Read more: Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion : The Two-Way : NPR Brief background, nuclear fusion is the fusing of two atoms, happens in the sun and stars and produces a ton of energy. If people can maintain nuclear fusion and get energy from it, then people have discovered a method of getting energy with no pollution and no (or less?) radioactive waste. Not only would it be cleaner, but it would also produce even more energy than nuclear power plants currently do, with nuclear fission. I found this quite interesting actually.
still a long way off sadly.you would need have to mine the moon surface for tritium. plus the reactors needed are beyond mans ability at present. saying that successful fusion energy generation would be as profound as coal or oil .
As long as the risk isn't too big then this is good news. I just hope it won't end up in any radioactive incidents.
one benefit of fusion is it produces less radioactive waste and what waste it produces is far less harmful.
I have not yet looked at the article, but astronomy is one of my many geeky passions, and wight hat fusion comes with it. Scientists have been able to produce fusion many times on this Earth. A great example is the hydrogen bomb, however we have been able to do it with magnets lasers as well for milliseconds at a time. The main issue is to get a continuous controllable fusion reaction that will give us a net output on energy. Now to read the article.
Fusion on earth is possible, but the heat generated and the amount of energy currently required to initiate it does not allow for economical nor energy efficiency. Of course standard fusion that most Sun sized stars carry out only create up to iron, that is where fusion stops and the majority of isotopes with atoms of atomic number 26 or less are not radioactive. Radioactivity is the result of nuclear fission, a different process.
I just skimmed the article and yeah, it doesn't look like anything new has happened that has not been done for the last 10 or 20 years. When we can do a sustainable fusion reaction, that is widely adopted, and perhaps (wishful thinking) we could create carbon polymer compounds from it , well most of the worlds problems would simply not exist anymore.
How would we create polymers out of essentially ionized atoms? You would need to cool them, and at which point would probably form a wide variety of poly disperse compounds. I mean elemental separation would be a necessity, and at best we could theoretically control the final element produced, but again how would you predict the compounds formed?
Fusion does produce radioactive isotopes, or at least can. The compounds produced can have unstable numbers of neutrons to protons, and any elements with that can be radioactive. For example carbon 14 is one of the radioactive isotopes of carbon, which is obviously less than iron. However it is nice that in general lighter radioactive isotopes are much better to deal with than something like, say, caesium 137. ---------- Post added 12th Feb 2014 at 07:39 PM ---------- I am thinking (once again wishful thinking) of crystalline polymers of very little elemental complexity, or maybe something of one element such as diamonds, or buckyballs. This would be much further into the future than sustainable fusion. I use the term polymer loosely for mearly repeating compound or element, though I suppose polymer for one element would not be the correct definition. Just a thought. Also I just saw that you used the word "majority", and yes I agree with that.
Well if it follows the pattern of stellar nucleation that the star that seeded our solar system did, carbon 14 would be a rather small natural abundance. I'm guessing if we went that far as to be able to create a stable fusion reactor that may cap out at lower atomic numbers then controlling isotope distribution may not be impossible.
The article stated essentially that this was a breakthrough because the fusion reaction produced more energy than was put in (with the lasers), marginally more, but everyone recognizes that this is a significant milestone. The first functioning laser was invented in 1960, the year of my birth. At the time it was called "a solution looking for a problem"...how times have changed!
I'm aware that fusion has happened on Earth, but the fact that a new method such as this one has come up can open the doors to harnessing its energy is amazing. We might even be able to unlock cold fusion.
Cold fusion is an oxymoron as we currently understand physics. It just isn't possible even with laser containment and magnetic fields.
I'm sure that's how people felt about the atom splitting, then boom, people discovered fission. As technology advances, I believe only time will tell if cold fusion is even remotely possible. It probably isn't but, anything can happen. Even without cold fusion, I still think this can open the doors to unlocking new technology that can use the energy from nuclear fusion.
The problem with the concept of fusion is that it required incredible amounts of heat as well as gives off gamma rays. We simply don't have enough pressure however to compress nuclei beyond their individual nuclear radius to initiate fusion. The actual compound itself that would do the compression would fuse itself prior to a self sustaining fusion. Simply we cannot physically achieve fusion that is cold. Is there a different method for energy generation? Maybe but transfer of energy is transferred through heat and electromagnetism. But then again warping space time on the Planck scale is theoretical and who knows if that's possible. I guess "cold fusion" may be possible but I don't think it's what we think it means.
Let's hope we get safer nuclear powerplants out of this... I do not get why they do not try the make a miniature H bomb... I know it takes fission from the Uranium 235 (activated by the TNT) to get the Deuterium or Tritium to fusion.... The reason why there is radioactive matter is because we get fusion by fission of Uranium. In this case they replaced the Uranium with a Laser.... Interesting stuff...
The nice thing about fusion is that they can use simple elements and turn them into other simple elements which are not nearly as bad as the depleted uranium produced as waste by fission-based plants. It would produce a lot more energy than fission reactors and would be much more environmentally friendly.
Fusion (and fission) need a critical mass/temperature/pressure to happen. If you miniaturise either H-bombs or fissure reactors no reaction will happen. It's one of the reasons the futuristic predictions of the 50's couldn't happen (some people thought that there would be nuclear powered cars, planes and even vacuum cleaners in the future...). On top of the critical mass needed, you need a way to convert all that free energy (heat) into real energy (electricity). So you need a lot of equipment for that too and having something explode in the middle of your delicate and extremely expensive equipment isn't going to help you create electrical energy. : p ---------- Post added 13th Feb 2014 at 10:41 AM ---------- I'm not sure what you mean.. create carbon and such from fusion and then create polymers from them? Or use the energy from easier nuclear reactions to create polymers from easily obtained existing sources of carbon? First method seems a bit silly, second method would indeed be awesome. : )