So controlled fusion is possible after all?


http://www.china.org.cn/english/scitech/155948.htm

Ever seen Spiderman 2? Yeah. Pretty much THAT, but in Beijiing, and with no spiderman to save the day.

We do fusion all the time in labs. It just takes more energy to maintain that we get out of it so it is effectively useless... unless you are REALLY desperate for helium.

ILL WAIT AND SEE... it would be nice.. but i have my doubts.

-MT

I would like to see their estimates of energy input and energy output. The last I heard for any fusion device was about one million to one. Pehaps they have it down to 10 thousand to one now.

What a stupid waste of money, we already have one sun. Why can't they invest that resource on other things. LOL

http://www.iter.org/

I dont actually believe that. Theyre going to build a susion tokamak inside 6 months and have it up and running straight after, all for only 37 million dollars? Something stinks.

ITER will take the next ten years to get up and running, and will have a fair bit of problems to overcome, but looks to be properly set up and planned.

this looks more like a hydrogen bomb testing lab then a sustainable fusion generator.


allthou this proves how dangerous chinas going to be in the next few decades,they are running circles around us in technology of every kind.



whether this is for nuclear testing or if they actualy build sustainable fusion its a win win for china.

Running circles in technology? WHich planet are you on?


Oh, MArs. That explains it.

What is your evidence for them actually running rings round us in technology then?

Plus, how the heck do you use a tokomak for nuclear testing? Can you suggest how?

yes,its used to study atomic reations in a controlled enviroment.very handy if trying to build reliable nuclear weapons.


and china is kicking our ass in every segment of technology,they outproduce and out cunsume us,they spend more on education,they have more equivilent dollars in reseach and devolopment.


its not that chinas moving ahead,america is falling behind.

what was the last inovation in energy technology in america?

how to get everyone to buy SUVS and how to make $3gallon/ gas=the highest profits of any industry in world history.

Mars13:The following indicates that you know hardly anything about thermonuclear weapons, atomic reactions, and Tokamak devices.
yes,its used to study atomic reations in a controlled enviroment.very handy if trying to build reliable nuclear weapons.Nuclear physicists do not need any more knowledge of nuclear fusion reactions to build a thermonuclear weapon. There is other knowledge which might be useful to them, but testing of implosion devices without or without the fusion fuel at the center is required, not testing Tokamak devices, which have little in common with H-Bombs other than that they use a fusion reaction.

BTW: I wonder if you know that nuclear reactions are involved in A-Bombs & H-Bombs, not atomic reactions.

this proves how dangerous chinas going to be in the next few decades

This doesn't prove anything. Dangerous? Hardly. You're just a sinophobe.

MArs, tell us in your own words what a TOkomak is. Then tell us what atomic reactions take place in it. In your own words. If you explain correctly, we shall start taking you seriously.
(honest!)


WEll facial, I suppose I'm a Sionophobe as well. But not a "nuke them all" one. I just see that China will be having some very interesting and somewhat harmful effects upon the rest of the world over the next 50 years.

forget the sun, meet your doomsday
http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=52065

China's communist, so maybe they COULD pull a tokamak facility out of their ass in 6 months. Hell, from what I understand soviet russia did similar over-paced projects to show off their technological "might". And I havn't looked into this but i read on another forum that soviet russia actually developed nuclear-powered jets, a great technoligcal achievement that we can't do even today. How? Skimp on the proper shielding! Such a rag-tag way of making "technology" is almost inconcievable and very harshly detested in most developed countries, and thus we have a number of agencies and laws in effect to make sure very well-made and secure plans are developed for pretty much any technological venture. It's slow, but safe.

Please correct me if this communist trend is a misconception.

Another reason the USSR was able to succeed at various technological projects is their willingness to put a huge percentage of their resources into an effort.

They were able to put a man into space first, but could not come close to manufacturing millions of cars, millions of TV's, millions of refrigerators, et cetera per year. Russians were always awed at the consumer products available in America. In the 1960's, one of their minor diplomats once insisted that a supermarket had been stocked form stores in at least twenty cities and that all the cars he saw were collected in the vicinity of the UN to impress foreigners.

Someone on sciforums said something about the nuclear powered plane thing last year. I cant remember whether it was an urban myth or what.

As for dictatorships, they always have an edge in that they can throw resources at a problem and not have to worry too much about it. But China very definiftely is not a communist country, you could argue in fact that it hasnt been at all.

I would like to see their estimates of energy input and energy output. The last I heard for any fusion device was about one million to one. Pehaps they have it down to 10 thousand to one now.Dinosaur, once in while you speak such utter crap I momentarily mistake you for a woo-woo. I wish you would stop it. It is quite unsettling. :confused:

If you will go to the home page of JET
http://www.jet.efda.org/
And the look up the History of the project you will find this.

During 1997 the JET operations included a three months' campaign of highly successful experiments using a range of Deuterium-Tritium fuel mixtures. The results were of major significance. JET set three new world records:

22 MJ of fusion energy in one pulse
16 MW of peak fusion power
a 65% ratio of fusion power produced to total input power.

That is several orders of magnitude better than the best you expected it to be. I do wonder when it was you last read anything about fusion devices in general and Tokamaks in particular.

Ophiolite: Sorry to be so wrong. It has been a long time since I read anything about fusion devices. I checked the URL you provided & as you posted, they claimed a 65% output/input efficiency, which I see no reason to question.

Due to the terrible efficiencies of the original devices, I stopped paying attention, assuming (erroneously) that no practical device would be seen in my lifetime. If they are getting 65% now, maybe I will see a practical device, but only if they beat their estimate of a practical device in 30-40 years (I am decades older than you).

I wonder what the true efficiency is. Might you know? For example: Does their efficiency estimate include the energy required to create the deuterium & tritium? When the efficiency was silly, nobody asked about such details.

Do you know why they talk about power input & output rather than energy in & useful energy out?

useful energy is energy that they can actually use for things other than sustaining the reaction. if useful energy is produced, we have a fusion powerplant on our hands, at least to some degree untill that useful energy is large enough that the energy is the promised "cheap" clean energy. but there is no useful energy yet, because the power input is higher than output, so the reactor isn't a powerplant yet, just a very elaborate space-heater :). but, we know that we can theoredically achieve the production of useful energy because that's pretty much all the sun over our head does, and does so naturally.

but i have a question... if we somehow get fusion powerplants to work, anyone know how theoredically small we could make a powerplant? does it have to be a 6-story-high tokamak? or could it be brought down to the size of, say, an electrical substation? just set it up in the middle of nowhere and power a village or something. anyone here study enough nuclear engineering to venture a guess?

Dinosaur - I don't know the overall efficiency for the JET device. I knew your original estimate of efficiencies was way off, so googled for something definitive.
The joint International [China, EU, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the U.S.] consortium that is to construct an energy producing reactor in France must presumably be at a point where they feel they can get more out than they put in, but exactly by how much I have no idea. When I have a chance I'll Google for it.
This is about the decision to build the plant in France:http://petrochemical.ihs.com/news-05Q3/international-thermonuclear-experimental-reactor.jsp

Edit: as is so often the case wikipedia has the answer:
The goal of is [I]To produce momentarily ten times more thermal energy from fusion heating than is supplied by auxiliary heating (a Q value of 10).
From:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

how theoretically small could we make a powerplant? does it have to be a 6-story-high tokamak? or could it be brought down to the size of, say, an electrical substation? just set it up in the middle of nowhere and power a village or something. anyone here study enough nuclear engineering to venture a guess?No knowledge of nuclear engineering, but consider other examples.
1) The first computers were housed in a large room and had less computing power than a scientific calculator.
2) The first lasers were the size of a desk (a large one). Now they fit inside a disc drive or 'pen'.
3) Add your own examples

No knowledge of nuclear engineering, but consider other examples.
1) The first computers were housed in a large room and had less computing power than a scientific calculator.
2) The first lasers were the size of a desk (a large one). Now they fit inside a disc drive or 'pen'.
3) Add your own examples What was the speed of the first car back then ?

The world land speed record over one mile at the time the first computer was built was 367.91 mph. When the first laser was fired it was 394.19 mph.

weed_eater_guy

Fusion will never work for electricity generation, it requires controlled methods, Fusion Bombs were uncontrolled reactions

Tokomaks for research could be built for a few thousand dollars in a few weeks if you weren't particular about how efficient they were. Depends on your definition of "working."

The article seems to be saying that this is an upgrade of an already existing device to make it fully superconducting. The last paragraph says that "if" they can extract enough energy, it will be like an artificial sun. Just a bit of hype there, nothing to worry about.

Anomalous, you do know abot fission bombs dont you? Do you have any technical reasons as to why fusion wont work?

As for shrinking fusion, I admit Ihave been reading too much SF, but I see no reason why we couldnt shrink one to substation size and smaller, as long as we by then have a much better understanding of sub atomic reactions of elementary particles, and thus better control of the reaction at the fine scale. At the moment, its all a bit like early engineering- stick enough material in and hope it works. With more computer work as well as better physics, we may well learn enough to be able to shrink it really small.

that and materials that don't mind so much being bombarded by neutrons, or maybe we'll have perfected He3-He3 fusion, no neutrons, much less harmful radiaton, but then you would need material that can withstand the higher temperatures and possibly magnetic stresses? I see potential careers here...

I think (semi-intelligent guess) Guthrie, the issue is the containment field. I suspect we are presently unable to create and maintain a very small containment field with small compact hardware components.

Oh yes. When you get small enough, mere temperature is not the matter, its more energy, and what form you put it in in, and get it out as. I dont know enough physics, but do we have to get the energy out in the form of heat, or is that just a by product of the innefficiencies of the reactions?

Fusion will never work for electricity generation, it requires controlled methods, Fusion Bombs were uncontrolled reactionsExactly what we can do inside a Tokamak. Control. Do you deny this?

Guthrie, I believe we get it out in the form of heat. That is certainly the way all other types of power station operate. But I also am no physicist. [The closest I get to physics is demonstrating the effects of gravity by falling down from time to time.]

I know we get it out as heat just now, as well as neutrons and other radiations, I was wondering if we can change the wavelength of radiation that comes out in any way? Making the reaction more efficient would be a good start, although that might involve strange trajectories of reactive atoms in super strength magnetic fields. HHMMmmm.

... I was wondering if we can change the wavelength of radiation that comes out in any way? .... HHMMmmm.

Best of Luck !

I hope U dont loose all the energy in form of Neutrino exhaust. :D

stories talk about someday mining the moon of it's helium-3 deposits on the surface to fuel He3-He3 fusion, and the promise is that this reaction yields no neutrons, but is convertable "directly into electricity", which to me implies that it's doing something with electrons themselves rather than just heating a steam turbine generator system. they say this is one of the strong points of it over deuritium-tritium fusion. maybe we could just stick two electrodes in a He3-He3 reactor and call it a power generator. wouldn't that be sweet... anyone know how that works?

.... implies that it's doing something with electrons themselves rather than just heating a steam turbine generator system. they say this is one of the strong points of it over deuritium-tritium fusion. maybe we could just stick two electrodes in a He3-He3 reactor and call it a power generator. wouldn't that be sweet... anyone know how that works? Do U think this will work ? http://www.focusfusion.org/what/deuterium.html

Weed_Eater_Guy: The following must have been dreamed up by a nuclear physicist on LSD.
stories talk about someday mining the moon of it's helium-3 deposits on the surface to fuel He3-He3 fusion, and the promise is that this reaction yields no neutrons, but is convertable "directly into electricity",Consier the following.About 99.9999% of the helium is helium 4, leaving very little helium 3 anywhere.


Helium is a very light chemically inert gas, which would not be found on the surface of the moon. Note that the moon has no atmosphere, mainly because of very low gravity. Most (all?) gases boil away from the moon and are lost.


A helium based fusion reaction would require much higher temperatures than hydrogen fusion.


Hydrogen is far more abundant than helium, making hydrogen fusion preferred.If you want to think about far out ideas for generating energy in the future, consider establishing automated equipment on Jupiter to manufacture hydrogen fuel cells. Jupiter is mostly hydrogen. A fusion reactor could be used for energy to send the fuel cells on a ballistic trajectory to Earth.

The above, as far out as it might be, is more likely than mining Helium 3 on the surface of the moon & fusing it.

Helium is a very light chemically inert gas, which would not be found on the surface of the moon. Note that the moon has no atmosphere, mainly because of very low gravity. Most (all?) gases boil away from the moon and are lost.
Nevertheless, there is He3 on the Moon. It was emplaced by the solar wind and retained in the mineral ilmenite.

About the feasibility on shrinking a tokomak to a palm-sized device: I think we may have to discover or find a way to synthesize high-temp superconductors, or else there is no way even silver fibers will be able to handle the enormous amounts of current required to confine the plasma.

From what i read, dino, is that there's enough He3 on the moon's surface to equal at least the ammount of energy resources on earth (coal, natural gas, oil, wood, etc.) in terms of how much energy we'd get out of it. Also that 40 tons of the stuff could power the US for a year. That's what i've read anyway, from several magazines and web sites, and who knows, maybe it is heavily biased, but seems unlikely that that'd be the case.

But why would we need to get hydrogen from jupiter? We have a ridiculous amount already on earth! I think a jovian hydrogen production station (maybe a space-elevator setup with one end dangling in jupiter/saturn's atmosphere and the other anchored to a geosynchronous satelite or asteroid) could be a nice supply point for ships and space stations in the jovian systems in, say, a few hundred years, but we don't need it to supply earth. hydrogen we have plenty of on the ground and in the ocean, its He3 that's lacking.

and anomalous, that looks like a cool idea, apparently already being used to make plasmoids, just not fusion. hell, if it discharges exhaust linearly, that's almost an interplanetary fusion propulsion system if you didn't decellerate the gas all the way to a stop in the particle decellerator, just slow it down enough to get energy to sustain the cycle, and leave the rest of the velocity with the exhaust to thrust out the back of a ship.

....
and anomalous, that looks like a cool idea, apparently already being used to make plasmoids, just not fusion. hell, if it discharges exhaust linearly, that's almost an interplanetary fusion propulsion system if you didn't decellerate the gas all the way to a stop in the particle decellerator, just slow it down enough to get energy to sustain the cycle, and leave the rest of the velocity with the exhaust to thrust out the back of a ship. But are the discharges positive or negative ?

I dont actually believe that. Theyre going to build a susion tokamak inside 6 months and have it up and running straight after, all for only 37 million dollars? Something stinks.

ITER will take the next ten years to get up and running, and will have a fair bit of problems to overcome, but looks to be properly set up and planned.
It looks like the newspaper article doesn't have the facts quite right.

The construction timeline (http://www.iter.org/constructsh.htm) on the ITER site tells a very different story... no real construction begins until at least 2008, assembly of the Tokomak itself won't begin until 2012, and first plasma is scheduled for late 2016.

Aye, I saw that. 2016 is about 10 years away. Which makes me immediately suspicious of the China attempt. WE're a long way past being able to throw something together in a few months that will work OK. The technology required for this, and the unknowns in terms of material life spans, control systems, etc etc, are so huge that I really doubt the newspaper article.

Anomalous,

What do you mean are the discharges positive or negative? what difference does that make?

Aye, I saw that. 2016 is about 10 years away. Which makes me immediately suspicious of the China attempt. WE're a long way past being able to throw something together in a few months that will work OK. The technology required for this, and the unknowns in terms of material life spans, control systems, etc etc, are so huge that I really doubt the newspaper article.

Did I read it wrong? I thought they said they were going to modify an existing facility, although it takes a careful reading to understand that. Their use of English may be a little loose, but as near as I can tell, that's what they said. So they remove whatever is left that is not superconducting and replace it with stuff that is superconducting, if that does them any good. I think that they would do better to find something more creative. One fascinating idea is to trigger fusing using pellets of antimatter. At the rate it's going it might be easier to manufacture those pellets than to keep trying to use magnetic confinement.

Anomalous,

What do you mean are the discharges positive or negative? what difference does that make?
Your propulsion system will either get negatively charged or positively.

Did I read it wrong? I thought they said they were going to modify an existing facility, although it takes a careful reading to understand that. Their use of English may be a little loose, but as near as I can tell, that's what they said. So they remove whatever is left that is not superconducting and replace it with stuff that is superconducting, if that does them any good. I think that they would do better to find something more creative. One fascinating idea is to trigger fusing using pellets of antimatter. At the rate it's going it might be easier to manufacture those pellets than to keep trying to use magnetic confinement.
I didnt notice that. But anyway, the way I see it, based upon what I rememebr from other places and things, is that simply refurbishing an existing tokamak wont do it. One reason Europe is going for a huge one is that sheer size will help make plasma control a bit easier, and doing it in mass helps as well.
As for anti-matter triggering, surely the problem is in keeping a reaction going? I mean it would be easy to get fusion by banging 2 streams of deuterium and tritium together in a huge particle accelerator, but a bit harder to get a sustainable reaction.

anomalous

i see what you're saying, i'd guess they could set it up like an ion thruster today, where positive ions are fired out the back of the motor, and a seperate electron gun fires electrons into the thrust-path to neutralize both the craft and exhaust charges. if exhaust were negative, i guess there would be positive ions leftover somewhere in the system to be discharged as well, but you'd want the heavier positive ions to be the ones accelerated, and i have no idea exactly how this fusion motor would work so i don't know if that's the case. I'm guessing it works by the plasma being fired in that linear direction is so energetic that electrons AND positive ions are in the same stream but so energized that they're not forming neutral atoms, which makes a nice ionized plasma path that makes an electromagnetic field which can be used to make energy. if the particles are used as exhaust, the path neutralizes itself as it cools in space and the neg and pos components come together. the ship would maintain a net charge this way.

again, just a guess, and a rambling one at that :D

Weed Eater Guy & Laika: I was surprized to discover that there is Helium₃ on the moon, as posted by Laika. I was even more surprises to discover that some though had been given to using it as fusion fuel.

I now know that the idea is not crazy, only naive. I found the following site with some information: http://www.redcolony.com/art.php?id=0506010, including the following (Some text bolded by me).The benefits of Helium3 fusion have been touted by many would be lunar colonists. Helium 3 is a rare isotope of the helium atom. It has been trapped in ilmenite granules on the moon over the 4 billion years of solar activity. Helium 3 can be fused with deuterium in a very clean fusion process. Helium is rather light, and one shuttle full of this product could theoretically supply all the energy needs of the earth for over a year.

Sadly, the amount of helium three available on the moon is not much more than what could fit in about ten shuttle loads. Also, the Deuterium (Hydrogen 2) needed to fuse with this helium is not available on the moon. A supply of hydrogen 2 sufficient to fuse with helium 3 would require expensive cryogenics, and shipping it from the earth would cost nearly as much energy as it would produce. Replenishing the supplies of helium 3 in the moon’s regolith would take about 4 billion years, making it a more or less non-renewable resource.

There is also the troubling little fact that fusion of helium three with Hydrogen two, although very clean, has not been performed in such a way as to produce any net energy gain. Entrepreneurs are still optimistic, but researchers have been unsuccessful in this effort since the late 1970s. Over 30 years of failure might indicate that this line of research is a blind alley.

Processing the raw ilmenite to obtain Helium 3 for export requires heating the rock to over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Mirrors, heating cables, and nuclear reactors have all been suggested for this process. Most of these ideas will require a fairly large outlay of materials, and if helium 3 fusion does not prove cost-effective, it would all be wasted.

A further trouble with this scheme is that the richest deposits of helium three are in the areas that have been around the longest. That is, there is more ilmenite, with more helium three in it, in the older and more rugged highlands than in the younger and lower Mares. As discussed in other places, the highlands are more rugged, making transportation more difficult than around the Mares.

The energy necessary to process helium 3 might be more efficiently put to work in creating solar panels. Solar panels on the moon would be more efficient than on the earth, since no atmosphere, or cloudy weather would interfere with the production. The electricity could then be beamed to earth via microwave.

The energy cost necessary to extract hydrogen 3 from the entire lunar surface would probably be more than the energy cost necessary to pave the entire moon in solar paneling. While the energy production would not be immediately as great, solar panels would continue to produce energy until the panels surface is smashed apart, or pitted beyond recognition by various meteorite impacts.

If fusion of He3 is ever viable, Uranus may be the place to go for it anyway.

why don't we have He3 somewhere on earth if helium's the second most abundant element in the universe?

Any gas giant would probably have a wealth of that stuff, assuming we could build a space evelator long enough to extract the gas from the planet into orbit... at least that's the idea i figured would happen.

Helium is being continuously produced on Earth by alpha decay, but I suppose the Earth's gravitational field is not strong enough to hold this light gas in the atmosphere.

All the gas giants do have the element in abundance, but I think Uranus is considered the most promising because of its weak gravitational field strength relative to the others. I'm not sure how a space elevator would change this; Jupiter has a very small period of rotation but I don't know the maths to determine the height of geo(?)stationary orbit.

Weed Eater Guy: Jupiter is mostly pure hydrogen.
But why would we need to get hydrogen from jupiter?The hydrogen on Earth is primarily bound to oxygen, requiring a lot of energy & equipment to obtain pure hydrogen. Hydrogen forms very strong valence bonds with other elements.

If we could find a method for creating energy from hydrogen on Jupiter, we could use very inefficient processes to manufacture fuel cells and launch them into a ballistic trajectory to Earth. Because of the huge amount of pure hydrogen available on Jupiter, you would not have to worry about being efficient.

I really do not think much of the above idea, but since others are suggesting some far out schemes, I proposed this one.

Somebody brought up the abundance of Helium, forgetting that approximately 99.999% of the helium consists of isotopes other than Helium₃.

Dinosaur, I knew that about He3 on the moon years ago, its been common knowledge for years. Sort of.

Theres SF stories where people mine He3 and other elements for fusion from Jupiter, and sell them onto the rest of the solar system.

I thought fusion was supposed to yield lots of power, including the power needed to electrolize water into oxygen and hydrogen? Since very little hydrogen is needed for a lot of power (proportionatly), the power needed to extract hydrogen on earth for fusion would probably be alot smaller than the power give off by fusion. I know, we may not have efficient enough fusion, but eventually it'd get there I think, abut the same time we decided to build the nuclear (fusion?) rockets needed to send equipment to extract raw hydrogen from gas giants.

Jupiter may be slow rotating, i don't know, i thought it was faster (because of it's massive electromagnetic field, i assumed it was spinning like a top), but Saturn rotates completely every 9 hrs or so, so geosync orbit is closer, making for a shorter space elevator.

And then, there are fusion processes which actually produce helium-3 as a byproduct. Perhaps lower-tech large-scale powerplants on earth would manufacture helium-3 for more advanced reactors in space and on the first manned interplanetary ships and such until we are able to tap the gas giants for their fuel.

How are you going to get electronics to work in the near Jovian orbit, given the intense radiation? And if you don't have electronics how are you going to manage the space elevators?

Sadly, the amount of helium three available on the moon is not much more than what could fit in about ten shuttle loads.
Another point that moon nuts seem to commonly overlook is that there is helium 3 on earth. Not as much as on the moon, but you don't have to go to the moon to get it. A quick google search reveals dozens of companies who sell it by the cylinder.

It's interesting that when people talk about the economic feasibility of mining helium 3 on the moon they always like to quote astronomical values by giving its price in terms of the price of the amount of oil that you would need to generate an equivalent amount of energy. I guess they probably realize that no one would be impressed if they knew that you can just order a big tank of it in the mail for a few thousand dollars.

It's also worth pointing out that you can make helium 3 through the fusion of deuterium. Since it's much easier to make a deuterium fusion reactor than a helium 3 fusion reactor, by the time you actually need helium 3 you will be able to make it yourself. Of course, since you can get deuterium from sea water it's unlikely that anyone would ever both trying to make a helium-3 reactor; but the point is that if you did want to make a helium 3 reactor for some reason, by the time you were able to do it you would also be capable of generating your own fuel.

electronics can be shielded. it's just a matter of how much shielding you want to lift because shielding is heavy and needs a larger launch vehicle to accomodate the payload.

and why use helium-3 fusion anyway? if deuritium-boron fusion can be done, hell we'd have all the fuel we need in the form of hydrogen from water and boron from seasalts!

and why use helium-3 fusion anyway? if deuritium-boron fusion can be done, hell we'd have all the fuel we need in the form of hydrogen from water and boron from seasalts!
I think helium-3 actually has the highest energy density, so it would probably be the best choice for something like an interstellar spaceship that was worried about getting as much energy as possible from a given mass of fuel. It also doesn't put out as much neutron radiation as deuterium-deuterium or deuterium-tritium reactors, so you would need less shielding...which again would be nice if you were on a spaceship that was worried about mass. But here on earth I think it would be very hard for helium-3 to compete. Who wants to build a more complicated reactor that can only get fuel from the moon when you can build a simpler reactor that gets its fuel from seawater? Extracting deuterium from seawater is practically free.

Does anyone know what sort of temperatures you need to fuse hydrogen and boron? I've heard that it doesn't put out neutron radiation either, but I don't know how difficult it is.

...Does anyone know what sort of temperatures you need to fuse hydrogen and boron? ...I seem to recal Boron is element number 6, if that is true then it is approximaely 6 times harder. I.e. to get the H & B nuclei within range of the short range strong nuclear forces you must overcome 6 times greater electrostatic potential or repulsion comparedt to H on H. this is only a first order estimate and it will depend upon the rate of fusion you wish to achieve (only an extremely small fraction of all collisons will result in fusion.)

Boron is element 5, with two stable isotopes: Atomic weights 10.0129 (19.7%) & 11.0093 (80.3%).

Boron is element 5, with two stable isotopes: Atomic weights 10.0129 (19.7%) & 11.0093 (80.3%).Thanks. I seldon search as menory is quicker but not alway accurate.

I also recal that it was Boron that gave rise to the nuclear unit of neutron cross section, the "barn." When it was first measured, it was an order of magnitude (or more - I forget) greater than any other known. Someone said "My god that is as big as a barn." -this sound like an story created "after the fact", but I do believe it is true.

Also part of phyics Boron folklore that is probably true is that Fermi held a bucket of borax (or some Boron solution) (and an ax to cut ropes holding some control rods out) and stood over the worlds first nuclear reactor as it went critical. I have some doubts about this as I have also read that the carbon blocks it was built with as neutron moderator were assembled inside a big cube made of sheet rubber. Perhaps the rubber skin was never used but only there to permit the O2 & N2 (air) to be removed if it did not achieve critical state when completed.

If anyone knows more accurately, please refresh my memory.

Like Clockwood mentioned much earlier, these devices have been built already... so it's misleading to name it the worlds "first" artificial star.

China should go for Aneutronic fusion:
There are three companies pursuing hydrogen-boron plasma fusion, a form of aneutronic fusion , Paul Koloc, Prometheus II, Eric Lerner, Focus Fusion and Clint Seward of Electron Power Systems http://www.electronpowersystems.com/ . A resent DOD review of EPS technology reads as follows:

"MIT considers these plasmas a revolutionary breakthrough, with Delphi's
chief scientist and senior manager for advanced technology both agreeing
that EST/SPT physics are repeatable and theoretically explainable. MIT and
EPS have jointly authored numerous professional papers describing their
work. (Delphi is a $33B company, the spun off Delco Division of General
Motors)."

Vincent Page (a technology officer at GE!!) gave a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research , which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion (Below Is an excerpt).
He quotes costs and time to development of P-B11 Fusion as tens of million $, and years verses the many decades and ten Billion plus $ projected for ITER and other "Big" science efforts:


"for larger plant sizes
Time to small-scale Cost to achieve net if the small-scale
Concept Description net energy production energy concept works:
Koloc Spherical Plasma: 10 years(time frame), $25 million (cost), 80%(chance of success)
Field Reversed Configuration: 8 years $75 million 60%
Plasma Focus: 6 years $18 million 80%

Desirable Fusion Reactor Qualities
• Research & development is also needed in
the area of computing power.
• Many fusion researchers of necessity still
use MHD theory to validate their designs.
• MHD theory assumes perfect diamagnetism
and perfect conductance.
• These qualities may not always exist in the
real world, particularly during continuous operation.
• More computing power is needed to allow use of a more realistic validation theory
such as the Vlasov equations.
• ORNL is in the process of adding some impressive computing power.
• Researchers now need to develop more realistic validation methods up to the
limits of the available computing power.
• Governments need to fund these efforts."


I feel in light of the recent findings of neutrons, x-rays, and gamma rays in lightening, that these threads need to be brought together in an article.

Thanks. I seldon search as menory is quicker but not alway accurate.

I also recal that it was Boron that gave rise to the nuclear unit of neutron cross section, the "barn." When it was first measured, it was an order of magnitude (or more - I forget) greater than any other known. Someone said "My god that is as big as a barn." -this sound like an story created "after the fact", but I do believe it is true.

Also part of phyics Boron folklore that is probably true is that Fermi held a bucket of borax (or some Boron solution) (and an ax to cut ropes holding some control rods out) and stood over the worlds first nuclear reactor as it went critical. I have some doubts about this as I have also read that the carbon blocks it was built with as neutron moderator were assembled inside a big cube made of sheet rubber. Perhaps the rubber skin was never used but only there to permit the O2 & N2 (air) to be removed if it did not achieve critical state when completed.

If anyone knows more accurately, please refresh my memory.

Cadmium sulfide, don't recall the formula, but it's a liquid at room temp. There were two physicists, dubbed the "suicide squad". Don't remember if Fermi was one of them. They weren't directly over the reactor but ready to run out over it on a catwalk.

Cadmium sulfide, don't recall the formula, but it's a liquid at room temp. There were two physicists, dubbed the "suicide squad". Don't remember if Fermi was one of them. They weren't directly over the reactor but ready to run out over it on a catwalk.thanks. Is it cadmium, instead of boron, that has "barn sized" neutron cross sections?

Possibly. Cadmium has been used as control rods in reactors since the beginning. Very effective "neutron sponge". It could be boron though, as I believe there is a strong resonance for the neutron/boron reaction. At one time there was talk of a cancer treatment. Incorporate boron into an antibody that would bind to the tumor, then hit the tumor with neutrons. Instant high energy alpha right in the tumor itself. Nothing ever seemed to come of the idea though.

Boron has the highest neutron cross section as mentioned already, by IIRC nearly an order of mgnitude. A lab I worked in used an Americium neutron source to quantify the amount of boron in Aluminium samples, by means of running a blank and a sample disc, and comparing the radiation count from each during exposure to the neutron source. OK, it wasnt the most accurate method, but gave respectable results, I think to 0.1 or 0.01%.