Fusion breakthrough a magic bullet for energy crisis?

Is this the breakthrough to make Nuclear Fusion a viable energy source?

''To date, experimental fusion projects have largely been focused on generating intense heat so they can fuse, and containing the super hot gases from this reaction consumes most if not all of the energy being produced by the fusion reaction.

The University of Florida have taken a different tack, by putting hydrogen and boron fuel into an accelerator that fires them towards each other at incredibly high velocities. When the hydrogen and boron 11 atoms smash into each other, they fuse, producing fast moving helium nuclei whose motion is converted into electricity.

This new process is clean, highly efficient and most important of all, simple. The output of the new reactor is electricity with its by-product being the same helium gas used to make voices squeaky and party balloons float, so there's no toxic radioactive waste to dispose of''


www.independent.co.uk...

Nothing will become of this, theres no money in extremely cheap/free energy

To me this is what all of this sounds like.

"Bla bla bla"

Why?

Because technologies like this will NEVER reach the market anytime this decade considering the ultra jerks running the world right now.

Don't mean to poop on the party, just being realistic thats all.

Fusion tech? What a joke. It's too cheap to be viable.

However Oil is superior in every way.

You have to kill people for it (check),
you have to spend tons of $ on it (check),
its very toxic and pollutes everything (check),
and it allows you to enslave humanity. (check)

Great, sounds like another amazing and promising idea that no doubt will quietly go away, or be bought up, never to be heard from again until one day down the road when it seems to late to reverse the environmental damage, and those oil and gas cats have finished their pillage at the global table; maybe then the idea will see the light of day.

The concept of money is such a sharp double edged sword:barf

My Dad once told me he heard about a guy who invented a battery system that could run off any organic material. You just jam the stuff into a compartment and the breakdown is converted into energy. He said the company Mallory (owners of Duracell) swooped in a bought his idea out for I think a couple hundred thousand at the time. Never heard from it again.

It seems any good idea that could sincerely help Humanity is literally vulturized by the money card. I love the concept of open source, I hope it really takes off soon.

I'd like to know how much energy it produces relative to the energy required to opperate the collider. It would seem that would be the real crux of the technology.

reply to post by jtma508


The article seems to suggest the energy required to fuse the particles like this, by dashing them into each other,is a lot less than when they are heated and then magnetised to fuse.

The real test will be in the replication of the experiment at other fusion labs around the globe...if their results also yield a similar result then it could have far reaching implications

The question I have is this..does the fusion process only work with fuel from the top of the periodic table ie: hydrogen and helium or could other elements be used as the fusion fuel ?

Now this is exciting... and t comes from an actual news source... star and flag...

reply to post by timski


Thats a good question. I suppose they are looking at these two elements as they are clean. What other elements did you have in mind?

Well, this would be bigger news if you could independently verify it on the University of Florida website, which you can't.

I also can't find any other news source on it.

I'd love for this to be true, and from what I've been able to ascertain the University of Florida certainly has the right sort of research departments to be doing this type of work (even a grant from the dept of energy, recently) but until there's a press release on their site I don't think you'll see it picked up by many more news sources. I actually hesitate to even tweet the article because I like to get more than one source on things like this.

Edited to add: If you read the comments, others are similarly perplexed.

Another red flag: there are no quotes and no names. Not even the proper name of the department that allegedly made the discovery. If it is true, it's bizarrely poor journalism. Reads like someone's hack blog post.

[edit on 11-1-2010 by quakewatcher]

reply to post by quakewatcher


The Independent is a good source for news. It is the most Progressive newspaper in the U.K. It states at the end of the article that the New Zealand Herald is its source, so there is your multiple sources

Originally posted by Peruvianmonk
reply to post by quakewatcher

 

The Independent is a good source for news. It is the most Progressive newspaper in the U.K. It states at the end of the article that the New Zealand Herald is its source, so there is your multiple sources

This is not two sources, same article written by the same person.

www.nzherald.co.nz...

There's a lot of questionable journalism out there, lately. Papers are cutting back drastically and not always fact checking properly. If something sounds poorly sourced, chances are it is.

As far as I can tell "Pat Pilcher" usually writes about gadgets. This type of serious science piece should at a bare minimum tell you the actual names of the people involved.

Originally posted by Peruvianmonk
Thats a good question. I suppose they are looking at these two elements as they are clean. What other elements did you have in mind?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by hydrogen/helium being 'clean'...because they are the lightest and least complex elements perhaps?

I was wondering if the heavier gas elements would give off more energy in the fusion process as they are denser in terms of atomic mass than either helium or hydrogen, and that whilst it may require a higher energy input to fuse, would give a proportionally higher energy output from the process?

Originally posted by timski
I was wondering if the heavier gas elements would give off more energy in the fusion process as they are denser in terms of atomic mass than either helium or hydrogen, and that whilst it may require a higher energy input to fuse, would give a proportionally higher energy output from the process?

No.

It all comes down to binding energy per nucleon, which becomes larger for heavier nuclei (and which is exactly why you can extract energy form fission, i.e. converting two lighter nuclei into one or more heavier). Ultimately the iron nucleus is the most stable, nucleons are deep in the potential well, so you won't make energy by fusing nuclei into something heavier than iron. If you go to even heavier elements, they eventually become unstable and fission becomes preferable.