The Large Hadron Collider : A future fuel experiment too?
One of the great things about vast government-funded scientific boondoggles, apart from their uplifting quality on civilisation, is that they sometimes lay claim to 'spin off' products. Teflon and satellites are two of the things that people point to as a reason for spending the thirty-five billion dollars at sixties prices on a moonshot, for instance. I know that there are many who say that they weren't linked at all, but perception matters sometimes.
Lost in the welter of bloviating about the CERN experiment has been a slightly more important, or at least realisable potential spin-off, however. To some scientists (I had a drink with some business people who were also very well qualified to hold forth last night), the CERN research that went live yesterday is also a nuclear fusion experiment.
Their reasoning is based around Thorium, which by some process I don't understand fully linked to 'F-orbitals' can, in the collider, result in the production and utilisation of nuclear power. Once the way in which this process could be effected in a large collider was understood and controlled, smaller units could be employed that would advance nuclear fusion research immensely and bring the 'holy grail' of power within reach. The International Atomic Energy Authority has for some time been looking for such experiments, since Thorium is considerably more abundant than Uranium.
I am not sure that a collider and accelerator are not being confused here, though I suppose that the technology is the same. It also may be that recent stories about India's nuclear power programme being based around Thorium and Texan ceramic isotope stories were being confused as we drank. Still, I was interested enough to follow things up here on the blog and I'd welcome any contributions.
In any event, it is good to see CERN's daring adventure up and running--I'm looking forward, and I know how this reads, to boson announcements or the lack thereof. How many times on a Thursday morning do you get to write things like that?
UPDATE: It appears that somewhere around last night's second bottle things went awry, and that the idea of the LHC as being of use to people engaged in fusion research is a tad misleading. I will leave the post up, but a reader, Erik Min, has provided a very helpful comment which is beneath this post, for which I'm grateful and which is presumably much more reliable than I. Discussions revolved around 'heavy hard fusion' last night, which as I understood it related to nuclear fusion per se but which actually had something to do with gluons, in the mind of the very well-qualified individual who was talking to me about it. Ah, the life of the mind....
One of the great things about vast government-funded scientific boondoggles, apart from their uplifting quality on civilisation, is that they sometimes lay claim to 'spin off' products. Teflon and satellites are two of the things that people point to as a reason for spending the thirty-five billion dollars at sixties prices on a moonshot, for instance. I know that there are many who say that they weren't linked at all, but perception matters sometimes.
Lost in the welter of bloviating about the CERN experiment has been a slightly more important, or at least realisable potential spin-off, however. To some scientists (I had a drink with some business people who were also very well qualified to hold forth last night), the CERN research that went live yesterday is also a nuclear fusion experiment.
Their reasoning is based around Thorium, which by some process I don't understand fully linked to 'F-orbitals' can, in the collider, result in the production and utilisation of nuclear power. Once the way in which this process could be effected in a large collider was understood and controlled, smaller units could be employed that would advance nuclear fusion research immensely and bring the 'holy grail' of power within reach. The International Atomic Energy Authority has for some time been looking for such experiments, since Thorium is considerably more abundant than Uranium.
I am not sure that a collider and accelerator are not being confused here, though I suppose that the technology is the same. It also may be that recent stories about India's nuclear power programme being based around Thorium and Texan ceramic isotope stories were being confused as we drank. Still, I was interested enough to follow things up here on the blog and I'd welcome any contributions.
In any event, it is good to see CERN's daring adventure up and running--I'm looking forward, and I know how this reads, to boson announcements or the lack thereof. How many times on a Thursday morning do you get to write things like that?
UPDATE: It appears that somewhere around last night's second bottle things went awry, and that the idea of the LHC as being of use to people engaged in fusion research is a tad misleading. I will leave the post up, but a reader, Erik Min, has provided a very helpful comment which is beneath this post, for which I'm grateful and which is presumably much more reliable than I. Discussions revolved around 'heavy hard fusion' last night, which as I understood it related to nuclear fusion per se but which actually had something to do with gluons, in the mind of the very well-qualified individual who was talking to me about it. Ah, the life of the mind....
Comments
No, the LHC will not do much for nuclear fusion. Or nuclear fission, the technique used at present, for that matter.
You indeed mixed things up a bit, during last night's drinking. So let me, a scientist involved in fusion research, try to clear things up a bit.
First there is nuclear fission. You take the nucleus of an heavy atom (uranium, typically), and shoot a small, neutral particle called a neutron at it. The neutron hits the nucleus, and breaks it apart. This not only creates two (or more) new nuclei (the remnants of the uranium nucleus), but also a lot of energy. Moreover, it creates at least one new neutron. This can bombard a new nucleus, and the process can go on.
In some cases, more neutrons are released, and the reaction will go faster and faster (2 neutrons lead to 4 in the next event, lead to 8 in the next, etc.), and may runaway. This is what happens in a nuclear explosion. In a reactor you therefore have to catch all excess neutrons, with things called control rods.
Now there is only a limited amount of (reactor grade) uranium in the world. Most other elements are not so good for fission. Other options are plutonium (only made in fission reactors, and therefor not much of a solution. Moreover, very useful for nuclear-bomb-production, and thus a bit dangerous to have lying around) and thorium. There is much more thorium then there is uranium, and moreover, you can use it to breed new fuel. In a thorium-fuel-cycle you can very efficiently use thorium, and upgrade "normal" uranium to reactor grade uranium in the process. That is why nuclear energy proponents say thorium may be the future of nuclear fission.
All of this has nothing to do with LHC, nor with nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion (the field I am working in) is actually the opposite of nuclear fission. Here, you take light atomic nuclei (of hydrogen, typically) and merge them together. The good thing is, this also releases energy. It is actually the way the sun and stars produce heat and light! The problem is, you need a temperature at least as hot as the center of the sun. Or even better, ten times as hot. We are talking 150 million degrees centigrade. We can make that temperature on earth (by heating a gas with microwaves - a lot of microwaves) and catch the resulting hot gas (we call it a plasma) in a magnetic cage. We can even make energy, but not enough. Right now, it costs us more energy to keep the proces going than we gain from it. But only barely so. But we have learned enough from earlier "small scale" experiments to confidently build ITER, a large machine designed to produce ten times more fusion energy than is needed to keep it going. That will be finished in 2018.
And what has the LHC to do with this? Not much, I am afraid. LHC will study the structure of the atomic nucleus in more detail. But we do not need that detail to understand nuclear energy, be it fusion or fission. It is interesting physics, yes. But the pay-back will be... More interesting physics. And, maybe, indeed... Spin-off.
But it's more important that anyone who stumbles across the blog gets the right information. You took the time to make a long comment, and it's appreciated. It's great when knowledge leads to knowledge, and that 'spin off' is worth it alone!