Monday, September 28, 2015
Two biggies
Two BIG announcements of REAL SCIENCE in one week. Oddly, both of them start with 'water' and end with 'flowing'.
The Mars-rivers announcement is dramatic and GOOD SCIENCE but not likely to be useful.
The other one is also GOOD SCIENCE and is almost guaranteed to solve some big problems.
Warm fusion.
Hot fusion, using tritium, has been absorbing billions and billions of dollars for 50 years, and still isn't any closer to reality. Still no net output. Time to shut it down.
Cold fusion remains mysterious. It's clear that some kind of reaction is happening, which releases energy from somewhere. But it's still completely unclear (to outsiders anyway) whether the reaction is chemical or fission-like or fusion-like. Research on this topic has moved into NDA-bound industrial circles at Toyota and elsewhere. It may turn out to be a useful 'fuel cell', but after 30 years you expect more progress.
Warm fusion is simply one step down from hot fusion, but the one step makes all the difference. Using deuterium energized by a laser, it's already giving more output than input. Best of all, it doesn't require the massive and tricky magnetic containment of hot fusion, because it's not all that hot.
Instead of uncharged neutrons, it yields a stream of muons, highly energized electrons. Fast-moving negatively charged particles form an immediate current output, which means this method generates both heat and electricity DIRECTLY. Because the muons decay quickly, they can't simply be sent into the power grid, but a continuous flow of charges can always be turned into useful power.
Labels: Metrology
¶ 12:39 PM
