Fusion Power Thread

[M II A II R II K]

Could This Lump Power the Planet?


Published Nov 14, 2009

By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK

http://www.newsweek.com/id/222792

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab are betting $3.5 billion in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet that could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. For some, that's hard to swallow.


- The pellet Moses holds is a model, but the real version will contain a few milligrams of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from water. If you blast the pellet with a powerful laser, you can create a reaction like the one that takes place at the center of the sun. Harness that reaction, and you've created a star on earth, and with the heat from that star you can generate electricity without creating any pollution.

- What Moses is talking about is controlled nuclear fusion—fusing nuclei rather than splitting a nucleus, as happens in ordinary nuclear-fission power plants. In a fission reaction, the nucleus of a uranium atom is split into two smaller atoms, releasing energy in the form of heat. The heat is used to make steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. In fusion energy, the second half of this process (heat makes steam makes electricity) remains the same. But instead of splitting the nucleus of an atom, you're trying to force a deuterium nucleus to merge, or fuse, with a tritium nucleus. When that happens, you produce helium and throw off energy.

- Moses believes, however, that his lab, which is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has cracked the problem. The big challenge fusion has faced is lack of power. Even the biggest lasers in the world could not generate enough energy to smash nuclei together and make them stick. But the reason the building we're in is so huge—it covers the area of three football fields—is that it contains an enormous laser, or actually a system that combines 192 identical lasers and zaps them into a round chamber, about 30 feet in diameter, where the tiny pellet of fuel awaits the blast. NIF's laser, which took a decade to build and was completed earlier this year, can produce 60 times more energy than any other laser ever built. Right now it's still being tested. But next year Moses and his scientists will fire it up with a full load of deuterium-tritium fuel, and Moses feels confident it will achieve "ignition," meaning a controlled burn in which you get out more energy than you put in. Moses, an award-winning laser scientist with a wry sense of humor, explains the whole thing as he leads me on a tour through the NIF facility. It's a vast, beautiful, awe-inspiring machine, mind-blowing in its complexity, with miles of metal tubes—all part of a system that starts with a tiny pulse of light, channels that light through machines that amplify its intensity and rocket the beam along using specially grown crystals and thousands of lenses and mirrors, and finally focuses these beams down to hit a target that is the size of a peppercorn—all in one millionth of a second.

[WestCoast]

totally sweet!

[youngregina]

perpetual energy?

[M II A II R II K]

Europe puts brakes on fusion project


November 19, 2009

By Geoff Brumfiel

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...es-on-fusion-p

The European Union (EU) is backing away from a 2018 start date for ITER, a multi-billion-euro fusion reactor under construction in the south of France.

- ITER is a massive experiment to prove the viability of nuclear fusion as a power source. When completed, superconducting magnets will squeeze a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes  deuterium and tritium  to temperatures in excess of 150 million �C. The resulting fusion reaction should produce ten times the power consumed in the process of creating the plasma.

- The EU is by far the largest participant in the project. It will pay roughly 45% of the construction costs of ITER, while the other participants  China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States  will each provide roughly 9%. The costs were originally budgeted at around �5 billion (US$7.4 billion) when the agreement to build ITER was signed in 2006, but they are now expected to be roughly double that figure by the time the reactor is built.

ITER WEBSITE

[M II A II R II K]

New inside out hover-magnet fusion reactor debuts at MIT


26th January 2010

By Lewis Page

Read More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01...usion_reactor/

MIT boffins this week have taken the wraps off a new kind of nuclear fusion reactor, different from the humdrum tokamaks and laser-ignition chambers which have thus far offered such disappointing results.

The new kit is called the Levitated Dipole Experiment (LDX), and features a half-ton magnetic doughnut suspended in midair by super powerful force fields. The underlying principles were discovered by observing the behaviour of space plasma interacting with the magnetic fields of planets such as Jupiter.

• Video Link

[huggkruka]

Intensly interesting stuff. I really hope we can pull it off soon, it would solve a lot of our problems. Here's another approach:

A startup snags funding to start early work on a low-budget test reactor.
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/

On the outside of the metal sphere are 220 pneumatically controlled pistons, each programmed to simultaneously ram the surface of the sphere at 100 meters a second. The force of the pistons sends an acoustic wave through the lead-lithium mixture, and that accelerates into a shock wave as it reaches the plasma, which is made of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.

If this works, we're never going to hear the end of "hammer time" jokes.

[M II A II R II K]

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes


28 January 2010

Read More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8485669.stm

A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show. The controlled fusion of atoms - creating conditions like those in our Sun - has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source.

- The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

- Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser - by a factor of 20.

- The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start "ignition" - effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.

[M II A II R II K]

Peering inside an artificial sun


January 29, 2010

David L. Chandler

Read More: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/plasma-science.html

After more than five decades of research, a major milestone toward the harnessing of fusion power is expected within the next year or two. This milestone, known as “fusion ignition,” should take place at an experimental facility built for that purpose in California. Known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, it started initial experiments last fall.

Researchers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) have played an important part in making this pivotal event possible, and that role is outlined this week in a paper published in the journal Science. In a nutshell, they’ve figured out how to use a second fusion reaction as a kind of backlight, allowing them to see the details of what’s happening inside the primary reaction.

A tiny chamber made of gold, called a hohlraum, is used to contain the pellet of heavy hydrogen fuel at the center of a fusion reaction at the National Ignition Facility. Laser beams enter through the two open ends of the hohlraum and are reflected in toward the fuel, heating it up to produce the fusion reaction.

Image: National Ignition Facility

[M II A II R II K]

Cold fusion is real, say scientists


22nd Mar 2010

Emma Woollacott



Read More: http://www.tgdaily.com/general-scien...=Google+Reader

Cold fusion is widely regarded as being just about as practical a technology as a perpetual motion machine or the Philosopher's Stone. But at a conference taking place over the next two days in San Francisco, scientists will argue that they're starting to make it a reality.

At the symposium, University of Illinois professor George Miley will report on progress toward a new type of battery that works through a cold fusion process and has a longer life than conventional batteries. It consists of a special type of electrolytic cell that operates at low temperature. The process involves purposely creating defects in the metal electrode of the cell.

Vladimir Vysotskii of Kiev National Shevchenko University will present experimental evidence that bacteria can undergo a type of cold fusion process and could be used to dispose of nuclear waste. He will describe studies of nuclear transmutation of stable and radioactive isotopes in biological systems.

And Tadahiko Mizuno of Hokkaido University in Japan claims he's developed an unconventional cold fusion device that uses phenanthrene, a substance found in coal and oil, as a reactant. He reports on excess heat production and gamma radiation production from the device.

"Overall heat production exceeded any conceivable chemical reaction by two orders of magnitude," Mizuno says.

[M II A II R II K]

• Video Link

[scalziand]

http://www.prweb.com/releases/fusion...web3766134.htm

Edison's Idea Factory to Ignite 2 Industrial Revolutions? Privately-Funded Hot Fusion Program Aims At 2010 Energy Break-Even

Hastings, MI (PRWEB) March 30, 2010 -- Anticipating net energy in 2010 or 2011,Energy Made Cleanly CTO Matthew R. Wood plans to aggressively minimize commercialization delays by building 2,500 local college collaborative network of DPF-based aneutronic fusion energy labs funded by alumni, business, and community leaders to address several clean energy challenges. Economy, solar, and bio fuels also to benefit.

[M II A II R II K]

New fuel could solve fusion


12 April 2010



Read More: http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/...=Google+Reader

Imagine if you could generate electricity using nuclear power that emitted no radioactivity: it would be the answer to the world's dream of finding a clean, sustainable energy source. That is the great hope raised by researchers who believe they have found a radical new path to the ultimate goal of solving the world's energy crisis through nuclear fusion power, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

The international team of researchers - led by Emeritus Professor Heinrich Hora, of the UNSW Department of Theoretical Physics - has shown through computational studies that a special fuel ignited by brief but powerful pulses of energy from new high-energy lasers may be the key to a success that has long eluded physicists. The intense laser beam would be used to ignite a fuel made of light hydrogen and boron-11. The resulting ignition would be largely free of radioactive emissions and would release more than enough energy to generate electricity.

The amount of radiation released would be even less than that emitted by current power stations that burn coal, which contains trace amounts of uranium. In another plus, the fuel source is plentiful and readily accessible and the waste product of ignition would be clean helium gas. "This has the potential to be the best route to fusion energy," says Steve Haan, an expert in nuclear fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, in a news report in the Royal Chemical Society's Highlights in Chemical Technology.

[scalziand]

http://www.physorg.com/news192730850.html

New project aims for fusion ignition

Russia and Italy have entered into an agreement to build a new fusion reactor outside Moscow that could become the first such reactor to achieve ignition, the point where a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining instead of requiring a constant input of energy. The design for the reactor, called Ignitor, originated with MIT physics professor Bruno Coppi, who will be the project's principal investigator.

The concept for the new reactor builds on decades of experience with MIT’s Alcator fusion research program, also initiated by Coppi, which in its present version (called Alcator C-Mod) has the highest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure (two of the most important measures of performance in magnetic fusion) of any fusion reactor, and is the largest university-based fusion reactor in the world.

The key ingredient in all fusion experiments is plasma, a kind of hot gas made up of charged particles such as atomic nuclei and electrons. In fusion reactors, atomic nuclei — usually of isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium — are forced together through a combination of heat and pressure to overcome their natural electrostatic repulsion. When the nuclei join together, or fuse, they release prodigious amounts of energy.

Ignitor would be about twice the size of Alcator C-Mod, with a main donut-shaped chamber 1.3 meters across, and have an even stronger magnetic field. It will be much smaller and less expensive than the major international fusion project called ITER (with a chamber 6.2 meters across), currently under construction in France. Though originally designed to achieve ignition, the ITER reactor has been scaled back and is now not expected to reach that milestone.

The Ignitor reactor, Coppi says, will be “a very compact, inexpensive type of machine,” and unlike the larger ITER could be ready to begin operations within a few years. Its design is based on a particularly effective combination of factors that researchers unexpectedly discovered during the many years of running the Alcator program, and that were later confirmed in experiments at other reactors. Together, these factors produce especially good confinement of the plasma and a high degree of purity (impurities in the hot gases can be a major source of inefficiency). The new design aims to preserve these features to produce the highest plasma current densities — the amount of electric current in a given area of plasma. The design also has additional structures needed to produce and confine burning fusion plasmas in order to create the conditions needed for ignition, Coppi says.

[scalziand]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8676678.stm

North Korea reports nuclear fusion success

North Korea has announced that it has made significant progress towards the development of thermo-nuclear power.

It is a claim that is likely to be met with some scepticism.

Despite hopes that the technology can produce large quantities of cheap, clean energy, no country has so far succeeded in making it work.

North Korea is one of the world's poorest countries and struggles to generate enough electricity for lighting and other basic needs.

The statement, carried by North Korea's official state media, said the country's scientists had succeeded in carrying out nuclear fusion.

Laboratory demonstrations of the process, known to release large amounts of energy, are nothing new.

But the North Koreans appear to be claiming to have gone much further, by building what they describe as a "unique thermo-nuclear reaction device".

Not sure whether they mean technology that would be useful for a bomb or for a powerplant or even if this claim should be taken seriously at all.

[Trantor]

you guys should go no further than POLYWELL, the fusion system designed by Bussard. Your navy is funding it and all the tests results so far point that it not only will work but will be the cheapest reactor ($200 million), creating the less radiation and being the most lightweight (thus an ideal candidate for spacecraft... no wonder the US navy is funding it... it wants it powering every ship in the navy)

[scalziand]

^^I think it's clear that an alternate design like plasma focuses or polywell will be realized sooner (and much more cheaply) than large scale tokamaks like ITER or the others that receive the lions share of funding.

[JDRCRASH]

Man, Cold Fusion would be one helluva breakthrough.

[scalziand]

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.co...rmed&Itemid=90

High Fusion Yields Confirmed

Posted in News on June 09, 2010 by Aaron Blake

New Calibration Confirms FF-1’s High Fusion Yields

Tests in early June have confirmed that FF-1 is producing higher fusion yields than have been achieved with any other DPF at the same peak current. The new tests were calibrated with LPP’s silver activation detector and our new commercially-purchased bubble detectors. In our two calibration shots, the bubble detector and our silver activation counter showed excellent agreement. We can now confidently use our previous measurements of neutron yields to compare our results with those of other DPF devices. Figure 1 shows two of the best shots from FF-1 (red dots) compared with the best shots for all non-LPP DPFs (blue dots). The FF-1 results are as much as a factor of ten above the other results and show a sharper increase with higher current. The green dot shows LPP results from 1994, which also lie above the main body of results. We cannot say for sure yet if this improvement in performance is due to our use of the Axial Field Coil or to the small radius of our electrodes or both. Further experiments are needed to determine this.


Figure 1. Neutron yield in various DPFs in the world. Derived from J.O. Pouzo, M.M. Milano in Current Trends in International Fusion Research: Proceedings of Fourth Symposium. NRC Canada pp 33. (2007)

The calibration also allows us to confidently chart our own progress over the course of 2010. Figure 2 shows the increase of fusion yield from FF-1 so far this year. Each point represents a new “record” for FF-1 yield. The figure shows that we have traveled a bit less than half way to our goal of demonstrating scientific feasibility which would involve a yield of 10,000 to 100,000 joules. If we can continue at the rate of progress of the spring, we should reach our goal by year-end.


Figure 2. LPP’s past and planned energy yield per shot in joules.

New Spark Plugs Pass First Tests

Our new spark plugs, which we hope to be far more rugged than the old, automotive ones, have passed their initial tests. Production of the spark plugs was slowed during May, partially because of redesigns needed as we went along. In addition, our first designs, tested in late May, did not work well. We had selected Macro, a tough ceramic, as the insulator for the spark plugs. However, this idea did not work. In our initial tests, all four insulators broke after two shots. Dr. Subramanian suggested using Lexan plastic for the insulator. Lexan is extremely hard to break, being used for bullet-proof glass, but melts at low temperatures. We would also try another plastic, PEEK, which has a much higher melting point, but is somewhat less impact resistant. After an initial eight shots at 24 kV with three new spark plugs, two using Lexan and one using PEEK (plus one old spark plug for symmetry), no wear was visible on the insulators, although there was very slight pitting of the tungsten tip. Since we don’t know how the insulators will react at higher voltages, we have decided to make half the insulators from one plastic and half from the other. The three switches fired within 50 ns of each other, which is acceptable and can be improved with further adjustment of the spark gaps. We expect to have all 12 spark plugs working by the end of this week.

Kansas State Graduate Students Arrive to Help LPP Project

Two Physics graduate students from Kansas State University have arrived for a month of work at LPP’s lab. The two students, Mohamed Ismail and Amgad Mohamed, have worked for six months at the small DPF facility run by Professor Ali Abdou, a former classmate of Dr. Subramanian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Abdou will also be participating in our research for a week at the end of the month, so our manpower will be greatly enhanced in June. The students have dived into the work and have succeeded in reducing the remaining electrical noise on the Near Time-of-Flight instrument by a factor of 75 in their first day of work. We are looking forward to working with our new colleagues this month, and anticipate great benefits from their assistance. The extra manpower will hopefully boost LPP’s progress, just in time for Mr. Lerner to present a paper at the International Conference on Plasma Science in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 20th.

[Trantor]

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[scalziand]

^I'm glad someone uploaded that program to Youtube. It was very good when I watched it. It's a shame that they only did all the big projects though, and didn't cover Polywell or FocusFusion.