Fusion Scientists See Progress

Interesting read:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...rogress-as-obama-shows-no-ardor-correct-.html

“All great progress is made by unreasonable men"

Whatcha say DCF?

I have serious doubts that this is going to happen. The problem is that creating the conditions for controlled fusion requires so much energy, I'm doubtful the scientists will even reach the break-even point, let alone come up with something which produces more power than it consumes.

Still, if they could even get a 1% return, it might make fusion viable. But I'm not gonna worry about it, cause it won't happen in my lifetime.

While I think we're still pretty far off from this, I do believe it is possible. While the initial energy input requirements are astronomical, if they can start a sustained reaction, the payback time becomes readily measurable.

Every time I read about the plasma furnaces being used to incinerate landfill debris that produce enough "syngas" [largely hydrogen] to sustain its own operation once started, using no net additional input of energy, I think of fusion.

I'd have to agree with the "unreasonable men" meme.

NIF is never going to make power, ever. It really was just greenwash on the nuke upkeep program - a way to make tests that don't violate some treaties we'd rather not - because if we do...who knows who else will be emboldened. It's taken my entire life for background radiation from the atmospheric tests to get somewhere back to normal - most of us grew up with twice normal exposure from those.
I'd rather not go back there. Nukes degrade over time, and obviously you want confidence they'll work when needed - that's what NIF and other programs were meant to insure, along with getting new data that might make designing "better" ones possible.

ITER - well, I could go on and on, but the tokomak boys (this isn't the only one) have been saying just give us another few bill and another decade and they are there.
We are on the ~4th go-around on that - I'd have fired them all on #2, frankly.

Funny thing about ITER. The figured out that they had to use DT fuel (two isotopes of hydrogen) to get to gain (maybe, maybe even with that they won't). There's no natural T around, so they'd have to breed that - nasty, very radioactive and bioactive gas. Anyway, the REAL problem they face is that the DT reaction makes 14 megavolt energy neutrons, which simply take things like stainless steel (not to mention superconducting magnet windings) apart in a very short time by just bashing the atoms out of the metallic lattice, or in layman's terms - turning metal into powder. They figured this well known phenomena (in other nuclear work) out after only a few tens of billions, and work since the 60's or so. OOPS! They've kind of shut down while they try and figure out a new design that wouldn't have this problem, and are looking at (what I consider) stupid things - like a chamber made of spinning liquid lithium to hopefully absorb enough neutrons to protect the outside stuff. Trouble is, the Li will also evaporate and get into their mix, and inhibit fusion...
Shorter - they are screwed. But various governments are excited about getting some T out of this - it's part of any thermonuclear weapon design, and decays with a half-life of 12 years. In practice, this means you gotta take your nuke apart every couple years to replace it...how often vs how much yield loss is why NIF existed - they thought if they really knew, it'd save money and risk in the long run.

No other methodology is getting much if any funding - it's almost "supression" but I kind of doubt it's anything but being stupid. U of Wisconson has a program they fund from other money, and it's pretty good, doing fusor type work as I do - they are my only competition. I'm beating them in Q right now, they are doing some great things in total output and instrumentation I can't do here - and we share results like good scientists should. But we're a long way from breakeven. As that meme says - you gotta be a little crazy to think the 10^4 improvement we need/want is possible.

I'm more than a little nuts. I think I found a way to get it, and have already gotten factor 500 (out of 10k we need) in tests, which is how I beat U-Wis (they have 20 times my output, but have to put in 500 times more power to get it). Diagnostics I've done on that show me that all I managed was to convert from "always wrong spin" of the reactants, to "random". I think "always right" might just do the trick, assuming the spin conservation laws propounded in the '30s by W Pauli are right (and they are, for everything else, but have been completely ignored by ALL fusion researchers but me).

I'm right now building a setup that will let me test/prove this thesis, which requires no violation of the widely accepted standard model laws - it's all tech, not science - but it's difficult tech, kind of like a super electron microscope with added constraints, for D. I expect to have testing going within a year (it's not as if I have 8 hours a day to do it, it'd be a lot faster if I did). If I can even prove I can affect the ratios of the three possible DD reactions (one of which makes no neutrons and outputs hot helium only and a gamma ray, easy to harvest) - that's near-Nobel turf, no one else has even thought to try - they are all "thermal/random" crazy. It's like thinking you can win with a high-firepower weapon even if you can't aim it. Duh.

NIF, meanwhile - O's going to get his way and shut it down almost certainly. Whether he should or not, I don't know. We really do need the nuke stewardship program to keep credible to get to disarmament, but that's getting into a realm that's political and outside my expertise.

Something that complex that tries to make power with a series of rather large bangs is going to run into trouble - that was never really their goal, for what they actually want, they only need a few a year, not a few a second. Imagine the stress failures of whatever holds those bangs....it's just not going to fly with the materials or metamaterials we know of now. The bangs involved aren't the nice controlled burn you get in a gasoline engine, these are the "real deal".


Might be worth looking into if we get to some new wonder material - in fact, that's how I used to be a profitable inventor - some new thing, say NeFeB magnets, comes around, and I go and think "now what used to be impossible or difficult that I can now do easy with this?" Often I get there first, because most people aren't as inter-disciplinary as I am and it takes awhile to connect the dots. So for example, I was the first with a permanent magnet miniature cyclotron design that solves a ton of problems for users - the entire thing goes easily into the vacuum tank, instead of having to have a big round but flat tank in the magnet field, making the required magnets smaller - nature is going my way on that. The configuraton solves most all the tough problems in cyclotrons (used in hospitals to make the junk they inject you with for pet scans and rads for cancer stuff), like drive level required so the spiral is coarse enough to miss the beam ejection plates - mine doesn't need high drive for that, nor does it even need beam ejection to do what's required, I can let it hit the walls and get what's wanted. And on and on. Many tons of steel and water cooled copper become a couple magnets and iron pole pieces you can hold in one hand at arms length without getting tired fast, for example.

I go all weak when Fusor starts giving us a tech talk
and read slowly to -

try and take it all in
make the experience last

I guess most of us rarely get beyond the 'con' part of fusion (-:

Fusion is interesting. In most reactions, none of the stuff changes identity, it just becomes more tightly bound per nucleon, and the difference is the output energy.

You don't necessarily HAVE to put in a ton of energy. The way most do it (thermal), yes, you do. That's because the energy input is thermalized, and with the laws of thermodynamics (which do have a few small issues) all that input energy splits up evenly into all 6 degrees of freedom - translation over X,Y,Z, and rotation around all three. When all you actually need is to get these self-repelling things close enough together for long enough for quantum tunneling to take you into fusion - the resulting nucleous being in a lower energy state, and energy likes to "roll downhill".

So if you can limit your energy input to one axis - translation in say, X (colliding beams) then that's factor 6 improvement right there. There's a lot more to it of course - it's hard to focus a beam of particles that repel each other to a tight beam - unlike photons, they push themselves apart (which is why your old-style TV went out of focus when you turned up the brightness).

Further, how close they have to be for how long depends on how much they "want" to fuse - spin must be conserved for example, and it's kind of a trick to prepare charged particles of just the right spin *before* you put in that energy to accelerate them.

By what I've said, it's easy to see where there are 3 DD reactions (D is a proton and a neutron, common stuff, not radioactive).
One is DD-> He3 + neutron (same number of everything, but two reaction products
Another DD -> T + proton (same deal, just a different combo of outputs)

Both of the above are roughly 50/50 in prevalence in thermal situations. They are much more common than the DD -> He4 (normal helium) because He4 is spin zero and D is spin 2. The more common reactions have two things to carry off spin, so are easier to get to go...to make this last one happen is more of a trick. But since it's fully bound He4 at the output, this reaction also puts out 4x (rough number) the energy of the other two - those put out about 3.5 MeV, the last puts out ~16Mev (for the same input energy).

You know, all these little factors of 100 and 6 and 4 start to add up, at least if you're a dreamer like me, and see 10,000 as not that huge an obstacle. To run my fusor presently (lousy reaction rate, but still world beating for now) I'm only putting in 50kv tops...and per reaction getting on average 3.5 mev...but most of the things I'm shooting at each other simply miss at present, or are in a spin state that can't fuse.

That's what I plan to fix as soon as I can. Thermal fusion is like trying to create car crashes with random directions, or sometimes so stupid as all in the same direction - on a highway, you don't have very many crashes because everyone is going the same way...

Ions (w/o electrons on them) are truly tiny...so most even colliding beam fusion is kind of like shooting shotguns at one another at 100 yds and hoping some pellets hit.
Now, if you took two funnels and put them point to point and shot them.....you get the idea, there's a lot of low hanging and unexplored stuff out there.

pmbug.com . Goldmart reviews to Nuclear Fusion all in one website. Fascinating.

We're a diverse group of good people here, to be sure. We have a lot in common in our basic outlooks, but different expertise. It's good to share, IMO.

When two guitar players swap licks - they both go away better, no one loses. That's a simple case. Here we look at paradigms, ways of looking at the world, and share what we know, because you just never know - some clue from over there might help you figure out something over here, seemingly unrelated till you connect the dots.

...and it is all just plain fecking interesting!!!


Thanks Fusor, I was lucky enough to got very good teachers in my lifetime, up to a high school (none of them with your expertise, but still good people at the required level) level, - and if I came across somebody like you in my college time, I think my passion for knowledge at that level would even grow back then, instead of dwindle.

...Never to late to fill the holes in my brain a bit, I suppose

Hey DCF, not sure if you are still receiving notifications from forum or not, but I ran across something this morning and wondered about your thoughts:

... The U.S. Navy has filed a potentially revolutionary patent application for a radical new compact fusion reactor that claims to improve upon the shortcomings of the Skunk Works CFR, and judging from the identity of the reactor’s inventor, it's sure to raise eyebrows in the scientific community.

This latest design is the brainchild of the elusive Salvatore Cezar Pais, the inventor of the Navy’s bizarre and controversial room temperature superconductors, high energy electromagnetic field generators, and sci-fi-sounding propulsion technologies that The War Zone has previously reported on. The patent for Pais’ “Plasma Compression Fusion Device” was applied for on March 22, 2018, and was just published on September 26, 2019. The claim states, in part:

"At present there are few envisioned fusion reactors/devices that come in a small, compact package (ranging from 0.3 to 2 meters in diameter) and typically they use different versions of plasma magnetic confinement. Three such devices are the Lockheed Martin (LM) Skunk Works Compact Fusion Reactor (LM-CFR) , the EMC2 Polywell fusion concept, and the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) machine. [...] These devices feature short plasma confinement times, possible plasma instabilities with the scaling of size, and it is questionable whether they have the ability of achieving the break - even fusion condition, let alone a self-sustained plasma burn leading to ignition."

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It is claimed in the patent application that this plasma compression fusion device is capable of producing power in the gigawatt (1 billion watts) to terawatt (1 trillion watts) range and above with input power only in the kilowatt (1,000 watts) to megawatt (1,000,000 watts) range. By comparison, America's largest nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona, generates around 4,000 megawatts (4 gigawatts), and the A1B nuclear reactors designed for the Navy's Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers generate around 700 megawatts. The patent even claims that the device can "possibly lead to ignition plasma burn, that is self-sustained plasma burn without need for external input power."

Most fusion reactor designs employ magnetic confinement to contain fusion reactions. This involves torus-shaped coils of superconductors to produce powerful magnetic fields that confine a reactor's plasma core.

The Navy's new plasma compression fusion device, however, claims as its key feature the same principle as in Salvatore Pais' other inventions: the “controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields.” Pais cites some of his prior publications as evidence that this type of spinning, vibrating electromagnetic system can create the high magnetic fields required to contain powerful fusion reaction in a stable form.

The patent describes how those magnetic fields are generated within a hollow plasma chamber which includes one or more opposing pairs of conical or domed “counter-spinning dynamic fusors” that feature an electrically charged outer surface containing ducts that inject fuel gases, such as Deuterium or Deuterium-Xenon, into the plasma chamber. As these electrically-charged fusors spin, Pais claims, they “create a concentrated magnetic energy flux and electromagnetic radiation within the vacuum chamber,” compressing and heating the gasses within. These fusors vibrate at a high rate as they spin thanks to piezoelectric films such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT) - the same piezoelectric metamaterial Pais claims enables his room-temperature superconductor patent.
...

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More: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...as-now-filed-one-for-a-compact-fusion-reactor

Be nice to hear from Fusor.
He went real quiet after a major and unexpected rise in the output of his experiments with fusion. I think it was a 10 fold increase on what was expected and he got a good blast of unexpected radiation along the lines of ' good job I'm not planning on having children' ......

He seemed pretty excited and somewhat stunned at this step change and then went dark on us.
I did email Cog Dis ( of ZH fame ) a he had recently moved to become a neighbour of Doug ( DCF) and while Cog Dis was able to confirm that Doug was still around, he was not close enough to know any details of Doug's activities.

And while on the subject of fusion and 'extremely efficient generators' I have been a bit involved with organising the Electric Universe conference for the last 2 years.

The SAFIRE team have created a plasma reactor chamber in an attempt to replicate the Suns atmosphere, the premise being that its the Sun's atmosphere that drives Earths climate not a thermo nuclear reaction within the Sun's body.

I learnt from the team last year that they had a worrying amount of energy output at times and this year they openly admitted it.
They know this is a dangerous thing to claim and are careful not to use terms like overunity but the evidence is presented in this video and the clear path to replication of the teams endeavours is now open.
Check out the video that was made around this years conference -


It felt like a historic moment for those in the audience.

* bump *

...
For the first time last week scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outside San Francisco were able to create a nuclear fusion reaction that generated more energy than was used to start it, ..., according to the Department of Energy.
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Right now scientists are focused on two methods to achieve nuclear fusion, one setting off a nuclear reaction and using magnetic fields to contain it and the other by burning concentrated nuclear fuel with high-powered lasers, the latter of which scientists at Lawrence Livermore used.

The problem with both technologies has been that it takes more energy to create the fusion reaction than it produces. Scientists have been steadily improving the efficiency of the reaction but the recent breakthrough in California represented the first time they achieved a net energy gain.
...
She said while it would likely be decades before the technology achieved commercialization, last week's breakthrough was a, "fundamental building block."

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^ Press conference lasts 30 minutes, then there is a panel discussion with the Lawrence Livermore folk.

If this actually does work there is no way that it will be made available to the masses.

Doc Brown has one.

... Unlike today's nuclear plants, which split atoms apart, fusing them is many times more powerful, with little long-term radiation. And it's easy to turn off, so no meltdowns. But getting from the first ignition to a powerplant will be hard.

Scott Pelley: How many shots do you take in a day?

Tammy Ma: We take, on average, a little more than one shot per day.

Scott Pelley: If this was theoretically a commercial power plant, how many shots a day would be required?

Tammy Ma: Approximately ten shots per second would be required. And the other big challenge, of course, is not just increasing the repetition rate, but also getting the gain out of the targets to go up to about a factor of 100.

Not only would the reactions have to produce 100 times more energy, but a power plant would need 900,000 perfect diamond shells a day. Also, the lasers would have to be much more efficient. Remember, December's breakthrough put two units of energy in and got three out? Well, it took 300 units of power to fire the lasers. By that standard, it was 300 in, three out. That detail was not front and center at the Department of Energy's December news conference which fused the advance with an unlikely timeline.
...

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Somewhere, DCFusor is laughing.

This seems more viable

WASHINGTON, May 17 (Reuters) - Companies looking to harness the process that powers the sun and stars to generate electricity expect to spend about $7 billion by the time their first nuclear fusion plants come online, a survey published on Wednesday said.

Fusion occurs when the nuclei of two light atoms such as hydrogen, heated to extreme temperatures, fuse into one heavier nucleus releasing vast amounts of energy.

I wonder if @DCFusor might have built a viable fusion machine if he had $7B in funding to work with...

US scientists have achieved net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the second time since a historic breakthrough in December last year in the quest to find a near-limitless, safe and clean source of energy

Scientists at the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory repeated the breakthrough in an experiment in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on 30 July that produced a higher energy yield than in December, a Lawrence Livermore spokesperson said.

Final results are still being analyzed, the spokesperson added.

When Frito Lay placed nacho cheese on a taco chip i thought it was bigger than landing on the moon.

I was cruising around the internet today jumping from here to there and ran across this:


Cool to see that Doug's work isn't completely lost.

So no actual new news other than some countries are building facilities for more testing/research. One of these teams is going to hit the lottery one of these days I guess.

pmbug said:

So no actual new news other than some countries are building facilities for more testing/research. One of these teams is going to hit the lottery one of these days I guess.

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A bit off topic but..........

How did Doug Coulter find this place? I've spent time reading through his forum, watching some of his vids and reading some stuff about him on different forums. He's a unique individual.....for sure. Would have been a neat experience to have known him personally.

The age of ignition pdf

searcher said:

How did Doug Coulter find this place? ...

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I had posted some comments on ZH back in the day. DCF and a few others (including @DoChenRollingBearing and @rblong2us if I'm not mistaken) also found there way here from there.

nickndfl said:

Doc Brown has one.

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I already got one.

Looks like it’s sold out now though.

pmbug said:

I had posted some comments on ZH back in the day. DCF and a few others (including @DoChenRollingBearing and @rblong2us if I'm not mistaken) also found there way here from there.

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Doug Coulter was also a neighbour of a regular zh contributor who wrote deep and long winded essays ( possibly hedgeless horseman ) and as Bug says , there were some comments threads that had these names pop up, like bumping into random folk you sort of know, that created a loose cohesion of folk who had similar views . I gave up on zh comment threads a long while ago though . Too much anger …….. I feel at home here

In a news conference today (Feb. 8), representatives from the Joint European Torus (JET) facility declared that the reactor's final tests yielded 69.26 megajoules of heat from just 0.21 milligrams of fuel — the equivalent of burning 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of coal. This is more total energy — though not more net positive energy — than any other fusion reaction has produced thus far.
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JET first fired up in 1983 in Oxfordshire, England. Its doughnut-like shape, known as a tokamak, allows scientists to whip modified hydrogen atoms into hot plasma by accelerating them to breathtaking speeds using a magnetic field. This setup creates the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion — the combination of two light atomic nuclei into one heavier one, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the process.
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JET's legacy will live on in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a massive tokamak in southern France scheduled to start up in 2025. The $22 billion dollar project will use a very similar fusion strategy, but at a much larger scale.
...

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China's "artificial sun" reactor has broken its own world record for maintaining super-hot plasma, marking another milestone in the long road towards near-limitless clean energy.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a steady, highly confined loop of plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — for 1,066 seconds on Monday (Jan. 20), which more than doubled its previous best of 403 seconds, Chinese state media reported.
...
EAST is one of several nuclear fusion reactors worldwide, but they all currently use far more energy than they produce. ...

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More:

Proxima Fusion, a venture-capital-backed company working on making nuclear fusion a reality, has open-sourced its reactor design in a scientific journal this week. Although a highly technical piece of work involving a lot of engineering, the company wants to share this information with the fusion community, whether based in the US or China.
...
... Much of the work in fusion energy has happened in the tokamak design of fusion reactors. Still, Proxima’s approach is slightly different since it uses stellarators.

Tokamaks and stellarators use extremely strong electromagnets to contain fusion plasma inside donut-shaped vessels. However, there is a difference in how they achieve this.

While tokamaks use a combination of electromagnets and current-induced plasma, stellarators operate only using magnets. This requires the vessel and magnet design to be much more complex while allowing the reaction to run continuously and safely.

Thus, stellarators offer the advantage of continuous operation for longer durations and protection of materials from fatigue over tokamaks while also being simpler to operate.

About a decade ago, researchers at MIT showed how a commercial-scale fusion reactor using a tokamak design could be built. What followed was a series of startups working with the tokamak approach to achieving nuclear fusion power.

Fusion energy technology has now seen another milestone moment, with the open-source design for a commercial-scale stellarator design.
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For publication, the Stellaris design has undergone detailed peer review and ensures it can overcome physics and engineering constraints through various simulations. The company is now ready to take the next step and build a demonstrator plant called Alpha as early as 2031.

If all goes well, Proxima Fusion’s design could power our grids as early as the next decade.
...

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More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...or-design-to-take-on-china-russia/ar-AA1zPuPm

We have Low Energy Fusion... Called LENR. But there are even better technologies for energy production. Wonder if Fusor was part of the discovery of the LENR reactions. Would like to have had a conversation with him. It started coming around again as I was in grad school.

@Voodoo - you might also enjoy this old thread: