Bubble Fusion Results Replicated by 4 Institutions 107
Trackster writes ""TROY, N.Y. - Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement." Here's another link in case EVWorld gets burned."
Can someone tell me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:3, Funny)
Luckily (Score:1)
Re:Luckily (Score:1)
Have an open mind. [lenr-canr.org]
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, this isn't a new form of energy. It's just a novel and promising way of tapping the energy released by fusion.
But this certainly does not look like snake oil, and it HAS been replicated several times as the articles report. So I think it's time to get excited!
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:4, Insightful)
The hot fusion folk have spent billions so what's a fraction of that to investigate something new and interesting?
Sure Pons and Fleischman screwed up - but it seems like the scientific community was not very objective about it - rather emotional in fact.
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
If some confirmed some parts and some other parts, it doesn't prove the phenomena isn't there.
It just indicates that it might be difficult to reproduce.
The scientific community did the equivalent of chucking the whole thing into the trash (including related stuff). Not objective.
Heck on the same terms I could say man-made hot fusion has been proven not to be viable - given the diffi
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
See, that's exactly what I mean by not objective.
Others (including some reputable scientists) actually did claim to reproduce P&F's results or had at least some interesting results.
But with the P&F screwup and mainstream science pissed off, many reputable scientists had to stop investigating especially the younger ones who had careers to protect.
That's proof enough for me of nonobjectivity. I'm not really surprised it turned
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
I don't understand this statement. Consider just the facts that come immediately to my mind:
I do.
P&F bypassed peer review and had a hyped press conference, and then shut down their labs to investigation.
Thats a flaw of the magazine where they published.
They then refused to release any meaningful details of their experiment.
The released "what they did" and "what they found".
Nobody could confirm their results in full (some confirmed one part, while another confirmed another).
Uncorrect. t
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case there is a viable mechanism since the bubbles potentially can generate the high instantaneous pressure and energy that is known to be necessa
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
it was supposed to occur through some mysterious mechanism when electrolysing heavy water with platinum electrodes. Of course it didn't actually happen and there was no reason it should.
Thats wrong.
No one ever claimed that "electrolysing" would cause a "cold fusion".
There are several cold fuson experimental set ups. A lot of them, e.g. myon catalized cold fusion works.
You are reffering to the P&F approach where they thought this would happen: hydrogen (deuterium and tritium as well) get sucked up
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:5, Informative)
Also, fusion is not the wonderous clean energy source it's made out to be, because any type of fusion that's realistically possible outside of a star also produces neutrons, which activate the reactor materials leading to significant amounts of radioactive waste. That said, the waste problem is not so severe as with fission plants because generally isotopes with short halflifes are produced.
For more information about fusion in general and amateur efforts in particular - I'm building a tabletop reactor - check out http://www.fusor.net/ [fusor.net]
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
Would it be possible to shield the reactor with water? IIRC, neutrons + water tends to produce deuterium and tritiu
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
And it's not so critical, either - neutron absorbtion won't activate everything undiscriminately - there are stability thresholds for isotopes and even then, all you get is a beta decay - gee, more electrons to the world(*) (unless, of course, the radiating nucleus happens to be insode your body, which can be annoying when in large quantities). You do have
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:1)
I am looking for something that will be able to replace depleting Oil and Gas reserves for power generation, in the developing as well as the developed world. And while pebble bed reactors look good from the non-proliferation and safety side of things, they are not so good on the re-
Are you sure? (Score:2)
Are you really, really [cornell.edu] sure about that? (-:
Re:Are you sure? (Score:1)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:1, Informative)
1) it's a beta emitter (thus more paperwork)
2) it's more difficult to acquire
Plus, it's easier to shield the 2.45 MeV D-D neutrons than the screaming 14.1 MeV D-T neutrons.
Re: I'm building a tabletop reactor (Score:1)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:3, Interesting)
D+He3 produces next to no neutrons, but there is no decent source of He3.
I was told recently that D+D can be "discouraged" from producing neutrons by doing
something clever with magnetic fields and nuclear spin
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:3, Funny)
Your worried its going to be another Fleisch in the Pon ?
Re:Can someone tell me - No. (Score:3, Interesting)
I work at Oak Ridge National Lab (although not in physics and I don't know these folks). A physics person I spoke to that has some inside perspective seems to think that it is legit.
However, he doesn't think there are any ideas around about how it could be applied to exctract any positive energy budget at this stage (let alone any practical ones). Unfortunately.
We can just hope that more people paying attention to it will increase the likelihood that some bright person will get some ideas in that di
Usefulness? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Usefulness? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Usefulness? (Score:1)
Re:Usefulness? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, I am not a physicist, but I suspect that "break-even" is defined as the TOTAL power output of the system! The problem is that to be useful, you have to get USABLE power out of the system.
If the energy comes out as heat, then you have to run a turbine, which is not terribly efficient. If the output energy is in the form of neutrons, then I do not know how you could get anything useful out of that other than a new and novel wey to irradiate and heat things.
So, if a physicist says that they have reached "break-even," then they are still only halfway there!
Re:Usefulness? (Score:3, Insightful)
All the energy put in comes out again (as heat, light, sound, etc), plus some additional energy released by the fusion. Since the total energy output must be greater than the input, but they haven't "broken even", they must be referring to the usable energy.
Re:Usefulness? (Score:2)
So if output = input + fusion
then breakeven is implied by fusion > input
Re:Usefulness? (Score:1)
To ignite the fusion reaction described in this article, they have to expose the canister to pulses of neutrons and generate ultrasonic waves. Both processes require a total energy Ei. The energy returned by the system is in the form of neutron emission. Those neutrons have an energy Ef. The break-even point is reached when Ef = Ei.
P
Re:Usefulness? (Score:2)
Re:Usefulness? (Score:1)
This is why the authors are now looking for applications which need a source of neutrons. Hence, they do not need to convert those in another form of energy.
RBFA (Score:5, Insightful)
It's actually the better link. Not sure why the submitter chose to relegate it to second-class status.
Re:Usefulness? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ergo, they need to scale up by about a factor of 1E7 to have a 1 W reactor, and 1E13 to have a 1 MW reactor (sufficiently powerful to supply the energy needs of a few thousand typcial North American homes.)
These are not small numbers. Offhand, I can't think of any technology that has successfully spanned this many decades from proof-of-concept to practical reality. Even going from an early Chinese gunpowder rocket to a Saturn V booster didn't involve such an impressive scaling up.
--Tom
Re:Usefulness? (Score:3, Informative)
How about The Marquand Logic Machine [ibm.com]?
That's a pretty impressive scaling up over the last 12+ decades.
Re:Usefulness? (Score:4, Insightful)
What if the scale up is so you can have something the size of a mini fridge in your cellar that creates energy for just your house?
Plus the reactors created thus far have been to study the principles, not attempt to harness them.
Any production reactor is going to be designed to maximize it's efficency, not maximize the viewability of the reaction.
Re:Usefulness? (Score:3, Informative)
For a commercial power plant, you need 10s or 100s of megawatts. For home, probably less than 10 kilowatts peak, less than that if I have a flywheel or other way to store power for peak demand periods? Call it 4-5 orders of magnitude saved. There are some additional potential savings in a distributed system; you can in principle do away with the transmission losses we suf
Re:Usefulness? (Score:1)
Re:Usefulness? (Score:2)
by the same argument, fission should have never worked, as for instance U235 only produces about 180MeV per reaction (i.e. only about one order of magnitude more than a D fusion reaction).
So it's all about the threshold of a self-sustaining reaction. Once you get that under reasonable conditions, scaling up is not so bad.
Not sure, but (Score:2)
We hear this all the time (Score:1)
Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:1, Informative)
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:1)
Nothing comes of them.
Although I agree a lot comes off the Sun
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
The Tokamac people got to break even in 97(IIRC). So something, at least came of it.
The problem I see with this bubble stuff is that they detect it by the emission of neutrons. Anything which gives out lots of neutrons is going to have many of the problems of fission - any plant big enough tobe useful will need shielding and will produce nasty waste makeing decomissioning expensive.
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:2)
JET was 14 years old in 1997, It is still operational, so it was long in the tooth, but hardly at the end of it;s life.
I beleive it's now basicly a testbed for technology for the proposed ITER project. ITER, if it ever gets built, is supposed to be big enough to run noticably over breakeven for sustained periods.
actually JET in 1997 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:2)
ObOldJoke: Some years ago, a student paper allegedly proposed that the fusion reactor architecture most worth pursuing was a Gravitational Confinement [usgs.gov] design.
The kicker is that he may be right (you could powe
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:2)
They have yet to get a Tokamac to break even for more than a single run; the complexities are too much. They say that as they scale up this will be less and less of a problem...
As far as neutrons; the main problem isn't the waste material, it's transmutation of the reactor itself. They choose the e
Re:We hear this all the time (Score:5, Informative)
Would anyone care to enlighten me as to when we'll see anything come of this promising technology, and when people will stop pussyfooting around and just increase the scale a little bit?
The trouble with fusion reactor experiments (of the tokamak kind) is that they are tremendously expensive and lengthy to build. After the previous generation of European experiments (JET) there supposed to be something like a seven-year gap before ITER [iter.org] would become available. IIRC the US pulled funding on their independent fusion programme, but eventually decided to join ITER too; its pretty much the only tokamak game in town.
However, due to its cost, ITER has always been mired in politics (even the site hasn't been chosen yet - 5 years after the project was supposed to have started) and this leads to more delays and increased costs.
Plasma theorists also have to find something else to do (and alternate funding) between each round of testing; seven years is a long time and people leave the subject, retire, etc, never too return. You'd be a very brave man to pin your career hopes on ITER being built on time. This then causes manpower difficulties for the project when it finally gets into gear, which then suffers more delays and overruns, etc, as postdoc researchers are trained up.
In short; expect progress when ITER is build, but don't hold your breath.
Wouldn't it be funny if (Score:3, Informative)
Wouldn't it be funny if the sheer acreage of acetone tank required to produce a watt o power makes it less economical than covering that same area with solar panels?
Fusion, Cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the kind of thing real progress comes from! Not the big nasty brute force machines we've been trying to coax a usable fusion reactor out of for decades, but a clever application of the laws of physics to get tiny pockets of fusion at much more sane average temperatures and pressures. Temperatures we can work with without having to contain them in giant magnetic toruses, temperatures we don't need petawatt lasers to generate for a fraction of a second.
I can see this development panning out, but even if it doesn't I'm still in awe of it's elegance.
Hot pants (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Fusion, Cool! (Score:4, Interesting)
When physicists started doing fusion research, the plasma chambers were about 3 feet on a side, and very easy to use (comparitively speaking). Most people didn't believe it would ever amount to anything, but everyone was in awe of the compactness, elegance and exotic behavior of the experiment.
The scientests working on it probably said exactly the same thing these guys are saying: we see some energy out, we're not quite at break even, but we'll get there.
After working with fusion guys for a couple of years, I know that this stuff gets complicated really fast. This bubble fusion technique is at the point laser fusion was at 15 years ago, which means it's about time everyone started taking it seriously. In a few years we'll be debating where to put the new, mega-huge bubble fusion test reactor, which will bring us, again, one step closer.
Sometime in the next 50 years, one of these methods will turn the corner. The magnetic field people will figure out what to make thier vessel walls out of, the laser people will figure out how to make and shoot perfect hollow spheres of frozen DT, or these guys will overcome whatever unknown problem is keeping them from producing energy.
Re:Fusion, Cool! (Score:2)
Problem is, at the 'sane' average temperatures and pressures, all you get is low grade generalized heat, which isn't suitable for power generation. (Not to mention the fact that these sonofusion devices are about wher
Re:Fusion, Cool! (Score:1)
This particular unit though is in teh infancy of its scientific growth. In 20 years (maybe more or less who knows with certain technologies and random descoveries) everyone will have their own mini fusion reactor to power their own living units. "The power grid" will no longer make reference to homes but street lamps or something...if we are even in need of lamps being as how we most likely wont be controlling our vehicles.
As wi
And you will know them by the trail of tritium (Score:3, Interesting)
and of course
Shark-mounted Neutron Cannon.
Re:And you will know them by the trail of tritium (Score:1)
Re:And you will know them by the trail of tritium (Score:2)
Can someone tell me (Score:5, Informative)
200 Hz pulses of neutrons and tuned ultrasound create cavities and grow bubbles in deuterated acetone which grow from 60 nanometers to 6 millimeters. At this point, they implode within nanoseconds, reaching estimated temperatures of 10^7 Celcius/Kelvin and 10^9 atmospheres (sea level) and releasing energy: tritium (hence fusion), light photons (sonoluminescence), gamma rays, and more neutrons. "Because the bubbles grow to such a relatively large size before they implode, their contraction causes extreme temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the interiors of stars." "In future versions of the experiment, the tritium produced might then be used as a fuel to drive energy-producing reactions in which it fuses with deuterium."
Re:Can someone tell me (Score:2)
And I was so hoping for heavy photons!
Why aren't there more comments?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this a sign that we've stopped caring about "cold fusion"? Is the fact that this field has had a less-than-credible past hurt this discovery? Is this a discovery? Have movies like Chain Reaction [imdb.com] spoiled us into thinking that this is a pipe dream?
Somebody help me out.
Re:Why aren't there more comments?! (Score:2)
That and it is Monday morning and the trolls haven't climbed out of their caves.
Re:Why aren't there more comments?! (Score:1, Funny)
Next Step - 1,000 Atmospheres (Score:5, Interesting)
"Since ordinary sonoluminescence delivers so much energy at pressures of only one or two atmospheres," he says, "you could hope that at 1,000 atmospheres, you'd be in fusion territory -- if the temperature also scaled up. But that's a really big 'if."'
I'm also surprised that this isn't on the main page of Slashdot. When reading the previous article on the discovery, there was a lot of "let's wait for confirmation" messages. Now we have it and it seems an appropriate time to get excited.
The coolest part about all of this is that it's relatively cheap, with the possibility of inexpensive and clean energy. The scary aspect that I haven't seen mentioned is that it could be an good source of neutrons used to enrich uranium and make weapons-grade material [ccnr.org].
Re:Next Step - 1,000 Atmospheres (Score:4, Interesting)
However, at higher temperatures, things could get "interesting". And at higher pressures, water's boiling point rises, so I guess we'll see.
Or they might try a liquid other than water, one that exists only at much higher temperatures... something like liquid Titanium. That's, what? 3500 farenheit? How hot does uranium have to get to liquify?
Make that 3034 F... oh and apparently tungsten is way up there too, with a melting point of 6192 F. Yow. Oh, and according to webelements.com, uranium melts at 2070F, and boils at 7101F. Uranium gas? That sounds unpleasant.
And I'm assuming that all that temperature data holds true at 1 atmosphere, piling on a couple thousand bars (or pascals or whatever) ought to drive those numbers up further.
It's actually not water (Score:2)
The acetone contains a form of hydrogen called deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Normal hydrogen contains only one proton in its nucleus.
Heavy nail polish? (n/t) (Score:1)
Heavy nail polish remover, that is (Score:1)
Re:Next Step - 1,000 Atmospheres (Score:2)
The problem being that bubble fusion depends on water. Basic physics here; Tin is the most stable element. Everything with an atomic level less than Tin is capable of fusing and releasing energy. Everything with an atomic level greater than Tin is capable of fissioning and releasing energy.
Titanium, tungsten, uranium, none of them would support fusion.
You know what the best element to fuse is? Hydrogen. The best isotope? Hydrogen-2. The liquid they are u
Re:Next Step - 1,000 Atmospheres (Score:1)
In high school, I did the calculations using CRC data, which implied that an isotope of nickle was even more stable than iron. It was a small difference, and perhaps I made a mistake. Or the CRC data might have been off.
In any case, this is the first claim I have seen for tin being the most stable element, and I doubt it.
Re:Next Step - 1,000 Atmospheres (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh... Fusion byproducts take decades rather than fission's centuries to loose their radioactivity, but I still wouldn't call it "clean".
But who knows? Maybe this technology will hit over-unity at higher temperatures and pressures.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Re:Next Step - 1,000 Atmospheres (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry. We prefer to keep the main page of slashdot for unconfirmed loony perpetual motion devices.
YU0 == T3H 5UXX0R! (Score:2)
Goddamned kneejerk skeptic. RTFA - the phenomena has been replicated. There's definately something there.
Now, any speculation about any purported wonderous applicaions of that phenomena could be treated as vaporware.
Re:YU0 == T3H 5UXX0R! (Score:2)
Would this work better in microgravity? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Would this work better in microgravity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, if it could work in microgravity, I'd have to wonder what it would matter? It certainly could power a large space station if we ever build one, but what about power on the ground? About the only way to get the power back down to earth would be something like microwave transmission, and I'm assuming that at least some of the aforementioned politicians have played SimCity, and won't let you run anything involving microwave power transmission or Godzilla in a populated area.
Re:Would this work better in microgravity? (Score:1)
You don't have to go to space for microgravity. Drop towers is one way to test it. I believe you can get a few seconds in a drop tower, which should be more than enough to test this
No? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've heard Taleyarkhan speak... (Score:5, Interesting)
First the internal review committe from Oak Ridge talked about how they couldn't find much evidence that Taleyarkhan and his group had actually produced bubble fusion -- this was pretty deadly in a scientific sense, since their OWN lab was very critical of their work. But then Taleyarkhan talked, and gave careful and convincing evidence to the contrary: His group actually HAD produced bubble fusion. It was a pretty tense afternoon, though everyone seemed to be of relatively good cheer. Fun times!
I hope Taleyarkhan and his group actually do figure a way to produce and control -- and maybe harness the energies produced -- bubble fusion; since I'm in physical acoustics, this means more jobs for me to go into!
Keanu Reeves discovers fusion?!?! (Score:1)
Anyone? Anyone?
Did he patent it yet? Hurry Keanu, hurry!
Re:Keanu Reeves discovers fusion?!?! (Score:1)
Can someone tell me (etc...) (Score:1)
I worked with Purdue's bubble fusion system for a bit. We used DD because of the near impossiblility of getting tritiated-acetone. The deuterium in the reaction comes from the acetone in which all hydrogen atoms have been replaced by deuterium atom. The generated heat is hot enough to break down the acetone an start the reaction.
Deuterated acetone is hard to come
Re:Can someone tell me (etc...) (Score:1)
Not possible. Generating that high of a neutron flux *requires* that amount of energy to be created at the same time. The neutrons are a by-product of the same boom-generating reaction.
I remeber this (Score:1)
They called it sonolumenecense or something like that. It didn't produce fusion at the time but they thought it might be a possibility
Good to know some cool wacky experiments come to fruition.
From 1998 check out http://www.ans.org/pubs/journals/fst/vol/34-2-128