More fusion hype?

Reflections on fusion history, current events, and predictions for the 'fusion powered future.
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Richard Hull
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More fusion hype?

Post by Richard Hull »

http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/04/Energ ... -Fusion%2f

Another followup.

The above article references a seemingly wondrful fusion breakthrough ending, of course, with how fusion energy can solve all our problems.......In case you didn't comprehend the article basic points.

These guys have seemingly codified the "islands" and "snakes" of instability in a mathematical fashion. Armed with this, they hope to rid the plasma of the density limits so common to every tokamak ever built, including MIT's latest iteration.

Now, by what machination of hardware will this be done? Give 'em a break! Real soon now, maybe. We are used to the wait, so take another whack at it guys.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Chris Bradley
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Chris Bradley »

I'm not sure this is even news. I thought magnetic islands were one of the main-stay 'known issues'.

Anyhow, I do love literal decomposition on this kind of 'fluff talk'. Let's look at what it says;

>"If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power."

OK, so what we really would like to read is "will accomplish fusion". We don't have this here, let's try;

" *could* accomplish fusion". We don't even have this much news here, let's try;

"could *help* accomplish fusion". We don't even have this much news here, let's try;

"could help eliminate *an* impediment to fusion". We don't even have this much news here, let's try;

" *If confirmed*, could help eliminate an impediment to fusion"....

.....blah blah don't even have this level of assurance in the comment!

No, we have;

" *If confirmed*, *could* *help eliminate* *an* *impediment* *to the development* of fusion"....

?!?!..

Are we to infer here that we are 6 layers of conditional statement away from tokamak fusion... after how many years and $?!!...
Dustin
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Dustin »

LENR in the news again, apparently with some validation,

"Brillouin has had two significant independent validations of their scientific model and claims. One of those was by Los Alamos National Laboratories. The other was by Dr. Michael McKubre of Standford Research International (SRI), who subsequently joined their board of advisors. McKubre was especially impressed by the consistency of the results. This was the first time (in the LENR experimental arena) that he was able to repeat something every time, without exception."

This seems related to Rossi and Defkalion but with a new theory on the process.
Hard to tell if there is something to this or not, some of the numbers do not match up with claims and an 'independent validation from someone who joins the board no longer seems independent'. I could not find any other citations or confirmations of these claims.
Still...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/04/brillo ... d-sri.html

Results
http://www.brillouinenergy.com/
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Carl Willis
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Carl Willis »

The Rossi project and its related spinoffs / copycats show no discernible commitment to scientific understanding.

For administrative purposes on this forum, there is simply no procedure, materials, or methodology in the record by which someone can reproduce or experiment with the supposed phenomenon being touted. It is effectively a non-issue here--closed to speculation, news updates, offsite links, etc.--unless and until there is a scientific communication of some kind. Whether the impediment to disclosure is intellectual property the principals are trying to protect, or whether the whole thing is a scam (the chances of which I'd put arbitrarily close to 100%), the end result for us is the same: we can't do anything scientifically productive or personally edifying in relation to these schemes because no information is available.

I'm tired of swatting this crap down again and again and there is a limit to the number of times its proliferators will remain a going concern on the forums.

-Carl
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Richard Hull
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Richard Hull »

Lotsa' hype from all supposed fusion areas but no commercialization. The hot fusioneers just promise useful fusion, while the cold fusion folks promise impending commercialization.

End result........more future hype from everyone and no real action.

Cold fusion folks form companies based on limited to no scientific basis for their claims and seek to now commericalize a product that is claimed virtually ready for market and beg capital. All such ventures have died almost instantly.

Hot fusion folks are capitalized to varying degrees, admit to not having a marketable product nor to having one in the near to usable future and seem to never produce or die.

Their one saving grace and main attraction to the lower forms is that they both claim to be greener than green, non-polluting and offer an in-exhaustable supply of future energy. Keeps 'em comin' back for more hype whenever it is served up.

In the mean time, the good offices of tons of burning coal along with a smattering of good ole nuclear waste laden atom bomb fission suffice to keep my computer screen aglow before my blurry eyes and they work together to charge my cell phone, lap top battery and my ever so green chevy volt. What a glorious dichotomy.

Both hot and cold fusion continue to be pursued in spite of their paths being littered with no usable product. Nothing to see here folks....just move on please....move along...

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Brian_Gage
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Brian_Gage »

Has anybody ever totaled up how many billions, or is it trillions have been spent world-wide on the "hot fusion" pipe-dream?
What would all those scientists do and say if some amateur fusor inovation produced a net energy gain?
Brian
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Richard Hull
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Richard Hull »

I would say several tens of billions or maybe a hundred billion total, world wide, to date. This assumes you leave out H bomb work and pure fusion weapons refinement research. Since 1953, when the fusion program started, the total spent on fusion energy in the US, both Magnetic and Inertial is ~$22.4 Billion dollars. The other large nations might have spent similar amounts. No where even near a trillion totaled up from all nations in the fray.

A huge fraction of all the money spent went for salaries of the people involved in the myriad of little, medium and large sized projects. A continuing series of "make busy" project for erstwhile fusioneers, if you will.

It must be remembered that a lot of early work was done on a shoe string and the government never leaped into fusion energy in a big way until the 70's and, in many ways, are tapering off due to the economic crisis. JET, NIF and ITER have consumed a lot of the recent world-wide funding and pushed the total into the near hundred billion range. Still those tens of millions for the tiny projects do add up.

I am assuming the ultra long shot to virtual impossibility of amateur or even privately funded ignition and net gain controlled fusion would drop the jaws of the annointed, but waiting for that to happen is like waiting for the pros to do it. The effort has already consumed lifetimes of a few generations of fusion researchers.

Fusion is easy provided you don't plan to harvest any real fusion energy.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Carl Willis
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Carl Willis »

For some reason the myth of amateur-professional adversity persists.

If an innovation occurs in the amateur fusion world, and is properly documented, the professional science community will undoubtedly get involved with enthusiasm. To those guys, it would be a welcome new frontier, a new bone to chew on. And naturally, interest and funding for other programs will take a hit in proportion to how exciting the new stuff is and how many resources it sucks up.

The billions of dollars spent on fusion-related research produces many results that are both smaller and more immediately useful than the long-term goal of a commercial energy solution. A lot of broadly-applicable innovations in materials science come out of professional fusion research, for instance. I think it's hard to single out fusion research as being a particularly profligate enterprise--whether your point of comparison is other government research, public spending and priorities in general, or the energy economy.

We all know the roadmap for magnetic confinement fusion is a long-distance commitment. However, this is the most promising and well-understood path forward right now. It's symptomatic of wishful thinking, or at the very least of a hubris unwarranted by any evidence to date, that the amateur world is out-competing professional fusion research.

-Carl
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Chris Bradley
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Chris Bradley »

Carl Willis wrote:
> If an innovation occurs in the amateur fusion world, and is properly documented, the professional science community will undoubtedly get involved with enthusiasm.

There lies the rub...

Amateurs are rarely in the position to have available the quality of diagnostic kit that would satisfy a professional researcher as being 'properly documented'.

One can present visual results, backed up with a few electrical measurements, maybe a Langmuir probe or two, but the standard now is that they will only look at material published in a journal, and it won't get into a journal with only photos, theoretical arguments as to what the photos show, and a few Langmuir probe plots.

If it doesn't reach a published journal, they ain't interested.... the bar is now set too high for the two groups to meet. But I'd not put this down to any professional snobbery on their behalf, on the contrary. I would site all the 'cold fusion' type plethora of snake-oil folks who have likely caused them to focus only on their own tokamaks, as a consequence of all the quackery. It is too much effort for them to take a look at something not already passed peer-reviewed barriers in a journal.
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Richard Hull »

I think if anyone had something real to show in fusion innovation all truly interested parties would sit up and take notice. There are still enough pro-mavericks out there who could leap on an amateur presented reality and hopefully run with it and give it the proper polish, extra research and publication it deserves. Hopefully they will fully credit the concept or nucleus idea to such an amateur.

Still, amateur breakthroughs are relegated to the lucky donkey class that I have long talked about. We need not hang our fusion hats on amateur researches.

The discovery of x-rays, radioactivity and fission were all lucky donkey moments. No one had an inkling of them or sought them out in a planned effort. They stumbled onto them while farting around on other stuff.

Ricahrd Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Frank Sanns »

Where are the experiments that could show if there is something there? Repeating the variations on the same is not good method. Where are the samples were the palladium is doped with elements across the periodic table groups? Where are the experiments with 50% D and T? Where are the experiments that generate more energy than normal chemical heats of solution or annealing? Where are the experiments with neutron rich substrates? Where are the experiments with fission prone materials. I can think of dozens of experiments that make sense from discovery point of view yet little of the more diverse approaches to characterize what might or might not be there are absent. Instead, work hovers very closely around a only the basics. There have been a couple of good papers out within a limited exploration range but for the most part it is same ole, same ole, which along with no published details, is a fairly certain sign of snake oil. Call it zero point energy, perpetual motion, over unity cracker kernel modulation or what ever you please but without robust design and results, it is snake oil.

Frank Sanns
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Steven Sesselmann
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Steven Sesselmann »

With virtue and tenacity, I believe the fusion dragon will be tamed, the big guys have already shown us that the dragon just gets stronger the more power you fight it with.

The dragon is of course the Coulomb force, and the way to defeat it is to work with it and not against it, tame it and let it unleash it's energy for you.

That should F.I.C.S. it....

Steven
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Doug Browning »

Reading through the Brillouin white paper was rather interesting. I find it hard to believe that colllective phonons along with electrons could develop the 782 KeV for proton to neutron conversions. On the other hand, there may be a clue here as to what is going on (assuming something is for the moment at least). They are using a pulsed current thru the metal lattice (very thin wires) to produce reactions (so claimed), with the theorized expectation of producing this sea of phonons.

The protons solvated in the lattice are restricted to specific pockets between the lattice atoms. The high permeability of hydrogen diffusion thru the lattice means they can exchange positions readily, but are normally kept apart by coulomb forces. If the pulsed conduction electrons are passing thru the boundary regions between two protons (either a raised orbital, or an atom to atom tunneling case), a lattice assisted three way collision could be enabled (phonons maybe giving a low energy push as well along a lattice axis, so technically a four or more way interaction). The intermediary electron removes the coulomb repulsion long enough for two protons to bump together via phonon pushes. A three or four way interaction like this could avoid most of the 782 KeV or similar coulomb barrier, since the electron now binds to two positives.

There is no law against removing a barrier if the complete reaction is energetically favored. This multi way collision would be statistically impossible in a plasma state, but perhaps possible in a cold lattice network providing the dimensional constraints. Subsequent reactions would involve adding another proton, one at a time, via a similar electron interaction. Whether their scenario of reaching 4H and decay to 4He is possible, this is new physics certainly. An interesting point they make however about very low energy window states not being complete in the national database.

Since the 1H lattice solvated protons have a similar repetitive spacing as the background metal lattice (when fully packed), could there be a periodicity in the wavefunction of a conduction or tunneling electron that would put a peak at the opportune positions for mediation. This might explain why only certain metals or alloys or packing level will work. The slight expansion of the palladium when packed, at the very least, says that the protons are well localised in the lattice gaps.

The proposed decay of 4H to 4He involves a Beta emission. At Mev levels, the acceleration/deceleration of the Beta alone should produce gamma rays. Very surprising that gamma rays would not be detected here if the proposed reactions were occuring. Are the resulting 4He/alphas detected above background levels? They propose energy absorption and conversion to phonons. I would guess that some further mechanism is still needed at Mev levels. Multi photon or phonon some how? There is coulomb coupling to the lattice that could do multi phonon, but most likely that is way way too weak for effective nuclear Mev coupling. With maybe eight surrounding lattice atoms, they would each have to be capable of 100 KeV order interactions! A really tough one to solve.

It would seem that something must directly interact with the nuclear decay somehow, like lattice fields to slow down a nuclear spin transition. Is there a missing 4H -- 4He intermediary isomer state or two with a spin change? Does palladium have a MeV order nuclear isomer state that could absorb the gamma rays and decay in smaller steps? Their proposed 4H state clearly needs to be verified, and its decay modes fully understood. So they added Nickel to the mix now... Is this alloy ferromagnetic or paramagnetic?
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Frank Sanns »

Don,

The total energy produced (if produced) always comes to an abrupt end with no more heat production. That shoots down just about all nuclear and chemical theories except for solvation or phase transitions.

Frank Sanns
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Doug Browning »

Regardless of what the results are with this LENR/CF stuff, it would be quite interesting to take one mini Palladium/Nickel wire (lattice pre-loaded with 1H or 2D, like Brillouin et al use) and put a 10,000 Amp pulse, or more, (cap discharge) through it. Sufficient current to implode the wire (a massive phonon if you will), and sufficient current to saturate the lattice with conduction electron flow (to get hoped for charge neutralization in between the protons or D's). The test conducted with some radiation test gear of course (a metal sleeve around everything to shield out the EMP for the test equipment). This configuration looks even more interesting than 2D filled, hollow carbon fibers.

I assume someone has tried this already? Probably the real question here would be: whether the intense electron conduction flow in between the reactants lowers the fusion Coulomb threshold any? Maybe a less severe current pulse is needed then.
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Re: More fusion hype?

Post by Richard Hull »

Don's comments above are dealt with in a bit more depth as a possible alternate fusion experiment. see this thread posted in the proper forum.

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7293#p49165

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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