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RE: [cdn-nucl-l] Tabletop Fusion in the news

Title: RE: [cdn-nucl-l] Tabletop Fusion in the news
Those who are interested in this issue should also read the response of  Taleyarkhan et al. to the Comments of Shapira and Saltmarsh.  That response can be found at www.rpi.edu/~laheyr/SciencePaper.pdf .  For some reason, ORNL does not seem to be interested in having people read the Taleyarkhan et al. rebuttal.
 
I am familiar with only one of the people involved.  R.T. Lahey, Jr., one of the "et al." in Taleyarkhan et al. has an excellent reputation as a specialist in two-phase flow, a subject of some relevance.
 
Best regards.
 
Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov
 
These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Ellis [mailto:ellisrj@ornl.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 12:43 PM
To: 'multiple (E-mail)'
Subject: Re: [cdn-nucl-l] Tabletop Fusion in the news

 
 
All,
Here's an excerpt from the public ORNL webpage with the media release, and links to the SCIENCE papers, and the article commenting on the paper. 
(if these links don't show up in this posting, just go to www.ornl.gov).  I recommend that you all check out the interesting media release and its Q&A section.
 
 
Regards,
Ron Ellis
 
 
Home: News: Recent News

Preliminary evidence suggests possible nuclear emissions during experiments
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., March 4, 2002 -- Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences have reported results that suggest the possibility of nuclear reactions during the explosive collapse of bubbles in liquid, a process known as cavitation. More...

To read the paper by Rusi Taleyarkhan et al., go to the Science magazine website at http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/hottopics/bubble/index.shtml.

Another view of the experiments, written by Dan Shapira and Mike Saltmarsh, can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/slsite/SLan5av2.pdf.

 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 06, 2002 3:12 PM
Subject: RE: [cdn-nucl-l] Tabletop Fusion in the news

And by the way,

Over a decade ago, UTIAS (U. of Toronto Institute of Aerosp. Stud.) used its experimental converging shockwave chamber to try to achieve D-D fusion (on a microscopic level) also. That was after they succeeded in using it to shock carbon into producing diamonds. As I recall, they did measure a few neutrons.... certainly no-one was claiming to have found a new "tabletop fusion" gizmo.

The approach was different from this latest (sono-luminescence) experiment -- they had a large, hemispherical cavity inside a massive block of steel; the cavity wall had a thin layer of plastic explosive on it, and it was filled with an explosive gas mixture; a spark at the geometric center of the cavity produced a spherical shockwave which upon hitting the cavity wall triggered the explosion of the liner, which then sent a very strong, converging shockwave back to the center, where extreme pressures and temperatures resulted.

There have also been reports of ablation of hail stones (ie. ice) by lightning being able to induce sufficiently powerful & accurate converging shocks to produce a small number of fusion reactions (but there's very little D in nature...).

Personally, I don't think its surprising to get a few fusion reactions in the SL experiment, with deuterated acetone. But certainly can not be a practical fusion energy device.

Just think -- if the sun was made of deuterium instead of hydrogen, it would have blown up in an instant, not be burning for billions of years !

Jaro


-----Original Message-----

Adam McLean wrote,

From what I have read, the temperature on the sun's surface is about 6,000 deg K and although the core of the sun is about 15 million deg K, there is also 250 billion atms of pressure there (see:

http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/sol.html).