Remember the backpacks in the Ghostbusters movies? They had nuclear accelerators on their backs. UCLA scientist Seth Putterman may not be far off from with their new experiments being published in today’s issue of the science journal, Nature.
Using the sun as a basis, the experiments build on work done by James Brownridge at New York State and could be the next generation in nuclear power.
The process involves taking a lithium crystal and putting it in container about the size of an egg and pumping deuterium gas into it. They cooled the gas to -33 degrees Celsius and then heated it up to 7 degrees Celsius in about 3 and half minutes.
The nuclei that sped up in the resulting electric field fused with the deuterium that stuck with the crystal. And now we have fusion.
A New Scientist story said quoted a British physicist:
“They make a very strong case for having seen fusion,” says Nigel Hawkes, a nuclear physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK.
But he is cautious about the potential for desktop neutron machines: “It’s too early to say where this might lead.”
“You Cannot Change the Laws of Physics”
“The first thing to note is that everything we’ve done and found is consistent with the laws of physics,” Putterman said.
This is significant because some past experiments dealing with fusion have failed to consider the old Star Trek quote.
But we’re not to the Enterprise yet. The problem with the experiment is the scale is still very small. The experiment Putterman did only involved a few neutrons per second. To make this practical and viable, it would need to be several million per second and they energy gained was about the same as they energy spent.
Still there’s hope. Current methods of generating these types of reactions are done in nuclear reactors and accelerators and cost millions of dollars to build an operate. This much smaller scale certainly makes it worth pursuing.
Putterman envisions microthrusters in the future by pushing the deuterium gas over the crystals in the opposite direction in which one wants to travel.
Maybe we are closer to the Enterprise.
Information from this story came from New Scientist and the Daily Bruin. You can see the full story on this experiment in the new issue of Nature, due out today.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
