14 ms·
Lattice Confinement Fusion
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spaetzleesser 6y agoBetter to read this: https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/ https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-...
- emeraldd 6y agoWould it make more sense to change this to https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-fusion/ https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/space/science/lattice-confinement-... ? One of the first links from the article. The original is spectacularly badly formatted and interspersed with so many ads as to be practically unreadable on a desktop machine ..
- giarc 6y agoSome of the ads are almost lifesized books. It's incredibly hard to discern what is ad and what is content.
- PaulHoule 6y agoArticles like this should be flagged. Reading that web is like drinking leaded gas.
- tlb 6y agoThanks, changed from the eye-rattling https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/amp34096117/nasa-nuclear-lattice-confiment-fusion/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/amp34096117/...
- agomez314 6y agoPalladium can store incredible amounts of hydrogen within its crystal lattice - was Tony Stark right all along?
- Everhusk 6y agoI dropped out of my masters because my prof basically laughed me out of the room for researching cold fusion/LENR, said it was a waste of time. Good to see unexplained anomalies in Science like this make their way back into the mainstream. We need this kind of science more than ever, no matter how 'crazy' it sounds. Crazy is whatever the hell we were doing the last few decades.
- glitchc 6y agoI'm sorry to hear about your experience (rather insensitive prof.) but if you tackled cold fusion for Masters, it's unlikely that you would have finished your degree in 2, 5 or even 10 years. This topic is not suited for a Masters level thesis, where the primary goal is to build research skills while giving you the taste of tackling a real problem in a defined, manageable form.
- vlovich123 6y agoDoes cold fusion not have sub-problems that could be tackled at a master’s level? I don’t think OP was necessarily saying that they were proposing their master’s would be about solving cold fusion completely.
- glitchc 6y agoIt could be theoretical. The high baseline effort and cost to run even a simple experiment would probably preclude empirical work. The theoretical area is probably saturated by now, will be difficult to carve out a niche.
- vlovich123 6y agoI feel like you could say that about any discipline that any Master's student would embark on just because the state of the art is extremely advanced, no? For example, if you're a chemical engineer focusing on batteries, you could say simple experiments are out of reach too because "simple" has advanced to a point that's extremely complex & expensive. I haven't done a Master's so I don't actually know.
- nynx 6y agoI have a habit of getting over-excited by announcements like this, but... this is very exciting! Hopefully lattice-confinement fusion would be much more compact than other methods. I wonder how much more compact.
- heimdall 6y agoNapkin math on power density and compactness: Theoretical LENR device would be comparable to an RTG [1] because at high heat the device would melt itself. It's more about a trickle of stable power, rather than being used as a cell of a power plant. So, ignoring support infrastructure and focusing on the size of the power generator, we have: Using the power source for the voyager probe as an example: RTG size: 0.5m x 0.5m x 1m == 0.25 cubic meters. RTG power: 2400 watts (thermal) RTG power density: 9600 watts per cubic meter Using ITER as an example for the scale of fusion power plant: Reactor size: 800 cubic meters Reactor power: 500,000,000 watts (thermal) Reactor power density: 625,000 watts per cubic meter So yeah, theoretically it would be compact, but low power density. Enough to power a space probe, but not our civilization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
- heavenlyblue 6y agoAren't RTGs super-expensive and hard to produce?
- extropy 6y agoFairly simple to produce, except getting the fuel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Criteria_for_selection_of_isotopes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_...
- outworlder 6y agoIf it can power a space probe, it can power a car. If it is even a fraction of the power of an RTG but without the same issues with fuel, it could be civilization changing. If it is not that compact but it can still be placed inside homes, ditto.
- mikewarot 6y agoWell, they managed to suppress this for 31 years so far. I wonder what other things are hiding in plain sight.
- wrycoder 6y agoThey keep renaming it, until they get enough social distance from cold fusion.
- vikramkr 6y agoSuppress? Is there something I'm missing? What's being suppressed?
- danbruc 6y agoThis experiments has some similarities with cold fusion [1] experiments, for example those of Fleischmann and Pons, as they involve metals and hydrogen. But I am not sure that hitting stuff with photons in the megaelectron volt range would or should still count as low energy in the context of cold fusion, so one could probably consider the similarities rather superficial. The Wikipedia article actually mentions that one proposed mechanism for cold fusion is the confinement of hydrogen inside of matter but also that this alone is not good enough to produce the claimed fusion rates. So in some sense some of the cold fusion people were on the right track, they just missed hitting the experiment with energetic photons. Now it seems pretty obvious, get the hydrogen close together inside a metal, then hit it hard to overcome the remaining gap. But I guess the cold fusion community really wanted really low energies and so this was not considered. Or maybe it was and they just missed another detail or could not build or run the experiment, I really have no good idea what the could fusion - or low energy nuclear reaction after that name was burned - community considered and tried. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
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- EthanHeilman 6y agoI don't think anyone suppressed cold fusion. The original results couldn't be replicated. There were some anomalous results, but no results that lined up with the original claims that were made. If scientist makes claim X and no one can replicate the experiment and most scientists conclude that claim X resulted from experimental error. That is not suppression.
- abeppu 6y agoThey mention possible future uses both for power production on space missions, and terrestrial power production. Is there likely to be a gap where it makes sense for the first, but not the second? E.g. is producing a deuterium-loaded metal an energy intensive undertaking, which could cause a process overall to be net negative, but still useful to put on a satellite?
- paledot 6y agoSure. Radioisotope thermal generators are standard issue on deep space probes but nearly unheard of in terrestrial applications, because there are so many easier and cheaper sources of energy on earth. If the best they can manage is a large, heavy reactor that produces a slow trickle of electricity that lasts for decades, that's viable for many autonomous space applications but nothing special on Earth, except maybe in a few remote applications like sensor platforms on the sea bed or inside volcanoes.
- addaon 6y ago"nearly unheard of in terrestrial applications" That "nearly" hides a lot of interesting stories, though! https://englishrussia.com/2009/01/06/abandoned-russian-polar-nuclear-lighthouses/ https://englishrussia.com/2009/01/06/abandoned-russian-polar...
- gpm 6y agoIf it's substantially more expensive per watt than solar, wind, and so on but can still be done compactly it could make sense for deep space probes that are too far from the sun for solar power. Currently these are powered by capturing heat from decaying radioactive elements which is far from efficient or cheap. Mostly I think that's just nasa justifying nasa doing this research though.
- vikramkr 6y agoFor anyone with experience in nuclear physics/fusion - how big a deal is this? I know that hard-tech findings tend to get, well, "selectively" presented to the public (I see at all the time in biotech), so I'm curious if this is actually a big deal? As in, does this phenomena (perhaps not in this form, but using this as a starting point) actually have the potential that people think of when they think "cold fusion" or "easy fusion power?" Or is there something missing in the reporting?
- heimdall 6y agoI got my undergrad in Engineering Physics from CU-Boulder and talked with many professors about fusion research (plus keeping up with developments since then). Putting aside all the controversy of LENR (low-energy nuclear reactions, the official name for cold fusion) and assuming that the theory actually results in usable tech (for once), the first line of the NASA article hints at where a device's power density would be competitive: > "A team of NASA researchers seeking a new energy source for deep-space exploration missions" which tells me that a theoretical device would be a replacement for current RTGs [1]. Low but consistent power for niche applications. But in general I wouldn't get your hopes up. The higher-energy types of fusion power are far more promising for world-wide civilization-powering clean energy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
- paulirwin 6y agoThe part that I'm not grasping about this is how you harness the power that is created. I think it's great that they can start a fusion reaction this way. But how does this become practical, in theory? Does the lattice radiate heat once fusion starts or something?
- heimdall 6y agoLooking at the provided fusion flowchart: https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/Steinetz-Fusionfigure_final_Rev2.png https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/Steinetz-Fusion... It appears to be the same mechanism as neutronic high-energy fusion. An energetic neutron gets kicked out, which collides with some material in the cell (probably the erbium lattice), and generates heat. Which then needs to be hooked up to a water boiler to create steam, which powers a turbine, etc. I'm much more hopeful for someone creating a Dense Plasma Focus device with aneutronic hydrogen-boron (pB11) fuel because the reaction energy can be directly captured as electricity, instead of having to capture hot neutrons to boil water.
- tlb 6y agoI would love for this to work as an energy source. The usual limitation seems to be that it's only a tiny minority of places in the lattice that have the right geometry to enable fusion, perhaps because because it's under strain from a nearby defect. When fusion events happen, it's likely to rearrange several nearby atoms. So you run out of the special lattice locations after a while. You can, of course, melt and re-cast the metal and hope to have a new crop of active lattice points, and it becomes a question of how much energy in vs. energy out.
- pharke 6y agoThat sounds more like an engineering problem. As long as you can reliably produce grains or pellets of the metal with enough lattice locations to produce a net positive amount of energy then the problem becomes simply how do you move those grains through the x-ray beam at the required rate while capturing the energy. Perhaps suspending them in a carrier fluid that could also act as a medium for heat transfer.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI think they were saying the challenge would be getting net positive energy from the metal for the reason they mentioned.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoNo worries. You just let the reaction run hot enough that it melts down the lattice. When it cools, you'll have a new crop of active lattice points. (I'm kidding... I think.)
- pharke 6y agoIf increasing the number of places in the lattice where fusion can occur is the problem it would really just be a matter of experimentation with different techniques for allowing the lattice to be further saturated. The article seems to indicate that these results give them a clear way forward. I took the parent comment to mean that the lattice would only be essentially one time use which to me doesn't seem a problem as long as you can get sufficient energy out of it to make up for 1) using an x-ray beam to ignite the reaction and 2) the energy input necessary to create the usable lattice.
- JackFr 6y agoSo when do Fleischman and Pons get rehabilitated?
- raverbashing 6y agoIt's not exactly Cold Fusion, you need a gamma beam to trigger it.
- aw1621107 6y agoIn support of your statement, physicists on the team explicitly state that this experiment is not cold fusion: > “What we did was not cold fusion,” says Lawrence Forsley, a senior lead experimental physicist for the project.... Forsley stresses this is hot fusion, but “We’ve come up with a new way of driving it.” > “Lattice confinement fusion initially has lower temperatures and pressures” than something like a tokamak, says Benyo. But “where the actual deuteron-deuteron fusion takes place is in these very hot, energetic locations.” [0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fusiontokamak-not-included https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/nuclear-...
- wahern 6y agoWell, cold fusion wasn't cold either, or at least that wasn't the claim. Cold didn't refer to the temperature at the point of fusion, but rather the ambient temperature. You can get extreme temperatures within otherwise room temperature materials. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence Fleischmann and Pons were reporting their results without any hypothesis as to the mechanism. I think the consequence of the whole kerfuffle is that today nobody will bother trying to reproduce your results without a concrete, plausible hypothesis. Saying that something isn't cold fusion is another way of claiming "it's not a scam", and normally implies "we can describe the phenomenon in terms of known physics".
- aw1621107 6y ago> Cold didn't refer to the temperature at the point of fusion, but rather the ambient temperature. Perhaps that was true then, but nowadays it seems like a rather ill-defined and not particularly useful distinction. Sure, the ambient temperature might be relatively cold, but why should that matter if the fusion itself is still taking place at high temperatures/energies? Should fusion in a tokamak be considered "cold fusion" because the apparatus itself is sitting in a room with a relatively cold ambient temperature? What about if someone develops a significantly miniaturized tokamak; say, a hand-sized one? Should fusion in that case be considered "cold"? This can be continued to smaller and smaller scales; in other words, at what point/scale does "high-temperature/energy fusion surrounded by low-temperature matter" move from "hot" fusion to "cold"? I think it'd be fair to say that "cold fusion" (heavily) implies new physics these days; otherwise, it's "just" a miniaturized fusion reactor.
- gpm 6y agoHow common are 2.9+MeV gamma rays in space? Could you theoretically make some form of "fusion boosted solar reactor" with something like this? Assuming not (seems like a good assumption) how low energy photons do you need to be able to use before that becomes plausible?
- raziel2701 6y agoI really like that it looks like the initial evidence was a discovery made on accident: “The key to this discovery has been the talented, multi-disciplinary team that NASA Glenn assembled to investigate temperature anomalies and material transmutations that had been observed with highly deuterated metals,” meaning that they had noticed weird shit happening in deuterated metals from some other experiment and had the opportunity to investigate said weird shit in detail. I'm glad that they were able to convince the management of looking into it rather than setting it aside and let it be forgotten. I don't like how strict top-down directed research can be at forcing us to focus on what was in the initial proposal and thus we let go of potential new discoveries because they want us to follow the script.
- 0-_-0 6y agoEspecially considering that anything related to cold fusion is automatically laughed out of the room
- the8472 6y agoConsidering they have to pump in x-rays, does this even stand a theoretical chance of being net energy positive? Remember that fusion can be achieved in a bench top experiment[0] without being useful for energy production. Could the neutrons be provided by fission instead of xrays? Link to paper is at the bottom of the article, the main text links to a paywalled one for some reason. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
- pfdietz 6y ago> Considering they have to pump in x-rays, does this even stand a theoretical chance of being net energy positive? No. The cross section for photodisintegration of a deuteron is much smaller than the cross section for loss to electrons. So even if 100% of the neutrons produced lead to fusion (which I extremely highly doubt) it could not be anywhere close to breakeven. The only way this might work would be if one could accelerate the deuterons directly and beam them at a deuterated target. But that's been done for 80+ years, so don't suddenly expect those results (that it cannot be close to breakeven either) to change.
- the8472 6y agoWhat about fission neutrons? Rather than having a pure fission device maybe one could boost the power output of a small nuclear reactor this way.
- pfdietz 6y agoOnly about 3% of the energy of a fission reactor comes out as neutrons, so even if one stipulates these would cause fusion efficiently the energy multiplication would be small. One might as well just stick with fission.
- pfdietz 6y agoPeople have been putting moderate energy deuterons into deuterated materials since the 1930s. They typically do it by shooting ions at a target, but it's standard technology for making neutrons in small neutron generators, for example those used in oil well logging. And it's well known this doesn't promise to produce fusion anywhere even close to breakeven. If I had to bet, I'd say these researchers missed some confounding effect and are measuring an experimental artifact.
- dangoljames 6y ago"Warp factor five, Mr. Scott."
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoIn typical hnews fashion people are ignoring the actual article and instead debating conspiracy theories about cold fusion and covid. This is not cold fusion folks. They're bombarding with 2.5 MeV photons. If you had a material made up of particles with that average energy it'd be 29011312515 Kelvin.
- wilg 6y agoI'm just upset that they used the same name as the well-known software project GNU Fusion, which is liable to confuse most people.
- andrewflnr 6y agoYou almost got me.
- raverbashing 6y ago> the neutrons were created through photodissociation of deuterons via exposure to 2.9+MeV gamma (energetic X-ray) beam. Gamma rays, not neutrons
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoDoh, minor brainfart. Thanks, I corrected it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hliyan 6y agoI think they saw "deuterium atoms in a metal lattice" and associated that with one of the original hypotheses about cold fusion. But this fusion is anything but cold: A metal such as erbium is “deuterated” or loaded with deuterium atoms, “deuterons,” packing the fuel a billion times denser than in magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion reactors. In the new method, a neutron source “heats” or accelerates deuterons sufficiently such that when colliding with a neighboring deuteron it causes D-D fusion reactions.
- dogcomplex 6y agoWhile this is all well and good - why is everyone chasing extremely-complex magnetic suspension etc fusion instead of just drilling a deep hole, dropping a stripped-down H-bomb in, and harvesting the (enormous) heat energy released via geothermal? The napkin math works out to insane energy gains in each iteration (even with low efficiency assumptions) if you're hydrolyzing hydrogen fuel from H2O for the next blast with the energy, and the process requires no new exotic science - all the basics were invented in the 60's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER Unlike back then, today we have high-voltage DC power lines capable of ~85% efficiency over a ~12k km range (planet is 40k km). A few of these stationed in the middle of nowhere could supply the world's power, even if they're not too safe to the surrounding area (which is unlikely, since we've blown up thousands of bombs underground "safely" for decades). Why the hell don't we have nearly-unlimited fusion energy farming by now?
- pfdietz 6y agoThe link you gave explains why PACER was abandoned. It just doesn't pencil out.