Comment by irthomasthomas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irthomasthomas | Hacker News Reader

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I'm surprised that we're still chasing moon shots in strong force fusion, while weak fusion, which has actually been demonstrated already, gets little attention. Chemically assisted/low energy nuclear reactions have been proven to produce clean energy and useful transmutation. This process can be used to turn radioactive waste into inert material. For example, technetium-99 is a particularly pernicious by-product of nuclear fission. It has a half-life of ~200,000 years and is very mobile in the atmosphere, making it difficult and expensive to handle. In a CANR reactor, this nuclear waste is converted into the safe, and valuable, palladium-106, and the by-product is clean heat. Given the double benefit of clean fuel and nuclear waste recycling, I think this should be a bigger priority than strong-force fusion.

http://nautil.us/issue/86/energy/einsteins-lost-hypothesis

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24216601?seq=1

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012815...

You're confusing the strong and weak nuclear forces from particle physics with the fission and fusion nuclear reactions. The (residual) strong force underpins the energy release in both fission and fusion reactions.

You've also linked to the debunked pseudoscience of 'cold fusion', (dressed up as low energy nuclear reactions...) from Pons and Fleischman.

Plenty of work is being done in the field of handling radioactive waste from nuclear fission. My field (decommissioning and waste management) is entirely dedicated to it.

From the first link: " It was only in 2006, with the publication of a landmark paper in the European Journal of Physics C, that neutron-induced transmutations, as something distinct from cold fusion, began to emerge as a viable theory. The paper predicts that electrons on a metal surface coated with hydrogen, deuterium, or tritium atoms can behave collectively (as Einstein had predicted) when driven by an oscillating electromagnetic field at a particular frequency. This collective behavior can give them enough energy to combine with the hydrogen, deuterium, or tritium to make neutrons.

The paper goes on to say that the resulting neutrons travel very slowly, slow enough, in fact, to get gobbled up by a nearby atom before they can even leave the microscopic vicinity of their birthplace. The atom then becomes unstable and might burp out radioactive decay byproducts like a gamma ray or energetic electron. A separate paper by the same authors calculates that microscopic surfaces of electrodes, like those that tend to produce low-energy neutrons, are efficient absorbers of radioactive gamma rays. So radioactive decay can be transformed into a bath of innocuous heat. And of course heat energy can readily be converted into electricity."

Landmark paper is a strong term for something that has been repeatedly debunked and then ignored by the nuclear physics community (all its citations are cold fusion journals...)

The theory Widom and Larsen propose violates the laws of physics and has no experimental evidence.

Put simply, the weak reaction needs an enormous amount of energy to happen. The difference between a neutron and a proton is 1MeV, more than the mass of the electron. The electric field at the surface of the metal is of the order of eV and does not account for this. So where are these massive electrons magically getting their energy from?

Or if you're comfortable with theoretical physics, a better critique can be found here: https://coldfusionblog.net/category/widom-larsen/

If we stopped what we worked on every time some nice theory came around which could work "better" (for whatever definition of better) we would never get anything done.

Scientists/companies working in these areas are free to produce results that make ITER obsolete. After they've done that we can discuss about abandoning the - from our current understanding of science - most likely path to (more or less) unlimited energy. So far, they are not further along than let's say fusion experiments in 1960.

But is the consensus that ITER will be self-sustaining from an engineering perspective?

It’s predicted to be able to have a Q>1.

This lecture was enlightening: https://youtu.be/L0KuAx1COEk

So you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source? The ITER project was founded in 2007. From there on hundreds of physicist, chemists, engineers and computer scientists started planning this RESEARCH project in order to better understand this kind of technology. Shouldn't we stick to what we have started (since this is (more than) cutting edge technology) and have a look at other technologies in parallel?

> So you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source?

OP said nothing of the sort. They said that they didn't understand the prioritization of funding given an alternative that they found personally much much more valuable.

I am pretty sure that this project is not prioritized in any way. It's a research project with funding from all over the world. It should be compared to the CERN project where scientists from all over the world try to understand science behind it better. One could argue that CERN is a waist of money since there are other fields of study in physics which seem to have more potential. We should be happy that states from all over the world are willing to pay for a research project, which does not have a direct "value" for the next couple decades. There will never be a private investor for this scope of project since there is no monetizable value behind it yet and maybe in the next 50 years.

No one claimed the opposite.

That's the very definition of a sunk cost fallacy

Came here to say just this. While I'm glad to see that research is finally culminating in investment and assembly we shouldn't be committing to this project just because people put time and effort into it.

Of cause we should put time and effort into it because it is not proven that it is wasted. There have always been people who said CERN is a waist of money but in the long run, mankind wouldn't be the same as today if we didn't fund it back in the days.

> ITER began in 1985 as a Reagan–Gorbachev[18][19] initiative[19][20] with the equal participation of the Soviet Union, the European Atomic Energy Community, the United States, and Japan through the 1988–1998 initial design phases. Preparations for the first Gorbachev-Reagan Summit showed that there were no tangible agreements in the works for the summit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Background

Not only that, before ITER we used to work on JET in 1991, which is in kind of a twin relationship with ITER. Abandoning ship now for a technology that isn't even proven to be viable in large scales would be insanity.

You're surprised that they would continue to pursue something that we are now pretty sure will work (though not necessarily cost effectively) instead of some quackery?

> which has actually been demonstrated

For certain values of "actually be demonstrated". I don't think it's been reliably shown to be a real phenomenon, has it?

That is my impression as well. It needs a lot more peer-review and reproducable results in different labs around the world by different scientists.

In case you missed it, they are basically talking about "cold fusion".

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