Earlier this week Jonathan Dorfan, the director of SLAC, announced a reorganization of the structure of the laboratory. The new structure involves four divisions, two scientific and two operational. One of the scientific divisions will bring together particle physics and astrophysics. It will be led by Persis Drell who also will be a deputy director of the laboratory, a position previously held by her father, particle theorist Sidney Drell. The other scientific division will be called “Photon Science”, which will make use of the SLAC x-ray sources. At the moment SLAC produces intense x-ray beams at the SSRL, using synchrotron radiation from a ring which is a descendent of the original SPEAR electron-positron ring that was crucial in the “November Revolution” of 1974 (and which also provided me with a job one summer).
The main SLAC linac is being turned into a free electron X-ray laser to be called the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), which will be operational in 2009. At that time the plan is for SLAC to be out of the accelerator based high-energy physics business, with the PEP-II collider also shut down. The last fixed target experiment using the linac, E158, recently reported the most accurate measurement of the weak mixing angle at relatively low energies (at LEP it was very accurately measured at the Z pole). This measurement shows the running of the ratio of coupling constants predicted by the renormalization group. For more about this experiment, see an article in the latest Nature magazine.
This week’s Science magazine also has an article about particle physics. It reports on the HEPAP meeting mentioned here earlier where a plan to evaluate whether to shut down PEP-II or the Tevatron early was put forward. On a more positive note, the House Appropriations committee has restored some of the cuts in the FY 2006 DOE budget proposed by the White House. The House committe added $22 million to the high energy physics budget, bringing it back to the FY 2005 level (which, accounting for inflation, would still be a cut, but a smaller one).
An article in New Scientist about the same House bill explains that money is being taken away from the ITER international project to build a fusion reactor and used to bring funding for domestic fusion research also back to FY2005 levels. This may have something to do with the fact that the latest news about ITER is that a deal has been reached that will site it in France.
Quantoken,
you are just obnoxious. Who talks about He3 from the moon? Deuterium from sea water is what the only sustained controlled fusion ever sparked on earth was using. You seem to think that everone except for yourself is a stupid moron. Some people tend to think the converse.
Michael
Michael saked:
“getting deuterium out of sea water does not kill the efficiency. Can you imagine that the people who work on fusion science, as well as those who grant billions of $$ funding for it, have checked this first thing?”
Absolutely not! There is a huge gap between Fundamental research and industry application. Can any of the earlier scientists who were the first one probing the secret of atoms imagine that their research will one day lead to a deadly weapon that could easily wipe out whole cities? No. Did the inventor of pesticides like DDT and 666 realize the scope how his or her invention destroys the environment? Absolutely not.
How hard or easy it is to extract fusable material from the environment is of absolutely no concern to those doing fusion research, or those grant research funds. So NO, they have NOT checked out this “first thing”. I would be surprised if you could cite even one paper by thermal fusion research scientists talking about the techniques or cost of mining or extracting He3 from the moon.
Quantoken
uh He3 that is 🙂
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/1283056.html
Lots of H3 on the moon.
-drl
Quantoken,
getting deuterium out of sea water does not kill the efficiency. Can you imagine that the people who work on fusion science, as well as those who grant billions of $$ funding for it, have checked this first thing? Do you really think that your rambling objections qualify as a contribution? I am afraid the answer to the last question is yes.
Michael
You still don’t get the most important point I pointed out. The important thing is it may actually cost MORE energy to extract and refine the fusable elements, than the amount of energy you can obtain by the fusiom reactor. If that is the case, then it is a useless technology, regardless of the monetary cost.
The energy cost is due to the percentage scarcity of the fusable isotopics like deuterium and He 3. You would have to evaporate tons of sea water just to obtain one gram, or even a few miligram of the scarce isotopics you want. Such refinery process costs huge amount of energy. And that cost can not be reduced beyond a theoretical level no matter how sophisticated your technology might become.
If you disregard of the cost efective factor, sure, we have plenty of alternative energy source we can think about. There are plenty of Hydrogen on Jupiter for example. Just ship some Hydrogen from Jupiter to earth and it will can be used on fuel cells etc. But the energy cost to bring Hydrogen from Jupiter to earth is more than you can get out of it, so it is infeasible. Likewise, there are plenty of methane for you ti mine on Uranus. But it is in-practical.
The only feasible, economical, and environmental alternative energy source, is the heat from the deep of the earth crust. Just dig a hole a few KM deep, you let water down and high temperature steam comes up, allowing you to turn it into electricity and other energy form. It’s actually nuclear energy since the source of heat is the natural decay of elements in the earth crust, like U238 and U235. That’s a huge amount of energy, causing tectonic plate movements, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Quantoken
What is everyone here talking about? No closer to viability than a long time ago? That is simply wrong. Just a few years ago there’s been the first self sustained controlled fusion for several minutes, and it put out a lot more energy than had to be put in.
I realize that science sceptics gather here. But why ignore well known facts?
Michael
In response to a couple of comments by Q:
“1.Feasibility. We have spent half a century on this without success. It may take another half century before the technology is finally achieved, and much longer before it becomes an economically viable energy source. The energy crisis will hit far before this becomes successful.”
I believe one can make a very convincing argument that the relatively slow progress in fusion research is directly attributable to the lack of any feeling of urgency. If a true energy crisis looms, it is almost certain that enormous resources will be poured into whatever alternatives seem best. That would probably include fusion, but other viable alternatives would get serious attention as well. It is not reasonable to assume the same level of funding as today and then extrapolate more than about five years into the future.
” 2.Usefulness. The fuel used in thermal nuclear fusion, Helium 3, is a scarce resource on earth.”
Helium 3 may look good in some ways, but deuterium-tritium as a fuel has a longer history of research and would almost certainly be more practical, if for no other reason than the scarcity of helium-3.
Of course, none of this means that fusion research will actually be practical as a large scale power source, but I wouldn’t count it out either. SOMETHING has to eventually take the place of fossil fuels…
M
Actually Mike, Quantoken raises a couple of fair points. With all due respect to the people who have worked on fusion and plasmas physics, we are no nearer a commercial or viable fusion reactor design –or even something for which you get more energy out than you put in–and may not even do so in this century. Its a tough, maybe intractable problem that only nature has solved in the sun and the stars. The political problems don’t help either. Still, maybe someday it will work but 200 years is too long to wait.
Sometime this century a massive global energy crisis is going to start to kick in and no-one seems to want to face up to it. I remember once being at the top of the World Trade Centre observation deck (in the good old days before it had jet airliners flying into it) taking in the amazing view and thinking about the colossal amount of energy New York was using up. Not to mention the endless stream of cars. And that is just a tiny part of the US and the world. In the future, just where is all that power going to come from? And demand keeps going up and up.
I still think ITER is worth doing though and the cost is not that great when put in perspective. Yes, there is Helium 3 on the moon but how do you get it even if you could use it? We could not get back to the moon either even if we wanted to. We are not as technically advanced as we might like to think.
Quantoken,
even if nuclear fusion will become practicle only in 200 years we have to do research now to make it possible in future.
Dmitriy
Quantoken,
you are underinformed and underexposed. Just keep your stupid ideas to yourself.
Michael
There is absolutely no point in wasting money on ITER or other thermal nuclear fusion research for several reasons:
1.Feasibility. We have spent half a century on this without success. It may take another half century before the technology is finally achieved, and much longer before it becomes an economically viable energy source. The energy crisis will hit far before this becomes successful.
2.Usefulness. The fuel used in thermal nuclear fusion, Helium 3, is a scarce resource on earth. Scientists have been telling us the total amount of He 3 stored on earth. That’s misleading when you do not talk at the same time what takes to extract the He 3. For example He 3 contained in one litre of sea water contain the amount of energy equivalent to one litre gasoline. But to extract the He 3 contained in one litre sea water probably costs energy equivalent to a few hundred litre gasoline. Then it is totally worthless as an energy source even if you do not consider the economical factors.
Or there’s plenty of He 3 on the moon, too. But to go to the moon and bring the He 3 back would also cost much more than what it is worth.
3.Cost, cost and cost. That includes econimical cost, environmental cost and resource cost.
Quantoken