NASA’s new shortcut to fusion power
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
This is one of the most clear explanations of fusion power I've read so far. Worth a read just for that alone.
> And as the technology matures, it could also find uses here on Earth, such as for small power plants for individual buildings
Distributed power generation is the ideal. Why bother with transporting energy when you can just generate it where you need it?
Really cool article/tech. I've not heard of LCF until now. Seems promising.
For the same reason every household no longer grows, harvests and threshes its own wheat, bakes its own bread, and why Mao Zedong's Great Leap Foward idea of building a blast furnace in every village, in order to increase the country's steel output was an utter failure.
Power transmission is cheap, and economics greatly favor utility-scale deployments. You also get significantly less need for wasted peak capacity when multiple power producers can pool together into a grid.
This feels like a weird point to make when solar power is as popular and growing as it is.
Localized power generation is not only here now, we already have programs to tie your localized power generation into the existing power grid and you get paid for it. I don't see how this system couldn't work the same way.
There's way too much human labour involved in getting someone to drive to your house, climb onto your roof and bolt panels to it. In that time, that same worker could set up a dozen similarly-sized panels when building out a utility solar farm.
And yes, if your time is worthless, and you don't value your neck, you could DIY, and save on some of those costs.
... But you'd still be tied to the grid (and paying grid fees), unless you are ready to invest $XY,000 for a massive battery bank... That might still leave you without electricity during a period of low generation/high consumption.
Where do you put the solar farm?
[1] 2 billion 'single-family' homes, 800 square feet of roof/average [2], ~50,000 square miles of roof space. Total land area of the Earth is 57 million square miles. You can take your pick of which 50,000 of it can be used for utility solar...
[2] This is a large over-estimate, reality is much smaller than that.
Low generation can be solved with an inexpensive gas generator for use in emergencies the likes of which might see three days use in a year.
You still need all of that if you put all the batteries together in a warehouse, not if you put them in each person's basement.
Again, economies of scale.
Tesla Powerwall 2 appears to be <5 cubic feet. That doesn't seem like a lot.
This is such a cop out. How I spend my time is up to me. If it's a DIY weekend project being worked on a weekend that I had no other plans, then it's not really a cost to me. Sure, professionally, I have my hourly rate that determines my "worth". However, I do not get to bill those hours 24/7/365. Even playing along with your premise, if I'm playing weekend electrician, I'm not a master electrician making the same rates as my other job so a 1:1 correlation is just a lame argument.
I'm setting aside the "when you die" part, but acknowleding its presence.
However, the new owners get a small tear and a tune from the world's tiniest violin. They know the panels are there when they buy the house. It's not a surprise at closing. If they decide to buy the house with that knowledge, then that's on them, their realtor, their inspector, etc. It's like saying someone that buys a full size truck and complains they didn't know the expense of fuel.
At some point I'm going to pay someone to come out re-shingle my roof anyway.
Other forms of energy, perhaps with the exception of wind power, do not work like that.
Funny (ironic?) thing about most the significant residential solar installations in my hood; they exist because they're grid-tied and generate revenue for the households.
If there were no grid for these homeowners to sell their excess power to, they wouldn't have bothered with installing and maintaining solar panels. It's not like there's zero risk involved, hell just having thousands of dollars of solar panels sitting on your roof alone is a big fat sign announcing "well-heeled folks reside here, break-in and pillage when absent". Not exactly the greatest thing to broadcast in the predominately low-income desert regions solar is most applicable to.
Also, the vast majority of houses can’t sustain their energy use off of rooftop solar alone.
If the cost of generating power drops, then distribution is a more viable model. Especially if you get extremely high fuel density. Also as we've found in California, power delivery can be very expensive.
Assuming some putative ideal future Mr Fusion, plugging it into the wall would be a completely different proposition, require relatively little space, and zero household labour.
Considering the massive infrastructure and street furniture required to distribute electrons, the unit economics of home fusion would need to be terrible in order for centralisation to remain competitive against the significant benefits for reliability and decentralisation.
Pretty sure this is off by a few orders of magnitude.
Crop nutrients are obviously a concern, but if you're only trying to survive for a couple of cycles seems totally feasible and could be extended artificially.
In the real world, people doing this for a living find that they need literally 100 to 1000 times that much land to feed a family of four.
I grow a lot of stuff and have for years and it’s an excessive amount of labor, you only get certain food during certain times of the year, sometimes for only for a few weeks, and that’s assuming you don’t have losses due to pests.
Agriculture is best left to the professionals for feeding societies.
If your municipal water supply is compromise, the last thing you should be doing with water is pouring it on the ground.
Potatoes are one of the most calorie-dense vegetables by weight and by growing space. They have 350 calories per pound, so you need 5700 pounds of potatoes to feed a family of four.
A good potato yield is about 25,000 pounds per acre, so you need nearly a quarter acre of potatoes (1000 square metres) to feed your family for a year.
I'm pretty sure you can't feed a family from what you can grow on a balcony.
/edit: >Research in the 1970s by John Jeavons and the Ecology Action Organisation found that 4000 square feet (about 370 square metres) of growing space was enough land to sustain one person on a vegetarian diet for a year,
https://www.growveg.com.au/guides/growing-enough-food-to-fee...
Not even close. Potatoes produce more calories per unit of land than anything else you can grow in a temperate zone garden. Intensively cultivated potatoes may produce 10,000 calories per square meter, but that would be a stupendously successful crop. In other words, to provide all the calories for a family of four, you'd need on the order of 1 to 2 square meters of potatoes per day.
Since you can't really live on potatoes alone, to get adequate nutrition across the spectrum of human needs, you need quite a bit more than that. You could feed a family of four for a year on less than a acre, if none of your crops failed or did poorly. I'd hate to be responsible for trying it on less than that though in the temperate US.
As everyone has pointed out, you needs lots of land for food. Far less for energy, and so less reason to centralise it if there is a good alternative.
Oh, god, I can even see the pain... just like inkjet cartridges. "Non-genuine fuel cartridge detected. Please remove and replace with a genuine cartridge."
You need to be able to throttle the power output up and down. That is harder to design and harder to make efficient. Or you need lots of batteries, which is expensive. And it all has to be sized for peak demand rather than being able to benefit from flows across the grid.
The one application I'm aware of that can cost-effectively use excess power of that sort is crypto mining, since there the vast majority of the cost is electricity; the capital cost is relatively low. Unfortunately it's arguable whether it does anything useful besides enriching the producer.
Not if you reverse the grid - instead of providing power to the nodes it takes excess away to scalable workloads. And you have grid access as a backup.
Almost any "scalable workload" actually capable of scaling up will have a high $$$ upfront cost for all the machinery / infrastructure involved.
If a decarbonation plant costs many millions of dollars to set up, nobody is going to let it sit idle waiting for some excess power.
The best use case for smoothing the demand curve IMO is thermal "storage". While production is high, people can crank the AC or heat. That way they don't have to use as much energy when production is lower.
I’m less certain about the other things - not many people will eg. put off a load of laundry to a less-convenient time to save 21 cents. And if my partner is too hot because the heater has been running for 30 minutes I really do not want to have a discussion with her about “thermal storage” :)
I believe in some places this is already done.
It is so much nicer to cool/heat pre-emptively. The power company has a very accurate view of what the next 12-24 hours will look like. If they know The sun will be shining bright and there will be an excess of solar energy, they should crank up people's AC so that they don't need to draw as much power later in the day. This way we smooth the demand curve without letting pipes freeze or giving people heat stroke.
> Unfortunately it's arguable whether it does anything useful besides enriching the producer.
I'd prefer to do something really useful, like desalination, pre processing of waste water prior to dumping it into the sewers, and so on, but all these would require a lot of plumbing.
"LCF isn’t cold fusion—it still requires energetic deuterons and can use neutrons to heat them."
No, it isn't. There is more than just a change of name involved with LCF: the statement "it still requires energetic deuterons" means the deuterons still have to be hot. They can't be at room temperature.
Sounds pretty much the same as room temperature to me. Also the pictures with the experimental setup suggest that the glass does not melt, which is pretty cool.
The orbitals of the electrons of deuterium are like 1000x bigger than the size of the nuclei. So once the incoming deuterium nuclei approach, it will be much closer to the target deuterium nuclei and it will not see the electrons. Note that most of the energy of the repulsion is when the nuclei are close, not when they are far away.
The erbium are useful to keep a lot of deuterium together, but the electrons shelling is probably very small.
The trick they use is to use a very energetic gamma rays that colides (indirectly) with one deuterium, and this deuterium is very fast that is the same effect you get when you have a very hot deuterium.
That notion of "hot" is not the norm. Most of us think in terms of temperature, not "energy". Would you want to get an X-ray if it were described in a way that sounded like high temperatures going to fry you? No.
When the original cold fusion work was published, physicists across the board declared it impossible, insisting that high temperatures (and/or pressures?) were absolutely required for fusion to happen. The notion of a desktop fusion reaction was categorically ridiculed. Now it's OK so long as we change our conventional definitions to make those earlier denials not seem ignorant. BTW I'm not saying the origial CF worked, just that those rejecting it used words that would also exclude the possibility of LCF (or LENR or whatever we call it now).
The fusor was invented in 1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
The few irradiated deuterons and the products of their collisions have speeds (kinetic energies) many millions times higher than those corresponding to the room temperature.
The average temperature remains low only because few nuclei take part in fusion.
If they would succeed to make enough nuclei to take part in fusion reactions to produce more energy than consumed, it is not clear how great the average temperature of the metal would become.
If the temperature of the metal would not increase excessively, that could happen only if most of the energy produced by fusion would be carried away by neutrons, which would be absorbed somewhere else, generating useful heat, but also creating undesirable radioactive waste.
This approach is indeed very promising, but there are many problems that must be solved, so there is still no chance for a fusion reactor in only a few years.
Certainly not above the melting point of the metal if the lattice structure is required to sustain fusion.
Now, if we could just make tepid superconductors...
the original cold fusion experiments explanation was lattice confinement in heavy metal (i.e. large electron clouds) like Pt/Pd plus energetic deuterons. What was very unclear is where those deuterons got their energy. It was theorized something along the lines that high electrostatic charges in the metal cracks accelerate the deuterons, etc.
Unfortunately pseudo-scientificity got somehow attached to that research, and that for decades prevented any meaningful research into the source of those deuterons and how to efficiently increase their number and/or how to efficiently add another source. Only passage of time and the name change to LCF - marketing, yea! - has allowed to restart the research, though still without due credit to the original research.
Yes, and that was because no energy source was being used to start the reaction; the metal with deuterons in it was just sitting there.
In these experiments, an energy source (gamma rays) is used to heat up the deuterons to start the reaction. That's a key difference, and it's why a different term from "cold fusion" is entirely appropriate.
If this is true, then LENR can be used to power cosmic apparatus in deep space. Maybe, it can power airplanes on distant routes also, like solar panels, but 24x7.
I suspect a magnetic field will help reaction rates too, even though you'll have a hard time finding research supporting or refuting that.
Even I had wondered if firing neutron into a cold fusion cell might be helpful. Turns out it probably is. But then it's not cold, its LCF.
ah yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer still a scam
I'm disappointed, because the Dec 9 event was previously a new LED light of some sort, and now I can't find it with a cursory search.
$25 maybe for preorder at the time. Maybe I'll check wayback machine or something.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210716204751/https://ecat.com/e...
and now redirects to a 404: https://ecat.com/ecat-skled
If deuterons could fuse with other deuterons in a metal lattice, this would have been seen ages ago, just by accelerating deuterons into a deuterium-loaded material. This is how neutron generator tubes work, and they've been used for longer than you've probably been alive.
What happens in these tubes is the vast majority of deuterons lose energy by ionization and don't undergo nuclear reactions. There is no radical increase in fusion from electron shielding.
> In 1989, two electrochemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, reported that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat") of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including neutrons and tritium. The small tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode. The reported results received wide media attention and raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy.
I planned to set up a similar experiment and bombard a hydrogen loaded target with muons, or move the experiment to the top of a Carpathian mountain, but the institute of nuclear research in Kharkiv, Ukraine is under attack, so it's not possible.
The idea of using ErD3 instead of Nickel or Palladium is very good, because it saves weeks of time to load the target with Deuterium.
Physicists knew P&F's nonsense was garbage because it required multiple miracles (that fusion would occur, that the ordinary fusion reactions would not, that some weird non-standard fusion reaction would occur instead.) Far, far more likely was they just were bumblers. And when replication failed (and it did fail; other vaguely similar but different sporadic results are not "replication") that prior was validated.
Just maybe people wanting a neutron source stay with thin foils to let the neutrons out because that's what they want. I wouldn't be surprised if this method of initiating fusion we completely overlooked for 90 years, but turns out to be viable after all. There are still many questions to be answered since the probability of a fusion event still seems to be too low. I just wish people would do more searching for answers and less outright rejection.
Isn't this just cold fusion? The end paragraph even credits an "International Conference on Cold Fusion".
No. You still have to heat the fuel. The claim of cold fusion was tnat the fuel could just sit there at room temperature and fuse.
For example, lab at top floor or in mountain area may produce much more heat than lab in basement at sea level.
And them being chemists not physicists.
And the University of Utah issuing a press release before the anything was peer reviewed.
The whole episode is is an example of what can go wrong with science. This article shows what clearly could have been a useful and productive field of investigation became poisoned to the extent that no significant research could go on for a quarter century and still the authors have to go to great pains to distance themselves from Fleischman and Pons.
That was a huge part of it - I wrote a paper on the controversy for a class. The physicists basically said "That can't work, it must be a chemical reaction." Regardless of the physics working or not, they were effectively saying two chemists couldn't properly do calorimetry on a cell containing 4 elements that don't do very much chemically. This a much harsher thing than the chemists saying physics overlooked something.
Well the assumption in the physics community is that if you're investigating this field you're a questionable character, so its surprising that it got investigated at all.
Whatever amount we are spending to develop these moonshots it needs to be more.
So many "hard things" become that much easier when we remove having to power it out of the equation.
A generator for a forklift is probably unrealistic, but for a huge, skyscraper building crane? Or for one of those giant shipping barges that produce multiple percentage points of our carbon emissions? That no longer sound so crazy.
Isn't that how the US powers its aircraft carriers and submarines anyway? Only with fission, which clearly is too dangerous to put on civilian ships.
I'll believe it when they can power a toaster or something.
> We can jump-start the fusion process using what is called a Dynamitron electron-beam accelerator. The electron beam hits a tantalum target and produces gamma rays, which then irradiate thumb-size vials containing titanium deuteride or erbium deuteride
But later it says:
> producing neutrons from a Dynamitron is energy intensive. There are other, lower energy methods of producing neutrons including using an isotopic neutron source
Is the input neutrons or gamma rays?
I know the throwaway comment is about fussion always being 30 years away but also does appear from the outside that hype/excitement is picking up for some of the recent advances in magnetic confinement fusion.
It seems to me to depend on whether they can find a way to get the reaction rate usefully high.
> The released neutron may collide with another deuteron, accelerating it much as a pool cue accelerates a ball when striking it. This second, energetic deuteron then goes through one of two processes: screened fusion or a stripping reaction.
So a neutron "may" collide. But what if it doesn't?
To be fair, the density is a lot higher an dhtere's an erbium lattice so this may just be a non-issue (or at least a much-reduced issue).
Anyway, I'm glad to see alternatives to "hot" fusion being researched. I'm far from convinced the tokamak approach of massive boondoggles like ITER will ever be commercially viable.
Doesn't mean they'll achieve net power this way, or that the lattice will survive the neutrons at practical fusion rates, but they seem to be seeing D-D fusion reactions.
> We’ve also triggered nuclear reactions by pumping deuterium gas through a thin wall of a palladium-silver alloy tubing, and by electrolytically loading palladium with deuterium. In the latter experiment, we’ve detected fast neutrons.
"electrolytically loading palladium with deuterium" is very, very similar to the Pons/Fleischman setup, which was basically electrolysis with palladium electrodes.
Honestly, there are a number of low-hanging fruits in fusion.
More recent calculations show that, if you include the kinetic energy of the muons, Muon-catalyzed fusion may be net positive [0]. This LCF stuff is a low-hanging fruit too——ignored for many decades because scientists didn't want to hurt their reputations.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion#Alternat...
The wikipedia article doesn't appear to give a clear answer