Laser Fusion Energy is coming

[newmac]

Run time: 09:51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmIHD6P3rdo   Posted on YouTube: May 12, 2008 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: December 10, 2008 By DU Member: newmac Views on DU: 777

 
An eraser head of frozen hydrogen; and a dozen giant lasers can soon create Fusion Energy for Amerca.
Even Ahnnold Schwartzenegger is praising it...

[slackmaster]

1. Tagged for later viewing

Gotta go to work.

:-(

[screembloodymurder]

2. If they can amplify energy, why do we need the fusion?

I don't get it.

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. It would be cool if it did really work.

[DetlefK]

7. They are not amplifying energy, they are increasing the number of photons created by the laser

What's the big advantage of a laser? The coherence length is very long (->low dispersion) and the photons all have the same phase ("lockstep"). When they all have the same phase, there are no disturbing interferences.

The prime laser is sort of the ignition. Then they use this beam to create further photons (investing electricity) that are in lockstep as well. I guess they use some kind of scintillation tubes for this.

They are not amplifying anything. They are just making copies of the original beam.

[OneBlueSky]

4. if they can indeed produce a fusion reaction comparable to the sun . . .

wouldn't the resulting heat just vaporize anything and everything in its vicinity? . . . how do you make a container to hold a piece of something that hot? . . .

[RandomThoughts]

6. The container would be electro magnetic.

I heard they were doing some test with containing plasma inside an electromagnetic container.

I wonder how they plan on getting a + balance of power, they mentioned how much power was being put into the fusion ignition, but did not mention how much the event would output. Anyone do the math, how much mass would be needed to get a positive output. e=mc^2 so it should be possible to figure it out. Like if they input X energy in form of charging lasers, then they need to reach a certain amount of mass to energy conversion to get a power plant.

Anyone know if they plan on using it like a kick start then using energy to continue fusing other atoms with a + net gain? This part makes me wonder, since we have no examples of fusion chain reactions without massive gravitational force inside a sun.

Thinking about it, in all suns, the energy radiates out, so maybe if you could reflect back some higher percent to the energy from core fuel that was being converted, a reflection that does not occur naturally you could create a sustainable chain reaction.

Sorta, suns disperse some percent, so grav is needed for continued reaction, but in artificial production, much of the energy is reflected back into next atom in line, with only a fraction escaping to be the power output of system.

Anyone know who they plan on getting excess power out of this?

Any good links out there?

[DetlefK]

8. The knowledge about magnetic bottles has been around for decades.

The most practical architecture for such an electro-magnet would be the "Tokamak". It was invented by a russian scientist (I forgot his name) and is currently used in most fusion-laboratories. ITER (an international test-reactor) will be build in the Tokamak-architecture as well.

The energy does not come from E=mc².
Let's say atom A has x nucleons, that are held together by the binding-energy E(A). Atom B has y nucleons, that are held together by the binding-energy E(B).

Now we fuse A and B and get C. C has x+y nucleons, but the the energy needed to hold them together is smaller than E(A)+E(B). And that surplus of unneeded energy is what we get. Fusion works until C (respectively x+y) reaches Iron-56. You can't get energy out of iron by fusion. But take elements heavier than Iron-56 and you get energy by fission.

Honestly, I don't think there's a good formula to calculate the net gain of energy in this experiment. You can calculate the binding-energy of an atomic nucleus with the Bethe-Weizsäcker-formula, but certain parts of that formula are not suited for small atoms.

[RandomThoughts]

9. So is this it?

Ok so attom A and B fused to create C, but C takes less energy to hold togeher so that is where surplus comes from.

So question would be, does the energy
is (a+b) - c > energy cost to fuse.

Is that right?

[mcjackson]

5. isn't this what...

...dr. octagon tried to do? we all saw how THAT turned out........ :-)