New insights on fusion power Research carried out at MIT's Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor may have brought the promise of fusion as a future power source a bit closer to reality, though scientists caution that a practical fusion powerplant is still decades away. Fusion, the reaction that produces the sun's energy, is thought to have enormous potential for future power generation because fusion plant operation produces no emissions, fuel sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little (and short-lived) radioactive waste. But it still faces great hurdles.
A Purdue University scientist who was reprimanded for research misconduct over claims he produced nuclear fusion in tabletop experiments is suing two other faculty members for alleged defamation.
Physicists and politicians from across Europe and beyond gathered at Londons Science Museum on Monday to mark the beginning of a three-year preparatory phase of a new 1bn project known as the European High Power Laser Energy Research Facility (HiPER).
An alternative fusion project has been kicked off in Europe that would seek abundant clean energy using a colossal laser the size of a football stadium.
On 23 March 1989 Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton, UK, and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah, US, announced that they had observed controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room temperature, and for around a month the world was under the impression that the world's energy woes had been remedied. But, even as other groups claimed to repeat the pair's results, sceptical reports began trickle in. An editorial in Nature predicted cold fusion to be unfounded. And a US Department of Energy report judged that the experiments did "not provide convincing evidence that useful sources of energy will result from cold fusion."
A Purdue University panel inquiring into allegations of research misconduct against nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan has concluded that "several matters merit further investigation". The panel was set up after contact between Purdue, based in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the Office of Naval Research, which in 2005 allocated $250,000 to research by Taleyarkhan. This was part of a project aimed at replicating his controversial claims to be able to generate fusion energy by collapsing bubbles in deuterated fluids. This is the third inquiry run by Purdue, which was criticised earlier this year by both scientists and lawmakers for its handling of concerns raised by scientists about bubble-fusion claims at the university. Purdue has not said publicly what exactly in Taleyarkhan's work it might investigate further.
A Congressional subcommittee has stoked the flames under the cauldron of controversy that is bubble fusion. Those flames all but died out last month after an internal investigation at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, absolved nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan of any scientific misconduct surrounding his research on producing nuclear fusion in collapsing bubbles.
Reports that the bubble had burst for a form of cheap, table-top nuclear fusion may have been premature. Rusi Taleyarkhan, the physicist at the centre of a furore surrounding so-called bubble fusion, was last week cleared of scientific misconduct. In 2002, Taleyarkhan, then at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and now at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, published a paper in Science claiming that bombarding a solvent with neutrons and sound waves produced tiny bubbles that triggered nuclear fusion reactions. Then in March 2006, Purdue began investigating allegations of misconduct against Taleyarkhan, amid accusations that the evidence of fusion he reported was actually caused by a radioactive isotope of californium. However, on 7 February, Purdue absolved Taleyarkhan's group of any misconduct. The verdict follows independent verification of Taleyarkhan's results by Edward Forringer of LeTourneau University in Texas and his colleagues last November. Taleyarkhan says he has been "vindicated".
On the surface, Thiago Olson is like any typical teenager. He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college. But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist." 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.
Scientists at the U.S. Navy’s San Diego SPAWAR Systems Centre have produced something unique in the 17-year history of the scientific drama historically known as cold fusion: simple, portable, highly repeatable, unambiguous, and permanent physical evidence of nuclear events using detectors that have a long track record of reliability and acceptance among nuclear physicists.