What ever happened to "Cold Fusion"?

[BeyGon]

I think all the big countries, U.S. Japan, China, India, and Russia plan on being on the Moon by 2015 to mine for minerals, Helium-3 for the new energy plan. I have seen quite a bit about this and you can google it. There have been a few Discovery TV show about it.

[sammyg2]

If I'm not mistaken, cold fusion has been replaced by man-made global warming

[SLO-BOB]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

More like I'm a realist.

You honestly think the oil companies and powers-that-be would let this emerge and potentially destroy them?

I don't. I suspect there'd be a few researchers that would "disappear" or have mysterious boating accidents or plane crashes.

I happen to agree. However, what if they're right? If we take that out of our economic picture, I'm sure it would have severe consequences. Kind of like banning tobacco. I'de be all for it, but I know we need the cash flow.

How about they simply buy the rights to the better, cleaner, technology and use it. Charge us the same rate. Leave the oil and coal in the ground.

[lendaddy]

Originally Posted by beepbeep

And then black helicopters appeared...

Why can people never tell when I'm joking?

I'm going to have to work on my methodology. Or maybe I'm just not funny? Naw that can't be it

[rammstein]

Green text for jokes.

[Moneyguy1]

And brown text represents?

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Old jokes?

Or maybe "recycled" jokes?

[beepbeep]

Originally Posted by lendaddy

Why can people never tell when I'm joking?

I'm going to have to work on my methodology. Or maybe I'm just not funny? Naw that can't be it

Ahh..damn. My jokes are on South Park-level. I didn't quite get the irony...


Anyway, I believe that biggest hurdle to developing working (warm) fusion are:

- The TIME SCALE
- The MIG MONEY INVOLVED

If you are politician, you don't want to pour many billions of $$$ into research which will reap benefit after you are dead or senile.

Also, these are big things. They will tend to centralize the power production...like five big plants for whole US. See the problems appearing?

Granted, they still have to make ITER work. It costs around 50b$ or so...

Hmm...which make me wonder about one thing: how much did you say war in Iraq cost? Hmm...imagine if you could pour that money into fusion research...hmm....imagine if thing actually worked....hmm....oil companies....hmm...what were Buschies into before politics? Or am I the one wearing tin hat now?

[Seric]

Doc Brown is still working on Mr. Fusion. Give him some time!

[rammstein]

Originally Posted by Moneyguy1

And brown text represents?

Writing while on the toilet

[SLO-BOB]

Originally Posted by beepbeep

And then black helicopters appeared...

Lol - That's good stuff. You're not only brainy, but very funny as well. I'll have to follow your posts more closely.

[sammyg2]

About 20 years ago i was working at lawrence livermore laboratories.
I asked one of the engineers, what's that big thing?
He said, "that's a fusion reactor"
No *****. does it work?
He said "no way, it's just a mock up. the government wanted us to spend some money so we did".

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

More like I'm a realist.

You honestly think the oil companies and powers-that-be would let this emerge and potentially destroy them?

I don't. I suspect there'd be a few researchers that would "disappear" or have mysterious boating accidents or plane crashes.

Dude. You've been watching too many mystery movies. This is real life.

[wrecktech]

Originally Posted by LubeMaster77

what do we need cold fusion for when we have the gererator?

Really, I have mine hooked up to my perpetual motion cratch slapper.

[DanielDudley]

Originally Posted by cmccuist

We already have fission. All those hippies and Jane Fonda who went bezerk over nuclear power (China syndrome, mushroom clouds etc.) were proven wrong.

(btw no radiation was released at 3 mile island and Chernobly was weapons reactor which didn't have a containment)

There's still the problem of high level nuclear waste, but that is easier to solve than containing a fusion reaction.

A lot of radioactive gas was released at TMI, and it was very fortunate that the prevailing winds were not blowing toward highly populated areas.

Doing fission safely is not cheap, and dealing with the waste has been an adressable issue that is not being adressed well

[DanielDudley]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

If I'm not mistaken, cold fusion has been replaced by man-made global warming

Funny. Dense, but funny.

[HardDrive]

SO thought this post was going to be about web development.

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by beepbeep

That looks like basic TOKAMAK. Hot fusion, for sure. There are other designs as well. Spherical design looks promising. Problem is wall degradation by neutron bombardment.

Anyone who thinks that fusion will be less dirty than fission is dreaming. Fusion produces neutrons. If you bombard stuff with neutrons, it will become radioactive.

Fusion is tough to get started, and very very tough to control. The main reason why it is considered better than fission, is there is a lot more of the fuel available. It is not cleaner.

[Hugh R]

About 33 y/o I worked on a TOKAMAK at the Francis Bitter National Magnetic Laboratory at MIT, it was kind of cool. We had a 210 ton flywheel we got from the New York City Subway Authority in this big room. We'd spin it up to about 350 RPM and then throw the field windings onto the generator (no, not a gererator, I know there is a confusion) and it would drop about 10 RPM. We'd shove a pulse of about ten million watts into about a dozen of these capacitors whose capacitance was each measured in hundreds of Farads (the little capacitors in old style distributors is measured in milli-farads). Each capacitor was about the size of a 35 gallon garbage can. You had to keep the capacitors shorted when they weren't being used or were being moved, because the earths magnetic field could induce enough charge in one to electrocute you. All the copper buss from the generator to the capacitors had silver-plated connections and each copper buss was about 1"x4" in dimension. They'd pull a vacuum on that TOKAMAK to 10 to the minus 9 torr.

They managed to get a plasma for about one millisecond. Don't know what they're getting now. The TOKOMAK is a concept we stole from the Russians.

[Aurel]

I wish I could work on cold fusion. Those are relatively simple electrochemical experiments in a calorimeter, and many researchers have reported anomalous heat generation. Unfortunately, I could never get funding to work on that.

"Cold Fusion is a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between Cold Fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here."
Brian Josephson and other cold fusion researchers said that cold fusion is suppressed, and that skeptics suffer from pathological disbelief.[14] They said that there is virtually no possibility for funding in cold fusion in the United States, and no chance of getting published.[15] They said that people in universities refuse to work on it because they would be ridiculed by their colleagues.[16]
There are still a number of people researching the possibilities of generating power with cold fusion. Scientists in several countries continue the research, and meet at the International Conference on Cold Fusion.

Aurel