The popular question is when will we have commercial nuclear fusion that has a significant impact on the energy production of the world.
Updated Prospects for Commercial Nuclear Fusion
I have had several articles summarizing the prospects for commercial nuclear fusion
The ITER project and the national ignition projects are decades away according to their own timelines. They are really counting on advanced superconductors to reduce the size and improve projected cost and performance.
So the near term possibilities are the smaller projects.
Helion Energy got funding increased towards tens of millions instead of a few million. John Slough works out of the University of Washington. If all proceeds on schedule then a Helion Energy machine that that proves commercial energy gain would be a 50 Megawatt system built in 2019. $200 million will be needed for the commercial pilot plant. The plan would be to start building commercial systems by 2022. I would give Helion the edge in terms of odds to be first to succeed. However, just like nuclear fission, their can be more than one successful technology. Different countries can adopt different or even multiple designs. There will also be nuclear fusion for space propulsion (actually easier than beating coal or natural gas for energy production. Run a fusion propulsion for minutes or hours and it is better than ion drive. Nuclear fusion will have a lot of applications that will need different designs.
LPP Fusion (Lawrenceville Plasma Physics) - the target is to make LPP Fusion with a commercial system 4 years after net energy gain is proved. The hop is two years to prove net energy gain. Then 2019-2022 for a commercial reactor (2022 if we allow for 3 years of slippage). They could lower energy costs by ten times.
LPP Fusion is very public about their research. They are minimally funded with a few million. They are trying to get tungsten and berrylium anodes and cathodes to work for their dense plasma focus design. Think of an advanced spark plug design. They are trying to get a handle on contamination from the firings. They are looking to coat their chamber with titanium. They have to up the amperage to about 3-4 megaamps.
General Fusion- has a steam punk like design with giant pistons striking a sphere with molten metal and plasmoids. They have Jeff Bezos funding as well as Canadian and Malaysian government. 2023 (targeting 4 cents per kwh)
Tri-Alpha Energy (previously talked about 2015-2020, but now likely 2020-2025). They have best funding of the venture funded fusion. They have raised over $150 million.
Lockheed Compact Fusion has a target date of 2024 and made big news recently with some technical details and an effort to get partners. Not much news out of Lockheed. Experts have criticized the technical details that they released. Outsiders think that they are too optimistic about how small they can make it by several factors.
There are several other projects.
IF they all stall out or do not deliver anywhere near their target dates, then I think the progress in high energy rapidly pulsed lasers will be where nuclear fusion is produced. Lasers keep improving by orders of magnitude and the pulsing also has rapid improvement.
It has been proposed for space propulsion but I think it would work for energy generation.
There was also a claim of ultradense deuterium generated fusion.
If no nuclear fusion works out and the LENR/cold fusion take a lot longer then I expect the molten salt nuclear fission to transform energy. In particular the Terrestrial energy reactor.
China is also working on supercritical water reactors that along with factory production efficiency and massive industrial scale could provide lower cost energy.
Really good solar with really good batteries scaled up by 100 times or more could also be transformative
Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy
By Jessica Orwig
October 30, 2015 11:21 AM
For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.
And they're still dreaming.
But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.
Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute
completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called
a stellarator.The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the W7-X.
And after more than a year of tests, engineers are finally ready to fire up the $1.1 billion machine for the first time. It could happen before the end of this month, Science reported.
The black horse of nuclear reactors
Known in the plasma physics community as the "black horse" of reactors that use nuclear fusion, stellarators are notoriously difficult to build.The GIF below shows the many different layers of W7-X, which took 19 years to complete:
From 2003 to 2007, as the project was being built, it suffered some major construction setbacks — including one of its contracted manufacturers going out of business — that nearly canceled the whole endeavor. Only a handful of stellarators have been attempted, and even fewer have been completed.
By comparison, the more popular cousin to the stellarator, called a tokamak, is in wider use. Over three dozen tokamaks are operational around the world, and more than 200 have been built throughout history. These machines are easier to construct and, in the past, have performed better as a nuclear reactor than stellarators.
But tokamaks have a major flaw that W7-X is reportedly immune to, suggesting that Germany's latest monster machine could be a game changer.
How a nuclear-fusion reactor works
Schematic of the average tokamak. Notice how it has fewer layers than the stellarator and the shape of the magnetic coils is different. The key to a successful nuclear-fusion reactor of any kind is to generate, confine, and control a blob of gas, called a plasma, that has been heated to temperatures of more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.
At these blazing temperatures, the electrons are ripped from their atoms, forming ions.
Normally, the ions bounce off one another like bumper cars, but under these extreme conditions the repulsive forces are overcome.
The ions are therefore able to collide and fuse together,
which generates energy, and you have accomplished nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion is different from what fuels today's nuclear reactors,
which operate with energy from atoms that decay, or break apart, instead
of fusing together.
Nuclear fusion is the process that has been fueling our sun for about
4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another estimated 4
billion years.
Once engineers have heated the
gas in the reactor to the right temperature, they use super-chilled
magnetic coils to generate powerful magnetic fields that contain and
control the plasma.
The W7-X, for example, houses 50 six-ton magnetic coils, shown in
purple in the GIF below. The plasma is contained within the red coil:The difference between tokamaks and stellarators
For years, tokamaks have been
considered the most promising machine for producing energy in the way
the sun does because the configuration of their magnetic coils contains a
plasma that is better than that of currently operational stellarators.
(Science Magazine on YouTube) Schematic of W7-X. But there's a problem: Tokamaks can control the plasma only in short bursts that last for no more than seven minutes. And the energy necessary to generate that plasma is more than the energy engineers get from these periodic bursts.
Tokamaks thus consume
more energy than they produce, which is not what you want from
nuclear-fusion reactors, which have been touted as the "most important energy source over the next millennium."
Because of the stellarators' design, experts suspect it could sustain a plasma for at least 30 minutes
at a time, which is significantly longer than any tokamak. The French
tokamak "Tore Supra" holds the record: Six minutes 30 seconds.
If W7-X succeeds, it could turn the nuclear-fusion community on its head and launch stellarators into the limelight.
"The world is waiting to see if
we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse," David
Gates, the head of stellarator physics at the Princeton Plasma Physics
Laboratory, told Science.
http://fortune.com/
This investor is chasing a new kind of fusion
A
prominent North Carolina investor is backing a new kind of fusion that
operates at much lower temperatures than thought possible, which would
make it easier to commercialize. So far the early results show promise.
Tom Darden, the founder and CEO of the $2.2 billion
private equity fund Cherokee Investment Partners, made his mark by
acquiring and cleaning up hundreds of environmentally contaminated
sites. Today he is also an early stage investor in clean technology,
having put his own money into dozens of companies in areas ranging from
smart grid to renewable energy, and prefab green buildings. More
recently he’s backed a new approach to fusion, a potentially abundant
and carbon-free form of energy that would operate at a much lower
temperatures than big government projects around the world, which
require temperatures of 100 million degrees centigrade and more.This new technology, called Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) is related but very different from the cold fusion technology that in 1989 researchers Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have licked when they revealed to the world a simple tabletop machine designed to achieve a fusion reaction at room temperature. Their experiment was eventually debunked and since then the term cold fusion has become almost synonymous with scientific chicanery.
What does Darden, a no-nonsense, investor with a sharp eye on the bottom line and a successful track record, see in this new, risky technology? Fortune’s Brian Dumaine spoke to him to find out.
Q: How did you get involved with low-temperature fusion?
A: Well, I thought the issue was moot after scientists failed to replicate the Fleischman and Pons initial cold fusion experiments. I was literally unaware that people were working on this in labs. I’ve made about 35 clean technology investments, and I thought that if someone’s doing this I should have heard about it. Then three years ago I started to hear about progress being made in the field and I said, “Damn, you have to be kidding, it doesn’t make sense.”
As it turns out, many of those early efforts to replicate cold fusion did not correctly load the test reactors or attempt to properly measure heat. The scientists trying to replicate the work of Fleischman and Pons were mainly looking for nuclear signals, like radiation, which generally are not present. They missed that heat was the main by-product. In addition, I learned that there have been nearly 50 reported positive test results, including experiments at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, EPRI, and SRI.
Q: The conventional wisdom is that LENR violates the laws of physics.
A: That’s right. To create fusion energy you have to break the bonds in atoms and that takes a tremendous amount of force. That’s why the big government fusion projects have to use massive lasers or extreme heat—millions degrees centigrade—to break the bonds. Breaking those bonds at much lower temperatures is inconsistent with the laws of physics, as they’re now known.
Q: What changed your mind?
A: Scientists get locked into paradigms until the paradigm shifts. Then everyone happily shifts to the new truth and no one apologizes for being so stupid before. Low temperature fusion could be consistent with existing theories, we just don’t know how. It’s like when physicists say that according to the laws of aerodynamics bumblebees can’t fly but they do.
Q: So you licensed the technology of Andrea Rossi, an Italian scientist and entrepreneur who’s been having some success with cold fusion.
A: That’s right. Rossi’s was one of the first investments we made. We’ve been seeing the creation of isotopes and energy releases at relatively low temperatures—1,000 degrees centigrade, which could be a sign that fusion has occurred. We have sponsored tests and more research for Rossi’s work. A group of Swedish scientists tested the technology, and they got good results. A number of other people say they are also getting positive results but these haven’t been confirmed. A Russian scientist, for example claims to have replicated Rossi’s work in Switzerland and got excess heat. That’s a good sign.
Q: So you’re optimistic?
A: Yes, In fact, Rossi was awarded an important U.S. patent recently, which is part of what we licensed, covering the use of nickel, platinum or palladium powders, as well as other components, in his heat-producing device. This is one of very few LENR-related patents to date.
But let me make one thing very clear. We don’t know for sure yet whether it will be commercially feasible. We’ve invested more than $10 million so far in Rossi’s and other LENAR technology and we’ll spend substantially more than that before we know for certain because we want to crush all the tests. (Recently, we have been joined by Woodford Investment Management in the U.K., which has made a much larger investment into our international LENR activities—so we are well funded.)
Cold fusion has such a checkered past and is so filled with hypesters and people with a gold rush, get-rich-quick mentality. We need to be calm, prudent and not exaggerate. I don’t want to say that cold fusion is real until we can absolutely prove it in ten different ways and then persuade our worst critics to join our camp.
Q: If it does work, what are the implications?
A: I’m doing this for the environment. If cold fusion works, it would address air pollution including carbon. It could be a game changer.
Bezos, Allen-fueled startups tackle nuclear fusion’s power
Originally published November 1, 2015 at 8:00 pm Updated November 1, 2015 at 9:33 pmhttp://www.seattletimes.com/
This is the C-2U machine at Tri Alpha Energy, a fusion company in Lake Forest, Calif. The machine was used to superheat a ball of hydrogen to 10 million degrees Celsius and hold it for 5 milliseconds, a... (EMILY BERL/NYT) More Backed by investors like Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen, young firms, including one in Redmond, say they’ll succeed where the government has failed in developing a fusion reactor.
By DINO GRANDONI
The New York Times
group of startups with ties to the Seattle area is promising a new and virtually unlimited source of power, one that produces none of the gases scientists say contribute to global warming. The only problem? A way to harness the energy source, nuclear fusion — the reaction that gives birth to sunlight — still needs to be invented. Such an achievement has long evaded government scientists and university researchers, despite decades of work and billions of dollars in research.
But backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and some of the wealthiest people in the technology industry — including Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — a handful of young companies say they can succeed where government has fallen short. Nuclear fusion is one of many areas of science and energy now getting the backing of venture capitalists. The investor dollars coming into fusion startups, like those in many areas of science, still pale in comparison with the money spent by governments.
But signs of progress, including some results that have eclipsed government projects, have generated hope among some scientists that the companies could help develop a fusion reactor within their lifetimes. At the very least, they talk a confident game — even though the history of fusion science is littered with frustration and false starts. Some fusion scientists, unable to evaluate the startups’ unpublished scientific results, doubt the companies’ chances.
“The fusion era is here and coming,” said William Lese, a managing partner at Braemar Energy Ventures, a venture-capital firm with a stake in General Fusion, one of the leading startups in the field. “The increase in activity in this space is perhaps a sign of that.” Nuclear fusion occurs when two atoms are squeezed together so tightly that they merge. That single, larger atom releases a tremendous amount of energy.
This happens naturally at the center of the sun, where gravity easily crushes hydrogen into helium, spewing forth the sunlight that reaches Earth. But on Earth, making hydrogen hot and dense enough to sustain a controlled fusion reaction — one that does not detonate like a thermonuclear bomb — has been a challenge.
Huge incentive
The potential upsides of the power, though, provide a huge incentive. Fusion reactions release no carbon dioxide. Their fuel, derived from water, is abundant. Compared with contemporary nuclear reactors, which produce energy by splitting atoms, a fusion plant would produce little radioactive waste.
The possibilities have attracted Amazon’s Bezos. He has invested in General Fusion, a startup in British Columbia, through Bezos Expeditions, which manages his venture capital investments. Paul Allen, meanwhile, is betting on another fusion company, Tri Alpha Energy, based in Lake Forest, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles, through his venture arm, Vulcan Capital.
Peter Thiel — the co-founder of PayPal, who once lamented the superficiality of the technology sector by saying, “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” — has invested in a third fusion startup, Redmond-based Helion Energy, through Mithril Capital Management.
Government backing Government money fueled a surge in fusion research in the 1970s, but the fusion budget was cut nearly in half over the next decade.
Federal research narrowed on what scientists saw as the most promising prototype — a machine called a tokamak, which uses magnets to contain and fuse a spinning, doughnut-shape cloud of hydrogen. Today’s startups are trying to perfect some of the ideas that the government left by the wayside. After earning his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1990s, Michl Binderbauer had trouble securing federal funds to research an alternative approach to fusion that the U.S. government briefly explored — one that adds the element boron into the hydrogen fuel.
Binderbauer, along with his doctorate adviser, Norman Rostoker, founded Tri Alpha Energy, eventually raising money from the venture-capital arms of Allen and the Rockefeller family. The company has raised over $200 million.
“We basically said, ‘What would an ideal reactor look like?’ ” said Binderbauer, is now the company’s chief technology officer. Rostoker died late last year.
General Fusion is pursuing an approach that uses pistons to generate shock waves through the hydrogen gas. Compressed hard enough, the hydrogen atoms will begin to fuse. General Fusion has raised about $74 million from private investors and another $20 million from the Canadian government. Its reactor concept, like that of Tri Alpha Energy, would yield power plants much smaller than a commercially viable tokamak, which would need to be larger than many stadiums are in order to work.
General Fusion’s idea to compress a ball of hydrogen, too, is borrowed from a government project aborted decades ago. The company’s innovation on that approach is to use cannon-size pistons for the compression. Difficult challenge Critics in the nuclear-physics field say it is unlikely startups will succeed with these alternative approaches.
“They just keep pounding on the same dead horse,” said Edward Morse, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “What happens in fusion is that the same ideas pop up every two decades. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole.”
In addition, private funds cannot match those of the most ambitious government fusion-energy project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, a stadium-size tokamak being built in France by the European Union, along with the United States and five other nations, for about $14 billion.
The United States is committed to funding about 9 percent of the project.
Hedging bet Still, the Energy Department is also hedging its bet, granting $30 million to alternative fusion projects, including Redmond’s Helion Energy, which received $4 million.
“In all of our selections, it’s not about a startup vs. something else,” said Eric Rohlfing, deputy director for technology of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, the government agency that made the grants. “It’s about the quality of the idea.” The startups counter critics by saying that they can be more efficient than government projects.
When Tri Alpha Energy’s panel of outside advisers visited the construction site of the company’s lab in 2007, the concrete was still being poured. Some advisers doubted the company would be conducting experiments within a year, as Binderbauer said they would. But by the following year, the machine was ready. “When I walked these guys out there to see that, their jaws dropped,” Binderbauer said. I do recall being surprised by how fast they said they would get the facility ready,” said Burton Richter, a professor emeritus at Stanford and Nobel laureate in physics who advised Tri Alpha Energy.
Reaching a milestone
This past June, Tri Alpha reached a milestone: Its machine superheated a ball of hydrogen to 10 million degrees Celsius and held it for 5 milliseconds — much longer than government projects achieved using the same method.
“You may ask: ‘Five milliseconds? That’s nothing.’ Certainly, that’s the blink of an eye to a layperson,” Binderbauer said. “But in our field, that’s half an eternity.” Other fusion efforts have set even more ambitious goals.
When Lockheed Martin announced its own fusion project last year, the company said it expected to build a prototype within five years. But history would suggest that struggles lie ahead. For example, the U.S. government’s other major approach to fusion, used by a California lab that fires 192 giant lasers at a container holding hydrogen to compress and fuse it, missed a 2012 deadline for producing more energy than the lasers put in.
That checkered past is not stopping the startups. “We’re moving very quickly,” said Michael Delage, vice president for strategy at General Fusion. “Is it two years away? Three years away? Four years away? Maybe.“ We’ll let you know when we get there.”
DINO GRANDON
http://nextbigfuture.com/
September 25, 2015
Patent details for Nuclear Fusion using lasers and ultradense deuterium
Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Iceland are researching a new type of nuclear fusion process.
This produces almost no neutrons but instead fast, heavy electrons
(muons), since it is based on nuclear reactions in ultra-dense heavy
hydrogen (deuterium). The new fusion process can take place in
relatively small laser-fired fusion reactors fueled by heavy hydrogen
(deuterium). They have gotten twice the energy from what they put in and
believe they can get to 20 times the energy out as put in.
Leif Holmlid filed a patent in 2012.
The nuclear fusion method comprises the following steps:
1. bringing hydrogen in a gaseous state into contact with a hydrogen transfer catalyst configured to cause a transition of the hydrogen from the gaseous state to an ultra-dense state;
2. collecting the hydrogen in the ultra-dense state on a carrier configured to substantially confine the hydrogen in the ultra-dense state within a fuel collection portion of the carrier;
3. transporting the carrier to an irradiation location; and subjecting, at the irradiation location, the hydrogen in the ultra-dense state to irradiation having sufficient energy to achieve break-even in energy generation by nuclear fusion.
Computational studies of the laser pulse energy required for break-even exist (see S.A. Slutz and R.A. Vesey, "Fast ignition hot spot break-even scaling". Phys. Plasmas 12 (2005) 062702 ). These studies yield a pulse energy around 1 J at break-even. In their experiments, break-even is indeed observed at 1 J pulse energy. From break-even to an energy gain of 1000, a further factor of at least 4 in laser pulse energy is required. they conclude that the available information agrees that useful power output from nuclear fusion in ultra-dense hydrogen will be found at laser pulse energy of 4 J - 1 kJ. Such a pulse energy is feasible.
Leif Holmlid filed a patent in 2012.
The nuclear fusion method comprises the following steps:
1. bringing hydrogen in a gaseous state into contact with a hydrogen transfer catalyst configured to cause a transition of the hydrogen from the gaseous state to an ultra-dense state;
2. collecting the hydrogen in the ultra-dense state on a carrier configured to substantially confine the hydrogen in the ultra-dense state within a fuel collection portion of the carrier;
3. transporting the carrier to an irradiation location; and subjecting, at the irradiation location, the hydrogen in the ultra-dense state to irradiation having sufficient energy to achieve break-even in energy generation by nuclear fusion.
Computational studies of the laser pulse energy required for break-even exist (see S.A. Slutz and R.A. Vesey, "Fast ignition hot spot break-even scaling". Phys. Plasmas 12 (2005) 062702 ). These studies yield a pulse energy around 1 J at break-even. In their experiments, break-even is indeed observed at 1 J pulse energy. From break-even to an energy gain of 1000, a further factor of at least 4 in laser pulse energy is required. they conclude that the available information agrees that useful power output from nuclear fusion in ultra-dense hydrogen will be found at laser pulse energy of 4 J - 1 kJ. Such a pulse energy is feasible.
By hydrogen in an "ultra-dense state" should, at least in the context of
the present application, be understood hydrogen in the form of a
quantum material (quantum fluid) in which adjacent nuclei are within one
Bohr radius of each other. In other words, the nucleus-nucleus distance
in the ultra-dense state is considerably less than 50 picometers. In
the following, hydrogen in the ultradense state will be referred to as
H(-1) (or D(-1) when deuterium is specifically referred to). The terms
"hydrogen in an ultra-dense state" and "ultra-dense hydrogen" are used
synomymously throughout this application.
A "hydrogen transfer catalyst" is any catalyst capable of absorbing hydrogen gas molecules (H2) and dissociating these molecules to atomic hydrogen, that is, catalyze the reaction H2 → 2H. The name hydrogen transfer catalyst implies that the so-formed hydrogen atoms on the catalyst surface can rather easily attach to other molecules on the surface and thus be transferred from one molecule to another. The hydrogen transfer catalyst may further be configured to cause a transition of the hydrogen into the ultradense state if the hydrogen atoms are prevented from re-forming covalent bonds. The mechanisms behind the catalytic transition from the gaseous state to the ultra-dense state are quite well understood, and it has been experimentally shown that this transition can be achieved using various hydrogen transfer catalysts, including, for example, commercially available so-called styrene catalysts, as well as (purely) metallic catalysts, such as Iridium and Palladium. It should be noted that the hydrogen transfer catalyst does not necessarily have to transition the hydrogen in the gaseous state to the ultra-dense state directly upon contact with the hydrogen transfer catalyst. Instead, the hydrogen in the gaseous state may first be caused to transition to a dense state H(1), to later spontaneously transition to the ultra-dense state H(-1). Also in this latter case has the hydrogen transfer catalyst caused the hydrogen to transition from the gaseous state to the ultra-dense state.
At a rate of one carrier foil per second carrying 3 µg ultra-dense deuterium giving fusion ignition, the energy output of a power station using this method is approximately 1 MW. This would use 95 g of deuterium per year to produce 9 GWh, or one 5 liter gas bottle at 100 bar standard pressure. By using several lines of target carrier production, several laser lines or a higher repetition rate laser, the output of the power station can be scaled relatively easily.
Catalytic conversion
The catalytic process may employ commercial so called styrene catalysts, i.e. a type of solid catalyst used in the chemical industry for producing styrene (for plastic production) from ethylene benzene. This type of catalyst is made from porous Fe-O material with several different additives, especially potassium (K) as so called promoter. The function of this catalyst has been studied in detail.
The catalyst is designed to split off hydrogen atoms from ethyl benzene so that a carbon-carbon double bond is formed, and then to combine the hydrogen atoms so released to hydrogen molecules which easily desorb thermally from the catalyst surface. This reaction is reversible: if hydrogen molecules are added to the catalyst they are dissociated to hydrogen atoms which are adsorbed on the surface. This is a general process in hydrogen transfer catalysts. We utilize this mechanism to produce ultra-dense hydrogen, which requires that covalent bonds in hydrogen molecules are not allowed to form after the adsorption of hydrogen in the catalyst.
The potassium promoter in the catalyst provides for a more efficient formation of ultra-dense hydrogen. Potassium (and for example other alkali metals) easily forms so called circular Rydberg atoms K*. In such atoms, the valence electron is in a nearly circular orbit around the ion core, in an orbit very similar to a Bohr orbit. At a few hundred °C not only Rydberg states are formed at the surface, but also small clusters of Rydberg states K N *, in a form called Rydberg Matter (RM). This type of cluster is probably the active form of the potassium promoter in normal industrial use of the catalyst.
The clusters K N * transfer part of their excitation energy to the hydrogen atoms at the catalyst surface. This process takes place during thermal collisions in the surface phase. This gives formation of clusters H N * (where H indicates proton, deuteron, or triton) in the ordinary process also giving the K N * formation, namely cluster assembly during the desorption process. If the hydrogen atoms could form covalent bonds, molecules H2 would instead leave the catalyst surface and no ultra-dense material could be formed. In the RM material, the electrons are not in s orbitals since they always have an orbital angular momentum greater than zero. This implies that covalent bonds cannot be formed since the electrons on the atoms must be in s orbitals to form the normal covalent sigma (σ) bonds in H2. The lowest energy level for hydrogen in the form of RM is metallic (dense) hydrogen called H(1), with a bond length of 150 picometer (pm). The hydrogen material falls down to this level by emission of infrared radiation. Dense hydrogen is then spontaneously converted to ultra-dense hydrogen called H(-1) with a bond distance of 2-4 pm depending on which particles (protons, deuterons, tritons) are bound. This material is a quantum material (quantum fluid) which probably involves both electron pairs (Cooper pairs) and nuclear pairs (proton, deuteron or triton pairs, or mixed pairs). These materials are probably both superfluid and superconductive at room temperature, as predicted for ultra-dense deuterium and confirmed in recent experiments.
Review of Scientific Instruments - Efficient source for the production of ultradense deuterium D(-1) for laser-induced fusion (ICF) (2011)
A novel source which simplifies the study of ultradense deuterium D(-1) is now described. This means one step further toward deuterium fusion energy production. The source uses internal gas feed and D(-1) can now be studied without time-of-flight spectral overlap from the related dense phase D(1). The main aim here is to understand the material production parameters, and thus a relatively weak laser with focused intensity less than a trillion watts per square centimeter is employed for analyzing the D(-1) material. The properties of the D(-1) material at the source are studied as a function of laser focus position outside the emitter, deuterium gas feed, laser pulse repetition frequency and laser power, and temperature of the source. These parameters influence the D(-1) cluster size, the ionization mode, and the laser fragmentation patterns
Journal of Fusion Energy - Ultradense Deuterium - F. Winterberg 2010
An attempt is made to explain the recently reported occurrence of ultradense deuterium as an isothermal transition of Rydberg matter into a high density phase by quantum mechanical exchange forces. It is conjectured that the transition is made possible by the formation of vortices in a Cooper pair electron fluid, separating the electrons from the deuterons, with the deuterons undergoing Bose–Einstein condensation in the core of the vortices. If such a state of deuterium should exist at the reported density of about 130,000 g/cm3, it would greatly facility the ignition of a thermonuclear detonation wave in pure deuterium, by placing the deuterium in a thin disc, to be ignited by a pulsed ultrafast laser or particle beam of modest energy.
Physics Letters A - Ultra-dense deuterium and cold fusion claims - F. Winterberg 2010
An attempt is made to explain the recently reported occurrence of 14 MeV neutron induced nuclear reactions in deuterium metal hydrides as the manifestation of a slightly radioactive ultra-dense form of deuterium, with a density of 130,000 g/cm3 observed by a Swedish research group through the collapse of deuterium Rydberg matter. In accordance with this observation it is proposed that a large number of deuterons form a “linear-atom” supermolecule. By the Madelung transformation of the Schrödinger equation, the linear deuterium supermolecule can be described by a quantized line vortex. A vortex lattice made up of many such supermolecules is possible only with deuterium, because deuterons are bosons, and the same is true for the electrons, which by the electron–phonon interaction in a vortex lattice form Cooper pairs. It is conjectured that the latent heat released by the collapse into the ultra-dense state has been misinterpreted as cold fusion. Hot fusion though, is here possible through the fast ignition of a thermonuclear detonation wave from a hot spot made with a 1 kJ 10 petawatt laser in a thin slice of the ultra-dense deuterium.
A "hydrogen transfer catalyst" is any catalyst capable of absorbing hydrogen gas molecules (H2) and dissociating these molecules to atomic hydrogen, that is, catalyze the reaction H2 → 2H. The name hydrogen transfer catalyst implies that the so-formed hydrogen atoms on the catalyst surface can rather easily attach to other molecules on the surface and thus be transferred from one molecule to another. The hydrogen transfer catalyst may further be configured to cause a transition of the hydrogen into the ultradense state if the hydrogen atoms are prevented from re-forming covalent bonds. The mechanisms behind the catalytic transition from the gaseous state to the ultra-dense state are quite well understood, and it has been experimentally shown that this transition can be achieved using various hydrogen transfer catalysts, including, for example, commercially available so-called styrene catalysts, as well as (purely) metallic catalysts, such as Iridium and Palladium. It should be noted that the hydrogen transfer catalyst does not necessarily have to transition the hydrogen in the gaseous state to the ultra-dense state directly upon contact with the hydrogen transfer catalyst. Instead, the hydrogen in the gaseous state may first be caused to transition to a dense state H(1), to later spontaneously transition to the ultra-dense state H(-1). Also in this latter case has the hydrogen transfer catalyst caused the hydrogen to transition from the gaseous state to the ultra-dense state.
At a rate of one carrier foil per second carrying 3 µg ultra-dense deuterium giving fusion ignition, the energy output of a power station using this method is approximately 1 MW. This would use 95 g of deuterium per year to produce 9 GWh, or one 5 liter gas bottle at 100 bar standard pressure. By using several lines of target carrier production, several laser lines or a higher repetition rate laser, the output of the power station can be scaled relatively easily.
Catalytic conversion
The catalytic process may employ commercial so called styrene catalysts, i.e. a type of solid catalyst used in the chemical industry for producing styrene (for plastic production) from ethylene benzene. This type of catalyst is made from porous Fe-O material with several different additives, especially potassium (K) as so called promoter. The function of this catalyst has been studied in detail.
The catalyst is designed to split off hydrogen atoms from ethyl benzene so that a carbon-carbon double bond is formed, and then to combine the hydrogen atoms so released to hydrogen molecules which easily desorb thermally from the catalyst surface. This reaction is reversible: if hydrogen molecules are added to the catalyst they are dissociated to hydrogen atoms which are adsorbed on the surface. This is a general process in hydrogen transfer catalysts. We utilize this mechanism to produce ultra-dense hydrogen, which requires that covalent bonds in hydrogen molecules are not allowed to form after the adsorption of hydrogen in the catalyst.
The potassium promoter in the catalyst provides for a more efficient formation of ultra-dense hydrogen. Potassium (and for example other alkali metals) easily forms so called circular Rydberg atoms K*. In such atoms, the valence electron is in a nearly circular orbit around the ion core, in an orbit very similar to a Bohr orbit. At a few hundred °C not only Rydberg states are formed at the surface, but also small clusters of Rydberg states K N *, in a form called Rydberg Matter (RM). This type of cluster is probably the active form of the potassium promoter in normal industrial use of the catalyst.
The clusters K N * transfer part of their excitation energy to the hydrogen atoms at the catalyst surface. This process takes place during thermal collisions in the surface phase. This gives formation of clusters H N * (where H indicates proton, deuteron, or triton) in the ordinary process also giving the K N * formation, namely cluster assembly during the desorption process. If the hydrogen atoms could form covalent bonds, molecules H2 would instead leave the catalyst surface and no ultra-dense material could be formed. In the RM material, the electrons are not in s orbitals since they always have an orbital angular momentum greater than zero. This implies that covalent bonds cannot be formed since the electrons on the atoms must be in s orbitals to form the normal covalent sigma (σ) bonds in H2. The lowest energy level for hydrogen in the form of RM is metallic (dense) hydrogen called H(1), with a bond length of 150 picometer (pm). The hydrogen material falls down to this level by emission of infrared radiation. Dense hydrogen is then spontaneously converted to ultra-dense hydrogen called H(-1) with a bond distance of 2-4 pm depending on which particles (protons, deuterons, tritons) are bound. This material is a quantum material (quantum fluid) which probably involves both electron pairs (Cooper pairs) and nuclear pairs (proton, deuteron or triton pairs, or mixed pairs). These materials are probably both superfluid and superconductive at room temperature, as predicted for ultra-dense deuterium and confirmed in recent experiments.
Review of Scientific Instruments - Efficient source for the production of ultradense deuterium D(-1) for laser-induced fusion (ICF) (2011)
A novel source which simplifies the study of ultradense deuterium D(-1) is now described. This means one step further toward deuterium fusion energy production. The source uses internal gas feed and D(-1) can now be studied without time-of-flight spectral overlap from the related dense phase D(1). The main aim here is to understand the material production parameters, and thus a relatively weak laser with focused intensity less than a trillion watts per square centimeter is employed for analyzing the D(-1) material. The properties of the D(-1) material at the source are studied as a function of laser focus position outside the emitter, deuterium gas feed, laser pulse repetition frequency and laser power, and temperature of the source. These parameters influence the D(-1) cluster size, the ionization mode, and the laser fragmentation patterns
Journal of Fusion Energy - Ultradense Deuterium - F. Winterberg 2010
An attempt is made to explain the recently reported occurrence of ultradense deuterium as an isothermal transition of Rydberg matter into a high density phase by quantum mechanical exchange forces. It is conjectured that the transition is made possible by the formation of vortices in a Cooper pair electron fluid, separating the electrons from the deuterons, with the deuterons undergoing Bose–Einstein condensation in the core of the vortices. If such a state of deuterium should exist at the reported density of about 130,000 g/cm3, it would greatly facility the ignition of a thermonuclear detonation wave in pure deuterium, by placing the deuterium in a thin disc, to be ignited by a pulsed ultrafast laser or particle beam of modest energy.
Physics Letters A - Ultra-dense deuterium and cold fusion claims - F. Winterberg 2010
An attempt is made to explain the recently reported occurrence of 14 MeV neutron induced nuclear reactions in deuterium metal hydrides as the manifestation of a slightly radioactive ultra-dense form of deuterium, with a density of 130,000 g/cm3 observed by a Swedish research group through the collapse of deuterium Rydberg matter. In accordance with this observation it is proposed that a large number of deuterons form a “linear-atom” supermolecule. By the Madelung transformation of the Schrödinger equation, the linear deuterium supermolecule can be described by a quantized line vortex. A vortex lattice made up of many such supermolecules is possible only with deuterium, because deuterons are bosons, and the same is true for the electrons, which by the electron–phonon interaction in a vortex lattice form Cooper pairs. It is conjectured that the latent heat released by the collapse into the ultra-dense state has been misinterpreted as cold fusion. Hot fusion though, is here possible through the fast ignition of a thermonuclear detonation wave from a hot spot made with a 1 kJ 10 petawatt laser in a thin slice of the ultra-dense deuterium.
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