Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept
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(Seriously, it's great that there are fundamental research programs still going on. Even the spin-offs are generally worthwhile by themselves.)
Meanwhile there's focus fusion (could get to net power next year with boron fusion), NIF (a couple years away, already working on a practical power plant design called LIFE), General Fusion (five years to commercialization if it works), Tri-Alpha (slightly more), picosecond laser fusion (simple high-gain boron fusion design, needs a laser six times bigger than our best now but lasers are advancing fast), polywell (Navy's doing it, could be five years if it works, they're not talking much), and a couple more that look promising but need funding (Helion, levitated dipole). And tokamak of course, which is still decades away from practical use so of course that gets the most money and press.
What people don't realize is that fusion has been advancing exponentially since 1970.
But still every fusion article gets the inevitable "fifty years away" joke. I'm on the verge of making a record of every one I see, just so I can send them all a "nyah nyah" when one of these projects comes to fruition.
What seems key to me is having a large enough energy output to harness without waste in the flare window while being able to manufacture fuel in sufficient volumes to power the sucker.
Focus fusion would be a small boron fusion device, producing 5MW per reactor at a tenth the price of coal. Potential drawbacks: the energy gain is a bit marginal so you have to also capture x-rays, and erosion of the electrodes could be a problem. But a 5MW plant should only cost half a million or so.
Picosecond laser would also do boron fusion (which in that design is only ten times harder than D-T), but with a 10,000x energy gain, divided by the one percent efficiency of the laser. It's projected to produce power as cheaply as focus fusion.
Tri-Alpha supposedly could achieve boron fusion but they've been very tight-lipped about the whole thing. They've gotten close to $100 million in venture capital though, including from Paul Allen.
Polywell, if it works, could do D-T fusion in a 2-meter sphere, or boron fusion in a 3-meter. I've seen relatively high projected costs, though that may be for D-T. If you're a scifi fan, this was invented by the guy who came up with Bussard ramjets. He was also a big tokamak guy, before he gave up on them.
Levitated dipole sorta turns tokamaks inside-out, with the plasma contained around the outside of a solid levitating torus. This seems to solve some plasma instabilities that tokamaks struggle with. They say it would be ideal for D-D fusion.
Deuterium (for D-D) and boron are readily available in large quantities relative to what we'd need. D-T needs tritium, which would have to be made by bombarding lithium with the neutrons from the fusion reaction. This would limit how fast we could roll out the reactors. D-D and D-T would both require steam turbines. Most people focus on D-T since it has the least stringent requirements, and the rest of these are D-T.
General Fusion uses a vat of molten lead and lithium, spinning to open a channel down the middle. A plasma ball is shot in from each end, then 200 steam-driven pistons slam into the container, making an acoustic shock wave that compresses the D-T plasma. The neutrons hit the lithium for tritium, heat the lead, and it all drives the steam turbine, with some steam diverted to drive the pistons. Jeff Bezos is a big investor in this one. Right now they've got the pistons working with the tight timing they need, and a prototype with a dozen pistons or so.
NIF says they're farthest along the development path, they're leveraging big advances in lasers, and with their LIFE development they're already working with thirty or so commercial suppliers to put together a practical reactor design with as much off-the-shelf equipment as possible. They don't need as much tritium inventory to start up as tokamaks, and think they can be competitive with fossil fuels. They've been talking 2020 or so for a demo reactor, but they also thought they'd manage ignition this year, and a recent DOE report said it'll be another couple years.
Helion targets a middle ground between tokamaks and NIF, in terms of temperature and density, which they think will be easier. They need $20 million for a full-size reactor, already built a 1/3-scale test unit. They're also working with NASA on a fusion rocket design.
Tokamak (like ITER) seems to be on a solid path to net power, but it's such a huge, complicated, expensive device that it's hard to imagine it being economical, and they're talking about a thirty year timeframe at best.
I mainly backed the project because I find it fascinating that someone is doing this on a shoestring budget, 'competing' with other multi-million projects. The audacity of this is inspiring, although I have no idea whether the project will ever result in something tangible.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1992078142/building-the-...
[2] http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/
(edited for typos)
Here's the video of his excellent (and, in retrospect, sad) presentation at Google. I say "sad" because it shows an intellectual giant, nearly on his deathbed, practically begging an Internet giant, for what was really the tiny amount he needed to continue with what had become his life's work. Anyway, it's an intense, fast-paced, insightful, and (likely) final public look into his mind, his work, and his character.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU (Should Google Go Nuclear?)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8 (archive copy)
UPDATE: I found a good paper covering the above talk. It's a 25-page PDF, of less than 2MB, with color photos and charts from the video.
http://askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/Should%20Google%20Go%20Nuc...
I also got the impression that he was in his own world. That tends to be how geniuses talk. There was no introduction, no covering of the basics, no time to settle in. It was like jumping into the ocean of his mind, and you either sank or swam with his thoughts.
He was 78, and possibly already sick with cancer at that time, yet he came off as a young visionary with unwavering optimism. That, combined with his accomplishments, made him amazing, and one of my heroes.
He was asking for funding. For funding, you need to convince people that it's worthwhile. There are many ways to do that. One is to say "trust me", another is to persuade through education, a third is to use money which was promised for another purpose, and so on.
He used the first approach. Only, he did it in a way that's similar to what a lot of kooks do - throw graphs up on a screen, without the time to review them, and on a topic which few in the audience will understand. That is not a way to convince people to fund your project.
You say "That tends to be how geniuses talk." That is incorrect. Look at Fermi, Feynman, Gould, Sagan - all considered geniuses, and all renowned for their ability to explain things. Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was meant for a wide audience, and was not a technical monograph. Freeman Dyson has written some marvelous essays, including his "A New Newton" book review of Gleick's Newton biography. Just take a look at the Nobel Prize lectures and you'll see good evidence that Nobel Prize winners are also able to explain their work using something other than a blizzard of viewgraphs. Those people are ones I admire.
Instead, I think this sort of presentation tends to be the way that people who are convinced of their genius-ness talk. And again, it's the sort of way kooks talk.
I want to be clear here. I'm not saying that he's a kook. The polywell reactor may be the power source of the future. But that presentation detracted from his goal, I presume, of getting funding for the project. Really, if you didn't know it was Bussard, would you be convinced? If I had given the same talk, in the same style, would you be willing to contribute $10 million in funding?
I googled http://www.google.com/#q=1960+technology+predictions , there are a lot of results, some of them are very interesting. But it is difficult to choose the sites with good reliable information.
Or in other words: http://xkcd.com/678/
What invention will render our predictions utterly useless? Consider the potential of memristor technology, for example, which could put vastly increase the power and space efficiency of computers and lead to micro-chip sized supercomputers. Or maybe we invent some form of nanofabrication, or room temperature superconductors, or some invention that wouldn't even make sense to us today.
If one of the boron fusion projects works out, we won't even have the neutron flux.
(Google will turn up plenty of full papers though.)
http://www.e-catworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/EFA-rep...
The general consensus from the scientists present at the event was that "yes, something strange appears to be going on, we need to attempt to replicate this". As a result, Rossi's research has triggered a non-negligible renewal of interest of Nickel-Hydrogen fusion (which has been going on for 15+ years), especially in Italy and Greece. A few well-recognized researchers openly and publicly admit that Rossi's research appears promising and deserves more research (such as Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist at NASA Langley Research Center).
Recently, Celani has been able to reproduce anomalous heat in Ni-H cells that cannot be explained by current physical theories (other than with Ni-H fusion being real): http://www.e-catworld.com/2012/08/celani-demonstrates-excess...
I am following the latest developments very closely.
The only reason Rossi is not taken more seriously is because current physical theories predict cold fusion should be impossible, and because he publishes barely enough information to reproduce anomalous heat in Ni-H cells without giving away all the experimental tricks he found to make the reaction more pronounced (he appears to be driven by greed and wants to commercialize the tech before letting the secret out).
Still, I don't think you personally can call Rossi a scammer, since you obviously don't follow Ni-H research that has been going on in the last year.
1. The Sun, by comparison, produces less energy (per volume) than compost [1];
2. Heavier isotopes of hydrogen, used because they provide a faster reaction, emit more neutrons, which tend to have a devastating effect on the container. Thus you have two conditions at odd: speed of the reaction vs viability of containment;
3. The Sun solves the problem of containing the reaction with gravity. Magnetism has yet to yet to be shown as viable of effective in energy terms; and
4. People focus too much on the fuel cost, which is near-zero and supply is effectively unlimited. But that's H1. Deuterium is relatively plentiful [2] but tritium is one of the most expensive substances (by mass) on Earth. Helium-3 is an alternative but is also incredibly expensive [3] such that recovering it from the Moon may actually be economically viable relative to cost (that should tell you something about how rare/expensive it is). D-D reaction research I think is currently far behind anything involving Tritium or He-3.
Fuel costs aside, that's only one input into the cost equation. Even if the fuel is free the power plant will cost $X to produce, will require $Y in maintenance per year for Z years and produce W MW of power. Plug all those numbers together and that power still has cost even with "free" fuel.
For automobiles at least, petrochemicals have some incredible advantages. They are relatively stable, cheap and the machinery for turning them into usable energy is cheap and mass-produced. Of course it has two major problems:
1. Emissions; and
2. It is a limited resource.
I tend to think at some point in the next few centuries genetic engineering will allow us to solve (2) by sustainably "growing" more fuel with something like algae or (to borrow an idea from Anathem) "fuel trees". Of course something must be consumed to produce this energy.
Battery technology will have to improve by an order of magnitude at least to be a viable alternative to fuels that are easily transported and don't require the infrastructure that charging stations otherwise would.
For fixed power generation I'm really not sure what the future holds. If we're not careful we'll simply exhaust a number of readily available fuels and the population problem will "correct" (as it often does) with war.
[1]: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/17/3478276.ht...
And you're right that batteries are a long way from being competitive with hydrocarbons. But with cheap enough power you can make hydrocarbons from CO2 in the air. The hardest part is concentrating the CO2. In theory the energy cost is only about a tenth as much as the energy content of the fuel you make. In practice it's quite a bit higher, but there are several research teams working on fixing that, including one by Nobel chemist George Olah.
Once you've got the CO2 you can use pretty standard chemical processes to take it the rest of the way. Olah advocates turning it into methanol and using that directly, but the oil companies have had an efficient methanol-to-gasoline process in production for decades.
One proposal to use that process is called Green Freedom, from Los Alamos. Their design uses a GenIII nuclear plant, and they think they could produce gasoline at $4.60/gal conservatively, or $3.40 assuming a couple modest technological improvements. They have their own way to concentrate the CO2, unrelated to Olah's work.
Get something like this and you can have carbon-neutral transportation using the vehicle fleet, gas stations, and pipelines we've got right now.
2. Oh no, neutrons! If only we'd spent 7+ decades working with neutron reactions and their interactions with materials. It's a shame there are no functional power reactors anywhere in the world that are subjected to a high-neutron flux.
3. Magnetic confinement of fusion works just fine, we're at a point where it looks like it's simply a matter of scaling things up to get to greater than break-even energy-wise. How practical and competitive such reactors might be remains to be seen, but it's fairly unlikely that they just plain won't work.
4. The biggest advantages of fusion as an energy source are that it's safe and clean. It won't be until quite some time in the future when we have the ability to make use of something like p-B11 fusion reactions (which are far, far beyond our capability at the moment due to the much higher plasma temperatures required) when fusion will be, potentially, much cheaper and easier than competing alternatives (due to the potentially lower capital cost and conversion efficiency of an aneutronic fusion reactor which wouldn't even need a steam turbine).
The lasers are almost good enough to try this and advancing fast.
Another approach to boron ignition is focus fusion. They published a peer-reviewed paper recently showing they'd achieved the temperature required for boron fusion (they're up to 1.8 billion degrees C). They need higher density though, they're working on that and hope to get to the level they need in a year.
2. You capture the neutrons with a lithium container, which produces tritium.
3. The Z-machine is an inertial confinement machine: a powerful electric arc produces a radiation pulse that compresses the fision target.
4. I suspect if you can achieve ignition with tritium, you can use the fusion flash to ignite deuterium in a two stage process.
I meant fusion target. Oops.
Or am I confusing propaganda? Their logo creeps me out too.
I think fusion energy is a big enough win for everyone that you don't need to assign some sinister backing to it. The Department of ENERGY damn well should be interested in a safe, clean method of generating electricity.
The logo is a thunderbird, after the mythological creature of the Native Americans.
http://insidehpc.com/2012/01/08/video-visualizing-the-los-al...
Logo reminded me of something out of Wolfenstein 3D
The paranoia in me always suspect they are all trying to make nuclear weapons without the pesky fallout which would be a horrible "advancement" as it would remove resistance to use them.
"The purpose of the Sedan explosion was to determine if nuclear devices could be used as cratering or earth moving mechanisms [for construction purposes]."
You're presuming those are different things, when they aren't necessarily. Good weaponry is a prerequisite for world (or even domestic) peace.
Of course, good ideas are also a prerequisite, and in that area, we're far more lacking.