6 ms·

Researchers demonstrate the ability to fuse atoms inside room-temperature metals

71 points by MindGods 6y ago

LatteLazy 6y ago
Just 20 more years and we'll have cheap, safe, limitless energy!
- choeger 6y ago
  Just 20 more years? Count me in, that is much better than what they promised 20 years ago, when they said that fusion energy would be viable around 2020, or what they told in the eighties when they said it would be 2000... Wait a second! What is going on here?
- beambot 6y ago
  To be fair, the timeline was predicated on spending levels that were never met. In fact, funding levels never made it above the "fusion never" threshold: https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png Interestingly, the projected budget was $100B-$300B in 2020 dollars. Certainly puts $4T stimulus plan into perspective!
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    Thorium reactors would have taken much less than that level of funding with (IMO) less engineering hurdles, and they made a functioning prototype that almost fit in a closet at General Atomics. This is all boondoggle money now with solar/wind/battery though. Maybe once we actually move a majority of the grid we can move back to major nuclear or fusion research.
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    I have seen this graph many times before on HN. I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe the investments in fusion have recently ramped up (the graph ends in 2012), but the end point of the "actual" fusion investment shows something a little less than half a billion dollars. Is this supposed to be worldwide investment, only US, only US Department of Energy, or what? Anyway, just in 2019 the US DoE got a budget allocation of more than half a billion dollars ($564 MM to be precise, see [1] page 162). ITER's financial statements for 2019 ([2], page 43) shows member contributions of € 400 MM, which is again about half a billion dollars. If we could manage to add up all the various research budgets for fusion, we would probably be quite a bit above the "never fusion" line, we could maybe reach the "moderate level" in the graph (the orange line). But the question is: is this needed? MIT alone has a fusion project (SPARC [3]) that appears to be ahead of ITER. A spin-off of that project is the Commonwealth Fusion Systems [4], which managed to raise about $200 MM of funding entirely from private organizations. Is it possible that we'll see a repeat of the Human Genome Project scenario, where the US Government invested $10 BN and more than a decade of reasearch, only to see a private company (Celera [5]) come in an steal the thunder at the finish line, with only a 20th of their budget? My point is that as society progresses, there is a time when a certain thing becomes achievable on a medium budget, which only 50 years before would be impossible on an infinite budget. Just think about sending a rocket to the Moon in 1920 or creating an mRNA-based vaccine for the coronavirus in 1970. It is very, very likely that if the US government had allocated $50-100 BN for fusion research in 1970, we would not be any closer to fusion today. However, today, 50 years later, we are at a point where fusion appears achievable only based on private investments. [1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/05/f62/fy-2020-doe-sc-fes-congressional-budget-request.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/05/f62/fy-2020-... [2] http://e.issuu.com/embed.html?d=2019_iter_annual_report&u=iterorganization http://e.issuu.com/embed.html?d=2019_iter_annual_report&u=it... [3] https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      Fusion seems like a rare opportunity to do remarkable impact for human society while also making a remarkable profit. Frankly, if I was a billionaire, I would treat fusion investments as half-charity. That's why I don't understand how so many billionaires have pledged to give a large % of their wealth away but the most promising privately funded fusion energy project only has $200 million in funding. That kind of discrepancy increases my respect for tech evangelists, Ray Kurzweil, etc...because marketing the future might bring it closer. We need more of that.
      - credit_guy 6y ago
        Bill Gates is doing just that, but with fission rather than fusion. If the aim is to fight climate change, then fission is a proven technology, while fusion is a very risky bet.
        keenmaster 6y ago
        Great. We should build standardized SMRs everywhere ASAP. Nonetheless, we don't have to pick between SMRs and fusion reactors. We can do both. The riskiness of fusion can be counteracted by taking an investing-as-charity approach to the whole field. If a billionaire is fine moving humanity closer to a low scarcity, carbon-free future without necessarily getting a commensurate payout, they should invest in fusion. Additionally, if they continuously invest in fusion and spread their investments across multiple fusion "bets," they can maximize their chance of making an outsized return.
    - parksy 6y ago
      As an aside, I think it kinda sucks that we're in the age of information, but I can't google "fusion energy research funding history" and get anything other than op-eds and old news about funding announcements. We should be able to see this information cleanly presented and filter by US, Worldwide, etc. Then we wouldn't have to guess or make assumptions. Is there a source of information I am lacking or do I have to do my own research project on fusion funding just so I can participate meaningfully in this conversation?
the8472 6y ago
Getting things to fuse is "easy" in the sense that you can do it on the lab bench with a farnsworth hirsch fusor, but that has no hope of ever reaching break-even. This article doesn't talk about break-even potential at all and yet they jump to potential applications.
- petermcneeley 6y ago
  "In the latter case, that extra neutron can start the process over again, allowing two more deuterons to fuse." So sounds like they are hoping for free reactions.
  - the8472 6y ago
    That's future research and doesn't necessarily mean it makes up for losses. They're counting chickens before they hatched.
- strbean 6y ago
  That still involves heating though, right?
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Is breaking even in such an experiment in violation of any thermodynamics laws? Or is it that we just haven't figured it out?
  - leephillips 6y ago
    It doesn’t violate thermodynamics; it’s the conversion of mass to other forms of energy. Nuclear fusion is the source of energy from the sun, but the sun has the advantage of its enormous gravity keeping things confined. The attempt to extract usable energy from controlled fusion on Earth is the attempt to, in the absence of this helpful gravity, find some other way to get enough nucleons close enough together. Nature makes this practically impossible, which is why we don't have fusion power after 70 years of trying. Fortunately, we don’t need it, as we can now use the sun’s fusion here on Earth.
  - 6y ago
colordrops 6y ago
Is there any reason this couldn't be used for general purpose energy? They work for NASA so perhaps they are just mentioning propulsion to keep their funding.
- gh02t 6y ago
  As noted by another commenter, this is a significant result but overall still very early. It's still not even clear if it can be used for energy production at all and there is a lot of work to be done before that will even be worth asking seriously. But a simple answer is: if it can be made to power a spacecraft it would probably be suitable elsewhere.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  >Is there any reason this couldn't be used for general purpose energy? It's possible to get out energy if you put enough energy in, but currently you can't even retrieve all the energy you started with, let alone generate energy efficiently enough to drop the cost below solar et al.
- leephillips 6y ago
  The idea is that if you fantasize that this might, one day, have gain > 1 it would be much smaller and lighter than other forms of fusion that you might also fantasize would, one day, have gains > 1. But, in this fantasy world, terrestrial fusion reactors would have much higher fantasy gains, so you are accepting a lower fantasy gain for lower weight. The reality is, fusion energy research has been a major activity since the 1950s, but no device (aside from bombs) has achieved practical break-even, despite occasional breathless but deceptive press releases from national labs. http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-energy-180313/ http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-e...
- DennisP 6y ago
  I'm guessing because it'd be expensive and have a low power output. That'd make it uncompetitive for a power plant, but fine for a deep space mission; you'd need very little fuel, so as long as the device itself isn't too massive, it'd be great.
dummydata 6y ago
From the article: “What we did was not cold fusion,” says Lawrence Forsley, a senior lead experimental physicist for the project. Cold fusion, the idea that fusion can occur at relatively low energies in room-temperature materials, is viewed with skepticism by the vast majority of physicists. Forsley stresses this is hot fusion, but “We’ve come up with a new way of driving it.”
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  How they define "cold fusion" temperature, if we look previous lab fusion experiments they all had very narrow point of fusion, welding arc has temperature of 10000 F withing few millimetre, that is what most of those previous so called cold fusion experiments did. But in reality fusion should occur at 100 million K. Cold fusion is refereed as room temperature, is there some trick in defining room temperature?
trhway 6y ago
>To overcome that barrier requires a sequence of particle collisions. First, an electron accelerator speeds up and slams electrons into a nearby target made of tungsten. The collision between beam and target creates high-energy photons, just like in a conventional X-ray machine. The photons are focused and directed into the deuteron-loaded erbium or titanium sample. that way of X-ray generation is of very low efficiency. They should have put that deuterium loaded erbium, titanium (or Pt or Pd like in the famous cold fusion experiment) into the Sandia Z-machine. The typical target for the Z is either LiD or frozen D, and i wonder why they have never tried more heavy metals, especially Pt or Pd, loaded with D given how heavy nuclei is supposed to help in the fusion based on the cold fusion effects and which this NASA research seems to hint at too: >But the lattice helps again. “The electrons in the metal lattice form a screen around the stationary deuteron,” says Benyo. The electrons’ negative charge shields the energetic deuteron from the repulsive effects of the target deuteron’s positive charge until the nuclei are very close, maximizing the amount of energy that can be used to fuse. Honestly, my best bet is that Musk, who needs at least fission or even better fusion for Mars (space is the only business case for any plausible peaceful fusion), would soon start a venture for it. The inertial confinement, either Z-machine style or laser (modern lasers are much more efficient than NIF) is clearly the way to go, especially for space and when you need real result instead of large government sponsored research.
- raziel2701 6y ago
  They don't use heavy metals because they strongly absorb X-rays, lower density materials are better at transmitting x-rays which is why they often use very low Z elements. Sometimes they dope with heavy metals but nothing has yet allowed to reach break even.
  - trhway 6y ago
    definitely, that is in general a factor. Though erbium and platinum doesn't differ that much than it come to X-ray attenuation. Additionally - the X-ray absorption by the lattice is important in the low energy level setting like that NASA experiment (basically equilibrium conditions) as any absorbed energy is basically lost and would just radiate away, whereis in high energy Z shot (non-equilibrium inertial confinement situation) the absorbed energy would still result in increased temperature and pressure of the target.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Reading this kind of news makes me very excited but again afraid at the same time, thinking is it again one more case of Fleischmann–Pons defamation in progress. As it sounds very much as saturation of palladium bar with isotopes of hydrogen.
badinsie 6y ago
DO NOT BE MISTAKEN This is the same Pons & Fleischmann Cold Fusion effect. I will not argue semantics but Pons & Fleischmann, and Andrea Rossi are also due credit for researching this phenomenon. it makes sense if you think about it... imagine a 3D metal lattice...only say 8 atoms... you tightly pack as much Hydrogen as possible in the middle of the lattice.... everything is under immense heat and pressure.... spinning like crazy.... you hit it with a jolt. or a hammer.... and everything sorta smashes into each other and explodes. or maybe this is the 'inverse beta decay' / controlled electron capture method.
- fernly 6y ago
  It is certainly reminiscent of P&F, in loading a metal matrix with deuterium. And the effect this paper documents could ... conceivably ... possibly ... maybe explain the erratic and fugitive positive results that P&F-style experimenters sometimes produced. But I don't think your certainty is well-founded yet.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  Spot on. Funny enough speaking about semantic, remind me on Star Trek dilithium crystals...

71 points by MindGods 6y ago

LatteLazy 6y ago

Just 20 more years and we'll have cheap, safe, limitless energy!

choeger 6y ago
Just 20 more years? Count me in, that is much better than what they promised 20 years ago, when they said that fusion energy would be viable around 2020, or what they told in the eighties when they said it would be 2000... Wait a second! What is going on here?
beambot 6y ago
To be fair, the timeline was predicated on spending levels that were never met. In fact, funding levels never made it above the "fusion never" threshold: https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png Interestingly, the projected budget was $100B-$300B in 2020 dollars. Certainly puts $4T stimulus plan into perspective!
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Thorium reactors would have taken much less than that level of funding with (IMO) less engineering hurdles, and they made a functioning prototype that almost fit in a closet at General Atomics. This is all boondoggle money now with solar/wind/battery though. Maybe once we actually move a majority of the grid we can move back to major nuclear or fusion research.
- credit_guy 6y ago
  I have seen this graph many times before on HN. I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe the investments in fusion have recently ramped up (the graph ends in 2012), but the end point of the "actual" fusion investment shows something a little less than half a billion dollars. Is this supposed to be worldwide investment, only US, only US Department of Energy, or what? Anyway, just in 2019 the US DoE got a budget allocation of more than half a billion dollars ($564 MM to be precise, see [1] page 162). ITER's financial statements for 2019 ([2], page 43) shows member contributions of € 400 MM, which is again about half a billion dollars. If we could manage to add up all the various research budgets for fusion, we would probably be quite a bit above the "never fusion" line, we could maybe reach the "moderate level" in the graph (the orange line). But the question is: is this needed? MIT alone has a fusion project (SPARC [3]) that appears to be ahead of ITER. A spin-off of that project is the Commonwealth Fusion Systems [4], which managed to raise about $200 MM of funding entirely from private organizations. Is it possible that we'll see a repeat of the Human Genome Project scenario, where the US Government invested $10 BN and more than a decade of reasearch, only to see a private company (Celera [5]) come in an steal the thunder at the finish line, with only a 20th of their budget? My point is that as society progresses, there is a time when a certain thing becomes achievable on a medium budget, which only 50 years before would be impossible on an infinite budget. Just think about sending a rocket to the Moon in 1920 or creating an mRNA-based vaccine for the coronavirus in 1970. It is very, very likely that if the US government had allocated $50-100 BN for fusion research in 1970, we would not be any closer to fusion today. However, today, 50 years later, we are at a point where fusion appears achievable only based on private investments. [1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/05/f62/fy-2020-doe-sc-fes-congressional-budget-request.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/05/f62/fy-2020-... [2] http://e.issuu.com/embed.html?d=2019_iter_annual_report&u=iterorganization http://e.issuu.com/embed.html?d=2019_iter_annual_report&u=it... [3] https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    Fusion seems like a rare opportunity to do remarkable impact for human society while also making a remarkable profit. Frankly, if I was a billionaire, I would treat fusion investments as half-charity. That's why I don't understand how so many billionaires have pledged to give a large % of their wealth away but the most promising privately funded fusion energy project only has $200 million in funding. That kind of discrepancy increases my respect for tech evangelists, Ray Kurzweil, etc...because marketing the future might bring it closer. We need more of that.
    - credit_guy 6y ago
      Bill Gates is doing just that, but with fission rather than fusion. If the aim is to fight climate change, then fission is a proven technology, while fusion is a very risky bet.
      - keenmaster 6y ago
        Great. We should build standardized SMRs everywhere ASAP. Nonetheless, we don't have to pick between SMRs and fusion reactors. We can do both. The riskiness of fusion can be counteracted by taking an investing-as-charity approach to the whole field. If a billionaire is fine moving humanity closer to a low scarcity, carbon-free future without necessarily getting a commensurate payout, they should invest in fusion. Additionally, if they continuously invest in fusion and spread their investments across multiple fusion "bets," they can maximize their chance of making an outsized return.
  - parksy 6y ago
    As an aside, I think it kinda sucks that we're in the age of information, but I can't google "fusion energy research funding history" and get anything other than op-eds and old news about funding announcements. We should be able to see this information cleanly presented and filter by US, Worldwide, etc. Then we wouldn't have to guess or make assumptions. Is there a source of information I am lacking or do I have to do my own research project on fusion funding just so I can participate meaningfully in this conversation?

the8472 6y ago

Getting things to fuse is "easy" in the sense that you can do it on the lab bench with a farnsworth hirsch fusor, but that has no hope of ever reaching break-even. This article doesn't talk about break-even potential at all and yet they jump to potential applications.

petermcneeley 6y ago
"In the latter case, that extra neutron can start the process over again, allowing two more deuterons to fuse." So sounds like they are hoping for free reactions.
- the8472 6y ago
  That's future research and doesn't necessarily mean it makes up for losses. They're counting chickens before they hatched.
strbean 6y ago
That still involves heating though, right?
ramraj07 6y ago
Is breaking even in such an experiment in violation of any thermodynamics laws? Or is it that we just haven't figured it out?
- leephillips 6y ago
  It doesn’t violate thermodynamics; it’s the conversion of mass to other forms of energy. Nuclear fusion is the source of energy from the sun, but the sun has the advantage of its enormous gravity keeping things confined. The attempt to extract usable energy from controlled fusion on Earth is the attempt to, in the absence of this helpful gravity, find some other way to get enough nucleons close enough together. Nature makes this practically impossible, which is why we don't have fusion power after 70 years of trying. Fortunately, we don’t need it, as we can now use the sun’s fusion here on Earth.
- 6y ago

colordrops 6y ago

Is there any reason this couldn't be used for general purpose energy? They work for NASA so perhaps they are just mentioning propulsion to keep their funding.

gh02t 6y ago
As noted by another commenter, this is a significant result but overall still very early. It's still not even clear if it can be used for energy production at all and there is a lot of work to be done before that will even be worth asking seriously. But a simple answer is: if it can be made to power a spacecraft it would probably be suitable elsewhere.
Qwertious 6y ago
>Is there any reason this couldn't be used for general purpose energy? It's possible to get out energy if you put enough energy in, but currently you can't even retrieve all the energy you started with, let alone generate energy efficiently enough to drop the cost below solar et al.
leephillips 6y ago
The idea is that if you fantasize that this might, one day, have gain > 1 it would be much smaller and lighter than other forms of fusion that you might also fantasize would, one day, have gains > 1. But, in this fantasy world, terrestrial fusion reactors would have much higher fantasy gains, so you are accepting a lower fantasy gain for lower weight. The reality is, fusion energy research has been a major activity since the 1950s, but no device (aside from bombs) has achieved practical break-even, despite occasional breathless but deceptive press releases from national labs. http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-energy-180313/ http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-e...
DennisP 6y ago
I'm guessing because it'd be expensive and have a low power output. That'd make it uncompetitive for a power plant, but fine for a deep space mission; you'd need very little fuel, so as long as the device itself isn't too massive, it'd be great.

dummydata 6y ago

From the article: “What we did was not cold fusion,” says Lawrence Forsley, a senior lead experimental physicist for the project. Cold fusion, the idea that fusion can occur at relatively low energies in room-temperature materials, is viewed with skepticism by the vast majority of physicists. Forsley stresses this is hot fusion, but “We’ve come up with a new way of driving it.”

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
How they define "cold fusion" temperature, if we look previous lab fusion experiments they all had very narrow point of fusion, welding arc has temperature of 10000 F withing few millimetre, that is what most of those previous so called cold fusion experiments did. But in reality fusion should occur at 100 million K. Cold fusion is refereed as room temperature, is there some trick in defining room temperature?

trhway 6y ago

>To overcome that barrier requires a sequence of particle collisions. First, an electron accelerator speeds up and slams electrons into a nearby target made of tungsten. The collision between beam and target creates high-energy photons, just like in a conventional X-ray machine. The photons are focused and directed into the deuteron-loaded erbium or titanium sample. that way of X-ray generation is of very low efficiency. They should have put that deuterium loaded erbium, titanium (or Pt or Pd like in the famous cold fusion experiment) into the Sandia Z-machine. The typical target for the Z is either LiD or frozen D, and i wonder why they have never tried more heavy metals, especially Pt or Pd, loaded with D given how heavy nuclei is supposed to help in the fusion based on the cold fusion effects and which this NASA research seems to hint at too: >But the lattice helps again. “The electrons in the metal lattice form a screen around the stationary deuteron,” says Benyo. The electrons’ negative charge shields the energetic deuteron from the repulsive effects of the target deuteron’s positive charge until the nuclei are very close, maximizing the amount of energy that can be used to fuse. Honestly, my best bet is that Musk, who needs at least fission or even better fusion for Mars (space is the only business case for any plausible peaceful fusion), would soon start a venture for it. The inertial confinement, either Z-machine style or laser (modern lasers are much more efficient than NIF) is clearly the way to go, especially for space and when you need real result instead of large government sponsored research.

raziel2701 6y ago
They don't use heavy metals because they strongly absorb X-rays, lower density materials are better at transmitting x-rays which is why they often use very low Z elements. Sometimes they dope with heavy metals but nothing has yet allowed to reach break even.
- trhway 6y ago
  definitely, that is in general a factor. Though erbium and platinum doesn't differ that much than it come to X-ray attenuation. Additionally - the X-ray absorption by the lattice is important in the low energy level setting like that NASA experiment (basically equilibrium conditions) as any absorbed energy is basically lost and would just radiate away, whereis in high energy Z shot (non-equilibrium inertial confinement situation) the absorbed energy would still result in increased temperature and pressure of the target.

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Reading this kind of news makes me very excited but again afraid at the same time, thinking is it again one more case of Fleischmann–Pons defamation in progress. As it sounds very much as saturation of palladium bar with isotopes of hydrogen.

badinsie 6y ago

DO NOT BE MISTAKEN This is the same Pons & Fleischmann Cold Fusion effect. I will not argue semantics but Pons & Fleischmann, and Andrea Rossi are also due credit for researching this phenomenon. it makes sense if you think about it... imagine a 3D metal lattice...only say 8 atoms... you tightly pack as much Hydrogen as possible in the middle of the lattice.... everything is under immense heat and pressure.... spinning like crazy.... you hit it with a jolt. or a hammer.... and everything sorta smashes into each other and explodes. or maybe this is the 'inverse beta decay' / controlled electron capture method.

fernly 6y ago
It is certainly reminiscent of P&F, in loading a metal matrix with deuterium. And the effect this paper documents could ... conceivably ... possibly ... maybe explain the erratic and fugitive positive results that P&F-style experimenters sometimes produced. But I don't think your certainty is well-founded yet.
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Spot on. Funny enough speaking about semantic, remind me on Star Trek dilithium crystals...