In the past, it's taken more fraking energy to produce fusion that the
Unlike a lot of overly sensitive poasters(sic), I have no delusions that anything I write is world changing or important. I don't take myself seriously so no one else should. Besides, my college major was physics and I'm still sore that I was never able to finish college and get my degree but I never lost my love of science and I try my best to keep up with and learn anything I can about what's going on in the world of science. I wish the educational system would encourage and foster children who have an interest in science and medicine. That way, "The Dumbassification Of America" may be somewhat mitigated. ^_^
Why? They have essentially nothing in common. An H-bomb isn't really a fusion bomb primarily at all--it's a fission implosion trigger device that causes a relatively small amount of fusion to occur but the actual object of the fusion isn't to be the destructive energy release mechanism but is simply a prompt neutron source to initiate a secondary fission reaction. It's that secondary fission explosion that gives the thermonuclear device it's extra bang, not the fusion reaction itself...
That ain't exactly what one would want to do for a controlled, sustained fusion reactor from which one could, hopefully, eventually build a power plant.
As said above, my doubts remain very high that it will ever become a practical replacement energy source but there's always things to be learned in basic research and development and who know?--maybe one day a breakthrough could actually happen. But, any conceptual idea to date makes the complexity of a conventional fission power plant pale by orders of magnitude...
And remember, for it to be practical it has to not only be economically feasible to build initially but be able to operate 24/7 for something like 95%+ reliability on a continuous annual basis between (relatively short) outages. I can't imagine any of the aforementioned technology being up to that task of any time _real_soon_now_ (tm) even if they were to get a 100:1 return on input energy on their next shot. :)
Plus if you're hoping to make people think this step in fusion research is going to result in clean limitless power plants, it's probably better not to talk about bombs.....
You know what I was thinking the other day. Those Iranians must be one dumb bunch. Seventy years ago, in 5 years the US went from the just the concept of an atomic bomb being possible, when no one had even produced a fission reaction yet, to working bombs. The Iranians have been working on a bomb now for what 15 to 20 years? And today the physics is proven, the essential ideas seem to be fairly well known, it's far easier to separate uraniumisotopes, guys like A Q Khan are selling DIY plans, etc. Even North Korea and Pakistan have figured out how to make them. So, what's up with those Iranians?
Good point...it's still a fear point w/ current technology the anti's use with the ignorant/gullible.
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I wouldn't go so far as to underrate their unrevealed abilities too much...having met a significant number of Irani engineers working in US commercial nuclear power, they're _not_ dummies by any stretch.
My alternative hypothesis is that there's some collusion going on in the upper echelon technical community that secretly isn't all that thrilled with the idea of becoming the bullseye of an Israeli preemptive strike if they let the cat out of the bag as to how far they really may be.
It's been a while since I've had personal contact with any of these folks I know well since having retired and returned to the farm, but they and many like them at home were and are not radical fanatics and the intellectual class in general isn't so much so there may also be some foot-dragging going on behind the scenes as far as actually producing hardware.
But it includes a fusion bomb. That counts whether it's primary or not.
The object of the fusion doesn't matter. The object of fusion in any future use of fusion for consumer electricity will also not be destruction.
"Extra bang" does not matter. It's the fusion reaction that is similar.
Of course. but when they created a nuclear chain reaction in power plants, they didn't claim that there was no nuclear chain reaction in atomic bombs.
On rereading what their claim was, "Researchers .... said they've achieved a first: A nuclear fusion system has produced more energy than it initially absorbed.", I can see now that it was tailored to exclude H-bombs and while you raised lots of extraneous points, you did come close to the distinction I now think they're relying on. That is, I presume, that the H-bomb's initial fission reaction produces more energy and more energy is (initially, they say) absorbed by the fusion "system" than is produced by it.
But this presents a new problem. In their own experiments, they used at least one quadrillion watts. If the fusion system produced more energy than that, where did it go? "The laser has not yet been able to ignite the plasma fuel", so what did it do, what produced the more than a quadrillion watts and how did they dissipate all that energy without using it in another laser?
I followed the link to the Nature article
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but they want $32 dollars for the article. Oh, well. Maybe it will be public knowledge some day.
I didn't claim there wasn't in a thermonuclear device, either.
I simply pointed out that the technique used for creating the fusion reaction in such a device has absolutely no use in the posited application of developing a controlled fusion reactor.
Hence the reason there was no mention thereof in the article and that I say they have nothing in common...it's the technique of creating same that is the issue, not that there is fusion.
No, you're missing the entire point of the neglect of a weapon in comparison -- the manner in which the fusion portion of the device is ignited is simply not a feasible solution for the problem at hand. Whether it did or didn't produce more energy than the input is immaterial for the contained-fusion folks cuz' they can't use the mechanism so there's no point in bringing it up.
What you're forgetting is that they didn't (at least I didn't see it if did) mention how _much_ more energy they got out than they put in (it only says they reported a ratio "greater than one". The actual generated heat is only that difference, not the total cuz' the other was absorbed and is "eaten up" before giving up the excess.
What they achieved was enough of the fuel undergoing fusion to release that fraction>1 but what they didn't achieve was enough input to actually cause the entire fuel target to undergo fusion -- iow, become a self-sustaining reaction aka the sun.
It's a step on a _very_ long road indeed despite the continue optimism. The folks in Rochester and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab back in the 70s and 80s had the same sureness it was "just 20 yr away"...it's endemic in the field and one has to remain optimistic despite the reality that they'll be retired and long gone before it ever happens...imo it's unlikely their grandchildren will see fusion-generated power on the grid.
Why would they have to dissipate the fusion reaction energy in a laser? I would presume it was just released as heat. According to the link, the laser was 10^^15 watts peak, but each pulse only lasted 30 x 10^^-15 secs. Unless my math is off, that's just 30 joules, which ain't much energy. And the laser power is probably the raw laser power, not what actually hit the tiny frozen pellet, which would be substantially less. Something there doesn't add up in the math. I would think they would hit it with one massive pulse and that it would be a hell of a lot of energy. But whatever amount of energy they hit it with, apparently they got more than that out and I would think it was just heat, absorbed ultimately by the large vessel the whole thing is in.
Have you followed any of what's going on with cold fusion, or low energy nuclear reaction, LENR as it's called today? From what I've seen over the last few years it looks like there are more and more credible researchers around the world who have stuck with this, reporting that they are seeing excess heat. You even have two professors at MIT that are believers that something unexplained is going on. Their experiments have produced more heat than can be explained. Ironically, it was MIT 20 years ago that played a major role in discrediting the work of Fleischmann and Ponns who claimed they had discovered cold fusion. The problem was that because whatever they had seen was not reproduceable and was inconsistent with known science, most everyone wrote the whole thing off. Even today, mainstream science thinks the scientists left are nuts, but it sure seems more and more of them are reporting results that produce excess heat and can't be explained.
My bet would be that if some new miracle energy source does emerge in our lifetime, LENR has a better chance of being it than conventional fusion. If there is indeed excess heat being generated and we can figure out the mechanism, it would seem that it's something that can be readily scaled without huge hurdles. And if it's real, it must be safe, no one has killed themselves from any radiation, byproducts, etc.
On 2/14/2014 7:17 PM, snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote: ...
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No, I haven't really paid any attention since some work after the big furor did with EPRI for the electric utilities to determine whether it looked like they should be investing some R&D dollars there. (Conclusion was basically "no, just keep reading the headlines and it'll be soon enough for practical applications if a real something does happen.")
The problem at that time and in my mind remains one that afaik(+) nobody's been able to come up with a plausible theory for what actually _could_ be happening given current knowledge of nuclear structure/forces. W/O a working hypothesis it's pretty much alchemy.
Again, not to say shouldn't continue to dabble/explore; _sometimes_ experiment does lead to theory altho it's far more rare now than years ago when the limits of what theory covered adequately were far more constrained. The problem with this one is that it seems to me it will have to produce some whole new sub-area of phenomena that just haven't yet fallen out of any of the multitude of theories and that seems, at least to me, incredible they've not hinted at the likelihood. Then again, perhaps it's right there in front of us and its just not been recognized.
(+) That's based on last I did which is now approaching ~10 yr since. But, I'd think if somebody had come up with that theoretical breakthru it would've been _VERY_BIG_NEWS_ (tm) and that fundamental knowledge leap would have been front page news not just a continuing set of "maybe, maybe not" measurements at the limit of detectability for some excess energy.
I pretty much agree. It's all over the map. On the one hand you have what appear to be very credible scientists at major universities, eg MIT, claiming they are able to get excess heat. And you have a couple of theories apparently based on sound physics that might explain what is happening, eg Widom-Larsen. And you apparently have NASA doing research, DOE finally providing some funding, but it's only $10mil. On the other hand you have scientists making claims that exceed what they can back up and they then have to retract them, making it hard to tell what's real and what's not. And outright frauds, IMO, like Andrea Rossi in Italy who "demonstrated" a 500MW E-Cat "reactor" and pretends he's taking orders for commercial units, has factories that don't exist, etc. And even that E-Cat circus has gotten a few real scientists involved that appear credible, where he's let them see limited demonstrations, etc. and then they attest to a least some of his claims.
Overall, I do think something real is probably going on though. It's hard to imagine that so many researchers over 25 years are all making mistakes in calorimetry. I guess the argument against it is that you'd hope by now even if the physics can't be explained, you'd have one experimental setup where whatever is going on it could clearly be demonstrated that you could put in 10 watts and get out 20W on a consistent basis.
Since you want to dredge that up again, perhaps you can answer this simple question, which no one else who wants to take cheap shots has answered:
I have what everyone agrees is a 3 phase system coming from a power plant. The 3 phases are 120 deg out of phase with each other. It gets stepped down via transformers and serves a building, 3 hots and a neutral. There are 3 phases there. Ok, now get rid of one phase. You now have two phases, correct? Now instead of those phases differing by 120 deg, let's make them differ by 150 deg. Still two phases present, yes or no? Now let's make them differ by 180 deg. Still two phases, yes or no? And if the answer to the that is yes, then if you set the voltage to 240V, it's electrically indistinguishable from split-phase 240V/120V going into a building. The electrons behavior, voltages, current, phase relationship, waveforms, are identical.
And if your answer is no, then explain the electrical miracle that just happened when we went from 150 deg to 180 deg.
Plus I have an IEEE paper, written by a power engineer with many IEEE papers under his belt, peer reviewed, delivered at a power engineering conference that addresses the very issue:
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"Distribution engineers have treated the standard "singlephase" distributio n transformer connection as single phase because from the primary side of t he transformer these connections are single phase and in the case of standa rd rural distribution single phase line to ground. However, with the advent of detailed circuit modeling we are beginning to see distribution modeling and analysis being accomplished past the transformer to the secondary. Whi ch now brings into focus the reality that standard 120/240 secondary system s are not single phase line to ground systems, instead they are three wire systems with two phases and one ground wires. Further, the standard 120/240 secondary is different from the two phase primary system in that the secon dary phases are separated by 180 degrees instead of three phases separated by 120 degrees. "
And these industry references, from electrical eqpt manufacturers that describe two phases being present:
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"The two Legs, represented by Phase A and Phase B, are 180 degrees apart. Since they are 180 degrees apart, wiring them together with their relative polarities as shown will result in:
L-NVac x 2.00 = L-LVac
120Vac x 2.00 = 240Vac."
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"The phase of hot leg 2 (Phase B) is in the opposite direction, ie 180 deg apart from the phase of hot leg 1 (Phase A)
I've not tried to duplicate the paper in depth but--from what I have read and the descriptions thereof I see some real issues that to me aren't consistent.
First, they claim somehow the "heavy" neutrons are formed at essentially room temperatures and they're then absorbed and cause the fission. The difficulty is they haven't afaict tell explained how they can be both essentially zero-KE and exist at room temperature and hence have roughly the thermal energy equivalent of 2200 m/s, in which case a significant fraction would have to escape the sample and be detected.
OTOH, even if one assumes that somehow that hurdle is breached, when they're absorbed to give rise to the subsequent decay, where are the resultant tell-tale mutated nuclei in the sample and the associated radiation byproducts going? AFAIK, again, they've not postulated some new radioactive decay process that is different than what we know, only that somehow all these products are contained. If that were so, then it shouldn't be at all difficult to reproduce and measure yet nobody seems able to do so.
Whatever it is that is going on, I don't think there's fully credible evidence as yet that it is "cold fission". Unfortunately, scientists often are as gullible as anybody else in believing their own pet theories and then there's the impetus to publish and if somebody will write a grant to support whatever it is then there's that motive as well. In some ways it seems to me much like the rebranding of "global warming" into "climate change" to keep the gravy train flowing there.
I don't mean this to impugn the integrity of most of these (Rossi and his ilk excluded, of course) but simply that they're human and so invested they can't separate themselves from their belief system any longer. Just like the folks at PPPL and Rochester LLE I described earlier -- it was a nearly religious belief as well as scientific effort driving the program and doubters weren't much appreciated.
As a consultant for them, I just needed the work to pay the mortgage and keep "time sold" at the 80% billing point to a client to have a full-time paycheck. :) With "no dog directly in the hunt" so to speak as there were always other clients to go hassle, it was fairly easy to see the two forces at work.
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