From: Jay Willingham (jaywillingham@cfl.rr.com)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 10:43:08 EDT
My point is as experimentation using favored theories has been slowed by the
lack of funding, so too has exploration for alternative ways to effect
controlled fusion been stifled.
Or, is "cold fusion" a "dead duck" because of a lack of encouragement (read
"funding") of innovative creativity in the scientific community? Perhaps
this is the price of preferring to focus on concepts already discovered yet
enormously expensive to develop.
We can hope that like so many discoveries, a new theory of controlled fusion
will be discovered when someone is looking at an altogether different
problem.
Jay
----- Original Message -----
From: "Iain Strachan" <iain.strachan.asa@ntlworld.com>
To: "Jay Willingham" <jaywillingham@cfl.rr.com>; "Darryl Maddox"
<dpmaddox@arn.net>; "ASA" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 2:33 AM
Subject: Re: the hydrogen economy
> Jay,
>
> > We could sure metaphor ourselves into a topic on the nature and form of
> > education of the young and not so young if our goal is creativity.
> >
> > Fusion seems to be an area where science has focused its research
dollars
> > globally.
> >
> > Who is watching the focus of the research itself? Are other areas of
> > investigation being ignored or starved as billions go into the
> > electro-magnetic method?
> >
> > From recent postings it would seem that the cost has halved. Will more
> > money be fruitful if the rate of innovation in the process accelerates?
> >
>
> I think you're slightly missing the point here. The cost has halved at
the
> expense of cutting back the program and almost certainly delaying the time
> when we can have useful fusion. The original concept for ITER was for it
to
> be an experimental reactor, that would of itself produce usable energy.
The
> aim now is to establish the experimental basis for the design of such a
> reactor.
>
> The main alternative to the electro-magnetic method is laser implosion
> fusion. The idea is that you have tiny pellets of Deuterium-Tritium which
> are symmetrically imploded by massive laser beams, and thereby caused to
> explode like mini H-bombs. The method is called "inertial confinement",
> because it is the inertial of the matter in the fuel pellet that causes it
> to stay together long enough for usable energy to be derived. A lot of
> reserach and money has gone into this method, but as far as I'm aware it's
> less economically viable than the magnetic confinement method. The laser
> facilities required are absolutely gigantic - the lasers are the same size
> as the Jet Torus hall. One of the prime motivators for funding such
> applications is the obvious military interest in developing high power
> lasers. But it seems extremely unlikely, given the massive laser
facilities
> required, that this method would be any cheaper than the Tokamak concept.
>
> One of the reasons for the huge cost of the experiments is that they do
not
> produce useful energy & require a massive input of energy to power the
> magnetic coils. The JET experiment, near where I live has a whole
> sub-station of Didcot Power Station to provide the power during pulses.
> Even that is not enough during the 30 second shot & half the energy
supplied
> is from a massive flywheel generator that is spun up to 225 RPM during the
9
> 1/2 minute down time between pulses, and during a shot its speed goes down
> to half that. Note that ITER will be producing nothing but Hydrogen
plasmas
> for the first 7 years, so it too will not produce usable power, and even
> when it does, there will not be any attempt to recycle the power. As far
as
> I know, the ITER coils will not require such a huge input of power,
because
> it will use superconducting coils. However, one still needs to input
> massive amounts of energy to heat the plasma up to the required ignition
> temperature. (By input of EM energy from coils and also by injection of
> high energy beams of neutral particles).
>
> As far as I know, the "Cold Fusion" concept is a dead duck.
>
> Iain.
>
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