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.”
No, no, no, no, no....
I meant something earthbound that we could plug into the electric grid and produce power.
I know that there are "breeder" reactors that manufacture more fuel than they consume.
But is there any kind of "incinerator" technology where you can just keep tossing in Mass (including nuke wastes) to be continuously reduced to energy?
Perhaps it would be a complex process requiring many steps through diffent types of reactors. But seems to me there "ought" to be a way to eventually burn all the "waste" down to zero.
Ditto: you're familiar with the industry: anybody ever come up with some fairly serious proposals along this line, or is it just plain too complicated to consider?
As to the argument that interstate highways represent a splendid example of govt. spending, two points need to be noted:
Providing usable roads has been an obligation of govt. since the Greeks and before.
Seond, highways -- Autobahns -- are a result of defense imperatives, and their construction, too, is a govt. responsibility, the primary purpose of the state being to protect its citizens' property rights and free speech.
More pertinent would be to remember not highways, but tech/megascience govt. pork fests. Why should a megabucks, publicly funded push to develop cold fusion achieve any better results than what we witnessed with, say, the SST?
Hey, I agree with you. There are lots of companies and people who would dearly love a marvelous new cheap and clean and decentralized power source. So I don't think big oil companies could successfully bury a technological breakthrough. Besides which, "cold fusion" is sexy -- it grabs at the public's imagination (as proven by the various movies that have used it as a plot gimmick). Believe me, any politician who participated in an effort to block cold fusion would be instant radioactive toast.
Whoopie! That would certainly be me. Thanks!
Not at all. Back in those days, the Government didn't HAVE that kind of cash. But what it DID have was land. And it granted ENORMOUS tracts to the railroads for "right-of-way", often hundreds of miles wide! And this grant of public land was not without government strings attached: rather than "invest its money as it saw fit", the railroads were permitted to sell this public land back to the citizens (settlers) to raise the cash to build the railroad. And all this was subject to various performance "standards" and schedules.
As different as electromagnetic [chemical] interactions are from nuclear processes. I will give this acoustic development a Very Possible as opposed to P&F, which earns a Not Possible Amundo.
Yes, the world is a bit more complex nowadays.
I'm comfortable with government involvement in fusion research, especially for peaceful applications such as energy production. It provides greater public accountability than if the technology was strictly "corporate intellectual property" and a "trade secret".
Chemical processes are in the electron-volt range. Nuclear process are in the million electron-volt range.
Chemical acoustic processes [fire is an example] involve electrons from the atomic electron shell and operate at electron-volt potentials. Nuclear processes mainly don't involve the electrons from the atomic electron shell, and it takes a lot more potential to make things happen among protons and neutrons.
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