Sandia Labs Takes First Steps Toward Fusion 371
robosmall writes "Sandia Labs has successfully demostrated the emission of neutrons (a side effect of thermonuclear fusion) from a BB-sized capsule of deuterium using using their venerable Z-Machine (eye-candy!). With this achievement they enter the race to create sustained fusion reactions."
The holy grail of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
clean and abundant power supply that could potentially alter our
entire power production system. One of the problems with the
transition to a hydrogen based economy has been that energy is
required to extract the hydrogen from known reserves (petroleum,
water, etc). The most common solution offered seems to be solar
powered systems, however fusion could offer a great alternative
which in the long run may prove more viable and more extensively
useable than solar, hydro-electric, or wind power individually,
maybe even collectively.
It's particularly encouraging to see the scientists questioned
their results and tested for extraneous sources before
publishing preliminary findings.
Re:The holy grail of energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Which of those technologies you cited, did you invent?
If you don't have anything to add to the discussion, just put down someone else's post?
Just because you already knew that, doesn't mean that everyone is as enlightened as you. I was excited by the prospect of the combination of the two technologies. I never thought it was an original idea, nor did I present it as such.
Fusion rules (Score:2, Insightful)
The first is when large-scale fusion reactors become viable. This will largely replace fission and fossil fuel power plants. The main effect will be to produce power for the transmission grid safer and cleaner.
Phase two is the real kicker though. This is when a fusion reactor is designed that is relatively small in size. Then the real effects of the fusion revolution will become apparent. Hopefully it will follow the path of electronics in that smaller and smaller versions will be designed. i.e. First airfares will go way down when fuel is replaced by an onboard fusion reactor. Then fusion powered cars will eliminate the need for refueling (except one in a lifetime). Eventually handheld electronics could be fusion powered. Once this happens power consumption is basically a moot point. Who knows what will be developed to make use of this? Only the future can tell...
Let's not break out the champagne yet (Score:4, Insightful)
What about refining the power plant once it is operational? Certainly there will be fusion at some point soon, but how long will it take to get from university/ experimental stages to commercial feasibility? A rather high-yield plant would be needed for powering the masses (though the day we have a global excess of any resource, even if only energy, will be a godsend! May we live to see it) and it could take years or decades to perfect even after break-even energy results are achieved. Let's not celebrate yet, there is still much to be done before the dream of commercially viable fusion becomes a working reality.
Re:Fusion is Good but Buoyancy is Better (Score:1, Insightful)
Walking on the bottom of the tank would require some friction between the bottom and your feet. How would you get friction when the whole thing is covered with oil?
My Question (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally can't wait until the Middle East once again becomes a red herring...
Re:Holy grail of energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal/oil/gas generators all generally heat water, turning it into steam, spinning a turbine to produce mechanical energy which is converted to electricity through induction.
Fission also releases massive amounts of heat energy which is absorbed by water and turns a turbine.
The majority of energy in these fusion reactions (Inertial confinement fusion (laser driven), magnetic confinement fusion (in a tokamak), electrically pulsed like in this article) leaves the system in the kinetic energy of the resulting particles. For example, Deuterium and Tritium are often fused yielding normal Helium and a neutron. Both are moving very fast after the fusion. This velocity is where most of the energy of fusion is. You can capture this again by letting the fast particles transfer their energy to a big resorvoir which would heat up from this energy transfer and again heat water to steam to turn a turbine.
With matter-antimatter collisions, the gamma rays would have to be absorbed by some matter, which energizes the matter, either thermally or electrically (that's how solar cells work - by liberating electrons by light interaction) or some other means I can't think of.
But you have to find the antimatter first
Re:Let's not break out the champagne yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can't Stress This Enough... (Score:2, Insightful)
now to some schlub making 500k and living under his/her means by 25%, of cource that is not going to be a big deal to them they can already pay their bills and eat regularly.
YEAH!! (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, it's already there! SOOO COOL!!
Re:Fusion isn't clean (Score:4, Insightful)
You just made my foes list due to your extreme lack of understanding. I don't know who your friends are, but they have been feeding you FUD!
This sounds just like the same sort of drivel that comes from the eco-morons when they start talking about how microwave ovens are bad for you because of the *nuculer* rays they emit, and go on about how irradiated food is radioactive. BLAH BLAH BLAH
Just FYI. I was raised in a volkswagon microbus and still have hair down to my butt, however I am also graduate student in physics. Please get a real education before spouting off with inane drivel!
END RANT
There are certain fusion reactions that can take place with *no* hard radiation. So you cannot just toss all fusion reactions into the same generalization. Further, as someone pointed out below the half life of irradiated neutron shielding can be very low, on the order of years rather than tens of thousands of years. As such it does not pose the same environmental hazard as spent fission fuel.
Re:Fusion isn't clean (Score:3, Insightful)
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/pdf/fdm1155
Looks like there can be some long lived(+100year halflives) radioactive byproducts, high level waste (HLW) to use the terminology.
So the bad news is... HLW exists in fusion reactors, long-lived radioactive product can be produced by that wacky little excited neutron....10% of the waste by volume, if I read the report right.
The good news is...it looks like the fusion reactors themselves might be used to burn/transmure a good chunk of those HLW elements via more neutron interactions, though the report is very vague on the technology that would need to be used to seperate the low level waste from the high level waste, to do the burn/trasmuting...and even then there could easily be long lived isotopes with small nuclear cross-sections that can not be cleaned up in this manner...well not in the 40 year lifetime of the reactor.
But, this really needs to be tested in a next step reactor design...inertial or magnetic confinement, either one...a reactor design that actually produces enough neutrons to test this trasmutation cleanup idea. Now that ITER looks to be going forward, finally...I'd imagine these sorts of long term reactor design/process issues will have a large role in the experimental ITER program.
-jef"as long as this fusion idea hangs around just long enough so I can make a career out of it"spaleta
Re:Fusion rules (Score:3, Insightful)
It's amusing how each new technology spawns such utopean views of the future. I love the old advertisements for "magnetic belts" and "electric hairbrushes". It's the wave of the future!
Re:Fusion isn't clean (Score:4, Insightful)
just my $.02
Re:If CorpGovMedia controls it, it will be expensi (Score:2, Insightful)
I really doubt that they could make fusion generated power as expensive as oil for one obvious reason: competition. There is very little competition in the oil supply market because the nations that are blessed with huge oil reserves would have it no other way. There is no way that a similiar fusion cartel could be created because anyone can make their own reactor once the technology is mature enough.
WTF are you talking about? If CorpGovMedia develops fusion power, it may very well be very cheap to generate. Fine...
But CorpGovMedia has lots of guns and stuff, and so if they want to sell it to Americans at the same price as oil, who will stop them? American citizens? Puh-leeze!
Re:The holy grail of energy (Score:3, Insightful)
ForceName / relativeStrength / effectiveDistance
strong-force / strong / quantum-distances
electro-weak-force / medium / atomic-distances
gravitational-force / weak / continental-distances
The rationale is as follows:
Strong and gravitational forces (not well versed on the weak-force) are mutually attractive for all particles. (non-biased)
The electro-magnetic force is is both additive and subtractive based on the sign of the charge of each particle.
Don't have a "good" explanation for why the strong force doesn't dominate throughout all distance-scales; String theory suggests that at quantum-scales, the number of dimensions opens up (like noticing a 2D oil-painting really has depth as you get up close to it). Such consolidation of dimensions as we grow in scale could cause the strong-force to dessipate more quickly than the other forces.
Reguardless, there are very few uncharged particles, and believe it or not, neutrons are charged. Both protons and neutrons consists of 3 fractionally charged particles (Up and Down quarks). For a proton, two are +2/3 and one is -1/3 (+2/3+2/3 - 1/3 = +3/3 = +1). A neutron is only minorly differeint, one +2/3 and two -1/3 (+2/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 = 0). Thus from distances very far away, a neutron seems to have a net-zero charge, but if you get really close, you'll feel fluxuations of positive and negative electric-force as the quarks zip around one another (as the moon causes tides on earth).
A heavy isotope (say atomic number 40) with zero neutrons would have an immensely positive charge. It would have 80 +2/3 quarks and 40 -1/3 quarks. If the isotope had equal numbers of neutrons however, then there would be 120 +2/3 quarks and 120 -1/3 quarks. 50% of all particles would be positive and 50% negative. Moreover, the net-neutral neutrons would act as electric-buffers between protons (shielding one from another as neutrons zip in between pairs of protons).
It is the combination of the shielding + the presence of -1/3 quarks within each nucleatide that weakens the electric force enough to allow the strong nuclear force to definately dominate on small scales.
If we had groups of fully ionized atoms (zero electrons), then we'd have net-positive atoms which would repell one another and prevent chemical bonding (and would facilitate an expanding universe - Gravity would be a non-factor). But pure -1 charge quantum particles called electrons are abundantly available in comparible numbers to nucleatides. Thus the electric-force pulls electrons around the aggregate nucleus consisting of stabalzing neutrons and radiating protons. At distances within the outer-most electron-orbital, the forces are turbulent. Electrons repel electrons and are dramatically attracted to the nucleus. However, the electrons are of a different quantum makeup than the Up/Down nucleatides, differing in several abstract properties, but most notably mass and an integer charge instead of a fractional one. Thus there is little ability for the electrons to collide or even orbit individual protons within the nucleus - they are destined for high and rapid orbits.
Since a proton has a net +1 charge and an electron has an exact -1 charge, placing the two right next to each other doesn't exactly balance out. But from far away distances, the net charge is zero. Thus if we have collections of atoms almost touching each other, complex dynamics are at work, and we have general chemistry. But as we distance ourselves from chemically neutral atoms (helium) or neutral molecules (non-ionized molecules like H2/ O2), we do not feel a net attraction or repulsion. Thus the strong force is lost at great distances for some speculated reason, and the electric force literally cancels out at even larger distances. All that we have left is gravity.
Now it's still possible to have ions or ionized mo
Re:Well, here's something positive on energy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sea water is, well, for the lack of a better word:
CORROSIVE. Well, it certainly ain't super friendly to a great many things... I mean, like, dude: BARNACLES.
C//
6K Meteror Off the Yucatan (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:idiot moderators (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you name me any technology that hasn't gotten cheaper over time? CD players? Microwave ovens? Cars? Cell phones? Wristwatches? Calculators? Even electricity itself is getting cheaper and cheaper every year, allowing for inflation.
I'm afraid it is you who needs the slow explanation. New technologies always supplant old, and there's nothing that anyone can do about it. I can imagine people like you trying to explain that the car would never replace the horse, or that airliners would never replace steam trains.
THis is because we have no control over CorpGovMedia....
You are correct, people like you with no understanding of technology or economics have no control over anything. Fortunately for the rest of us, you don't matter.