| From: | JonSzeto@***.com JonSzeto@***.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Cold Fusion (Re: SR History) |
| Date: | Tue, 16 Mar 1999 13:18:04 EST |
> > Let us not forget the first Cold fusion power plant going online in
> > 2027, giving all those technological wonders in the 205X's power
> > to run... :)
>
> Technological pet peeve ...
>
> Cold fusion, otherwise known as muon-catalyzed fusion, works.
> Theoretically. I read the original papers by Pons & Fleichman and the
> earlier papers by the Brigham Young experimental group.
So was that the explanation given for the result? Last I heard (in '90)
they (or at least RPI's Nuclear Engineering professors) still hadn't
figured out how Pons & Fleichman got it to work. (I still think that
experiment was a hoax, the result of some sloppy lab work.)
> The trouble is the muon catalysis part. A muon is a heavier cousin to an
> electron (in the Lepton family) and masses about 200 MeV. The excess energy
> gained from a deuteron-deuteron fusion is about 20 MeV.
>
> To just break even (ie gain back the energy from making the muon) you need
> at least 10 collisions, on the average, per muon. The deuteron-muon capture
> cross section is so small that it's difficult to get one event, let alone
> dozens. So for practical purposes, muon-catalyzed fusion will never work.
You also forgot to mention that the muon is an unstable particle that
generally can only be found in particle accelerators (as residue of
certain high-energy atomic collisions) and has an average life of 1E-06
seconds (1 microsecond for you English majors).
Also, it's muon-CATALYZED fusion, so all it does is make it easier for
the fusion event to occur, by reducing the size of the Bohr orbit, thus
increasing the sigma cross-section at a lower temp. (Oh, and a DD
collision? Couldn't you also do this with a DT collision?)
[ObSR] Here's an interesting hypothesis for your consideration, Adam.
When I was at the Fermilab accelerator in '88, one of my lecturers
speculated that the reason high-energy particles (muons, strange & charm
quarks, etc.) are unstable was because the energy state of the universe
was simply too low to support them.
What if the mana level affected the universe's energy state? So as the
mana level of the universe rises, so does the energy state of the
universe, allowing the sustainment at some point of higher level
particles. So consequently at some point (either in SR3's past or its
future), stable muons (and strange & charm quarks) could exist, and in
large enough quantities to make "cold fusion" possible. And at some
point in the far future, the energy state could be high enough to
sustain tau particles and top/bottom quarks.
> On the other hand, Lawrence Livermore Labs is on schedule to go online with
> an Inertial Confinement Fusion plant that will make 60% of the energy put
> in, and can be boosted to breakeven or beyond. Fast Z-pinch reactors are
> also becoming a possibility.
How long does LL think it would be before they could get to breakeven?
When I was in college (in the late 80s) the consensus of the academic
community (read: RPI's Physics department) was that it would be 30-40
years before anyone could get to breakeven (2010-2020), let alone a net
energy gain. Is ICF now the model du jour, or is the tokamak still alive
and kicking? And what are fast Z-pinch reactors? (You may want to send
these last Q's private, since we've likely gone above everybody else's
heads.)
-- Jon
