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Wednesday, December 05, 2007

There is natural concern about what the world will do for energy when the supply of fossil fuel available at acceptable cost is exhausted some time in the future, maybe 200 years from now. One power source that would solve the probalem, if we could get it to work efficiently, is fusion power. Work on fusion power has been going on since I was in college, but I haven't followed it closely. Here is an article about fusion power research in Europe that I got from the blog "Blue crab Boulevard."


James Randerson, writing in The Guardian, describes a new initiative in Europe to use lasers to try to create a working fusion reactor.

It's a clean source of energy using fuel that can easily be extracted from sea water, and it isn't owned by Saudi Arabia. We're talking about fusion - and a multinational project led by British researchers that aims to use high-powered lasers to produce nuclear fusion, the same physical reaction powering the sun. If they succeed, they could solve the approaching world energy crisis without destroying the environment.

Although the team admits a commercial fusion reactor is still decades away, it believes using lasers to spark fusion shows great promise. The EU has agreed to fund the setup costs for a seven-year research project called HiPER (High Powered laser Energy Research) to build a working demonstration reactor. But preparing for that stage - requiring the collaboration of 11 nations including Germany, France, Canada and Russia - is expected to cost more than €50m (£35m). Building the reactor itself will cost more than €500m.

Money machine

Why such investment? Because if we can control a fusion generator, it will be self-powering, offering abundant excess energy (to convert in turn to electricity) from virtually unlimited fuel. On top of this, its waste products won't contribute to climate change or pose the long-term waste storage problem that fission - our present nuclear generation system - poses. And we desperately need new electricity sources.

But fusion is infamous for its grand claims, massive grant proposals and, so far, limited success. Physicists joke that they've been saying fusion power is 40 years away for the past 40 years. So far it's only been used in the H-bombs exploded in tests, but that was uncontrolled.

Up to now, most attention has been on so-called magnetic fusion (see panel), in which a powerful magnetic jacket brings two different isotopes of hydrogen at enormously high temperatures close enough to fuse. That releases huge amounts of energy. It's been done - but no reactor has been built large enough to generate more energy than is put in via the magnets.

It's an interesting read, but I was a bit surprised at this passage:

Laser fusion involves some mind-numbing science. CLF's laser, called Vulcan, is the most powerful laser in the world: it can focus 500 joules of energy (about the same required to lift 50 apples by 10m) into a laser burst just 40 femtoseconds (40 x 10-15) long - equivalent to one second in a million years. During that period, it's applying 10,000 times more energy than the National Grid generates

I'm not sure how to square that claim with other information. The University of Rochester (New York) has been conducting laser fusion experiments since 1970. I've known about that place for decades, even though I do not follow fusion research closely. Their OMEGA facility is supposed to be operational this year and will be able to focus as much as 40,000 joules of energy from 60 lasers - which calcs out to slightly more than 666 joules per laser. Here's the website for the UofR's Laboratory for Laser Energetics which describes their facility. Unless I'm misreading something, the European project is far, far behind the one at Rochester.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought your readers would be interested in looking at these energy technologies and EPS's theoretic base for ball lighting.

Aneutronic Fusion: Here I am not talking about the big science ITER project taking thirty years, but the several small alternative plasma fusion efforts.

There are three companies pursuing hydrogen-boron plasma toroid fusion, Paul Koloc, Prometheus II, Eric Lerner, Focus Fusion and Clint Seward of Electron Power Systems

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

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

Here are the links:

http://www.electronpowersystems.com/

U.S., Chilean Labs to Collaborate on Testing Scientific Feasibility of Focus Fusion http://pesn.com/2006/03/18/9600250_LPP_Chilean_Nuclear_Commission/



However, short of a Energy "silver bullet" like fusion , Here is a fully DOABLE technology


Time to Master the Carbon Cycle with Terra Preta Soil Technology;

The integrated energy strategy offered by Charcoal based Terra Preta Soil technology may
provide the only path to sustain our agricultural and fossil fueled power
structure without climate degradation, other than nuclear power.

The economics look good, and truly great if we had CO2 cap & trade in place:


Terra Preta soils I feel has great possibilities to revolutionize sustainable agriculture into a major CO2 sequestration strategy.

I thought the current news and links on Terra Preta soils and closed-loop pyrolysis would interest you.

SCIAM Article May 15 07

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=5670236C-E7F2-99DF-3E2163B9FB144E40



After many years of reviewing solutions to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) I believe this technology can manage Carbon for the greatest collective benefit at the lowest economic price, on vast scales. It just needs to be seen by ethical globally minded companies.

Even with all the big corporations coming to the GHG negotiation table, like Exxon, Alcoa, .etc, we still need to keep watch as they try to influence how carbon management is legislated in the USA. Carbon must have a fair price, that fair price and the changes in the view of how the soil carbon cycle now can be used as a massive sink verses it now being viewed as a wash, will be of particular value to farmers and a global cool breath of fresh air for us all.

If you have any other questions please feel free to call me or visit the TP web site I've been drafted to co-administer. http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/?q=node

It has been immensely gratifying to see all the major players join the mail list , Cornell folks, T. Beer of Kings Ford Charcoal (Clorox), Novozyne the M-Roots guys(fungus), chemical engineers, Dr. Danny Day of EPRIDA , Dr. Antal of U. of H., Virginia Tech folks and probably many others who's back round I don't know have joined.



Also Here is the Latest BIG Terra Preta Soil news;

ConocoPhillips Establishes $22.5 Million Pyrolysis Program at Iowa State 04/10/07

Mechabolic , a pyrolysis machine built in the form of a giant worm to eat solid waste and product char & fuel at the "Burning Man" festival ; http://whatiamupto.com/mechabolic/index.html

UN Climate Change Conference: Biochar present at the Bali Conference

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/steinerbalinov2107



Erich J. Knight
540-289-9750
shengar at aol.com

7:53 AM  
Blogger M. Simon said...

Here is a better bet:

Bussard Fusion Reactor
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

It has been funded:

Bussard Reactor Funded

The above reactor can burn Deuterium which is very abundant and produces lots of neutrons or it can burn a mixture of Hydrogen and Boron 11 which does not.

The implication of it is that we will know in 6 to 9 months if the small reactors of that design are feasible.

If they are we could have fusion plants generating electricity in 10 years or less depending on how much we want to spend to compress the time frame.

BTW Bussard is not the only thing going on in IEC. There are a few government programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana among others.

The Japanese and Australians also have programs.

If you want to get deeper into the technology visit:

IEC Fusion Technology blog

Start with the sidebar which has links to tutorials and other stuff.

11:48 AM  

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