NASA's Basement Nuclear Reactor 368
cylonlover writes "If Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, is correct, the future of energy may lie in a nuclear reactor small enough and safe enough to be installed where the home water heater once sat. Using weak nuclear forces that turn nickel and hydrogen into a new source of atomic energy, the process offers a light, portable means of producing tremendous amounts of energy for the amount of fuel used. It could conceivably power homes, revolutionize transportation and even clean the environment."
One small problem (Score:5, Funny)
"But what about the terrorists?"
Government: Approval Denied.
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"But what about the terrorists?"
I'm sure the CIA would love them to be developing bombs that have no net energy release. It makes givng them cupcake recipes [huffingtonpost.com] look positively hazardous.
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Re:One small problem (Score:5, Insightful)
"But what about the terrorists?"
I'm sure the CIA would love them to be developing bombs that have no net energy release. It makes givng them cupcake recipes [huffingtonpost.com] look positively hazardous.
In the UK its illegal for anyone to possess information that might be useful in commiting an act of terror. So that pretty much bans all knowledge
Re:One small problem (Score:4, Funny)
In the UK its illegal for anyone to possess information that might be useful in commiting an act of terror. So that pretty much bans all knowledge
But it does explain a lot about Comprehensive Education.
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Indeed ... armed with only Newton's laws of motions, I could come up with all sorts of dastardly things.
And don't even get me started on gravity. ;-)
Re:One small problem (Score:5, Informative)
If you RTFA you find it is not expected to produce objectionable byproducts like regular reactors. It says that unlike fission and fusion reactions that depend on the strong nuclear force for their energy this is drawing energy from the weak nuclear force. Like fusion though it appears to be mostly in the experimental stage and is years away from practical application. One difficulty they have is they need to generate vibrations in the 5-30 THz range which the researcher calls "the valley of inaccessibility".
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I guess its practical application is 30 years away.
Re:One small problem (Score:5, Funny)
So in other words, this has not been conclusively proven impossible [xkcd.com].
It IS from the strong force (Score:4, Informative)
So the mechanism to get the reaction to happen is thought to involve the weak force, the end result is Ni + H -> Cu which is just plain fusion. You can compute the energy output based on the mass difference of the inputs and outputs. The problem is that people are finally reproducing the old Cold Fusion work and getting a better understanding, but they face the problems caused 20 years ago. Problems like the DOE deciding it was all a crock and putting policy in place not to fund any research in that area. Problems like the physics community lashing out saying "it can't be fusion, it must be a chemical reaction" (saying that to chemists working with 4 elements in a jar). Now it has to go by the name LENR, but places like NASA and MIT and (allegedly) some folks in industry are working on this.
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but places like NASA and MIT and (allegedly) some folks in industry are working on this.
Or more like: people at places like NASA and MIT. There have been a few proponents that worked at those places that worked on LENR in their off-time, that later in either PR or otherwise gets reported as NASA and MIT officially working on such research. Even in one case, one NASA research quite explicitly states several times in his blog that he is doing that as a side project completely unrelated to his job at NASA, but people continue to insist that his research is a sign of official support from the NA
Sounds Highly Dubious (Score:3)
This sets off a reaction in which one of the neutrons in the nickel atom splits into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. This changes the nickel into copper, and releases energy without dangerous ionizing radiation.
A proton and an electron moving with nuclear decay energies are precisely what "dangerous ionizing radiation" is. The used fuel from nuclear reactors is dangerous because it is rich in beta emitters which produce high energy electrons. High energy protons are even more dangerous because, for the same energy, they will move more slowly and so be more heavily ionizing.
The article is also extremely vague about how the electric field
Re:One small problem (Score:5, Informative)
But what about all those reactors that blew up or melted (in TFA)? Or were they cheating and just bombarding the nickel with slow neutrons? One would think that if they produced an exothermic reaction even one time and weren't complete Pons and Fleishman nutcases they'd be able to pick up the beta (if not gamma) signature of the events. I'm also a bit curious as to just where the energy produced "comes out". They assert that no gamma rays happen. They get electron and neutrino out. Presumably we're talking about order of MeV/event, so the reaction produces order of MeV electrons (we hope, as energy going into neutrinos is gone forever) and a certain amount of lattice recoil in the now-copper nucleus. MeV electrons seem to have enough energy to produce an electron-positron cascade and convert at least some of the energy into X-rays (ionizing radiation). Probably relatively easily stopped (as is the beta itself) but the process would likely not be "radiation free". Finally, those same electrons seem as though they have the right general range of energy to be captured by the hydrogen nuclei (or would, if they didn't scatter on the way in and if there was any sort of cross-section) leaving open the possibility that the electrons themselves would create the requisite electron excitation and some sort of chain reaction might be possible.
Interesting idea, in other words, but TFA doesn't clarify the underlying physics to the point where it is really intelligible.
rgb
Re:One small problem (Score:5, Informative)
LENR is a very long way from the day when you can go out and buy a home nuclear reactor. In fact, it still has to be proven that the phenomenon even exists
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Robert Duncan, Vice Chancellor for Research University of Missouri: "There have been great advances in this discipline over the last five years by research labs and private institutions around the world, and this work will be explored at ICCF-18. The Naval Research Lab (NRL), and many other excellent laboratories have confirmed that the excess heat effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons are real, and
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Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:2, Insightful)
While I think technically this is possible, IMO it will never happen. Imagine the following tagline:
"Have enough electricity for 20 years"
Do you really think any power plant company will want this? Of course maybe somebody will sell for 20 years, and 35K, thus making it not that useful. The only reason why we are not using our own generators right now is because they are too tedious and twiddly factor. If you could produce reliable energy without the twiddle factor we would not be in this mess we are.
Re:Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason why we are not using our own generators right now is because they are too tedious and twiddly factor. If you could produce reliable energy without the twiddle factor we would not be in this mess we are.
Ummm... I recently installed PVes on my roof. Tedious? I don't think so. Expensive? It was 1.5 month worth of my wage. Warranty for 25 years, I guess they'll last at least 12 without degrading in performance too much. Reliable? Well, as reliable as the Sun is... would I be able to invest in an 15K buffer system, I'm sure I could live "off power grid" even in winter time (summer time, I'm pushing on the grid twice as much as I'm consuming).
What point I'm trying to make? I'm less dependent know on the power producers than I was 1 year ago and I didn't need to sell my first born for it.
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Nice trick there, telling us the cost based on your "wage" - which to us is an arbitrary number.
For me, it's very concrete, believe me, but you don't expect to make public my payslip on /., do you? (all I can say, I'm not paid to the top of the industry, I enjoy a quiet life now).
How many monthly electricity payments did it cost you? How long before it pays for itself?
My estimations for the time to total RoI: between 5 and 6 years at the current rates on energy. But they do have a nasty habit to increase year after year in Australia so it may be shorter.
(they say that's because of network maintenance: I reckon [heraldsun.com.au] their [standard.net.au] insurance premiums [smh.com.au] went up)
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Not really a trick. PV systems have come way down, particularly in the last two years (the US actually punished China for making them too cleap).
You can get individual panels for $1.50 to $2 a Watt now. In bulk (such as a full pallet that you'd use for covering your roof), you can get them under a dollar per Watt.
Y
Re:Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
About 20 years ago a friend and I were discussing hard disks. My first PC had a 300 MB hard drive, and he had just gotten one with a 1 GB drive. I noted how capacity was growing, and some day we would have 1 TB drives. He said no, the hard drive manufacturers would never allow it. According to him, 1 TB was so much storage you could buy one and never have to buy another drive for the rest of your life. No way the hard drive manufacturers would ever sell something which put themselves out of business.
Well, we all know how that turned out. If you build it, people will find a use for it. For energy, off the top of my head I can think of a few tremendously high-power applications which will probably become feasible with the advent of cheap power. You can desalinate all the drinking and irrigation water the entire planet needs. You can atomize toxic compounds like dioxins, decomposing them into their constituent elements. You can convert CO2 back into O2 gas and carbon (soot), reversing a century of greenhouse gas emissions. You can power railguns to launch large quantities of fuel and other supplies into orbit to construct spacecraft for manned interplanetary missions (currently the energy cost is $5k-$10k per kg put into low earth orbit).
So the power companies may not be making as much money selling household power. But they'll certainly be making money selling power for other uses. Probably a lot more money than they're making now.
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1 TB was so much storage you could buy one and never have to buy another drive for the rest of your life
So hard drives were presumably a bit more reliable back then? I've heard people saying that they have older drives that have kept going, but modern ones fail a lot faster. So maybe he was right?
Re:Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, newer HDD drives tend to be much more reliable.
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Bit errors per tb or whatever. Observing new hard drives don't last as long is also simply a product of the amount of physical atoms representing each bit getting smaller and smaller. There's a reason conspiracy theories die on Occam's Razor.
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Your friend was also correct: how many of those drive manufacturers are out of business now?
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You can power railguns to launch large quantities of fuel and other supplies into orbit to construct spacecraft for manned interplanetary missions (currently the energy cost is $5k-$10k per kg put into low earth orbit).
Energy costs aren't the hurdle there. [maglaunch.com]
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If the US companies are stalling this development I bet soon enough some Japanese or Chinese companies think is is a great idea and start selling it all over the world. Just like electric cars, pv solar cells. US companies may even try to block import of those great power supplies and make the US into some backward country where they are still burning fossil fuels for energy while the rest of the world moves on.
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Yes, the power company would never want some of their customers to actually be producing electricity and putting it on the Grid where the electric company gets to set the price they pay for it. They would much rather be slaves to the price of coal and fluctuating demands of its customers.
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See, if you form a bowl-shaped structure from a thin sheet of aluminum and place it on your head then you will be instantly transported into a universe where corporations are organized enough to cooperate to prevent you from having free energy.
Re:Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt the "all over the world". China for instance is unlikely to bow to US lobby demands.
So if LENR turns out to be real, I expect the following sequence of events to happen: ;-)
1) Western energy industry giants badmouth the technology and lobby against it.
2) China, Russia and maybe India will use it anyway.
3) Above countries have considerable economic advantages, get stronger in comparison to USA.
4) US politicians panic. Having LENR is declared a matter of national security, opposition from energy industry giants is overruled
Re: Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also born of ignorance: conspiracy theories depend on every allegedly greedy company acting with surprising benevolence for it's community of allegedly greedy companies.
They all fall down where they simply assume that all these companies unanimously feel they'll be better off if they collaborate and suppress something. They never manage to explain why every individual conspirator wouldn't be working as hard as they can to eliminate the others, which gets especially murky when you consider that the individual companies aren't companies but people, and people get concerned about things like legacy and principles and whatever (which simultaneously leads to good things - tech companies building spaceships - and bad things - the Koch brothers believing they're still fighting communism or something).
Re:Cool idea, but never happen... (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting theory, and that may actually be the case.. however, lets look at the cable industry, specifically Comcast, in my neighbourhood.
When FIOS was released, about 80% of the people in my little corner of the neighbourhood switched in an instant (for obvious reasons being service sucks, as does customer service and it was over priced). I live in a part of the area where we have around 30 or so houses, and no through street, around 25 or so of those houses now have FIOS.. the remaining few people all have Comcast, and its dirt cheep, they (Comcast) have been throwing freebies and discounted services at those few remaining customers, because if they switch, they lose their foothold in our part of the community.
So in this instance, the exact opposite of what you propose would happen actually occurred. And they have similar costs when it comes to easement maintenance.
Legitimate science, there are not alone (Score:4, Interesting)
A couple of days ago the Nuclear Energy Institute was talking about it on their facebook page and the American Nuclear Society posted a similar story on their "nuclear cafe".
The University of Missouri will host a cold fusion conference in July this year and George Miley from Illinois (UIUC) will discuss his research results in a talk at the upcoming "Nuclear & Emerging Technologies for Space (NETS-2013) organized by the ANS starting coming Monday. (http://iccf18.research.missouri.edu/)
On a ANS meeting in November 2012 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries reported about their transmutation experiment and successful replications of the experiment at Toyota lab.
Re:Legitimate science, they are not alone (Score:5, Informative)
you will find the presentation about the Widom-Larsen-Srivastava that TFA talks about.
you will also find the slides about the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries transmutation experiment (and the Toyota replication of it) http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=5&materialId=slides&confId=177379 [indico.cern.ch]
As mentioned above it was also presented at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting in Nov 2012:
"Replication experiments have been performed in some universities or institutes mainly in Japan. T.Higashiyama et al. of Osaka University observed transmutation of Cs into Pr in 2003[7]. H.Yamada et al. performed similar experiments using Cs and detected increase of mass number 137 by TOF-SIMS. They used a couple of nano-structured Pd multilayer thin film and observed the increase of mass number 141 (corresponding to Pr) only when 133Cs was given on the Pd sample [8]. N. Takhashi et al., the researchers of Toyota Central R&D Labs, presented that they detected Pr from the permeated Pd sample using SOR x-ray at Spring-8 and the detected Pr was confirmed by ICP-MS and TOF-SIMS [8]." http://newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ANS2012W/2012Iwamura-ANS-LENR-Paper.pdf [newenergytimes.com]
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Ha. The LENR research at University of Missouri is being performed by the Sidney Kimmel Institute for Nuclear Rennaisance (SKINR). That makes it LENR-SKINR... like the band
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You guys change your story every week.
So changing your opinion in the face of evidence instead of holding onto a blind belief is a bad thing?
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Cold fusion again? (Score:5, Interesting)
"...is called Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions or Lattice Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR). In the late 1980s, it went by the name of “cold fusion.”
This claims you can harness the power of the weak nuclear force while turning nickel to copper without releasing ionizing radiation.
And: "In past years, several labs have blown up while studying LENR and windows have melted".
Seriously?
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But wait, there's more:
"Zawodny says that the most logical first application of LENR is the home reactor..."
Are we talking about the same type of logic?
Re:Cold fusion again? (Score:5, Interesting)
But both the Navy and NASA have been saying the basic idea might be workable. Is this Rossi guy just borrowing the buzzwords to put together a scam? Or are these other folks actually making him more believable?
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It's a reaction and a purported mechanism that have been floating around in cold fusion circles for quite a while. It shouldn't be surprising that scam artists, deluded tinkerers, or serious researchers have all considered it.
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I would guess that's due to the hydrogen being used. I'd love to see this work and happen as the article describes, but I'm getting a little fatigued by all these "free energy around the corner" publications. Yes, I know, it's not actually free energy.
Unfortunately this sounds a bit like the e-cat, which again would be great if it worked, but Andrea Rossi's demonstrations leave a lot to be desired.
Maybe NASA will let others play with it (Score:3)
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I guess he got an Italian patent on it. Does that mean anything? I wouldn't think that proves a lot.
Science win (Score:3, Funny)
I can see the marketing slogan right now (Score:5, Funny)
"Brought to you by the knights who say NiH!"
Chart of the nuclides (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chart of the nuclides (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it looks like Dr. Joe Zawodny himself agrees with you that the extraordinary evidence to prove this even works has yet to be demonstrated:
http://joe.zawodny.com/ [zawodny.com] That's his private blog, and an interesting read. Looks like he's into model rocketry too.
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What a wonderful counterpoint to the article. If I had mod points I would give them to you.
Re:Chart of the nuclides (Score:5, Interesting)
Nickel-64, at a natural abundance of about 1%, would be a better candidate, as neutron capture would result in Nickel-65 which decays to stable Copper-65 with a very short half-life of 2 hours. This is a "clean" beta-emitter with an energy of about 2.1MeV.
The overall reaction seems to be p + Ni-64 -> Cu-65 + ve + anti-ve + 2.1MeV. This is at least physically plausible as a reaction. The electron (removed from both sides above) acts as a sort of catalyst, a way to get the proton through the coloumb barrier by transforming it into a neutron.
Getting the neutrons to collide with Ni-64 nuclei rather than escaping implies a lot of Ni-64, and any escaping neutrons would irradiate everything else nearby, or impurities in the nickel such as the aforementioned Ni-62, or worse Ni-58 which would produce Ni-59, a positron emitter with a half-life of 76000 years.
But to me, the real red flag on this is getting the hydrogen atoms to collapse into neutrons, a process which I've never heard of before. Even if it's possible, can you get a net gain? Does it take more than 2.1MeV? Slashdot - educate me!
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Beryllium-7 decays naturally (to Lithium) by electron capture, but obviously Hydrogen doesn't, without some sort of push.
According to one of the presentations [indico.cern.ch] at the LENR symposium [indico.cern.ch] at CERN last year, the required energy deficit is on the order of 1.28 MeV, which in principle can be supplied by surface plasmons. The author states that observed neutron generation in lightning discharges and piezoelectric rock fracturing can be explained by this process.
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Re:Smells like bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, NASA Langley Research Centre, those famous cranks. While I really don't think it's true, it's certainly newsworthy that a NASA group of all people are proposing it.
Currently used tech? (Score:3)
After reading the article, it appears that the magic formula is subjecting a nickel metal hydride to T-waves. Perhaps all the existing NiMH batteries out on the market can be somehow re-purposed to last forever if someone can invent a portable terahertz wave generator.
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Batteries generate current, this reaction generates heat, so you couldn't use them directly. Although it would certainly be convenient to just charge up a bunch of old NiMH cells, then use them as "fuel rods".
(If this were true. I'm sceptical.)
Not sure if believe... (Score:2)
I would invest in this (Score:2)
For once a scientist has possibly developed a system where were not boiling water. In reality we have never left the steam age as even our most technologically advanced fusion reactors are nothing but steam generators in the end. Here we have something that can finally produce direct electricity in usable currents (Yes there are beta batteries but they're radioactive).
Airlines the the most doomed industry unless this is brought into commercial production, because eventually fuel will become too expensive
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This cold fusion device has not been shown to produce any electricity.
It will still be radioactive (Score:5, Informative)
For the purpose of this post, I'll accept that they can convert protons to neutrons as described, although I'm very dubious about this.
Here [wikipedia.org] is a table of nickel isotopes.
Here [llnl.gov] is the first source I found for neutron cross sections of nickel isotopes (pdf). (See figure 12, look at the left hand side of each 'destruction channels for ??Ni' plot for what low energy (thermal) neutrons will do.)
Cross sections are in barns, and are approximate as I'm eyeballing them off a logarithmic scale.
58Ni [stable, 68% abundant] (0.006 barn) -> 59Ni [-> 59Co, 76000 yr half life]
59Ni [unstable but long lived] (0.02b) -> 59Co [stable] or (0.005b) ->56 Fe [stable] or (0.004b) -> 60Ni [stable]
60Ni [stable, 26%] (0.006b) -> 61Ni [stable]
61Ni [stable, 1%] (0.002b) -> 62Ni [stable]
62Ni [stable, 4%] (0.006b) -> 63Ni [->63Cu, 100yr]
63Ni [unstable] (0.001b)-> 64Ni [stable]
64Ni [stable, 1%] (0.004b) -> 65Ni [->65Cu, 2.5 hr]
None of the cross sections are hugely larger than the others, so all these reactions will occur with reasonable frequency. So irradiating nickel with thermal neutrons, you are going to produce radioactive 59Co (76000yr), 63Ni (100yr) and 65Ni (2.5hr). The 65Ni isn't a problem - turn off the reactor, wait a couple of days, and it will all be gone. The 59Co is only a bit of a problem - with such a long half life, it isn't very radioactive. The 63Ni however is nasty. Like 137Cs (30yr) from the Fukashima reactors, the half life is short enough to be quite radioactive but long enough that you can't just wait it out. Finally, the nickel won't be 100% pure, so you have to worry about what neutron irradiation will do to the impurities.
The 65Ni means when you turn off your reactor, it will continue to produce residual heat for hours.
The article gives the impression that weak nuclear reactions aren't dangerous, but this is not so. If it were, nuclear reactor waste wouldn't be dangerous.
This reactor will be producing ionizing radiation when running (mostly gamma rays, some beta rays mostly from 65Ni decay, and a tiny amount of alpha particles from 59Co(n,a)56Fe.) This will require some pretty heavy shielding to stop it. (A good sized water bath should work, every 7cm of water [xkcd.com] halves the radiation and you want hot water anyhow. But concrete is less prone to leak away.) You'd also need to worry about stray neutrons, although I expect that can be fixed with a thin layer of something that has very high thermal neutron cross section and no dangerous daughter products.
In short, I don't think I want this in my basement.
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Oops, spotted an error. In the paragraph "None of the cross sections are hugely larger than the others..." read 59Ni for 59Co.
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On my reading of the article the only reaction that makes sense is 64Ni -> 65Cu.
Either the neutron capture reaction they are looking for specifically targets that species of Ni (which would be as amazing as H -> n in the present of these same T waves) or they're starting with 64Ni (or at least depleted 62Ni Nickel)
The other thing I wonder is whether this is not a thermal reactor - The beta decay of 65Ni could be directly generating an electric current (which would mean that although the reaction would
And now the science.. (Score:2)
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Just try... (Score:5, Funny)
...getting the landlord to fix the nuclear reactor.
It's hard enough to get him to fix the water heater.
Quote Zawodny (Score:4, Insightful)
The first line of the article "If Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASAâ(TM)s Langley Research Center, is correct" is misleading. Zawodny hasn't stated that it works or that he thinks it's definitely a real effect.
Let's look at what Zawodny actually has stated before:
http://joe.zawodny.com/index.php/2012/01/14/technology-gateway-video/ [zawodny.com]
That he still holds this opinion is consistent with the quotes in the gizmag article:
Don't believe a word (Score:2, Interesting)
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Completely agree!
the article says that "he electrons in the metal lattice are made to oscillate so that the energy applied to the electrons is concentrated into only a few of them" How??? How does the energy get concentrated at the required MeV level - that energy is WAY above anything involving lattice interactions. If you did have MeV electrons in the lattice they would scatter and create showers and loose that energy very quickly.
The fundamental problem with all cold fusion type schemes is that nuclear
I was excited until I read further down (Score:3)
Sounds promising (Score:3)
Re:Tamper-proof? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tamper-proof? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Three comments:
1) Not everything scales up at linear-or-better rates;
2) Better distribution of anything reduces the impact of failures; and
3) Who the hell said anything about no more power stations anyway?
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Honest question: If it works on a small scale couldn't we just build lots of them all in one location? We already have the distribution network.
That would give you economies of scale in maintenance on production, but you'd still sit with the maintenance of the distribution network, which you could perhaps eliminate if you rather sell individual units. I can also imagine that companies would not mind shifting the burden of maintenance cost onto the individual, even if it is more expensive overall. In fact m
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Also from a self-funding perspetive: people are happier with buy-to-own then rent contracts, because it perceptually opens leeway for improvements in maintenance practice or cost-saving. At the very least it gives you a mark to aim for for "free" electricity.
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4) Producing electricity far away from where it is used is inefficient since transporting electricity is quite inefficient.
Whereas transporting hydrogen is easy and loss free.
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If it was that simple, we would just run lines straight from the power station to peoples houses and connect them up in parallel. There is a reason why transmission lines use 200kV and up to transmit power. If there was no loss, then there would be no need, we could just cram 120 (or 240) volts down the line at 100 000A and be done with it.
Instead, power is sent our of the station at high voltages, and stepped down to the appropriate power (for commercial, 380V 3 phase, for housing 120 to 240V) to account
Re:This is stupid. (Score:5, Funny)
If something can be done on a small scale, it can be done better on a large scale This is why we have power stations.
... and brothels?
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If something can be done on a small scale, it can be done better on a large scale This is why we have power stations.
... and brothels?
In this country we call a large scale whore house Congress.
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If something can be done on a small scale, it can be done better on a large scale This is why we have power stations.
Many cities pipe hot water from those power stations to homes for heating and washing.
I suppose you think anyone who has their own home heating furnace or water heater is backward and inefficient?
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Re:We can't handle nuke waste in few central place (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read the article, the reactions only work if you subject it to THz wave EM energy. So damaging this type of reactor would only ever have one kind of effect... it would stop working and go back to being a big lump of inert metal. Assuming it works in the first place after all.
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Fusion is actually about 80 billion dollars away. Funding has asymptotically gone down since the 70s, so considering it in that context (i.e. a certain amount of equipment and researchers are generally needed to develop it) it's not surprising it's always 50 years away.
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Good luck with recycling that, where I live it's hard enough to get rid of used auto oil at the local dump (municipal recycling facility).
They found a way to dispose of radioactive smoke detectors. [wikipedia.org] If they can get the radiation low enough, they can find a way to easily dispose of these new devices as well.
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From the article:
This sets off a reaction in which one of the neutrons in the nickel atom splits into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. This changes the nickel into copper, and releases energy without dangerous ionizing radiation.
So l do not really see a recycling/upgrading/replacing process.
Thanks for quoting that particular bit. This illustrates a point about trying to "dumb down" theories for the general public to understand.
I love how they describe beta decay in the same breath as they say "without dangerous ionizing radiation" in that quote.
More from TFA:
Instead of using radioactive elements like uranium or plutonium, LENR uses a lattice or sponge of nickel atoms, which holds ionized hydrogen atoms like a sponge holds water.
A bit misleading there, since there may be no radioactive fuel sitting around, but they supposedly produce a radioactive nickel isotope in the process. (Nickel and copper are naturally slightly radioactive, but it's so weak I'll cut the
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I have been mooning Venus (quite large I assure you) for some time now.
Re:huh (Score:4, Funny)
what the fuck is gizmag?
When I were a lad, we spelled it jizz mag, and we were happy.
Re: (Score:3)
what the fuck is gizmag?
When I were a lad, we spilled it jizz mag, and we were happy.
FTFY
Re: (Score:3)