the whole world knows about cold fusion. They let the cat out of the bag. And no matter how much science/industry wants cold fusion to go away, the world knows what THEY discovered!
It's not an "improvement", it's an entirely different physical principle.
I don't care if F&P's method was sporadic and elusive.
That's an unintentionally apt description of their method. Their results, however, were nonexistent.
The point is, they brought cold fusion into our conciousness.
Into the public consciousness, for what that's worth. Physicists were aware that it was possible; it had been predicted by Andrei Sakharov in the 1940's.
If they had gone the "peer" route, the invention might have been squashed.
That is so far off base that I can only conclude you have an anti-science axe to grind. A week or two after Pons and Fleischmann hit the pages of People Magazine, Steven Jones of BYU published a peer-reviewed cold fusion technique, using the technique of muon catalysis proposed by Sakharov. The difference is that his technique actually works. There was no attempt to "squash" it. I've never heard one word of reproach for that research.
The fact is that, while we may have looked askance at Pons and Fleischmann's method of announcing their discovery, the physics community overwhelmingly assumed that their claims were honest and that their work was carefully done. We wanted to believe it was true. Many teams rushed to verify their results.
But nature cannot be fooled. It quickly became clear that their results could not be reproduced. They were not forthcoming with details of their work, and when the details did eventually come out, the work turned out to be inexcusably shoddy.
Let's take them one at a time:
Electronic computers: Alan Turing and his team developed the first electronic computer at Britain's Bletchley Park during WWII to decode German Enigma signals. So my caveat about the survival-skewed imperatives of wartime spending applies.
Incidentally, Turing et al. were decoding signals encoded by the lineal descendant of a machine invented by a private German company to preserve the security of commercial cables -- and Turing came up with the idea for his "bombe" in the Thirties, without a penny from the public purse having underwritten his thoughts. As a physicist, you surely know this.
Radar: Again, a wartime breakthrough, funded in the interests of national security to shoot down Huns before they could bomb England.
Rockets: Yet another wartime imperative. That's why the first serious rockets studied, tested and copied by the US were captured German V-2s.
Satellites: A direct outgrowth of the Cold War. In other words, a military exercise. Remember the panic over Sputnik 1? I'm just old enough to remember my parents being worried that the Rusians had seized the high ground of space. That was the threat that prompted the accelerated development of satellites by the U.S.
The common element in all these examples: In times of war, normal market forces are set aside in the interests of national survival. This is unfortunate but understandable. Where does govt. funbding of fusion to the tune of billions of dollars enter the equation? Why spend so much when, if the post is true, private researchers on small budgets are making splendid progress on their own, or at least with minimal govt. support.
But even granting your point, let's see where government's continuing involvement in your examples has led us.
Computers: Do you think, even for a moment, that the wonders of the Web -- FR most of all -- would be in place if government and bureaucrats had continued to dominate the development of cyber tech? The Internet grew expontentially in terms of users and tech once its development moved beyond govt.-funded DARPAnet, which was another defense-inspired undertaking by Uncle Sam.
. It was entrepreneurial instincts that gave us the Internet we enjoy today, not bureaucratic ones. If bureaucrats had remained in charge, I'd be writing this on a Remington Imperial typewriter, taking it to the Post Office and paying inordinate sums to have a civil-service clerk transcribe it for transmission, where the entire procedure would be repeated in reverse at the other end.
Rockets: Unlike computers, where private industry has become the mainspring of tech advances, NASA continues to dominate rocketry. The result: our Rube Goldberg space shuttle, a creature of pointless complexity, whose sole purpose is transporting cargo to the equally complex, expensive and baroque International Space Station.
In other words, NASA spends billions building an orbiting platform we don't need in order to have a destination for a shuttle we also don't need. That is absurdity squared.
Get Govt. out of space, let entrepreneurs in, and we might see the space hotels I read about in the science fiction books of my wide-eyed youth. Instead, when a billionaire wants to visit the space station (as happened last year), NASA does everything it can to keep him on the ground and, ironically, it is left to the Russians to take him aloft as a paying passenger.
Whatever govt. touches it ruins or distorts. As P.J. O'Roukre says, put the word "public" in front of anything and you have the difference between a public toilet and the bathroom in your home.
As a Freeper, you should know all this already. Or is it that you oppose govt. spending only until it applies to the laboratory in which YOU happen to work?
The sainted Gipper put it best: "Government IS the problem." Always
Easy as pie. Load into a rather substantial container. Load on rocket. Launch towards sun! Hope it hits. I know the enviro-wackos will get their undies in a bunch at such a suggestion but it is a sound answer to a tacky problem. We should have ignored them 30 years ago and just started doing it but it is not too late!
As a long-time skeptic when it comes to most conspiracy theories, I don't particularly want to buttress the theory that "big business is quashing new technologies". However, it's not unreasonable to argue that big business (especially big oil companies) would be much happier with high-temperature Tokamak-type fusion than "cold fusion".
High-temperature fusion will (at least initially) cost billions of dollars in capital costs for each giant power plant, even when it finally becomes economical (and that time is decades away). So big oil companies need not fear serious competition for quite a while, and then they would likely be the ones making the huge capital investments during a slow phase-over. High-temperature fusion follows the classic model of big government R&D expenditures which big business subsequently exploits.
Cold fusion, on the other hand, would be what is called a "disruptive" technology. It could happen relatively cheaply and quickly, possibly by new companies or ones not currently in the energy business, and it would obsolete much of the existing investment and energy infrastructure. So no, I do not think the giant corporations who currently dominate energy production and distribution would be too pleased with a technological breakthrough. That doesn't mean they could successfully scuttle cold fusion's development, but they would not be happy campers.
How different are the principles? In both processes, deuterium is dissolved in a medium and then subjected to intense vibrations - one sonic and the other lattice vibrations. The emission of light when ordinary water is subjected ultrasonic vibration seems to suggest that the localized rise in temperature or pressure would be more likely. Of temperature and pressure I would look to pressure as the most likely controlling. The sun may be characterized by high temperatures but the pressures in the sum are enormous as well. As humans we all experience wide variations in temperature and see and feel the effects whereas few humans experience wide variations of pressure, except for scuba diving or a sudden change in the air pressure in an airplane. Thus, the first variable we look for and hang our hats on is temperature.
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