Nuclear fusion instead of fission (the way of salvation for humanity?). Thermonuclear fusion

And what kind of "holraum" is this?

Gold holraum laser fusion

National complex of laser thermonuclear reactions (National Ignition Facility, NIF) in the United States, it is called a dual-purpose laser fusion. It is designed to help American armed forces to maintain its nuclear arsenals in a combat-ready state in the conditions of a moratorium on nuclear tests, and it also offers breakthrough discoveries that can provide civilization with a sea of ​​​​clean and cheap energy.

According to the press, things at NIF are unfolding as well as possible. But the auditors of the US General Accounting Service (GAO, analogue of the Russian Accounts Chamber) there is doubt about this, which they shared with Congress in report number GAO-10-488.

NIF, NIC and NNSA

In March 2009, the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) completed construction of NIF, a $3.5 billion project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The estimate includes $2.2 billion for the actual construction and $1.3 billion for the assembly and installation of 192 lasers and related equipment.

The agency plans to create extremely high pressures and temperatures in NIF, which are typical for nuclear explosions. If all goes well, then new installation will allow Americans to study the characteristics of nuclear explosive devices without testing them, prohibited by the terms of the US moratorium adopted in 1992.

NNSA rightly calls laser fusion a "critical component" of a large-scale program to maintain the combat readiness of American nuclear arsenals. Military tasks will be a top priority for the NIF, but military administration ready to provide installation capacity for civilian researchers.

The design and construction of the NIF is directly the responsibility of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The first theoretical studies aimed at preparing for the emergence of NIF date back to March 1997. In 2005, the NNSA, following congressional directives, created NIC (National Ignition Campaign) and instructed her to oversee the management of the project. In addition, for third-party control over the project are invited independent experts and expert groups.

Lasers and hohlraum

The technology used in NIF can be called "laser fusion". In American literature, the term "ignition" stuck behind it. Once everything is ready, NIF operators must simultaneously focus 192 laser beams on targets smaller than a dime. The total beam energy will be 1.8 MJ.

In one working cycle lasting about one millionth of a second, the beams must pass through a series of optical multipliers, and then focus on a microscopic target. The latter will be located inside a spherical chamber 10 meters high.

NIF installation diagram - GAO auditors drawing.

The target itself, in turn, is a hollow golden cylinder. He is called German word"holraum" (hohlraum) is a cavity whose walls are in radiation equilibrium with the cavity. In the holraum, like in a nesting doll, there is a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn. It consists of a frozen layer of deuterium and tritium surrounding a cooled gaseous mixture of the same isotopes.

During operation, the NIF lasers must quickly heat up the inner walls of the hohlraum, which will convert the laser energy into X-rays. In its turn, X-rays must quickly heat the outer surface of the fuel capsule. With proper heating, the capsule should collapse with a force comparable to that arising during a rocket launch, that is, an inward explosion (implosion) of the deuterium-tritium layer should occur.

If the implosion proceeds symmetrically and at the desired speed, then the deuterium and tritium atoms will be forced into a fusion reaction lasting 10 trillionths of a second. The temperatures that will be created in the fuel capsule are expected to be in the order of 100 million degrees - that is, it will be hotter in the capsule than in the center of the Sun.

Schematic of energy transfer in hohlraum - drawing by GAO auditors.
Click the left mouse button to view in full scale.

Preliminary tests to substantiate the processes incorporated in the NIF facility were carried out at the Laser Energy Laboratory of the University of Rochester (New York). The lab's OMEGA and OMEGA EP laser systems are the workhorse of all NNSA laser fusion research today. Prior to the creation of NIF, they held the world record for laser beam energy.

Targets, hohlraums and other related equipment for the NIF are supplied by the Californian company General Atomics. The Los Alamos National Laboratory is responsible for the diagnostic systems, while the Sandia Lab is responsible for supporting research on the "Z Machine" facility, which is capable of converting electromagnetic radiation in x-ray.

Technical problems

Will the creation of NIF lead to success and will American scientists be able to ignite a thermonuclear reaction using lasers? GAO auditors dryly recall the conclusions of the independent JASON group, which lists the NIF developers facing technical problems.

One of the main tasks is to minimize the loss of laser radiation, that is, to significantly reduce the fraction of energy that passes by the hohlraum or is reflected from its walls. If the reflection threatens with a simple loss of energy, then each missed beam will negatively affect the symmetry of the compression of the fuel capsule, thereby casting doubt on the fact of the initiation of a thermonuclear reaction.

Even the most accurate aiming of the laser beam does not guarantee complete success. Under the influence of laser radiation, the ionization process starts inside the hohlraum, and the resulting charged gas interferes with the energy transfer processes. In short, as a result of the interaction of ionized particles and laser beams, part of the energy that has arrived in the hohlraum will be taken back out of it.

Scientists call this process "laser-plasma instability." (laser-plasma instability). In addition to energy loss, it also leads to unwanted interference between laser beams, which will adversely affect the symmetry of the implosion.

The second major problem with NIF is related to implosion speed. To initiate a thermonuclear reaction, the fuel capsule must be compressed 40,000 times its original size. In this case, the capsule must maintain a spherical shape. Moreover, implosion must occur at a given rate, otherwise it will not be possible to create the pressures necessary to start the synthesis of light nuclei.

If the surface of the fuel capsule is not smooth enough, or if the x-rays are not uniformly incident on the capsule, finger-like protrusions will begin to form on the capsule. As shown by the results of calculations for mathematical models, the formation of protrusions will be the result of hydrodynamic instabilities that occur when materials with different densities come into contact. If there are too many protrusions, then the thermonuclear reaction will not go on, since the temperature inside the capsule will decrease due to the protrusions.

The finger-like protrusions on the surface of the fuel capsule are a drawing by the GAO auditors.
Click the left mouse button to view in full scale.

In addition to these two problems, the creators of NIF also face more traditional, but no less serious difficulties. So, they need to provide reliable control over the state of the optics, which, of course, will eventually be damaged by laser beams passing through it.

At first, there will be few such damages, but over time, their number will begin to grow, and if the total percentage of damages exceeds a certain limit, then the operation of the NIF at nominal parameters will be impossible.

To the credit of the creators of NIF, they do not get out of trouble. The hohlraum has been completely redesigned, and its new design promises to minimize laser energy loss. Coverings of the entry points of laser beams were removed from his project as soon as it turned out that a seemingly good idea to arrange in a special way the places where the beams hit the target leads to a sharp increase in "laser-plasma" instabilities.

After a long search, scientists settled on helium as the material that fills the hohlraum. The original project was supposed to use a mixture of hydrogen and helium. These and other modifications were tested in combat during the first experiments on the NIF, performed in 2009. The results obtained are considered satisfactory, and there are hopes to avoid instabilities when operating at rated power.

Understanding of implosion processes should improve after completion of a series of computer simulations in two- and three-dimensional models. In addition, hydrodynamic instability is being actively studied at the already mentioned OMEGA complex. NIF staff also hope that they will be able to provide control over the condition of the optics.

The work of NIF with a total laser beam energy of 1.8 MJ has been postponed to 2011. Until the end of 2010, the unit will operate with energies of 1.2-1.3 MJ. According to experts, at an energy of 1.2 MJ, energy losses due to instabilities did not exceed 6% in the first experiments, despite the fact that the project allows 15% losses.

The first inclusions also led to the first losses in optics. In March 2009, part of the beams was unexpectedly reflected on the way to the target. A "successful" salvo, combined with a design error, disabled 4% of the total number of mirrors in the system. Fortunately, the "execution" took place at low beam energies, otherwise the consequences could have been even worse.

Installing NIF step by step is moving towards par. The most recent results from the December 2009 experiments were obtained with a laser energy of 1.2 MJ.

Independent experts urge caution. They predict that NIF will inevitably face new technological and physical challenges that are impossible even to predict at this stage. And GAO auditors are wondering if the current schedule is realistic, according to which the first laser fusion reaction will occur in 2012?

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Nuclear fusion reactions are called thermonuclear because the only way excitation reactions - heating nuclear fuel to a high temperature.

The nuclear fusion reaction can also serve as a source of energy.

Nuclear fusion reactions require extremely high temperatures and pressures.

Hydrogen-3 is the easiest to enter into the nuclear fusion reaction, but it is present in earth's atmosphere in such small quantities, and its production is associated with very high costs, that the very feasibility of using it as a fuel is called into question.

This reaction is called a nuclear fusion reaction, since the result of the combination of nuclei is a heavier nucleus.

In order for a nuclear fusion reaction to begin, it is necessary to reach a temperature of the order of a million degrees. Since the only currently known means of achieving such temperatures are nuclear fission reactions, a fission-based atomic bomb is used to excite the hydrogen fusion reaction. It is assumed that the energy released by stars, including our Sun, is formed as a result of nuclear fusion reactions, similar to the above reactions. Depending on the age and temperature of the star, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen nuclei, as well as hydrogen and helium isotopes, can take part in such reactions.

The main problem with the fusion reaction is to develop a technology that can hold a gas of charged particles, a plasma at a temperature of the order of many millions of degrees for quite a long time in order to release the required amount of energy, while the plasma is in an isolated state. . There are two methods by which this process is controlled: the method of magnetic fields and the method of holding heavy hydrogen atoms with the help of powerful lasers. This method represents the easiest way to carry out nuclear fusion, which involves deuterium and tritium and which takes place in a plasma held by magnetic fields at a temperature of more than 100 million C. end products fusion reactions are helium ions (He-4) and neutrons. About 80% of the energy released as a result of fusion comes from neutrons. The systems for heat transfer and conversion to heat, which are the next step, are similar to those used in nuclear fission reactors.

Learning how to generate useful energy through nuclear fusion is important primarily because thermonuclear fusion is an almost inexhaustible source of energy. The cost of fusion fuel is small compared to the cost of fossil fuels; it is available everywhere, and the process of obtaining it has only a minor impact on the environment. Further, although thermonuclear energy is also one of the types of atomic energy, it differs significantly from conventional atomic energy, which is released during the fission of uranium, plutonium, and thorium. Compared to nuclear fission reactors and the dangers they create, a fusion reactor appears to be far less dangerous.

The rate of energy release as a result of all the reactions of nuclear fusion occurring in every second turns out to be a strikingly small value, if expressed in calories per gram of matter. It will be more than 100 times less than the speed at which human body in one second it releases heat in the process of its metabolism. Certainly, total The heat given off by the Sun cannot be compared with the heat of our body due to the extremely huge value of the total mass of the Sun. But the question arises how the Sun can be so hot if the rate of heat release per gram of mass in it is 100 times less than in our body.

It is generally accepted that generating energy through nuclear fusion should cause less pollution. environment than by nuclear fission. However, it should be taken into account that construction materials for the internal parts of a fusion reactor must become very radioactive and often have to be replaced. What is the cause of these complications.

The abundance of an element is related to the stability of its nucleus and the course of nuclear fusion reactions of elements. In accordance with this, there are approximate rules that determine the abundance of an element. Thus, it has been observed that elements with small atomic masses are more common than heavy elements. Further, atomic masses the most common elements are expressed in multiples of four; elements with even ordinal numbers are several times more common than their neighboring odd elements.

Truly immense prospects for the development of the energy basis of production promises society the mastery of a controlled nuclear fusion reaction. The solution of the problem of controlling thermonuclear reactions is on the agenda of Soviet science. Among its tasks is the discovery of ways to directly convert thermal, nuclear, solar and chemical energy into electrical energy.

If the protons manage to get close to distances r r0, then a nuclear fusion reaction occurs, the nucleons form a bound system - the nucleus of the deuterium atom. The bound state corresponds to the model of a particle in a potential well. But such approach of particles is prevented by a potential barrier. To elucidate the possibility of a reaction, it is necessary to solve the problem of the passage of particles through a barrier at different energies.

Lithium is a source of the heavy isotope of hydrogen, tritium, which is used in nuclear fusion reactions.

Thermonuclear fusion (thermonuclear fusion, controlled thermonuclear fusion, UTS) - an old, but still valid method of cutting the budget bubble on a global scale, capable of producing a source of hundreds of energy, starships and other kosher things as a by-product.

The working prototype of the miracle machine is visually represented as the disk of the Sun rotating above the surface of the earth. True, we cannot cut down exactly the same one: in order for hydrogen to be able to thermonuclear reaction itself, without a body kit, it needs a lot. No, a LOT. 80 Jupiter masses or more. But we are working on it.

thermonuclear plasma.

Essence™

Briefly about the main thing. A long time ago, Einstein extended E=mc², now known even to children, to all objects (including those moving at near-light speed, without any ethers and electrodynamics). At the same time, scientists realized that two deuterium nuclei ²H (this is a heavy isotope of hydrogen) weigh a little more than one helium-4 4 He nucleus for a reason. Moreover, during the synthesis of this same helium from hydrogen, the binding energy Δm×c², where Δm is the mass defect, happily flies away in the form of the kinetic energy of the synthesis products.

In principle, the synthesis options are actually a little more than shitty. You can use deuterium, and lithium, and tritium - but at least something! Here are just:

1. for the synthesis of heavier elements, you need b O high temperature;
2. in the synthesis of elements heavier than iron, less energy is released than in the synthesis of iron.

Fusion research is largely an experimental science. Here you are not Perelman, you can’t do anything sensible with three kopecks of money. You need complex expensive equipment and a bunch of black nerds who will service this equipment. All this needs a lot of money. And, oddly enough, they do stand out. And when any government allocates money for something, they inevitably go not only to those aspects that are really important, but also to those that are better advertised. Even those scientific organizations, who really want to do something useful, are often forced to do something more "fashionable" than really important, because otherwise they will not receive money.

In fairness, it should be noted that the cost of fusion looks huge only until you compare them with all sorts of nanotechnologies and other joys of sawmills.

Why is this even needed?

As you know, oil, coal and gas will not last so long. Moreover, environmentalists are unhappy. There seems to be enough uranium and thorium, but people are afraid of something. And it is not clear where so much radioactive waste should go.

The thermonuclear fusion allows in the future to receive energy literally from water, and the waste of its work will be only ordinary harmless hydrogen and helium. There will be radioactive tritium inside the reactor, but there will be hundreds of grams of it, as opposed to a hundred tons of semi-spent fuel in conventional nuclear reactors, so nothing like Chernobyl can happen even if a fusion reactor explodes. But its explosion is possible only in the event of a terrorist attack, since the reaction there, in principle, cannot develop spontaneously.

Also, in theory, rocket engines, based on a subject, are capable of delivering an impulse greater than plasma, electric, and all sorts of nuclear ones. That allows you to get a tractor suitable for use on planetary and even interstellar scales at a speed of 10% of the speed of light. In the second case, however, the flights will be unmanned. But for 50 years before the nearest star, you can doshkandybat.

Why doesn't it work?

For a fusion reaction to occur, two nuclei must approach very closely. close quarters. But the nuclei have a positive charge, and therefore repel each other. To bring them closer to each other, they need to be accelerated to tremendous speeds. One of the main options for such overclocking is heating to a high temperature. The calculation shows that a temperature of the order of 10 ^ 9 Kelvin is needed. But due to the so-called "Maxwellian tail", the synthesis is already ignited at 10^7. Popularly, this can be explained as follows, at a given temperature, gas particles move with various velocities determined (in the pre-relativistic region) by the Maxwell distribution. Therefore, even at a temperature of 10-7 K, there are particles whose velocities are sufficient to overcome the Coulomb repulsion and merge two nuclei into one. But at such temperatures, the substance becomes a plasma and radiates energy very intensively, that is, it quickly cools down.

Fusor Farnsworth

If you, anon, are so impatient to carry out thermonuclear fusion and do not need energy, then building a mega-reactor is not at all necessary. A subject is enough - a small device that allows you to file a thermonuclear reaction without restriction on your desk. The only negative is that Farnsworth's fusor does not generate energy, but, on the contrary, it eats and is robust. In the 2000s, in the United States, they tried to cut down an improved version of the fusor, called Poliwell, in the hope that it would at least work out something. It didn’t work out, it didn’t work out - he just began to consume a little less.

Cold fusion and more

An epic bunch of charlatans. Moreover, if some of them only offer their promising “solutions”, then others even offer ready-made solutions implemented “in hardware”.

Among all this numerous nonsense occasionally, but still there are normal developments. In particular, muon catalysis, the use of colliding beams of fast deuterium and tritium ions, etc. But all of them are still extremely far from obtaining useful energy and in practice can be used (and are used) only as sources of fast neutrons.

Hybrid fusion reactor

It is known that in thermonuclear bombs often use a shell of depleted uranium to significantly increase the power of the explosion: neutrons D-T reactions have such high energy that they cause the fission of even "non-fissile" heavy isotopes. Of course, the idea quickly arose to apply the same principle to peaceful reactors.

What is good

• The creation of a hybrid power plant can be started even tomorrow, since the use of depleted uranium will increase the energy release by 5-10 times;
• Thousands of tons of depleted uranium will finally be found useful application(so far they are stupidly fired from tank guns in the form of ordinary blanks, into tank armor);
• In intense fluxes of fast neutrons, many long-lived isotopes are converted into short-lived isotopes, which makes it possible to process waste from conventional nuclear reactors;
• In such reactors, you can produce a lot of clean and cheap uranium-238 and plutonium-239 for atomic bombs (it is worth noting that the same thing happens in fast neutron nuclear reactors. And the same 239 Pu will most likely be used as fuel in reactors , since BN reactors can make it from useless uranium-238 in huge quantities (or rather, with an output factor of 1.4-1.5)).

• There are hundreds of tons of radioactive substances in such a reactor, which means you can expect a sea of ​​lulz. Although here, unlike fission reactors, they can be obtained only with a powerful external influence, the uncontrolled development of the reaction is impossible here;
• In such a reactor, radioactive waste is not only processed, but also produced, which needs to be disposed of somewhere (however, mostly short-lived, in contrast to fission reactors).

ITER

Dawn over the great construction site of thermonuclearism.

The largest on this moment unit. Type - tokamak. Built in the south of France. The name originally meant "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" ("International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor"), but now they prefer not to decipher it at all - they say, some people have bad associations with the word "thermonuclear". True, we have already received a safety certificate, even like more than one. At the beginning of 2014, a fonat began to collect votes for the production of a LEGO model. For a relatively small piece, it takes about five hundred bricks.

pros

• Should briefly give out ten times the profit in energy. Approximately as much and need a real power plant - only, of course, constantly.
• Has its own website. It is updated regularly, so that everyone can just as regularly rejoice at the successes of mankind.
• The site has a link to a webcam standing next to the construction site, so that everyone can be convinced (except when it is transferred to a view from the other side) that they are working there, and not sawing. Or maybe they started to cut - for some reason they have been limited to relatively regular pictures for quite a long time.

Lulz

Theoretical physicists are still shitting bricks, and Murphy is assembling a pattern from H-mode magnetic confinement setups. So, when a certain power of additional plasma heating is reached in tokamaks (and later this was achieved in stellarators), the transfer slows down sharply, and hence the energy loss in the plasma. Imagine for yourself: you have been developing everything for a long time, calculated, built a tokamak, and it suddenly works twice as well as expected!

Theorists came up with a bunch of hypotheses how to explain the appearance of the H-mode and the complete discrepancy between the experimental formulas and the classical theoretical ones, even in terms of the sign of the derivative, but there is still no single clear model. The experimenters, on the other hand, simply figured out how it works and began to resemble shamans no less than the admins: in the same way, they cannot explain how it works, but it does work.

Fans of searching for deep meaning and religious people may consider that this is a sign from G-d that we are moving in the right direction or modern manna from heaven from him.

It also allows optimists to count on the discovery of some kind of UH mode in the future and the appearance of thermonuclear power plants much faster than current forecasts. Well, or pessimists - to expect the appearance of some reverse mode, which will make the situation even worse than it was before the discovery of the H-mode. And fodder for theorists, of course - the relativistic case closely clashed with the quantum one, and what else is needed for string theory? They have black holes, now they have the Higgs boson, and now they have H-mode.

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Notes

Innovative projects using modern superconductors will soon allow controlled thermonuclear fusion, some optimists say. Experts, however, predict that practical use will take several decades.

Why is it so difficult?

Fusion energy is considered a potential source. It is the pure energy of an atom. But what is it and why is it so difficult to achieve? First you need to understand the difference between classical and thermonuclear fusion.

The fission of the atom consists in the fact that radioactive isotopes - uranium or plutonium - are split and converted into other highly radioactive isotopes, which then must be buried or recycled.

Synthesis consists in the fact that two isotopes of hydrogen - deuterium and tritium - merge into a single whole, forming non-toxic helium and a single neutron, without producing radioactive waste.

Control problem

Reactions that take place in the sun or in hydrogen bomb, - this is thermonuclear fusion, and engineers face a daunting task - how to control this process at a power plant?

This is something scientists have been working on since the 1960s. Another experimental fusion reactor called Wendelstein 7-X has started operation in the northern German city of Greifswald. It is not yet designed to create a reaction - it is just a special design that is being tested (a stellarator instead of a tokamak).

high energy plasma

All thermonuclear installations have a common feature - an annular shape. It is based on the idea of ​​using powerful electromagnets to create a strong electromagnetic field shaped like a torus - an inflated bicycle tube.

This electromagnetic field must be so dense that when it is heated in microwave oven up to one million degrees Celsius, plasma should appear in the very center of the ring. It is then ignited so that thermonuclear fusion can begin.

Demonstration of possibilities

Two such experiments are currently underway in Europe. One of them is the Wendelstein 7-X, which recently generated its first helium plasma. The other is ITER, a huge experimental fusion facility in the south of France that is still under construction and will be ready to go live in 2023.

Real nuclear reactions are expected to take place at ITER, albeit only for a short period of time and certainly no longer than 60 minutes. This reactor is just one of many steps on the way to making nuclear fusion a reality.

Fusion reactor: smaller and more powerful

Recently, several designers have announced a new reactor design. According to a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as representatives of the weapons company Lockheed Martin, fusion can be carried out in facilities that are much more powerful and smaller than ITER, and they are ready to do it within ten years.

Idea new design is to use modern high-temperature superconductors in electromagnets, which exhibit their properties when cooled with liquid nitrogen, and not conventional ones, which require a new, more flexible technology that will completely change the design of the reactor.

Klaus Hesch, who is in charge of technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in southwestern Germany, is skeptical. It supports the use of new high-temperature superconductors for new reactor designs. But, according to him, to develop something on a computer, taking into account the laws of physics, is not enough. It is necessary to take into account the challenges that arise when putting an idea into practice.

Science fiction

According to Hesh, the MIT student model only shows the possibility of a project. But it's actually a lot of science fiction. The project assumes that serious technical problems of thermonuclear fusion are solved. But modern science has no idea how to solve them.

One such problem is the idea of ​​collapsible coils. Electromagnets can be dismantled in order to get inside the ring that holds the plasma in the MIT design model.

This would be very useful because one would be able to access objects in the internal system and replace them. But in reality, superconductors are made of ceramic material. Hundreds of them must be intertwined in a sophisticated way to form the correct magnetic field. And here there are more fundamental difficulties: the connections between them are not as simple as the connections of copper cables. No one has even thought of concepts that would help solve such problems.

too hot

High temperature is also a problem. At the core of the fusion plasma, the temperature will reach about 150 million degrees Celsius. This extreme heat remains in place - right in the center of the ionized gas. But even around it it is still very hot - from 500 to 700 degrees in the reactor zone, which is the inner layer of a metal pipe in which the tritium necessary for nuclear fusion to occur will "reproduce".

It has an even bigger problem - the so-called power release. This is the part of the system that receives used fuel from the fusion process, mainly helium. The first metal components that the hot gas enters are called the "divertor". It can heat up to over 2000°C.

Diverter problem

In order for the installation to withstand such temperatures, engineers are trying to use the metal tungsten used in old-fashioned incandescent lamps. The melting point of tungsten is about 3000 degrees. But there are other limitations as well.

In ITER, this can be done, because heating in it does not occur constantly. It is assumed that the reactor will operate only 1-3% of the time. But this is not an option for a power plant that must operate 24/7. And, if someone claims to be able to build a smaller reactor with the same power as ITER, it is safe to say that he does not have a solution to the divertor problem.

Power plant in a few decades

Nevertheless, scientists are optimistic about the development of thermonuclear reactors, although it will not be as fast as some enthusiasts predict.

ITER should show that controlled fusion can actually produce more energy than would be spent on heating the plasma. The next step is to build a brand new hybrid demonstration power plant that actually generates electricity.

Engineers are already working on its design. They will have to learn from ITER, which is scheduled to launch in 2023. Given the time required for design, planning and construction, it seems unlikely that the first fusion power plant will be launched much earlier than the middle of the 21st century.

Cold Fusion Rossi

In 2014, an independent test of the E-Cat reactor concluded that the device averaged 2,800 watts of power output over a 32-day period with a consumption of 900 watts. This is more than any chemical reaction is capable of isolating. The result speaks either of a breakthrough in thermonuclear fusion, or of outright fraud. The report disappointed skeptics, who doubt whether the test was truly independent and suggest possible falsification of the test results. Others have been busy figuring out the "secret ingredients" that enable Rossi's fusion to replicate the technology.

Rossi is a scammer?

Andrea is imposing. He publishes proclamations to the world in unique English in the comments section of his website, pretentiously called the Journal of Nuclear Physics. But his previous unsuccessful attempts included an Italian waste-to-fuel project and a thermoelectric generator. Petroldragon, a waste-to-energy project, failed in part because illegal dumping is controlled by the Italian organized crime, which initiated a criminal case against him for violating the rules for waste management. He also created a thermoelectric device for the Corps of Engineers ground forces USA, but during testing, the gadget produced only a fraction of the declared power.

Many do not trust Rossi, and the editor-in-chief of the New Energy Times bluntly called him a criminal with a string of failed energy projects behind him.

Independent Verification

Rossi signed a contract with the American company Industrial Heat to conduct a year-long secret test of a 1-MW cold fusion plant. The device was a shipping container packed with dozens of E-Cats. The experiment had to be controlled by a third party who could confirm that heat generation was indeed taking place. Rossi claims to have spent much of the past year practically living in a container and overseeing operations for more than 16 hours a day to prove the commercial viability of the E-Cat.

The test ended in March. Rossi's supporters eagerly awaited the observers' report, hoping for an acquittal for their hero. But in the end they got sued.

Trial

In a Florida court filing, Rossi claims the test was successful and an independent arbitrator confirmed that the E-Cat reactor produces six times more energy than it consumes. He also claimed that Industrial Heat agreed to pay him $100 million - $11.5 million upfront after the 24-hour trial (ostensibly for licensing rights so the company could sell the technology in the US) and another $89 million after the successful completion of the extended trial. within 350 days. Rossi accused IH of running a "fraudulent scheme" to steal his intellectual property. He also accused the company of misappropriation of E-Cat reactors, illegal copying innovative technologies and products, features, and designs and inappropriately attempting to obtain a patent on its intellectual property.

Goldmine

Elsewhere, Rossi claims that in one of his demonstrations, IH received $50-60 million from investors and another $200 million from China after a replay involving top Chinese officials. If this is true, then a lot more than a hundred million dollars is at stake. Industrial Heat has dismissed these claims as baseless and is going to actively defend itself. More importantly, she claims that she "worked for more than three years to confirm the results that Rossi allegedly achieved with his E-Cat technology, all without success."

IH doesn't believe in the E-Cat, and the New Energy Times sees no reason to doubt it. In June 2011, a representative of the publication visited Italy, interviewed Rossi and filmed a demonstration of his E-Cat. A day later, he reported his serious concerns about the method of measuring thermal power. After 6 days, the journalist posted his video on YouTube. Experts from all over the world sent him analyzes, which were published in July. It became clear that this was a scam.

Experimental confirmation

Nevertheless, a number of researchers - Alexander Parkhomov of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia and the Martin Fleishman Memorial Project (MFPM) - have succeeded in replicating Russia's cold fusion. The MFPM report was titled "The End of the Carbon Era Is Near". The reason for such admiration was the discovery, which cannot be explained otherwise than by a thermonuclear reaction. According to the researchers, Rossi has exactly what he is talking about.

Viable open recipe cold nuclear fusion can cause an energy "gold rush". Alternative methods may be found to bypass Rossi's patents and keep him out of the multi-billion dollar energy business.

So perhaps Rossi would prefer to avoid this confirmation.