DailyDirt: Fusion Is Less Than 30 Years Away (Maybe)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fusion has been a promising potential energy source for decades. The joke is that it's always just 30 years away. Every so often, people working on various forms of fusion make some news with press releases claiming that they've discovered some revolutionary new way to achieve cheap/free/clean fusion. But whenever a fusion science "breakthrough" is announced in a press release in lieu of a peer-reviewed journal, it usually turns out to be disappointing. Everyone wants to see fusion energy become a reality, but it'd be nice to see real scientific progress towards it instead of promotional hype to boost the reputation of a lone inventor or a company's skunkworks program. It's great to be optimistic about the future of fusion; just don't cry "wolf" too many times, okay?

• Lockheed Martin has issued a press release claiming a "breakthrough" in fusion and a prediction that they'll have a working prototype within the next 5 years. This new approach appears to achieve a "high beta" so that more plasma can be contained, but it would be nice if more of the science were publicly available -- especially before the press release. [url]
• University of Washington engineers have proposed a fusion reactor design they call the dynomak which could produce energy more cheaply than coal. Getting to a breakeven point might be a bigger hurdle than making fusion energy cheap. [url]
• Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat device is a "cold fusion" (or low-energy nuclear reaction, LENR) generator that claims to produce oodles of energy without any waste or any negative side effects whatsoever. Independent verification of this device's capabilities is claimed, but what is really necessary is independent replication of this device. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: andrea rossi, cold fusion, dynomak, e-cat, energy, fusion, lenr, low energy nuclear reaction, skunkworks
Companies: lockheed martin

DailyDirt: Taking Another Look At Nuclear Energy...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Nuclear energy has been around for decades, but its safety and the safety of its radioactive waste have always been a political nightmare. Still, some researchers have been redesigning nuclear reactors to make them safer in many ways, but these newer designs have yet to be scaled up and used commercially. Maybe someday nuclear technology will be ubiquitous, but it'll likely take a long time before anyone is willing to embrace fission/fusion energy that doesn't come from the Sun.

• A European research reactor called Guinevere demonstrates the safety and benefits of a hybrid reactor-accelerator design. This nuclear reactor design is an accelerator-driven system (ADS) and uses a particle accelerator so that its nuclear reactor can run without enough fissile material to generate a nuclear chain reaction (so all the nuclear reactions stop when the external particle accelerator stops). A bonus feature is that its radioactive waste material can be transmuted via the particle accelerator into elements with lower half-lives that may be more convenient to handle and store. [url]
• Teenager Taylor Wilson has been building nuclear reactors for a few years already, and his current project is to build small, modular nuclear reactors capable of generating just 50-100 megawatts of electricity. Wilson's reactors would create a more decentralized network of electricity generation, but that's a lot of NIMBY to overcome.... [url]
• Italian scientists have halted research on piezonuclear fission. Low Energy Nuclear Reactions have been associated with Cold Fusion, so if there's any kind of non-classical fission/fusion going on, it may take extraordinary evidence to convince anyone of it. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: cold fusion, electricity, energy, fission, lenr, nimby, nuclear, particle accelerator, peizonuclear, power, reactor

DailyDirt: Cold Fusion Sounds Like A Free Lunch (There Ain't No Such Thing)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Clean, cheap and reliable (pick 2!) energy sources would significantly change how the world works. But so far, the technology has eluded us. Various forms of nuclear fusion always seem just a few years in the future -- and meanwhile the sun taunts us with its enormous proof-of-concept activity, just happily turning hydrogen into helium only one astronomical unit away. With that in mind, here are a few quick links on some sorta sketchy ways to get something for nothing.

• Creating copper from nickel and hydrogen -- and producing energy in the process -- sounds like a scam. But when these "Mr. Fusion" units are (or aren't) being exported from Italy later this year, we'll know for sure. [url]
• The Casimir effect and the Casimir-Polder force have been observed in 1948 -- demonstrating that a vacuum isn't really nothing. Here's your free lunch, amateur physicists. Enjoy! [url]
• According to WikiLeaks, Libya traded its nuclear material enrichment program for millions of dollars in other equipment. Did Libyans read The Mouse That Roared in jr. high, too? [url]
• To discover more stuff on alternative energy, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: casimir effect, casimir-polder force, cold fusion, libya, nuclear energy