NASA Researchers Demonstrate the Ability To Fuse Atoms Inside Room-Temperature Metals (ieee.org) 107
Researchers at NASA's Glenn Research Center have now demonstrated a method of inducing nuclear fusion without building a massive stellarator or tokamak. In fact, all they needed was a bit of metal, some hydrogen, and an electron accelerator. IEEE Spectrum reports: The team believes that their method, called lattice confinement fusion, could be a potential new power source for deep space missions. They have published their results in two papers in Physical Review C. "Lattice confinement" refers to the lattice structure formed by the atoms making up a piece of solid metal. The NASA group used samples of erbium and titanium for their experiments. Under high pressure, a sample was "loaded" with deuterium gas, an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron. The metal confines the deuterium nuclei, called deuterons, until it's time for fusion.
"During the loading process, the metal lattice starts breaking apart in order to hold the deuterium gas," says Theresa Benyo, an analytical physicist and nuclear diagnostics lead on the project. "The result is more like a powder." At that point, the metal is ready for the next step: overcoming the mutual electrostatic repulsion between the positively-charged deuteron nuclei, the so-called Coulomb barrier. To overcome that barrier requires a sequence of particle collisions. First, an electron accelerator speeds up and slams electrons into a nearby target made of tungsten. The collision between beam and target creates high-energy photons, just like in a conventional X-ray machine. The photons are focused and directed into the deuteron-loaded erbium or titanium sample. When a photon hits a deuteron within the metal, it splits it apart into an energetic proton and neutron. Then the neutron collides with another deuteron, accelerating it. At the end of this process of collisions and interactions, you're left with a deuteron that's moving with enough energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier and fuse with another deuteron in the lattice.
Key to this process is an effect called electron screening, or the shielding effect. Even with very energetic deuterons hurtling around, the Coulomb barrier can still be enough to prevent fusion. But the lattice helps again. "The electrons in the metal lattice form a screen around the stationary deuteron," says Benyo. The electrons' negative charge shields the energetic deuteron from the repulsive effects of the target deuteron's positive charge until the nuclei are very close, maximizing the amount of energy that can be used to fuse. Aside from deuteron-deuteron fusion, the NASA group found evidence of what are known as Oppenheimer-Phillips stripping reactions. Sometimes, rather than fusing with another deuteron, the energetic deuteron would collide with one of lattice's metal atoms, either creating an isotope or converting the atom to a new element. The team found that both fusion and stripping reactions produced useable energy.
"During the loading process, the metal lattice starts breaking apart in order to hold the deuterium gas," says Theresa Benyo, an analytical physicist and nuclear diagnostics lead on the project. "The result is more like a powder." At that point, the metal is ready for the next step: overcoming the mutual electrostatic repulsion between the positively-charged deuteron nuclei, the so-called Coulomb barrier. To overcome that barrier requires a sequence of particle collisions. First, an electron accelerator speeds up and slams electrons into a nearby target made of tungsten. The collision between beam and target creates high-energy photons, just like in a conventional X-ray machine. The photons are focused and directed into the deuteron-loaded erbium or titanium sample. When a photon hits a deuteron within the metal, it splits it apart into an energetic proton and neutron. Then the neutron collides with another deuteron, accelerating it. At the end of this process of collisions and interactions, you're left with a deuteron that's moving with enough energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier and fuse with another deuteron in the lattice.
Key to this process is an effect called electron screening, or the shielding effect. Even with very energetic deuterons hurtling around, the Coulomb barrier can still be enough to prevent fusion. But the lattice helps again. "The electrons in the metal lattice form a screen around the stationary deuteron," says Benyo. The electrons' negative charge shields the energetic deuteron from the repulsive effects of the target deuteron's positive charge until the nuclei are very close, maximizing the amount of energy that can be used to fuse. Aside from deuteron-deuteron fusion, the NASA group found evidence of what are known as Oppenheimer-Phillips stripping reactions. Sometimes, rather than fusing with another deuteron, the energetic deuteron would collide with one of lattice's metal atoms, either creating an isotope or converting the atom to a new element. The team found that both fusion and stripping reactions produced useable energy.
Might be unstable? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you need the metal lattice to be re-usable, you don't want the result of your electron bombardment-enhanced fusion being unstable metal isotopes.
Re: Might be unstable? (Score:3)
NASA proposed this for deep space missions. I donâ(TM)t get the impression they planned on reusing the lattice.
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cool.
this gets us at least to the moon.
how
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1, The Moon is not deep space
2. It provides a source of power for propulsion systems that do not rely on chemical rockets
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I can see rods of the metal being fed into a compact accelerator and the heat from the reaction being absorbed by thermoelectric generators while the used part of the rods is jettisoned.
Ok, I also took your advice and looked up NAZI in the freedictionary.
Nazi
Nazi (näts, nt-)
n. pl. Nazis
1. A member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, founded in Germany in 1919 and brought to power in 1933 under Adolf Hitler.
2. An adherent or advocate of policies characteristic of Nazism; a fascist.
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Nazi is right wing.
Making "Socialist" bold does not change that fact.
Definition of Nazi (Score:1, Interesting)
The National Socialist German Workers' Party is usually considered extremely right wing, despite the word "Socialist" in its name. In terms of Capitalism vs. Marxism, they clearly fell on the capitalist side. Names are cheap distractions in politics.
Which leaves the informal definition of "Severely intolerant or dictatorial". Here I can agree that Cancel Culture and AntiFa have similarities. For a serious attempt at building a Marxist society they are too much at odds with each other.
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Okay, fair enough. Still, if it works and it's energy-positive (which it may not be; maybe I misinterpreted the summary), then it could be adapted to other uses.
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No, it doesn't need to be re-usable... the released heat on demand is way, way more than a chemical reaction could ever deliver. This is nuclear fusion power.
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Why not? Additional electrons or nucleons flying around from decaying isotopes would likely contribute to additional fusion events. And if the lattice has already been reduced to powder anyway you don't have to worry about losing structural integrity.
Eventually you'll probably convert enough of the lattice to unhelpful isotopes that the reaction rate will slow way down, but that's probably going to take a long time since you're talking abut a side reaction, and if it happens too quickly for your purposes
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Why not? Additional electrons or nucleons flying around from decaying isotopes would likely contribute to additional fusion events. And if the lattice has already been reduced to powder anyway you don't have to worry about losing structural integrity.
Eventually you'll probably convert enough of the lattice to unhelpful isotopes that the reaction rate will slow way down, but that's probably going to take a long time since you're talking abut a side reaction, and if it happens too quickly for your purposes it shouldn't be hard to recharge the reaction vessel with fresh powder.
Radioactive decay doesn't create neutrons flying around, that would be fission. And neutrons flying around probably wouldn't help fusion reactions occur. There would be quite a few electrons and positrons flying around in addition to He2+ (2 neutrons and 2 protons, basically a He nucleus) however.
As for structural integrity, the fact that he metal is converted to a power should tell you what the effect of this reaction is on that. It decimates it.
This is more pure research that someone had to tell an
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Nucleons, not neutrons. But yeah, you're right, nothing (known) ejects protons as it decays either, just helium nuclei. I didn't think that through. Still, high-energy photons and electrons from the decay are unlikely to be a problem.
It sounds to me like the metal is decimated during the hydrogen-loading process, not the subsequent fusion reaction. And since it's a powder already before the reaction begins, structural integrity is apparently not important.
Of course it's (semi-)pure research, did anyone
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Radioactive decay doesn't create neutrons flying around
Yes it does. That is how nuclear reactors work. Facepalm. However it is mostly called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Radioactive decay doesn't create neutrons flying around Yes it does. That is how nuclear reactors work. Facepalm. However it is mostly called: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Radioactive decay isn't nuclear fission. You are confusing the two. If you want to consider the fissioning of U-236 to be decay, then I guess. But that's not really how the jargon is usually used. Radioactive decay is usually described to produce 3 types of ionizing radiation: alpha (He+2), beta (electrons and positrons), and EM (x-rays and gamma rays). The 4th type of ionizing radiation, neutrons from fission, is considered to be the product of fissioning and not a type of radioactive decay as radioac
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Radioactive decay isn't nuclear fission. You are confusing the two :D
Actually I do not, hence I linked the article above
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Radioactive decay doesn't create neutrons flying around Yes it does. That is how nuclear reactors work.
Even in a nuclear reactor, SP is very very rare (< 0.01% of the energy). If you had bothered to read your own link you would know that. SP absolutely isn't how nuclear reactors work, they work by induced fission. Occasionally a neutron appears from nothingness to cause the fission to occur, but the vast majority of the time its from neutron coming from another source. But please continue just inventing your own facts on nuclear topics. Nothing has stopped you from doing that yet.
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Unfortunately you are bad in reading. :P
What you say is exactly what I said
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Why not? Additional electrons or nucleons flying around from decaying isotopes would likely contribute to additional fusion events. And if the lattice has already been reduced to powder anyway you don't have to worry about losing structural integrity.
Eventually you'll probably convert enough of the lattice to unhelpful isotopes that the reaction rate will slow way down, but that's probably going to take a long time since you're talking abut a side reaction, and if it happens too quickly for your purposes it shouldn't be hard to recharge the reaction vessel with fresh powder.
The energy used to power the accelerator can be recaptured by the themoelectric process which would convert the heat into electricity. The powder is inside the lattice of the metal rod which could be constructed as a series of metal "pedals" that allow each one to be disconnected and dumped overboard as each pedal is consumed.
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Only a some of the energy can be recovered - heat is the waste-pit of the universe, and last I heard nobody has figured out a way to convert it to useful energy more efficiently than a theoretical Carnot-cycle engine can manage.
That'd still help - but if the reactor is so close to break-even that recycling some of the wasted input energy is going to make a big difference, it's probably not producing enough power to be useful. Generally when you're talking about recycling energy in a fusion reactor you're t
May not be cold fusion, but it's close (Score:1)
Re:May not be cold fusion, but it's close (Score:5, Insightful)
They have to clearly say that it is not cold fusion as being associated with cold fusion is career suicide for physicists these days.
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They have to clearly say that it is not cold fusion as being associated with cold fusion is career suicide for physicists these days.
Even though it appears to be exactly Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion: deuterium-loaded metallic lattice bombarded by electrons, operating through one of the mechanisms proposed to explain the original experiments.
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Pons and Fleischmann had filled a bottle with heavy water, which is water comprised of deuterium and oxygen. They then passed an electric current from a palladium cathode through the heavy water, and the palladium absorbed deuterium atoms, which according to Pons and Fleischmann, forced them to fuse, and generated heat and neutrons.
That [interestin...eering.com] does not sound anything like what TFA describes.
Not at all cold fusion, not close (Score:3)
They have to clearly say that it is not cold fusion as being associated with cold fusion is career suicide for physicists these days.
Even though it appears to be exactly Pons-Fleischmann cold fusion
Not; did you miss the part about the electron beam producing x-rays with photon energies of 2.5–2.9 MeV and accelerating the deuterons??? 2.5-2.9 MeV is not "cold" in nuclear terms-- it's corresponds to about 30 billion Kelvin, well exceeding plasma fusion temperatures.
Seems to be a peculiar variant of accelerator beam fusion, where instead of an accelerator beam they're using x-rays to accelerate the deuterons. Bears some relationship to cold fusion, in that they're putting the deuterium in a cry
Not carrier suicide (Score:2)
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I remember following Pons and Fleishmann when it was going on, and they seemed mystified that others were seeing different results. Some got heat but no neutrons, some got tritium but no measurable heat, some got nothing, etc. The US Naval Laboratory spent a decade reproducing their experiment and found that the amount and type of impurities in the metals made a dramatic difference in results, so much so that if Pons and Fleishmann had purchased from a different lot of metals their experiment would have f
Whatever you say, don't mention the war (Score:2)
Cold fusion.... well, you started it.
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They have to clearly say that it is not cold fusion as being associated with cold fusion is career suicide for physicists these days.
Especially since the used tubes, while warm, are cool enough to be picked up by hand.
Re:May not be cold fusion, but it's close (Score:4, Interesting)
Alain Williams wrote:
They have to clearly say that it is not cold fusion as being associated with cold fusion is career suicide for physicists these days.
Frederick Soddy recalled that, when he and Rutherford performed nuclear transmutation experimentally, he exclaimed:
"Rutherford, this is transmutation!"
and Rutherford replied
"For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists."
Tokamaks: hot but dilute. (Score:2)
Imagine someone trying to handle a sample of the plasma from a tokamak reactor???
Tokamak plasma is hot, but not very dense by human standards of density. If you tried to hold some Tokamak plasma in your hand, it would cool instantly, and your hand wouldn't heat up enough to notice.
Interesting, but power source? (Score:2)
Re: Interesting, but power source? (Score:2)
That depends solely on the amount of heat generated compared to the energy spent. If the ratio is high enough for your chosen loop design then you can run it at superunity.
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Exactly. And the energy required to shove two nuclei close enough together to fuse is vastly exceeded by the amount of energy released by the resulting fusion event, to the point that the original energy is barely even a rounding error.
The limiting factor on break-even fusion is how much of the input energy actually contributes to fusion events, rather than being converted to waste heat through ineffective collisions. Which is where the electron screening - screening the nucleus repulsion until the last m
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I suppose this might be a replacement for RTGs, and produce electricity the same way -- thermally. Russia had a large RTG which converted neutrons from a rudimentary fission reactor to heat.
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Presumably not, otherwise they wouldn't propose this for a power source. You'd need a fairly large unit to produce enough power to keep itself running; the Russian RTG I was talking about produces 3kw of electricity.
You won't be powering any pacemakers with this technology that's for sure.
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>I suppose this might be a replacement for RTGs, and produce electricity the same way -- thermally.
As opposed to?
Every commercial nuclear reactor in the world produces energy thermally - the world gets virtually all its electricity from steam engines, the only question is whether the heat to produce that steam is produced from coal, gas, oil, biomass, or a nuclear reactor.
The only nuclear reactor I recall hearing proposed that wouldn't (necessarily) need to resort to a heat engine is a Polywell fusing hy
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Thermoelectrically. With thermocouples.
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Okay, yeah, at small scale (such as most RTGs) thermocouples are viable. Particularly if your primary design goal is low maintenance rather than efficiency - such as in space applications where the repair fees for a house call are... astronomical. (ba-dum-tsh)
Thermocouples still produce energy thermally though...
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Damn - you must be such a welcome guest at parties, with a pessimistic attitude like that. This is pure research into whether this mechanism could even work, not a demonstration of a working power source. On a technology development timeline, these guys are somewher
Re:Interesting, but power source? (Score:4)
No, it's not a potential power source, not even close and there is absolutely zero promise that the idea ever could work as a power source.
Triggering fusion in room temp solid is interesting for it's own right, but to suggest it's a potential pathway to fusion power is a boldfaced lie.
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Of course it's a potential new power source. The same way the discovery of fission revealed a potential new power source.
Obviously it's not remotely ready to be _deployed_ (I assume), but they're not claiming it's a viable power source as-is, just that it has the potential to become one.
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"These guys" will understand better than any of us how far fetched building a viable reactor is. So I don't think they would mind if someone is skeptical.
Lets talk about the Technological Readiness scale:
Level 2? A potential appliication is given as "deep space missions". That is easily said and "deep space missions" makes sense for NASA, so I think the researchers have technically reached level 2.
For Level 3, what eactly counts as proof of concept? I'd say showing that the application you named for Level 2
It is a good question, actually (Score:2)
That is, it is EASY, trivial, to fuse hydrogen. A child can do it (well, OK, a rather talented child, but I knew enough electronics/electrical engineering to build a fusor in grade school, maybe I'm a bit weird...). The problem is, none of those methods is even close to ever being able to break even. That IS the only real question with any fusion device, CAN IT BREAK EVEN? You got to answer that first, and the default answer should be "not a chance in hell" because the world is littered with such failures.
S
Any relationship with e-cat? (Score:3)
I am really curious...
nope "ecat from rossi" was a scam (Score:2)
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You mean this is fraud too? :)
So... cold fusion is real? (Score:1)
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Load it with deutrium, and focus a beam of high energy protons.... Under pressure....
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No. This is very hot fusion...only in very small pieces.
P.S.: There probably *is* a cold fusion, mediated by muons, but that's a different matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The US Naval Laboratory (along with dozens of other experimenters) has confirmed that the Pons/Fleishmann cold fusion setup does work, although output is so low as to be useless for power generation. It's been "rebranded" as LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, fusion and there are a lot of labs that are working on various aspects of it. These researchers on the other hand clearly state (FTFA) “What we did was not cold fusion,” says Lawrence Forsley, a senior lead experimental physicist for the
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Yes. Seems so. Just not the method they handed us in the past. I spotted the old one was a con job early on. This one sounds more plausible. We'll see.
The physicist guy in me says - BS. You need a whole lot more energy to fuse things. Maybe I'm stuck in the 1960s.
20 years too late (Score:1)
So, cold fusion works.... Pons is owed an apology, and so are those Fleischmann left behind.
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Dr. Alfred Wegener feels their pain.
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My initial reaction as well, but I was wrong. The researchers state in the IEEE article that this is NOT cold fusion, it's hot fusion but they've found a way to confine the "hot" reaction areas to individual cells in the metallic lattice.
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My initial reaction as well, but I was wrong. The researchers state in the IEEE article that this is NOT cold fusion, it's hot fusion but they've found a way to confine the "hot" reaction areas to individual cells in the metallic lattice.
So they've improved on cold fusion a bit.
What is the net neutron count? (Score:2)
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Apparently it's deuterium-deuterium fusion. The article doesn't say what happens to the tritium produced though.
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The process is tentatively being referred to... (Score:2)
Fursors have been known to work... (Score:2)
So how are those indirections between accelerating charged particles and two nuclei fusing supposed to yield more energy output per input?
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it's just as useless for producing any net power. Many orders of magnitude (understatement of the year) more energy required to produce particle beam than results from fusion. We could do fusion by particle accelerators in the 1970s, and for power generation this is equivalent in usefulness, which is to say utterly useless and laughable to claim it has anything to do with ability to generate energy by fusion.
Why the two step? (Score:2)
And not just use an X-ray source? Seems strange to bombard something to get high energy photons when you could just just inject high energy photons from the start.
Anyone?
Re: Why the two step? (Score:2)
But that's how almost all x-ray sources work. What would you suggest?
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They are, that's what the separate tungsten target is for.
It's not like they make x-ray lightbulbs that you can just turn on, you have to produce them indirectly. A typical x-ray tube is a simple electrostatic particle accelerator (similar to a cathode ray tube) that slams electrons into a tungsten target at the anode, which then produces x-rays. And there's probably not a whole lot of demand for off-the-shelf high-energy x-ray tubes. Or maybe that's exactly what they're using, but they specify the tube
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This is correct. Mostly all practical energy x-ray source comes from bombarding a target first.
Exceptions are synchrotrons, which generate x-rays as the production of bending electron beams in a storage ring (due to conservation of momentum.)
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Touche. Slightly more expensive though... and say the x-rays (or whatever acceleration-dependent frequency they emit) are (usually?) an undesirable but unavoidable side effect rather than the purpose. Does anyone use synchrotrons as an x-ray source?
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The only one that I'm familiar with personally is the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Labs in Illinois.
Curious (Score:3)
I'm curious - I assume they using bremsstrahlung photodissociation as a neutron source just because it's easier to do lab-scale? I'd expect that for a proper reactor you'd use a spallation neutron source, no? Or heck... if the goal is just to use the neutrons to scatter deuterons to target energies, just outright accelerating deuterons, no?
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Good question about directly accelerating deuterons. I was thinking the same thing. This is part of why they published two papers. One is on proving they've seen fusion. The other (https://journals.aps.org/prc/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.044609) covers why this works. They're claiming that there are advantages in:
1) having the deuterium located in the lattice, as this somewhat lowers the coulomb barrier
2) using a neutral particle to impart energy into the lattice-embedded deuterium
Also, spallation? Maybe
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Well, in general, with fusion the big challenge is to max out energy output while minimizing energy inputs. Spallation is (or at least was the last I checked) the most energy-efficient non-fission neutron source.
So they invented Fusion Powder? (Score:2)
(sorry, couldn‘t resist)
Yeah sure (Score:2)
potential new power source for deep space missions
The only caveat being they have yet to actually produce power this way. Minor detail.
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Of course they did - fusion=power.
They didn't convert that thermal power to something more useful, but that's trivial - every nuclear reactor in the world uses the same basic steam-engine technology for that.
And I didn't see mention of the output-vs-input power ratio to know if they produced _net_ power, though I assume not in a proof-of-concept experiment.
But if they successfully caused fusion, they can't help but produce power.
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That seems like the safe assumption. But like you said, a minor detail - at least this early in a new technology's development.
So that's what erbium dowels were for... (Score:2)
Should I.. (Score:1)
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I too believe that the public should not have any access to scientific results that are not final, implemented, and complete with an attractive WordPress e-commerce portal. The public simply isn't equipped to understand the scientific process.
Yes Slashdot, that was sarcasm.
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Hand in your Nerd Card, if you don't think a new way to make fusion is really cool then there's no hope for you.
Good Work, But the Write-Up Is Misleading (Score:3)
A new method of producing fusion energy has to start somewhere, and certainly an initial demonstration is a long, long way from an optimized one for practical us, but that said, the statement that "The team found that both fusion and stripping reactions produced useable energy." must be using a highly specialized and obscure meaning for "usable".
The peak fusion neutron output was 1500 neutrons per second, roughly the rate of the fusion reactions. This is an energy production rate of 3 nanowatts (assuming they were all the highest energy reaction D-T). They are long way from demonstrating that this can be anything other than the scientific curiosity.
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and more to the point, particle accelerators have been used to make fusion in targets for half a century. This is cute way to hold the deuterium but it's just as useful for "making energy", which is to say useless as tits on a bull.
A Plumbus (Score:3)
First they take the dinglebop, and they smooth it out, with a bunch of Schleem. The Schleem is then repurposed for later batches. They take the dinglebop and push it through the Grumbo, where the Fleeb is rubbed against it. It is important that the Fleeb is rubbed, because the fleeb has all of the fleeb juice. Then a Schlommy shows up and he rubs it and spits on it. They cut the fleeb. They are several hizzards in the way. The blamphs rub against the chumbles. And the plubus and grumbo are shaved away. That leaves you with a regular old Plumbus.
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upon reading the summary
This is Slashdot. All summaries read that way.
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What would you prefer? In general there's two options when summarizing a highly technical process:
1) Describe it in oversimplified terms (such as they did here), so that people with the relevant background (like a solid grasp of high-school physics) can at least understand the basic process.
2) Dumb it down enough so that people without the necessary background can imagine they understand it, while providing zero actual information to those who actually could.
Given that this is a technical site - "News for
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I didn't think that I expressed a problem with the summary at all. I was simply sharing a humorous memory that it brought to mind. I had assumed that some other slashdot posters would also be fans of Rick and Morty and get a chuckle.
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Sorry, I assumed comparing a scientific summary to (what appears to be) an explicit technobabble mockery of them was an inherent criticism.
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another related article from 2013 (Score:2)
Low Energy Nuclear Reactions [newatlas.com]
Same basic idea just coming at it from a slightly different angle.
Usable energy is not the point of these papers... (Score:2)
Deuterium-deuterium fusion has two orders of magnitude higher Lawsons criteria, and an order of magnitude higher in ion confinement time and the necessary ion density for fusion.
Among other criteria (most importantly, the higher reactivity of deuterium-tritium fusion), these problems have made deuterium-deuterium reactions much less realistic than a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor.
These papers are concentrating on a subset of approaches to decreasing the ion confinement and ion density problem, by using de
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sorry - the first sentence should read "Deuterium-deuterium fusion has two orders of magnitude higher Lawsons criteria, and an order of magnitude higher in ion confinement time and the necessary ion density for fusion compared to deuterium-tritium fusion."
Gold! (Score:1)
10 Gold (gold)
20 Always believe in your soul
30 You've got the power to know
40 You're indestructible
50 Always believe in, that you are
60 GOTO 10
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Blanket the fission reactor core with a fusion reactor?