Alternative to Tokamak Fusion Reactor 266
Sterling D. Allan writes to tell us OpenSourceEnergy is reporting on a "far more feasible and profoundly less expensive approach to hot fusion". Inventor Eric Lerner's focus fusion process uses hydrogen and boron to combine into helium which gives off tremendous energy with a very small material requirement. Lerner's project apparently only requires a few million in capital investment which is a far cry from the $10 billion being spent on the Tokamak fusion project.
Re:Eric Lerner (Score:5, Informative)
More information (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Skeptical.... (Score:2, Informative)
Cooks and crackpots (Score:5, Informative)
If I trust the physics papers on the web (Score:5, Informative)
(a) yes, H-B fusion (aneutronic) is possible, but...
(b) it requires very high temperatures, and suffers from a variety of energy loss mechanisms which make getting usable energy from it difficult. This is similar to when I was in grad-school, and everyone was whispering about Muon-catalyzed fusion, which turned out to be impractical for energy extraction as well.
IANA(N/P)P (i am not a nuclear/plasma physicist), but the papers I skimmed suggest that you could use this method, mixed with a conventional Deuterium/tritium mixture, to get cleaner fusion and better burn rates. Of course, not being a physicist, it's possible that the journals I found the citations in are the physics equivalent of Journal of Pointless Chemistry.
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleU
Probable Translation: Another backyard inventor who can read enough of the literature to be encouraged, but not enough to admit the drawbacks.
Secondary Translation: I canna' change the laws of physics, Captain.
Re:Securing funding (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Of Plasmaks and Prizes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads .. (Score:3, Informative)
It's like walking on coals. Coals get red-hot at about 600 degrees Farenheit, due to black body radiation. People can walk on them, though, because human flesh is much denser. (It also helps if you do it right after the morning dew, and it's a bad idea to linger.) The coals are hot but the total amount of energy isn't that high.
It's a bit like having a very high voltage but a low amperage in a circuit. Another example of a plasma having a very high temperature but very low total energy is the temperature of interstellar space [wikipedia.org]: it can be millions of degrees hot, but have a handful of atoms per cubic meter.
Integrity Research Institute (Score:5, Informative)
The glowing praise in the article comes from the Integrity Research Institute,
which doesn't even have its own domain name: http://users.erols.com/iri/>
The web site lists three directors:
Director 1: (also President and Chairman) Dr. Thomas Valone
Physics, engineering, and teaching background
Sounds good.
Inventer of the Photonic Rejuvenation Energizing Machine and
Immunizing Electrification Radiator
what the fuck?
Director 2: Jacqueline Panting Valone
General Manager of M.A.M.S.I., a representative of several suppliers of
microwave components and subsystems to OEM, military and commercial
companies.
Could have a solid technical background.
Ms. Valone is also a strong advocate of holistic health, including
electromagnetic medicine and is responsible for the Health programs
of our Institute.
Holistic health seems respectable. I am more than my symptoms.
But "electromagnetic medicine?" Give me Maxwells Equations,
not new-agey energy-fields-surround-us.
In her spare time, she volunteered for The Hospice Program of Broward
County where she assisted patients in their transition and helped family
members cope with their loss.
Very important work. She sounds like a good person.
Ms. Valone is a doctorate candidate of Naturopathy at Trinity College of
Natural Health and is certified through the College of Natural Health
Professionals, CNHP.
Never heard of them. What does this have to do with physics?
Director 3: Wendy Nicholas
EDUCATION
2001 Johns Hopkins University Rockville, MD
* Continuing Education student in Telecommunications
May be a wonderful, capable person. Why is she on the board of directors?
Re:Reverse Particle Accelerator (Score:2, Informative)
Absorbing betas will not transmute elements. Betas are simply high-energy electrons, and will land on a piece of metal and create a negative charge. Beta emission also can't really cause damage to anything other than eye tissue as it is absorbed by the top layer of your skin. It can cause burns but seriously anything will shield against beta.
Alpha is absorbed within 10cm in air and cannot penetrate your skin whatsoever. Alpha emitters are practically harmless unless eaten, and if the target is part of the electric circuit (i.e. supplied with the free betas) then they will simply combine with them to form ordinary helium.
The problem: neutrons and gamma as mentioned in a post below. If they say this won't produce gamma... gamma rays are produced in almost every nuclear process due to excited nuclei. Gamma requires lead or concrete shielding, and neutrons require thick concrete shielding. Both cannot be fully absorbed, only attenuated - which is why they are dangerous.
Of course who says this has to be in your house just because it is refridgerator sized. It will be in a power station behind some concrete blocks, and should be less dangerous than even a particle accelerator (where I work, very safe) due to low capability to activate surrounding elements. The facility should not become radioactive in any signifigant way, i.e. 1 day cooldown may be required before work, rather than 1 month.
Safety is not an issue here, the issue is whether the science works or not.
Re:Slashdot Needs a Science Editor (Score:2, Informative)
When someone states $200,000 to $300,000 to make a 20 megawatt generator, I just fall down laughing. You can't make a 20 megawatt transformer for probably 10-100 times that price, let alone the cost of the atomic "process equipment" and ion beam to electric current conversion.
There may be no "radiation" of dangerous particles or left over radioactivity, but shielding everything and everyone within site from X-Rays is going to also cost a lot.
This guy is looking for his next round of funding to keep himself alive. The people doing reputable work in this field are a small group of Phds who all know each other and have been in it for decades. If you search the scientific literature and read the articles (impossible as that is without a particle physics degree), you can see who is active and achieving results that are published.
Re:Eric Lerner (Score:3, Informative)
Ahhh! Somebody has to shoot those worse than useless science teachers or imbecile media from which people get these ideas. There are an overabundance of people who think a theory is a concept that somebody came up with and a fact (or truth) is a theory that has been proven to be true. This is garbage. Science doesn't deal in facts. It's all models of how reality works. Newton wasn't wrong. His model works and works well for most things we'd normally encounter. Relativity improved upon it where Newton's model breaks down. But even relativity and quantum mechanics are in conflict so neither is a perfect model.
"Theory" is not, I repeat not, and idea or concept. "Theory" is a description of the principles behind the model of how things work. I've studied gas turbine theory, for instance. Does anybody believe gas turbines don't exist? A thought up idea or concept to explain things is an hypothesis. Some will argue this is symantics; that "theory" is used by laypersons to mean what scientists would refer to as an hypothesis. Fine, except that the two meanings of "theory" are getting mixed. Big Bang theory is a description of the big bang model, not a reference that it is merely an hypothesis. Evolution theory is a description of the model of how evolution works, not a reference to it just being an hypothesis (which it isn't).
Models always have flaws, and models get better. But none are ever meant to describe a fact or truth. The same results can occur from a Big Bang progressing forwards, or an intelligent designer creating all things a few thousand years ago to look exactly as if they had been produced by the Big Bang. The latter case is irrelevant to science because it can neither be examined, tested, or provide predictive results. The former case can do all of them. Note that this says intelligent design, for example, is possible but cannot be scientific nor can it be a required explanation. That it is internally inconsistent (and has been since the argument was formulated centeries ago) and doesn't do a thing for explaining where we came from also means it's not even intellectually useful.
Re:From a Thermodynamic perspective (Score:2, Informative)
Once again, Slashdot gets played... (Score:2, Informative)
This is Mr. Allan's personal website [sterlingdallan.com]. If the story itself isn't enough, you can judge Mr. Allan's credibility by looking at some the other websites he's founded and administers.
This is truly shameful.
Re:Eric Lerner (Score:5, Informative)
* "The Tokamak project" - a tokamak is a type of reactor, not a specific project. The specific project is ITER.
* "Open Source Energy Network". Yeah, that's either A) a prestegious indedpendent journal, or B) a news source that has reviewed such a journal.
Fusion is a very complex topic, and this article doesn't even begin to discuss it. Currently, fusion research projects are divided between the "big guys", such as ITER and NIF, and the "little guys" such as sonofusion, focus fusion, and interial electrostatic confinement. The "little guys" are jealous (somewhat rightfully) that the big-ticket items get funding, and their more long-shot but cheaper concepts don't get the little money that they need.
Lets back up a bit and discuss the basics. The critical forces that we're dealing with are electrostatic force and the strong force. Since you're trying to ram nuclei together, the electrostatic forces between the protons in the nuclei are going to make it incredibly difficult for you. Once you get close enough, however, the strong force (which only acts over short distances) takes over, and dominates. Thus, there is an energy barrier that you have to get over - the coulomb barrier. If your particles aren't moving fast enough, or are angled incorrectly, you just bounce off, or worse.
Worse? Well, we're not just talking about nuclei - there are electrons, too. The longer you spend in the vicinity of electrons, the more likely you are to hit them. A high energy particle that hits an electron wastes its energy as bremsstrahlung. It's also possible to lose energy from the core through synchrotron radiation.
By the numbers, it looks like it'd be almost impossible to do. Thankfully, you have to big things working to help you out. One, particles in the core do not all share the same energy level; in fact, they'll vary by orders of magnitude from each other. So, while most of your core will be well below the required energy level, a few particles will be very energetic. The other thing that helps you out is quantum uncertainty - basically, since the positions can be uncertain, you can effectively tunnel past the coulomb barrier.
Even still, it's an incredibly difficult problem. Stars cheat - they have gravitational confinement, making the problem quite easy to keep a tight, hot core. However, for us, all of the energy of the particles (and new energy released by fusion reactions) is incredibly hard to keep close together.
The energy barrier depends on what reaction your looking at. Dt-Dt fusion is pretty low; so is Dt-T. Fusion involving helium takes a lot more energy, and wonderful fusion methods like B11-P (you can capture almost all of the energy released) take a huge amount of activation energy.
Inertial confinement, like ITER, uses strong magnetic fields and fast-moving plasma. Charged particles moving through a magnetic field experience a force perpendicular to the direction of motion and the magnetic field, called Lorentz Force. The interesting thing about it is that it seems to scale up well; the downside is that scaling up means massive devices. Things like B11-P fusion are really right-out for now because of how much you'd have to scale up. But there's good confidence that it will work.
Inertial electrostatic confinement fusion involves spherical acceleration of ions in a near vaccuum. If they miss colliding with other ions, they just bounce outward then fall back inwards for another pass. There are few electrons in the fuel to waste through bremsstrahlung. The problems are getting density and stopping collisios with the inner coil that attracts the ions to the center. Whether it's possible to overcome is a big question. As a note, these are popular for amateurs to build - see "Farnsworth Fusor". Since the devices are inherently small, they would scale to B11-p fusion.
Focus fusion involves trying to get magnetic vortices that are incredibly intens