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NASA Found Another Way Into Nuclear Fusion (2020)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- darksaints 5y agoMaybe submit a version of the story that isn't a paywalled exclusive.
- mattmaroon 5y agohttps://www.ans.org/news/article-447/nasa-work-on-lattice-confinement-fusion-grabs-attention/ https://www.ans.org/news/article-447/nasa-work-on-lattice-co...
- darksaints 5y agoThank you
- _joel 5y agoBypass Paywalls extension helps here
- gitanovic 5y agoSounds like a third renaming of cold-fusion, then called LENR, now it is lattice confinement fusion... Let's see if this turns out to be snake oil, or something comes out of it.
- lumost 5y agoThe cold fusion fiasco did a number on research into nuclear reactions in complex systems. Ignoring any of the energy applications, it's been demonstrated that bombardment of deuterides with hot neutrons reduces the energy requirement for fusion by 10x. There are a number of reasons to believe that interesting reactions would occur in certain metal-hydride systems under specific circumstances.
- gitanovic 5y agoOk, thanks for the clarification, I just don't want to keep my hopes up too much on it. I read quite extensively about cold fusion, and in the end there were too many bad actors to actually have a demystified clue of what's happening
- wolfram74 5y agoI've been working on the assumption low energy nuclear reactions is a more general term that includes phenomena like muon catalyzed fusion in addition to the lattice confinement approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
- jjk166 5y agoNo, LENR/CANR/Lattice fusion are all the same line of research as the og cold fusion - looking for fusion reactions in metal hydrides with deuterium. Muon-catalyzed fusion is a totally unrelated phenomenon which has merely been referred to as cold fusion by some pop science articles.
- lanevorockz 5y agoDon't let the "BreakThrough" keyword fool you, it's being used as clickbaitly. Reality is that Nuclear Fusion is maturing quite quickly and we might see application this decade.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoWhat has changed?
- showerst 5y agoNot OP, but a couple of things: 1. For magnetic confinement -- Affordable, extremely high powered magnets called ReBCO magnets have hit the market in recent years. 2. Increases in computing power have made doing the modeling for a new design into a task that can be done in a cloud cluster, instead of requiring a dedicated supercomputer 3. VC's have funded a number of companies to actually start building prototypes. I'm not qualified to say if it's "for real" this time, but there's definitely new excitement in area.
- EthanHeilman 5y agoCFS's SPARC started construction this year (2021) and should come online and produce net energy by 2025. That is, some of the best plasma physics scientists in the world are predicting net energy in four years. If they pull this off we will see a gold rush towards commercial fusion. I expect to be using fusion power in my house by 2032. Find me in 2032 and tell me if I'm wrong.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoWhich will come first fusion or the James Webb Telescope? ...
- Pompidou 5y agoFrance ITER will come first.
- hobscoop 5y agoI don't understand the promise of lattice confinement fusion. While it is certain believable that they measured fusion events, the explanation they give involves several unlikely steps of one particle hitting another. Since each step is unlikely, the overall gain of the process is extremely low, like 10^(-6). It's not obvious how the gain might be improved to something technologically useful (over 1).