Well, in my previous thread in my conjectures (right I hope and think), I listed a book entitled "Sun in a Bottle" written by Charles Seife. I sort of put it out there to buttress my belief that the modern interpretation of particle physics (especially) is wrong. I will start off by quoting a paragraph from the book on pages 105 and 106...it provides a sort-of synopsis:

     "The brew did not behave the way scientitst expected it to. It seemed to have a mind of its own, thwarting all attempts to keep it under control. Pinch it or squeeze it or even try to keep it confined in a magnetic trap and it writhed around and ruffled itself in instability after instability. Physicists built bigger and more expensive machines to wrestle the instabilities into submission, but they were failing. As the machines started costing millions and tens of millions of dollars, the scientists were no closer to building a fusion reactor than before; they were just uncovering more and more subtle ways that the plasma fought their will."

The book again: "Sun in a Bottle"; subtitled "The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking". Copyright Charles Seife, 2008. First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin.

Hmm, I'm missing a post I applied previously concerning the first serious fusion reactor. This was initiated by a researcher at Princeton University by the name of Lyman Spitzer. He eventually formulated, and helped construct a figure-eight machine using magnetic containment of the plasma starting in 1951. This design wasn't as "leaky" as the standard torus and the straight tube designs. The money was provided by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1951, and he began the work on this machine which was called the Stellarator. The competition heated up with work being done at the newly created Livermore lab in the U.S. utilizing a straight-tube design with magnetic containment, and in England with current induced plasma "pinching" in a cylinder.

In England, a researcher named James Tuck, who had worked with the Manhatten Project, had started work on the pinch idea at Oxford University Clarendon's fusion project and he traveled back to Los Alamos bringing the pinch idea with him. In 1951, he built a pinch machine at Los Alamos, which he called the Perhapsatron.

The Stellarator, Perhapsatron, and the straight-tube magnetic mirror designs all had successes to some degree. The Atomic Energy Commission decided to persue all these designs with its funding and grouped all three of these efforts into one project: Project Sherwood.

Project Sherwood's funding was initially modest at a few hundred thousand per year, but it grew substantially from there. This was classified research but word had leaked out that Britain, the USSR, and the U.S. were all working in the area of fusion power. In August of 1955, fusion scientists from all around the world met at a U.N conference in Geneva on the peaceful utilization of atomic energy. The president of this conference was an Indian physicist named Homi Bhabha and he made a pronouncement: "I venture to predict that a method will be found for liberating fusion energy in a controlled manner within the next two decades..."

Lewis Strauss, the head of the AEC wanted a share of this dream and he confirmed the U.S. was indeed trying to build a reactor that would produce energy. People began to learn about Project Sherwood in greater detail...

dnatech : This is an interesting field and it has several control problems, but I think they will get there eventually. Everyone has his own deadline but time will tell. 

I am not so sure on this Primordial. Each of these efforts, made with brilliant technical and extremely knowledgeable people, ended in completely failure. It was always "just around the corner", so-to-speak. I guess, that is in a way the premise of this book. Even though this author doesn't explicitly state this, I would say it is inferred. This on my part is to give an overview, and to give my personal sense that modern physics has missed something really big. Humankind, with its understanding of current particle physics and quantum physics SHOULD have already achieved the actual generation of positive fusion power gain. Like I said, something big in our understanding is missing. My postings in the Semi-Classical musings have a relation to this matter also. I have hope that I can contribute to find out what this missing element entails...even though I am no expert, I may have a sense.

Lyman Spitzer used some of his AEC grant to disprove the Perhapsatron. Two of his team members, professors Martin Schwarzschild and Martin Kruskal found that pinched plasma is very unstable...any kinks that occur immediately blow up beyond control. This instability occurs within a fraction of a second, and in 1953, the Perhapsatron failed with instabilities of this type. Even buttressing the plasma with magnetic fields failed.

In 1954, Edward Teller also figured that plasma held by magnetic fields, the primary route of the Stellarator and the magnetic mirror devices, in themselves were to produce instabilities under certain conditions.

Research funding increased to five million in 1955, and then to ten million in 1957. In 1954, Spitzer gave an estimate of a needed two hundred million to give a functioning, power producing machine.  Eventually, Teller's Livermore got one-half of Project Sherwood's funding, Princeton came in second, and Los Alamos came in a distant third.

dnatech : I know very little about the  Stellarator , or the  Perhapsatron, except they use magnetic pinch. What is their big problem?

The Stellarator and the Perhapsatron were fusion devices fashioned in the 1950s...60 years ago. The Stellarator had a figure-eight design, because in a simple torus (donut) the outer windings for the magnetic bottling of the plasma possessed weaker field arrangements and the plasma would "leak out" towards the outer edges of the torus...with the figure-eight design, the plasma circuit would have a balancing out when the plama circuit went from one end to the other.

The Perhapsatron was a simple cylinder in which a current was applied into the plasma causing the plasma to compress inwards. When the compression occurred, this caused a tension, which in itself contributed to instabilities that spiraled out of control.

Both of these devices essentially lost containment of some, or most, of the plasma. The still could not reduce instabilities, even with more powerful, larger devices.

dnatech : Thanks for the info. I haven't kept in the know on fussion, just a docudrama on z-pinch.

Los Alamos researchers (under Tuck) were the first of this funded group that seemed to achieve real fusion power production in 1955. They were using a larger device to induce pinching and they figured that they could induce pinches fast enough and in succession so that real fusion of deuterium happens before the kink instabilities kick in. And they were seeing this with this new method...burst of tens of thousands of neutrons with each successive pinch. The only trouble is that instead of neutron outflow being non-directional, these outbursts were directional in that the energy was concentrated on one side of the current direction. Tuck estimated that with each pinch, the machine could produce explosions equivalent to several tons of TNT per pinch.

This bias in neutron production towards the front of the pinch machine indicated that the neutrons were not coming from thermonuclear fusion. The neutrons, it turned out, were coming from another type of instability soon to be called "sausage instability". The plasma becomes pinched so the current has wasp-shaped pinches in the total flow. The stronger electric fields at this pinched point accelerate a small handful of nuclei in the direction of the current, and then these nuclei strike the relatively cool cloud of plasma and fuse, which releases the directional burst of neutrons. This type of neutron production was termed "false neutrons", or "instability neutrons".

In the next turn of events in which fusion seemed to have been achieved, it was the British with their ZETA machine, which cost less than one million dollars. ZETA was an acronym for Zero-Energy Thermonuclear Assembly. This machine began operation in August 1957 at the Harwell laboratory near Oxford. By August 30, neutron production pinch by pinch. The physicists thought that the ZETA machine created temperatures of around 5 million degrees with each pinch. The scientists wanted to release their findings, but were held back by the Americans who had earlier come into agreement with the British to share data on fusion reactors with each other as well as when to declassify any results. It was decided to release the results at a second UN conference in 1958 while the Americans made an effort to catch up. The news, however, leaked out in early September.

Basil Rose, a physicist at Harwell, became skeptical of ZETA's results, and by running the machine with its magnetic fields and currents reversed. Neutron energies should have equivalence---they didn't. Obviously, it was the case of false neutrons again.

A new design of the "pinch-type" machine came online in the U.S. It was called Scylla. This new device ran current around  the circumference of the plasma tube instead of through the plasma itself. Scylla was able to heat deuterium to more than ten million degrees. The neutron emissions were such that actual fusion was being achieved, but of course there was no net power generation.

Andrei Sakharov of the Soviet Union was the next participant to provide hope to go by. His design of a newer type of fusion reactor called the tokamak, which was a torroid that used magnetic containment plus pinch-type current to great effect. It had its drawbacks in the sense that its plasma is not stable until the plasma current is running. Any disruptions can be catastrophic.

By the mid-1960s, the tokamak was reporting very good results...it was confining plasma at a given temperature and density ten times longer than any other machine in the world.

Tokamak stands for (in Russian): toroidalnaya kamera ee magnitnaya katushka...toroidal chamber with magnetic coil.

The use of lasers to initiate fusion began in earnest. Plasma compression by lasers came to be known as "inertial confinement fusion". The Livermore laboratory had physicists named Ray Kidder, John Nuckolls, and Stirling Colgate designing laser fusion schemes soon after the first laser was built.

The first big laser device was built in 1974, and it was known as Janus. This device had two laser beams that hit a tiny pellet of deuterium and tritium from opposite directions. Fusion was detected by neutron emission, but it was on a small scale. The Russians and French had already achieved small-scale fusion using lasers, but the American press blew off foreign attempts at fusion. However, the American press did really see something with an American company called KMS Industries, Inc., that had built its own laser fusion system. By May, 1974, KMS's physicist founder and president, Keeve M. Siegel, had reported that his system was producing neutrons from laser fusion. With the oil crisis happening at this time, and the spate of publicity involving laser fusion, with a private company to boot, the U.S. Congress turned on the money tap again.

Janus was suffering from the effects of heat. Janus achieved immense power using neodymium doped glass excited by a flash lamp. The heat changed the properties of lenses, mirrors, and the air itself. Cold and hot spots were created by loss of focus through the affected mirrors in the beam, which caused pitting in the lenses and finally destruction. Every time the laser fired, it destroyed itself.

The next laser-fusion machine from Livermore was called Argus. This machine eliminated hot spots by shooting the beam down a long tube and removed everything but light at the center of the beam...the lab had to be large because the tubes were more than a hundred feet long. This technique sacrificed some of the laser's power, but it was worth it to prevent self-destruction.

Magnetic fusion had the tendency to heat up the electrons more than the nuclei, and it was found out this problem was even worse for laser devices, in fact, in the laser fusion devices, the electrons would get so hot that the target would explode before the nuclei heated up. The researchers found that by increasing the frequency of the beam by shining the laser light through crystals but the result was that the beam lost its intensity even further, and to boot the laser device became even more expensive.

Research then went into designing a laser device that used twenty beams to target a deuterium pellet from all directions. This design was called Shiva. It failed still by a factor of 10,000...it was postulated that fusion would be successful at this point. Now they found another instability called Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The pellet in a sense became denser than the laser light compressing the pellet and therefore the pellet became distorted pushing tendrils in all directions. Like other instabilities, once it started it went out of control and quickly grew.

Here are two paragraphs from pgs. 124 and 125 from the book "Sun in a Bottle" by Charles Seife in going on with this story:

     "The Livermore scientists tried everything they could to get the Rayleigh-Taylor problem under control. One method mimicked the Teller-Ulam design for the hydrogen bomb. Instead of using the lasers to push directly onto a dollop of deuterium, the new method did it indirectly. The pellet was ensconced at the center of a hollow cylinder known as a hohlraum. Instead of striking the pellet, the lasers struck the insides of the hohlraum. The hohlraum then radiated x-rays toward the pellet. This setup is known as indirect drive, and it helped ameliorate the problems with the instabilities.

     But it didn't do enough. Shiva, which had cost $25 million to build, only performed a fraction as well as its designers had hoped. It didn't come close to producing as much energy from fusion as it took to run the lasers. Reaching breakeven was a much harder task than expected. The answer seemed within reach, though: just build a bigger Shiva, one with ten times the power, and ten times the price. By the beginning of the 1980s, Livermore was building a $200 million laser named Nova. Researchers there were confident Nova would finally take them to the promised land---igniting fusion fuel, producing more energy than it consumed. Once more, fusion scientists were about to have their faith severly tested."

Oh well, maybe the next "breakthrough" of cold fusion would work, wouldn't it?

In the book "Sun in a Bottle" by Charles Seife, on page 128, he says that the claim of cold fusion by the chemists at the University of Utah was the biggest scientific scandal of the 20th century...don't know if I agree per se, and he goes on to say that others have hope in cold fusion also, even people who are well-meaning. The two researchers were named Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. They announced their "discovery" on March 23, 1989. The simple set-up involved a rod of palladium metal immersed into a container of deuterium-enriched water and then ran an electric current through this system.