First step toward making “little sun” as limitless energy source reported

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="5">First step toward making “little sun” as limitless energy source reported</font></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Arial">Nov. 23</font><font face="Arial"><font size="1">, 2005<br> Special to World Science<br> </font><br> </font><b><font face="Arial" size="2">Scientists say they have taken a first step towards making a sort of miniature sun that could serve as a virtually limitless energy source.<br> <br> The project, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, would involve squeezing atoms until they merge, releasing energy in the process. This is essentially how the Sun shines. <br> <br> </font><font face="Arial" size="2"> <p> Scientists have been working for decades to harness such processes because it’s thought that this would provide a clean, safe alternative to existing nuclear power plants. But technical hurdles and at least one widely publicized false claim of success have beset the research.<br> <br> The Livermore project would use the world’s most powerful laser to heat up a small, enclosed space.<br> <br> In that space, scientists would place a container holding a frozen sample of a type of hydrogen. The heat would expand the container, forcing its contents into a smaller and smaller space until the atoms merge. They would be compressed as strongly as atoms are at the Sun’s center.<br> <br> Livermore scientists reported in a new paper that in a test run without the container of hydrogen, the enclosed space generated enough energy in the form of X-rays to produce the necessary heating to make the project work.<br> <br> The research was published in the Nov. 18 issue of the research journal <i> Physical Review Letters</i>.<br> <br> It will take decades of additional work to convert this promising start into working power plants, said the laboratory’s Eduard Dewald.<br> <br> Once researchers do produce fusion, it will take “a few more steps to get more energy out of the capsule than into” it, he explained, a requirement in order for the research to have practical value. “That will be reached hopefully in 2010.”<br> <br> Even then, the amount of energy produced will remain small unless governments or investors supply the resources to expand the experiments into mass-scale production, he added.<br> <br> Existing nuclear power plants extract energy from atoms by splitting them up, a process called fission. The new research, by contrast, does it by forcing them together, a process known as fusion. <br> <br> The reason these seemingly opposite processes can achieve the same result is that the types of atoms are different. Some types release energy when they’re forced together, others do so when they’re split up. Fusion energy research employs variants of hydrogen atoms called deuterium and tritium.<br> <br> Another line of research toward harnessing fusion energy involves using magnetic fields rather than laser heating to confine the atoms. Last summer, an international group of scientists and politicians agreed to build an experimental fusion reactor in Cadarache, France, using that strategy.</font></b><font face="Arial" size="2"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>* * *</p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051123_fusionfrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font></p> <p></b></p> </center></td> </tr> </table> </body>