Careful: the beverage you're about to enjoy is 7000 degrees Kelvin:

A team of scientists claims to have achieved nuclear fusion, the Holy Grail of renewable energy, in a small, "tabletop" device no larger than two coffee cups stacked atop one another. By passing sound waves through liquid acetone, researchers caused bubbles within the substance to collapse in a reaction believed to produce enough heat and pressure to sustain nuclear fusion. While the overall results of the study only suggest, but do not confirm, nuclear fusion in the bubbles' collapse, the researchers who conducted it seem confident they've achieved what was long thought impossible. "I think there's definitely fusion," Richard Lahey, one of the scientists who conducted the experiment, told The Village Voice. "Don't think I'm being too flippant in saying `Yeah, it's fusion.' There are a lot of ways to create fusion, so that's not a shock. But it is a shock to make fusion so cheaply."

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38511-2002Mar4.html

I no expert on this stuff but after reading your link and this one ( http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0210/baard.php), I can't see how this could ever be anything more than a scientific oddity.

For the sake of argument let's assume that fusion really is occurring. How would you ever get energy out of this thing? By their own description the fusion is taking place on an extremely small scale. What you need is a self-sustaining reaction if you ever hope to get energy back. It seems to me that while a given bubble may have a teeny bit of fusion occurring it in no way causes more fusion to happen. You need to keep spinning your propeller (or whatever they use) to continually create new bubbles that fuse. My guess is you will spend a lot more in energy creating the bubbles than you will ever get back.

Isn’t this problem that plagues Tokamac Fusion Reactors? They can get a fusion reaction to start but they spend more energy doing this than they get back making the thing worthless in a practical application. I think part of the problem lies in removing and adding more fuel to the 'fire'. The fusing plasma has to be contained in a magnetic bottle since no earthly material could withstand the temperatures these things work at. Once you have fusion running you need a way to get the heavier elements produced by the reaction out and put new deuterium back in without stopping the reaction... not easy to do.

Ive heard that a swedish team of scientist had figured it out how to do fusion that didnt take to much energy to run but they couldnt get permission to try it because of a law in sweden that says that a person can not make experiments that has to do with nuclear stuff... i dont know if what im saying is right, it was just something one guy told me... do other countries have these laws? We have them in sweden because of our politics who are so stubborn that they want to get rid of our nuclear plant and instead use coal and oil... they dont understand that nuclear waste is less dangerous than all the waste from coal and oil... its sad really....

Do you know what might keep them from taking their idea to a country with less restrictive laws?

Peace.

Stupidity knows no bounds....

Im not sure... Im gonna talk to my friend again and come back to you....

More on Fusion, courtesy of BusinessWeek

MARCH 18, 2002

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Is It Really Fusion This Time?
An Oak Ridge National Laboratory team says yes, and some peers agree. But there are doubters


Fusion on a tabletop? Shades of 1989, when reports about cold fusion sparked headlines and wide-eyed fantasizing about cheap, clean, and unlimited power. Cold fusion fizzled, leaving scientists bitterly disappointed. So it's no surprise that many are skeptical about the latest report of of tabletop fusion in the Mar. 8 issue of the prestigious journal Science. But if the research holds up and can eventually be commercialized, the technology would end the world's dependence on oil and eliminate the production of radioactive byproducts at today's nuclear power plants, which release energy by splitting atoms, not fusing them.

To date, the main--and ghastly--use of fusion has been in hydrogen bombs. No existing technology can both control and sustain such a fusion reaction in a way that could be used to generate electricity. Nuclear physicists have been trying ever since the first hydrogen bomb exploded in 1952. So imagine their surprise when a team of engineers asserts that they have developed a new method that may produce sustained nuclear fusion. The technique is called sonofusion--sound-triggered fusion--because it supposedly works by pumping ultrasound waves and a beam of neutrons into a modified form of acetone, a common solvent that's used in fingernail polish remover, for example.

Even though the new claim is already provoking a heated debate similar to the furor that engulfed cold fusion, this time the official announcement comes with the imprimatur of Science--and more than a year of peer reviews by leading scientists. While not all of the sonofusion reviewers voted in favor of publication, the report of tabletop fusion does come from an outfit well versed in nuclear physics: Oak Ridge National Laboratory. However, the team consists mainly of engineers, not nuclear physicists, hence much of the initial skepticism. In fact, even Oak Ridge management had second thoughts and asked two of its nuclear physicists to verify the work. They failed. The sonofusion team insists that the double-check effort was flawed. Claims and counterclaims have been flying across the Internet. "These guys are almost to the point of calling each other liars," says Seth J. Putterman, a University of California at Los Angeles physicist and a reviewer for Science.

Clearly, getting published in Science doesn't guarantee acceptance. Claims of fundamental scientific breakthroughs, says William C. Moss, a reviewer and a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, must be held to the highest standards. Tabletop fusion would be potential Nobel prize work, he explains, "so it's easy for people to lose their objectivity." But Moss isn't writing off sonofusion altogether. "In fact, I wrote a paper a few years ago saying that it might be possible."

The Oak Ridge team that took up that challenge is led by senior scientist Rusi Pesi Taleyarkhan. It consists of two other Oak Ridge researchers, plus Richard T. Lahey Jr., an engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Robert I. Nigmatulin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. To generate the immense heat needed to fuse nuclei, they turned to an obscure phenomenon called sonoluminescence.

Sonoluminescence uses ultrasound energy to create little bubbles in a liquid--bubbles that grow to many times their original size, then swiftly collapse and disappear with a wink of light. It all happens in a tiny fraction of a second, so determining what goes on is extraordinarily difficult. Even after studying sonoluminescence for two decades, Putterman can't say precisely how much heat is released by the imploding bubbles, but temperatures may reach as high as those in the sun.

Harnessing the sun's source of power would be the ultimate energy technology. In a world where fusion is possible, seawater could be fuel. A cubic kilometer of seawater contains as much energy as all the world's oil--in the form of deuterium, a "heavy" variant of hydrogen that has a neutron as well as a proton in its nucleus. And the oceans have millions of cubic kilometers of water.

However, five decades of painstaking fusion research have failed to tap the energy locked up in seawater. The two orthodox roads to forcing deuterium to fuse are expensive and confoundingly complex. Magnetic confinement, the leading candidate, would create an artificial sun suspended in a magnetic field, since no material can withstand temperatures of 100 million C. The other would use a football-stadium-size array of powerful lasers to zap little glassy spheres of deuterium. Both can achieve fusion, but only briefly, and they consume much more energy than they produce.

The latest hope for magnetic confinement is ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Russia began designing it in the late 1980s. But when the price tag hit $10 billion, the U.S. had second thoughts and yanked its support in 1999. Since then, a redesign has trimmed the size of ITER and slashed the projected investment to $4.5 billion. Early this year, the U.S. began to think about rejoining the program. Groundbreaking for ITER is expected around 2003 or 2004.

ITER would cap a 50-year quest--but wouldn't end it. Fusioneers have always said commercialization is at least 20 years in the future, and it probably still is. ITER is just one more stepping-stone to harnessing fusion energy. And despite fusion-research budgets in the U.S. of upwards of $250 million a year, scientists say they could use even more.

So when a small group from outside the fusion Establishment claims it can produce fusion on a shoestring, researchers working on the big-bucks programs tend to worry about the future of their pet schemes. Rensselaer's Lahey hints that this might have affected the replication effort by Oak Ridge nuclear physicists Dan Shapira and Michael J. Saltmarsh. But Putterman points out that Shapira and Saltmarsh measured something not in the Taleyarkhan team's paper: correlating the detection of neutrons, which are one of the telltale signs of fusion, with when bubbles imploded; no meaningful relationship was found. Lahey retorts that Shapira and Saltmarsh didn't set up their instruments properly.

The first order of business is to end the bickering, says Lawrence A. Crum, a researcher at the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory in Seattle and a reviewer. "What matters now is to confirm whether there really is fusion going on. If this really is confirmed, there'll be a bunch of companies started," he predicts, to build bubble-fusion power sources.

Lahey is cautiously optimistic that his group's design could turn into a big source of future energy. "The first step would be to increase the neutron yield by replacing the deuterium with tritium," an even heavier form of hydrogen with two neutrons. Adds Taleyarkhan: "We've already filed patents on lots of ideas for scaling up."

Even small units could find immediate markets. Applications would include sterilizing food, boosting the production of chemicals by raising the temperature of reactions, and producing the streams of neutrons needed for small, inexpensive detectors for sniffing out explosives at airports and remotely peering into cargo containers at seaports.

Actually, the entrepreneurial phase has already begun. Three years ago, engineer Ross Tessien founded Impulse Devices Inc. His Grass Valley (Calif.) startup has hired a leading sonoluminescence researcher--D. Felipe Gaitan, a protege of Crum's--and is working on simulations of sonofusion reactors up to 20 feet in diameter that would create giant bubbles. Tessian is now negotiating with Los Alamos National Laboratory to verify his computer models.

Among the original sonofusion pioneers is Roger S. Stringham, a former researcher at SRI International. He co-founded First Gate Energies in the mid-1990s, and the Woodside (Calif.) company has recently built several demonstration sonofusion devices. He will discuss his latest efforts on Mar. 22, during a final-day cold-fusion session at the American Physical Society's Annual March Meeting in Indianapolis.

Session moderator Scott R. Chubb, head of Research Systems Inc. in Arlington, Va., predicts that researchers will eventually uncover "some very exotic reactions" that explain how tabletop fusion works. For instance, he suggests the physical dynamics of sonofusion "become deeply intertwined with electromagnetism," causing deuterium to behave somewhat like electrons. "This is something you'd never expect to see in conventional fusion reactions," he adds. As more physicists get intrigued by sonofusion in coming months, he anticipates many other surprises.

By Otis Port in New York

<i>We have them in sweden because of our politics who are so stubborn that they want to get rid of our nuclear plant and instead use coal and oil... they dont understand that nuclear waste is less dangerous than all the waste from coal and oil... its sad really....</i>

Unbelievable as it sounds, many scientists (and of course politicians!) suffering from anti-nuke paranoia refuse to see the facts: <b<nuclear energy is safer, cheaper and more environmentaly friendly than fossil fuel burning.</b> Especially politicians and law makers, they don't know what they are talking about when they propose to withdraw from nuclear energy and use "alternative energy" as wind or solar power. As these "alternatives" have shown not to be efficient in a cost/benefit analysis, they keep using coal, and oil for making electricity. Now allow me to quote what Walter Marshal (Lord Marshall of Goring), chairman of <i>Britain's Central Electricity Genreating Board</i> (C.E.G.B.) said in 1988:
<blockquote>
<b><I>Earlier this year, British Nuclear Fuels released into the Irish Sea some 400 kilograms of uranium, with the full knowledge of the regulators. This attracted considerable media attention and, I believe, some 14 parliamentary questions. I have to inform you that yesterday the C.E.G.B. released about 300 kilograms of radioactive uranium, together with all of its radioactive decay products, into the environment. Furthermore, we released some 300 kilograms of uranium the day before that. We shall be releasing the same amount today, and we plan to do the same tomorrow. In fact, <font color="red">we do it every day of every year so long as burn coal in our power stations</font>. And we do not call that "radioactive waste". <font color="red">We call it coal ash.</font></i></b>"
</blockquote><center>
<font size=5><b>The same thing happens in the United States
and throughout the world.</b></font>
</center>
And this is what Dr. Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission said back in 1993:
<blockquote>
<b>Of all industries, the nuclear industry alone has taken responsibility for its wastes from the beginning. Yet, ironically, since no one has been ever hurt or contaminated by the nuclear residues, it is the one industry most often criticized for its waste management practices.</b>
</blockquote>
Now tell me: are politicians just plain dumb? Because ignorance is no excuse for the lack of common sense. You can ignore everything, but once somebody showed you the facts, the common sense should take over emotions and fears and make you take the right decisions. Politicians and environmentalists are doing just the opposite thing.

Here is a link to the recent refutal of the paper submitted for cold fusion evidence.

<A HREF="http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0204065" target=new><FONT COLOR=ff009 size=+1> Cold fusion refuted </FONT></A>


Even in the original paper below it mantions that other teams could not reproduce the result.

<A HREF="http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/hottopics/bubble/1067589.pdf" target=new><FONT COLOR=Lime size=+1> cold fusion pdf </FONT></A>

What happened to Tokamak Design?


bye!

Just did a google search, there are about a hundred links on it, here's one.


<A HREF="http://elvis.neep.wisc.edu/~medusa/MEDUSA.html" target=new><FONT COLOR=ff009 size=+1> MEDUSA Tokamaks </FONT></A>


<img src="http://elvis.neep.wisc.edu/~medusa/medusa-cs.GIF">