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November 22, 2006
cause for optimism
I enjoyed reading about the "nuclear teen": In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.Sooner or later, some creative young genius like this will come along and make it really work. It's just another reason why I think "Peak Oil" theory suffers from static analysis. UPDATE (11/27/06 ): My thanks to M. Simon at Power and Control for linking this post and yesterday's Justin's cold fusion post with plenty of excellent discussion. What's great news is that this appears to be scalable: ...the idea is to build a fusion device that produces no long lived nuclear radiation and that works with the forces of nature instead of against them. The voltage required to make these devices work is on the order of 10 to 20 thousand volts or less. About the same voltage as you would find in a tube type monitor or TV set. Nothing very exotic. For a full scale power producer it is predicted that you would need about 2 million volts. Well within the range of current technology for small scale devices. Currently the highest voltage used in electrical transmission is 1.15 million volts. Scaling that up to two million volts for production devices should not be too difficult.Sounds almost too good to be true. The more feasible this becomes, the more likely that environmentalists and other wackos will find reasons to object. posted by Eric on 11.22.06 at 12:41 PM |
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Well, fusion is nothing new. Non-teens at government labs have had fusion reactors for decades.
The problem is the self-sustaining putting-out-more-energy-than-you-put-in part, and I doubt a teenager in his basement is going to manage that part. (Especially without Farnsworth having already invented it for him!)