Experts Say New Desktop Fusion Claims Seem More Credible

[kysrsoze]

Scientists are again claiming they have made a Sun in a jar, offering perhaps a revolutionary energy source, and this time even some skeptics find the evidence intriguing enough to call for a closer look.

Using ultrasonic vibrations to shake a jar of liquid solvent the size of a large drink cup, the scientists say, they squeezed tiny gas bubbles in the liquid so quickly and violently that temperatures reached millions of degrees and some of the hydrogen atoms in the solvent molecules fused, producing a flash of light and energy.

"It can do some interesting science stuff as is," said Dr. Richard T. Lahey, a professor of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an author of a paper describing the findings that will appear in the journal Physical Review E. "Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.

{snip}

When this team of researchers made the same claim in an article in the journal Science two years ago, many scientists reacted with skepticism, even ridicule. But new experiments, using better detectors, offer more convincing data that the phenomenon is real.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/science/03FUSI.html


Very interesting....

[DerBeppo]

1. hmmm...

black hole in a bottle?

[DenverDem]

2. It's going to take a quantum leap in energy technology

to avoid the disaster of Peak Oil.

Had we started doing serious research on this in the 70's when Carter had the guts to try and tell us the truth we would have a solution by now. But the American way of Cowardly and Massive Denial caused us to throw Jimmy off the train and blindly stagger forward with Oil Business as Usual to the point of no return we find ourselves at now.

I pray to God that Kerry is courageous enough to confront this issue, tell the sheeple the truth and lead. Short of that, there will be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

[Festivito]

3. Hmmmm, as well. (Is it snowing in here?)

"better detectors" would better see "millions of degrees" and a "flash of light" after cooly using "ultrasonic" waves. and this is not exciting enough but that it needs to be "scaled up." (That means he needs lots of MONEY.)

That and the "flash" of "energy" makes me think it's snowing inside.

[On the Road]

4. Hey, I Was Just About to Post A Similar Article

Here's a link from a different source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/040303080222.htm

The key passage:

Before such a system could be used as a new energy source, however, researchers must reach beyond the "break-even" point, in which more energy is released from the reaction than the amount of energy it takes to drive the reaction.

"We are not yet at break-even," Taleyarkhan said. "That would be the ultimate. I don't know if it will ever happen, but we are hopeful that it will and don't see any clear reason why not. In the future we will attempt to scale up this system and see how far we can go."

[hunter]

5. Anyone can build a fusion reactor...

High school kids have built them as Science Fair projects. You can also buy "off-the-shelf" fusion reactors for use as as neutron sources.

The problem is that you have to put more electricity into these things than you can get out.

[On the Road]

7. I Didn't Know That

How do the tabletop reactors get sufficient temperatures to fuse two hydrogen molecules into a helium?

[phantom power]

8. Are you sure

are you sure you aren't confusing "neutron source" with "fusion reactor"?

Neutrons can be produced with fission reactions. To my knowledge, nobody has ever produced fusion on a desktop (until these guys, and we should all wait for further verification).

[hunter]

9. Easy...

The commercial links tend to float around a bit, and get less and less descriptive over time, but you might try this example:

http://www.thermo.com/com/cda/product/detail/1,1055,17330,00.html

The page above is for a commercial D-D neutron source.

There are amateur fusion pages all over the place, here's one:

http://fusor.net/index.html

Many amateur scientists do things that are quite alarming to "Homeland Security" types, from launching large rockets to playing with highly radioactive materials... Be safe.

[meow mix]

6. concerning that last paragraph...

here was another article..
it was from a couple years ago - sorry dont have a link now.


A report on the experiment conducted by scientists at Oak Ridge, Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York and the Russian Academy of Sciences was published in the respected journal Science -- against the advice of at least three scientists who reviewed the paper for the journal:
"I reviewed the paper twice, I rejected it twice," said William Moss, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
"I told Science you can't publish it because it's not right," said Lawrence Crum, a physicist with the Applied Physics Lab of the University of Washington at Seattle.

"They say it was subject to stringent peer review, but does that mean it passed peer review?" asked Seth Putterman, a physicist with the University of California at Los Angeles, who also rejected the article.

As the accusations and allegations increased, Taleyarkhan's supporters fought back. Russ George, a California scientist who has worked for many years on alternative energies, said the three critics were Taleyarkhan's competitors.

"They are not happy that they are beaten to the prize," said George, formerly a visiting scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and at the Stanford Research Institute. "They have so much to gain by having Taleyarkhan fail."

[NNadir]

10. Without commenting on the report's merits, many Nobel Prize winning papers

have been rejected.
Rejected Nobel Papers

Hans Krebs (the 1953 Nobel Laureate for the discovery of the Krebs cycle, aka The Citric Acid Cycle) kept his rejection of his Nature Paper framed over his desk. The reason the paper was rejected was not crass actually, it just stated that they already had too much to publish and had no room for Krebs' work.

As for whether this work itself has merit is not for me to judge. The issue should be (as it was for Pons and Fleischmann) is neutrons. If there are neutrons, it's fusion. If there are no neutrons, it's bullshit. Hot or cold, the trick is to get the nuclei close enough to have the strong force dominate the electrostatic repulsion. I would guess that there is some modeling of the wave functions of the various species involved to produce a stab at what the probabilities of these type of interactions under the specified conditions might be. Still, predictions based on mathematical modeling are by no means always correct.

I'm glad the work is getting an airing. It's potentially important and needs review.

[rman]

11. temps are estimates, no neutrons measured

no evidence of fusion whatsoever.
it's kinda interesting but not sensational.