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Power Science

Lightning Fusion And Other Hot News 232

Posted by Zonk from the hot-stuff dept.
DumbSwede writes "PhysOrg.com reports that according to calculations by B.M. Kuzhevsky, the head of the neutron research lab at Moscow State University, neutron levels far above normal background levels exist during lightning strikes. While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events. Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect. Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs. This year has also seen the final selection of France for the ITER experimental Fusion Reactor site. With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"
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Lightning Fusion And Other Hot News

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  • If we were supposed to have invented a good process for fusion reactors, Doc would have showed up by now and shown us his MrFusion plans!
    • No Doc was killed by one of those mico H-bombs! duh.

      Although I for one would rather mico H-bombs than full size ones... maybe then they'd be small enough to be useful.. save on munitions cost... yeah that's it... hey doc, what's that in your pock.... oh crudd
    • If we were supposed to have invented a good process for fusion reactors, Doc would have showed up by now and shown us his MrFusion plans!

      That demands the obligatory George McFly:

      "Are you oh-kay?"

    • At the Taco Bell Invitational Science Conference next month I plan to announce the discovery of energy release following the ingestion of Mexican food, from the fusion of farton particles.

  • Your question can't be answered so simply. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by subreality ( 157447 ) * on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:24PM (#13634927)
    There are always a decent number of promising looking new strains of scientific research, in every field. The trouble is that all of these have a huge washout rate. Each will be developed into usable products over thirty years, if we can discover how to apply what we've learned today in a practical way. The trouble is that the application will always require a whole host of other discoveries, and plenty of tedious implementation research - and if anything goes wrong along the way, the idea will wash out.

    All the past discoveries looked just as promising as anything you see today. They didn't pan out yet. Today's look good today. They're worth following up on. But nobody can just tell you if these things will be workable in the end - that's what the years of research are for.

  • Why, yes. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:25PM (#13634935)
    > With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"

    "Why, yes, we are on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be', and we always will be!"

    • hmmm, yeah, doubt it. (Score:5, Informative)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:14AM (#13636087)
      Yeah, I don't quite know why the question is being asked of /. but anywho, glad it is...

      I don't particularly trust anything at all I read on "physorg" unless it is also published somewhere else and this search is not [google.com] boosting my confidence in the article's validity. Other things which make me doubt the clam VERY VERY MUCH are the fact that lightning has a temperature usually not reported in the literature to be above 40-50,000 Kelvin [anl.gov] while virtually all fusion devices (which are in thermal equilibrium, as this would also be the mechanism here presumably unless they are proposing some super exotically weird non-equilibrium mechanism) need to attain temperatures in the MILLIONS of K range to even begin seeing neutrons. The fact that they are also claiming that this explains why they see "100 times the background" levels of neutrons during lightning storms is, I think, bordering on the ridiculous. There is a reason it took us until just 2 years ago to discover that lightning emits x-rays [space.com], and that is because uhmmm it involves studying lightning at very close range! Interference effects in sensitive electronic equipment caused by the insanely huge magnetic and electric field pulse very close by are extremely hard to eliminate. Until I read the paper, I'll very highly doubt this neutron/fusion "discovery".

      Anyway, I think the following line in the submission needs some factual clarification:
      "Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs."

      This is a bit of a convoluted misconception. Firstly when NIF (if they ever finish the damn thing) compresses and ignites its DT capsules, they will theoretically produce a gain of something like a maximum of ~50. That is to say, they will release ~50 times more energy than was delivered to them by the lasers which are used to start the reaction and this will result in the emission of a neutron pulse and other thermal and electromagnetic energy in the 10s of megajoules range. This is exactly a replica of a thermonuclear bomb in the lab (without the primary). They ARE "micro-H-bombs", that's the whole idea of the thing. Secondly NIF want's to use uranium and plutonium as reported recently [insidebayarea.com] not because they will increase the fusion yield of the micro-bombs but rather because the megabar, megakelvin conditions achievable with NIF will allow the examination of these metals at the conditions which are found at the cores of imploding primaries [wikipedia.org] (and secondary "sparkplugs"). These are called "subcriticals [lanl.gov]" and they allow the examination of the equation of state" of these metals at energy regimes pertinent to A-bombs without having an actual chain reaction occur.

      As for the question "With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'"...
      Don't count on it. There are lots of very promising [oemagazine.com] and very very exciting [mit.edu] ideas out there, but fusion on an economic (and laboratory; ie. not H-bombs) scale is just damn hard to do. The 30 year rule, sadly, still applies. T
      • "doubt the clam"

        "Hey, clams got mouths!" (With apologies to Johnny Hart)

      • You CAN find traces of fusion reaction even at 40000K, because temperature is a statistic measurement (the mean value of a bell-shaped curve). So you will always have a _small_ percentage of atoms with 10x speed (in the range of 4 millions of Kelvins) and at this temperatures fusion reactions can occur.

        Of course, it's nowhere close to break-even, but nonetheless it might help in fusion reactor design.

        • Re:hmmm, yeah, doubt it. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by ultranova ( 717540 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:02PM (#13638135)

          You CAN find traces of fusion reaction even at 40000K, because temperature is a statistic measurement (the mean value of a bell-shaped curve). So you will always have a _small_ percentage of atoms with 10x speed (in the range of 4 millions of Kelvins) and at this temperatures fusion reactions can occur.

          Unless, of course, fusion reactions occur in the upper end of atom speeds when the mean is at 4 million Kelvins. I presume so, because otherwise the Sun would burn all of it's core hydrogen nearly instantaneously (every time two atoms collide - happens quite often at those speeds) and would consequently blow apart from the huge energy burst, and whatever remains would then go out because no hydrogen remained. Since Sun is still shining, I consider my interpretation likely.

          In any case, fusion can occur in any temperature, because quantum uncertainty can always make two nucleus to appear close enough each other for strong nuclear force to bind them. Coming to think of it, what would happen if you froze hydrogen atoms near absolute zero - since the speed of the atoms would be very well known (close to zero, deviating less and less the lower the temperature gets) their position should become very uncertain, to the point of essentially occupying the same space; would this lead to fusion ? Would it be easier to cool a hydrogen pellet to low enough temperature to ignite fusion than to heat it up ? Would it get overclokcers processor cooling equipment outlawed as weapons of mass destruction ?-)

  • Neutron Storms (Score:3, Funny)

    by kyle90 ( 827345 ) <kyle90@gmail.com> on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:30PM (#13634975) Homepage Journal
    From now on, whenever there is a thunderstorm; I am going to refer to it as a neutron storm. That just sounds so cool.
    • oh sure, you think it SOUNDS cool, but you have never been caught in one have you?
      First thing you know you tachyon drive begens to get glitchy and you loose communications.
      then navigation goes and it's opps bang you stuck on some backward ass planet posting on some site about some primative form of power. What, where you guy like monkies until last week?
      sheesh

  • 1.21 Gigawatts! (Score:5, Funny)

    by xCepheus ( 687775 ) <dntn31.yahoo@com> on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:30PM (#13634977) Homepage
    Dr. Emmett Brown: No no no, this sucker's electrical, but it requires a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.

    So... what the article is saying is that Dr. Brown used the electricity from the lightning strike, instead of plutonium, to generate the nuclear reaction to generate the electricity to power the fluxcapacitor?

    It all makes sense now?

  • End of the World (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Danger Stevens ( 869074 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:34PM (#13635000) Homepage
    Is it worthwhile to limit the advances of potentially destructive sciences like this one or is it an inevitability?

    It seems to be that the way to keep the world safe from nuclear (or something else we may now uncover) holocaust is not to limit the technology that will be used as tools, but to increase the quality of life of any civilization desperate enough to commit mass-murder in an organized way.
    • Yes, and the only way to do that is to reach in and tear out the dictatorships that are causing the problems.

      Ugh. One world governement.

    • Re:End of the World (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RubberDogBone ( 851604 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @01:10AM (#13636280)
      : Is it worthwhile to limit the advances of potentially destructive sciences like this one or is it an inevitability?

      The problem with limiting study of subjects such as this (or stem cells, or anything else) is that there will always be someone or a group of someones who will not obey they limits.

      I.e. Congress may pass laws to forbid US researchers from studying stem cells but foreign powers have no such problems and will push their scientists to pursue the goals. Net result is that the foreign powers have the potentially very powerful technology and the US does not. But we've held the moral ground, by golly!

      In the case of fusion from anything, you can bet every nation on the planet with any kind of military force -and probably many private companies- will be looking very carefully at this, if it seems like it will work.

      If a group of nations stands back and says they won't allow the research, there will surely be plenty of nations which will allow it, and the research will still go on no matter what.

      In the case of stem cells, we have already seen dozens of countries jump in on this. There is far too much to be gained, and honestly, what the US says or does is of decreasing concern to many countries.

      Yeah, I'm probably going to blow my karma saying that. It's not anti-American to state the facts as they are. Oh well.

    • Re:End of the World (Score:3, Insightful)

      by srleffler ( 721400 )
      Keep in mind that the destructive potential of nuclear fusion has largely been already realized. Most of what we have left to learn is how to create controlled fusion.
      • And really, if development into micro-H-bombs is what it takes to get fusion research going, then I say "bring on the bombs." Often times military research is a BIG contributor to overall scientific knowledge just because of the AMOUNTS of money dumped into large research projects that could NEVER show ROI even in a university environment.

        So destruction really can be the path to a better fusion future. Assuming we make it that far...

  • great... (Score:2, Funny)

    by simonharvey ( 605068 )
    While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events.

    Now 'ol george is gonna commit to a war against the wheather

    • Re:great... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sploxx ( 622853 )
      While only a small percentage of rainwater contains atoms of deuterium, the lightning still provides enough energy to create fusion events.

      Of course, the next interesting thing to do would be creating artificial lightning in a heavy water atmosphere... maybe this even has practical (neutron generation) uses?

      But someone must have done this already. I'm to lazy to google-research this. Are there any such experiments?
    • Nah, he'll wait a week before responding. The new Joint Chiefs, affectionally known as "Brownie," will be on top of everything.

  • Fusion is the Future (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fortress ( 763470 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:35PM (#13635010) Homepage
    We really shouldn't spare any resources researching and developing fusion power. It has the potential to solve many of our environmental and energy-scarcity problems in one fell swoop.

    The development of fusion is more important than just about any other scientific project, as the abundance of cheap energy would enable other projects. And yet how much are governments/energy companies devoting to it? Less than what we spend securing a limited oil supply in an unstable part of the world. I wish we had more far-sighted, responsible leaders who are interested in more than lining their own pockets or winning the next election (pretty much the same thing).
    • We have the technology today to blanket the sunny side of the moon with solar panels and beam "free" energy back to Earth. The problem is that nobody wants to foot the several hundred billion required to make it happen. But just think how different all our lives would be if energy was practically free....
      • Indeed, free energy would cripple the economy. And it wouldn't even be a bad thing, except for the power hungry. With free energy, processing raw materials and manufacturing them would be free as well (but only nearly so at first). With enough time and energy, you can do anything.

        Think of capitalist complaints against communism. They complain that a communist society offers no incentive for innovation. With advances in robotics and food technology, there would be no incentive for innovation if the wo

        • Imaginative, but way off the mark. For one thing, you point out that if energy is free, then given enough time, you could do anything--extracting minerals, R&D, growing food, &c. But have you considered that time itself is the most valuable commodity of all? And time will never be free, even if aforementioned R&D grants us immortality. Neither will energy, for that matter, for the same reason. The scenario you describe would definitely make a great screenplay, but in reality? Not a chance.
      • as seen in global warming (whether human caused or not is not the point here).

        the amount of solar energy hitting earth is enormous and is more than we need, the "only" problem is to capture it, either directly with solar panels in deserts, or by tapping its effects:
        - water power (sun transports water)
        - wind power

        i think with the billions needed to add even more energy from space to our system (bad idea) it should be possible to get a significant amount of energy from the earths deserts.

    • Re:Fusion is the Future (Score:3, Informative)

      by tmortn ( 630092 )
      Expensive to develop and deploy with little return means no vested intrest in providing it for industry. To go heavy at fusion right now means they get squeezed from both ends. IE it costs more to research and then implement but they have to charge less than the tech they replace otherwise nobody wants to use it. Its a Chicken or the Egg kind of problem. How do you get cheap plentifull fusion power if it dosn't exist already. More importantly, how do you make money making it happen?

      As for why the government
    • I think energy from fusion is a good thing, but it's naive to think that it will solve environmental or political problems.

      What will happen is that people will come to expect what we now consider "abundant" energy from fusion, and they'll go to the limit using that as well, until they hit environmental and engineering limitations.

      Environmental and other problems related to energy are psychological and social, and they don't have technological solutions. We need to be satisfied with less than pushing our en

  • Of Course! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Filberts ( 35129 )
    *Now* I understand why we needed to steal Plutonium from the Libyans...

  • Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by algae ( 2196 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:51PM (#13635110)
    my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame?

    And my answer for you, Zonk, as it frequently is for giant world-changing questions like these, is, "How the hell should I know? I'm a freakin' sysadmin."

  • Environmentalists Caused the Grenhouse Effect (Score:5, Insightful)

    by robbak ( 775424 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:55PM (#13635138) Homepage
    (How's that for a trollish Subject line!!)

    The theory goes like this:
    Environmental lobyists successfully made nuclear power unpopular. They did this by beating up the dangers of accidents, and the difficulties of storing the waste products until we work out what to do with them. 200 years at the outside, not the x million year half-life. By so doing, they stifled the development that would have lead to much safer, more efficient systems. As an example, the pebble bed systems being developed in China.

    With nuclear power out of the equation, we had to turn to other areas. This meant the only viable scheme for baseload power generation: Fossil fuels. Mainly coal. No, do not talk about renewables. Solar is far too expensive and inefficient, wind would require so many turbines it would cause climate change, and, while hydro power has proved succesfull in countries that are geographically suitable, just you try damming a river these days!

    Replacing nuclear with coal was thought to be a win, as it would be a decade or so before they gathered enough evidence to prove the Greenhouse Effect. So, we continue to mine, ship and burn coal, a procedure which, incidentally, kills Chernobles of miners every year. (maybe I exagerate: figures, anyone?)

    So we reach today. CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by the gigatonne, the temperature inexorably rising, and the nuclear solution still a dirty word. Well done, Greenpeace!!
    • I wouldn't say enviromentalist per se, but more of the anti corporateist that took over the large envirmental groups years ago.

      The founder of green peace is NOT anti nuclear. How ever he left as it becamme more about stopping corporation, and less about making them become enviromentally friendly. Which nuclear power is.

    • Caused & Greenhouse Effect (Score:5, Informative)

      by wytcld ( 179112 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:50PM (#13635437) Homepage
      If you'd known guys like the guys I've known who've built and operated nuclear plants, you'd realize how lucky we've been there haven't been numerous meltdowns. And nuclear waste disposal is a problem; looked around Hanford lately? But it was simple economics that stalled the nuclear power program. Hydro is cheap. Coal is cheap. And most especially virtually all new power plants built in the past couple decades in the US have been natural gas -- because we've put in a whole bunch of new wells and it has been both cheap and relatively clean-burning (although extraction can really ruin water resources in, say, Wyoming). Nuclear plants can be built more safely now than in the 50s and 60s, but up until just now they haven't been economically competitive with natural gas-fired plants. Industry makes its investments where it can make the best return.

      The destruction of natural gas wells and pipelines in the Gulf has now changed that. Yes, there could have been more nuclear plants built meanwhile, if nobody had cared about safety (which is expensive to build in), either in terms of potential catastrophe or radioactive releases. You can call the people who care about standards for such things "environmentalists" -- although in reality most of the restrictions are put there by our government because it by law covers the insurance for nuclear plants, and it doesn't want to be over-exposed to catastrophic loss (either to the plants, or cities downwind). Of course, if the government were sane it would have invested more in levees....

      • Re:Caused & Greenhouse Effect (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @10:59PM (#13635780) Homepage Journal
        you'd realize how lucky we've been there haven't been numerous meltdowns.

        We've had one meltdown in the commercial reactors in the US that was due to not following procedure and about ~30 something things going wrong simultaniously. Radiation released to the public was about the amount you'd get on a couple cross country flights. We don't have a problem with this in the US.

        There is no way for us to generate more plutoniam or uranium. Once it's gone.. that's it.

        Only because Carter banned breeder reactors in the US. With them, we could refine and reuse what is currently defined as "nuclear waste".

        But it was simple economics that stalled the nuclear power program.

        Along with all the anti-nuclear bias floating around in the US that has been promoted.

        Nuclear plants can be built more safely now than in the 50s and 60s, but up until just now they haven't been economically competitive with natural gas-fired plants. Industry makes its investments where it can make the best return.

        See above. Idiot protesters can shut down/delay/hassle a program to make it un-economical as easily as anything else. Why should they try (although one group is trying to build one), when protest groups will delay it into oblivion. Industry will try best return with the least hassle. Natural gas just doesn't have the hassle that nuclear does, even though it produces CO2 and nuclear doesn't.

        Yes, there could have been more nuclear plants built meanwhile, if nobody had cared about safety (which is expensive to build in), either in terms of potential catastrophe or radioactive releases.

        Again, look at 3 mile island and all that led up to its problem. We have built them safley and 3 mile island is about the worst that can happen.

        • Re:Caused & Greenhouse Effect (Score:5, Interesting)

          by tbo ( 35008 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @04:49AM (#13636847) Journal
          We've had one meltdown in the commercial reactors in the US that was due to not following procedure and about ~30 something things going wrong simultaniously. Radiation released to the public was about the amount you'd get on a couple cross country flights. We don't have a problem with this in the US.

          No, we have not had any meltdowns in the US. A meltdown is when the reactor core overheats, and you get molten fissile material burning a hole through the bottom of the reactor.

          Three Mile Island was not a meltdown, it was a fairly small (intentional) release of radioactive gas*, done to avoid the possibility of an explosion of hydrogen that operators thought might have been generated by high-temperature steam that was released through a series of other problems and errors. Even if the operators hadn't released that gas, and there had been an explosion, it almost certainly still would not have lead to a meltdown. Unlike reactors designed by Soviet communist fools, American reactors do not operate in or near a regime with positive feedback. Canadian CANDU reactors are even safer, as the moderator required for the reaction to happen (heavy water, or D2O) is also the coolant. If something goes wrong, it boils off, and the reaction stops before anything gets too out of hand. Pebble bed reactors are even safer--as I understand it, they operate in a regime where Doppler broadening at high temperatures decreases the neutron capture cross-section enough to stop the reaction. The point is that Three Mile Island wasn't actually a very dangerous failure, and that it wasn't close to being a meltdown. It was bad, but probably also a worst case for a US reactor.

          As others have pointed out, it is true that nuclear is more expensive than natural gas-generated power, however the cost of natural gas power depends primarily on the cost of natural gas (whereas uranium is a small portion of the cost with nuclear power). If you also include a reasonable carbon tax, nuclear can start looking pretty good. It's the only serious non-CO2 producing candidate for baseline electricity production. Wind and solar can effectively be used supplementally, but as a baseline source, you'd have to factor in the cost of storing power for use at night or during cloudy or calm periods, and that's going to be extremely expensive. Most reasonable proponents of wind power will tell you it's not ever going to make up more than 10 or 15% of US power, even in a best case. With solar, you can do some simple calculations based on the solar radiation flux and realize that the land area required for it to replace most or all of our energy needs would be absurd (as in, by a couple decades from now, we'd have to cover an area larger than California with solar). Hydro is great, but there are a fixed number of rivers around to dam, and it's very hard politically. There's no way, for instance, that Hetch Hetchy could be dammed today--in fact, that dam may eventually get removed for environmental reasons.

          *the amount of radioactive material released during the Three Mile Island incident was such that, if you were standing immediately outside the power plant's outer fence during the whole thing, you would have received a dose equal to a normal year's worth of background radiation in the US, or about 3 months' worth of background in France. Background radiation varies subtantially by geographic region due to naturally occuring radioactive elements in the soil.

          One more thing for the spelling Nazis who were picking on someone for spelling Chernobyl as "Chernoble": since Russia and the Ukraine use a different alphabet than we do, English translations of place names are just transliterations. For some names (such as Chebychev, aka Chebyshev, aka Tchebychev), there are several common English spellings. It may well be the case that Chernoble is simply a less common transliteration. I don't know, and I suspect you don't, either, so give the guy a break.
    • FWIW, Greenpeace now consider nuclear power the "lesser of two evils".
      • And there is just one of the fscking hypocracies of the whole movement. What happened? Did Nuclear get less evil? or did the alternative get more evil? I would love to think that the net global evilness is decreasing but I suspect that the alternatives just got eviler and so as far as the greenies (or perhaps watermelons is a better phrase, you know, green on the outside but pink in the middle) in a world that is getting just more and more evil nuclear is becomming acceptably less evil than anything else...
    • Don't forget the tons of uranium being pumped into the atmosphere by the coal plants. Coal contains quite a bit of uranium.

    • well, them and anyone who wanted an a-bomb... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by YesIAmAScript ( 886271 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @10:47PM (#13635725)
      In order to use nuclear power in a widespread fashion, we'd relaly have to have fast breeder reactors, to extend the lifetime of our supply of fissionable materials.

      The problem is that fast breeder reactors are perfect for making weapons-grade Plutonium too.

      So although I very much lament how poorly most people understand nuclear power and how they don't understand how much cleaner it is than any alternative (except solar), there are other impediments too.

      I have to say I found it hilarious that North Korea demanded the US build them a light-water reactor. We suck at power reactors. They should ask the French to help them build one of their reactor types instead. Better yet, get the French to make you a pebble-bed reactor.

      • In order to use nuclear power in a widespread fashion, we'd relaly have to have fast breeder reactors, to extend the lifetime of our supply of fissionable materials. The problem is that fast breeder reactors are perfect for making weapons-grade Plutonium too.

        Two points.

        If our military cannot adequately secure the transport of material between the commercial reactors and the reprocessing facilities, within our own borders, there's something wrong.

        Thorium fuel cycles can also be used in breeders, pr

    • Coal mining-related deaths (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SysKoll ( 48967 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @10:49PM (#13635736)
      So, we continue to mine, ship and burn coal, a procedure which, incidentally, kills Chernobles of miners every year. (maybe I exagerate: figures, anyone?)

      I assume you mean "Chernobyls". More than that, actually. Coal mine accidents killed about 6000 (six thousands) people in 2004, the enormous majority in China. China is also the main coal supplier of the USA. Is that why coal is considered "safer than nuclear"? Because only some Chinese die?

      It should also be noted that coal's carbon structure is a natural trap for heavy elements, especially uranides (thorium mostly), which is why you register a significant radiation level downwind from a coal-burning powered plant. You can wash the combustion output, but then you have to dispose acidic, radioactive sludge. Naaah. See this article. [usgs.gov]

      But most of the pollution is not even coming from coal-burning plants, as explained in this article. [minesandcommunities.org]. Excerpt: According to Stracher's forthcoming article in the "International Journal of Coal Geology," scientists have determined that coal fires in China consume up to 200 million tons of coal per year. For comparison, coal consumption in the United States during 2000 was just over one billion tons, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

      Since CO2 is formed by binding two oxygen atoms (molar wight 16) on each carbon atom (molar w. 12), 200 million tons of coal at 80% carbon form about 200* 0.8 * 16 * 2/ 12 = 427 million tons CO2. So when I hear well-meaning but clueless environmentalists worrying about cow farts while ignoring this huge problem, I know that whoever feeds them this disinformation has an agenda.

    • Umm....how do wind turbines cause climate change?

      Just....y'know...wondering about your bullshit claims.

      Any references (from reputable sources, natch) to back that up?

      Or did you just get modded +5 for spouting random crap. Oh, I forget, this is /.

      -Nano.
      • Noise pollution mostly. They make this whup-whup noise, which is very low frequency, travels well and is very annoying.

        Honestly though, wind turbines biggest enemy is themselves. Try as they might, it's really difficult to operate them effectively due to maintenance costs and low power output in general.

        Wind is perhaps part of the solution, but a small part.
    • Nuclear fission power as the world's primary energy source is not feasible due to the security problems. To achieve that goal, every country on the planet would be peppered with breeder reactors. Not only are those trickier to run than current non-breeder reactors, but they also involve much more handling of weaponizable material.

      It would be no longer possible to even attempt to argue with any country that they should stop their nuclear research, no matter what Axis they are a member of. Basically, any co

    • MOD THIS PARENT UP!!!!!! NOT THE GP. This one has a very insightful idea. Had I mod points, he'd be modded up.

      though I thought the pebble-bed reactor was started by France in Southern Africa. Correct me if I'm wrong, PLEASE.

  • Frequent Slashdot readers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rescate ( 688702 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @08:56PM (#13635143)
    Frequent Slashdot readers no doubt remember recent articles on Fusion induced by sonic compression and more recently by pyroelectric effect.

    This obviously excludes the editors.

  • the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs.

    Joshua: Shall we play a game?

    David: Yeah. How about Global Thermonuclear War.

    Joshua: Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?

    David: Later. Right now lets play Global Thermonuclear War.

    Joshua: Fine.


    *ducks*

  • The Fusion Prize Legislation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) * on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:22PM (#13635257) Homepage Journal
    Back in 1992 I worked with a number of hot fusion (and "cold fusion") energy entrepreneurs to come up with a set of prizes that they considered a fair contest -- each for a major milestone toward environmentally benign and cheap energy. Although I submitted it to Congress that year and sought the support of a variety of people who had been active in legislation to reform NASA [geocities.com], I didn't have the political traction to make much headway. Robert W. Bussard [wikipedia.org], one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, submitted this legislation to Congress a few years later along with a letter detailing some rather astounding admissions of subterfuge during the founding of the Tokamak program [geocities.com].

    The fair contest idea seems to have been picked up around that time by the X-Prize guys and taken to resounding success, for which we should all be grateful. The need for fusion prizes remains.

  • Ball lightning (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Belseth ( 835595 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:22PM (#13635258)
    For decades now there's been talk that the secret to cheap fusion might be ball lightning. This recent finding would seem to bear that out.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • We keep hearing that it takes enormous amounts of energy to initiate fusion... Could lightning be a cost effective way to make fusion mainstream? I've seen videos of people "guiding" lightning by using small rockets... Could you use that energy in a meaningful way?
  • Last I heard, lightning reaches temperatures approaching that of the sun's surface. If such is the case, then something approaching that process has to occur.
    • Last I heard, lightning reaches temperatures approaching that of the sun's surface. If such is the case, then something approaching that process has to occur.
      The sun's surface is approximately 5780 K (See here [wikipedia.org]). That's not much, fusion usually needs on the order of millions of K.

  • Dumb question time! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fred fleenblat ( 463628 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:29PM (#13635309) Homepage
    Why not tap the power of lightning directly?

    Okay, there will be some engineering issues since pretty much anything that interacts with lightning gets burnt to a crisp, but fusion has some similar technical problems so this isn't totally left field.

    (a) how much actual power does lightning provide over, say, the continentaly US?

    (b) what kinds of structures could be built/flown to tap into the electric charges in clouds?

  • Venus & Jupiter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nherm ( 889807 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:36PM (#13635357) Journal

    FTA:

    the same mechanism should also work in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter where thunderstorms are also frequent and sporadic neutron streams should arise there.

    Accordly to wikipedia, water in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter are far lower compared to Earth's levels (.002% for Venus [wikipedia.org] and 0.1% for Jupiter [wikipedia.org]), so maybe observations of neutron emissions are not so affected by the "thundery" neutrons like the article proposes.

    Reading the article about deuterium [wikipedia.org] at wikipedia, I found a bit strange that there's no known natural process to produce it... maybe some chemistry-geek could comment on that... the article says that there is 10^15 deuterium atoms per cubic centimeter on Earth's atmosphere, considering the 6800:1 ratio when compared to hydrogen...

    Is only that 10^15 atoms per cm^3 seems like too much atoms without known origin for me... (other than the big-bang, like the wikipedia article says)

    • Uh, well, the bang is where the deuterium came from, ultimately. Everything else, too. Your heavy metals, for instance, came from stars later on. Think of any heavy nuclear decay chain starting point (I don't have my chart of decays handy), and you have the same problem--where did it come from? The wiki probably wants to say that there's no known process occuring right now that's generating more--water autoionizes, but it doesn't "autoisotopize."

  • Why are you asking on an IT site (Score:3, Funny)

    by birge ( 866103 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:39PM (#13635373) Homepage
    Isn't asking about nuclear fusion on an IT site kind of like asking for formula one driving tips on, well, an IT site? The only correct answer you'll get is "I have no goddam idea."
    • WTF? Are you trying to tell me /. is no longer "The Nuts and Volts of News for Nerds"? Or maybe you are just telling me there is nerds only in computer science departments.

      Even with a political issues section in /., it becames obvious it's no longer what it was and the original poster's question make it clear. That's a politician's question. Something like, "I know you guys are researchers, but tell me what you will find if you want some funding, otherwise it will become very difficult to justify the expen

  • Reminds me of that bash.org quote. (Score:4, Funny)

    by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Friday September 23, 2005 @09:46PM (#13635419) Journal

    (Bismarck) Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes!!!!
    (Bismarck) France is going to house the new nuclear fusion reactor!
    (Bismarck) If it suceeds, cheap long term energy. If it fails, BAM! France is gone!
    (Bismarck) It's win win!
  • ObBTTF quote: "...the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigowatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning."

    Seriously though, there has been some research done about using lightning as an energy source... Namely, the University of Florida [ufl.edu] has built equipment that attracts lightning, and the results have been pretty impressive. That said, however, they are less than hopeful [weatherwise.org] of using it as a reliable power source.
  • Consensus suggests that the Tunguska event [wikipedia.org] was the result of a comet or meteor, but there is some doubt. Some of the physical evidence suggests something like a nuclear blast occurring, but there is a lack of radioactive materials on the site. Still, it would be interesting if this lightning thing somehow tied in with the event in Siberia almost a century ago.
  • Methinks that what Herr B.M. Kuzhevsky "discovered" is that lightning acts as a natural Farnsworth fusor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch_Fus or [wikipedia.org].

    Boring... :) Or am I missing something?

  • are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?

    Certainly! That time period is now down to 20 years away and always will be. See what progress we've made?

  • Predicting the technological future (Score:4, Interesting)

    by adminispheroid ( 554101 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:17AM (#13636099)
    On the subject of predicting technological development, here's a (possibly apocryphal) story.

    Financier Roger Babson had a chat with Edison, in which he observed that most of Edison's inventions grew out of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, and posed the question, what area of science did Edison think would be next to yield important technological developments. Edison's answer was, Einstein's theory of gravitation. So Babson founded an institute to encourage research in gravitation (which is still around) (by which I mean the institute; of course gravitation is still around).

    At this point it's plain to see Edison was wrong. But if you look at what was known at the time, it was an insightful guess. It's just that, as progress marched on, people discovered reasons why it's going to be very hard to make handy widgets that work based on Einstein's gravity theory -- the primary reason being that, in practical terms, it's so much weaker than EM.

  • Giant leap! (Score:3, Funny)

    by elgatozorbas ( 783538 ) on Saturday September 24, 2005 @12:30AM (#13636147)
    ...are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"

    Yes, from now on it will only (perpetually) be 20 years away...

  • ... when I get my fucking flying car. And not a moment sooner.

  • Lightning Fusion (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bbamboo ( 732869 )
    Some years back, a physicist from India published a journal paper on this topic. He measured a few excess neutrons occurring during large lightning strikes, calculated the rates ( I think it was related to the naturally occurring amount of deuterium in rainwater ( a VERY tiny amount)). That paper made the point that while a lightning strike might make a few fusions, it's such a small amount that it's main benefit is the paper published about the phenomena. The paper was a letter to Nature, if memory serves.

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