Aboriginal Science Fiction, Issues 57–58 — page 53: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

puts out only the amount of ener- gy that a 100-watt light bulb burns in five hours possibly fuse atoms, when people building little suns can’t seem to get the job done? It’s all a question of power. Power is defined as the amount of energy you consume over a given amount of time. In the case of one joule, that is equivalent to one watt consumed in one second. However, one joule is also equiva- lent to 10 watts consumed in 0.1 seconds. Do you see where this is headed? If you burn energy really fast, you generate huge power lev- els. The faster you burn, the high- er the power for the same amount of total energy. But of course, those power surges last for only a short period of time. The researchers at Livermore have a laser that packs its punch in only 0.5 million-millionths of a second. For that small period of time, the power reaches 1,250 million-mil- lion watts. This is 1300 times more power than can be generated by the entire US electrical grid. But of course, it only does it for an incredibly short period of time. But that is the key. You com- press the light-bulb-like energy of the laser into incredibly short time periods. And then what do you do with it? You focus the laser on a small pellet (the size of a pea) that contains deuterium and tritium (the same fuel as used by the little sun crowd). The outer layer of the pellet is vaporized, blowing out- ward, which in turn sends an inward shock wave which com- presses the deuterium and tritium fuel. This compression heats the fuel to temperatures of up to 100 million degrees — much hotter than the center of the sun. At those temperatures fusion will take place, generating the same alpha particles and neutrons as in the case of ITER. Again, for this scheme to work, you need to gen- erate more power from the fusion process than you do in running the laser. This approach is less mature than the little sun approach. NIF is currently under construction and should start firing its laser at little pellets in the next few years. What If? Will this be the way to achieve a working fusion system? No one really knows. They are going to have to build it and just see what it does. Cold Fusion NIF is certainly different from ITER, but it shares many things in common. Both those approaches get atoms incredibly hot, so that when they collide they can smash together and form a larger atom. Is there another way to get these atoms close together, a tricky way that might not require them to get so hot? Well, there might just be. It is first necessary to consider just what an atom is. An atom is certainly very small, but the neutrons and pro- tons that make up its core are sub- stantially smaller. An atom’s size is the swarm of electrons that buzz about it. An electron has an incredibly small mass, and it is because of that small mass that it has a relatively large size. What? Now, that doesn’t make sense when you first hear it. The prob- lem is that when you start talking about things as small as an elec- tron, you enter a physical realm that is dominated by quantum mechanics. When _ something weighs as little as an electron, it is no longer a particle. It is not cor- rect to think of it as being just a really small speck of dust. When objects have as little mass as an electron, they start So, if you could do something with those electrons, make them heavier, then the atom itself would be physically smaller, since the smearing out of the electron, or the region of fog which it makes up, would become smaller. In this way, when two of these shrunken atoms come together, they could get much closer before banging head on and bouncing apart. Another way of looking at it is that you wouldn’t need to get these atoms as hot in order to get them to fuse, since it’s easier to get them closer together because they are smaller to begin with. Is there a way to make an elec- tron heavier? Well, not really. However, you can replace the elec- trons of an atom with another type of particle called a muon. A muon has the same negative charge as an electron, but it has a mass 200 times greater. Researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford-shire, Britain, are mak- ing muonic forms of matter by replacing the electrons’ with muons, and as a result are able to slam muonic-based atoms togeth- er at relatively low temperatures and get them to fuse. The chal- lenge to this approach is that muonic matter lasts for a very short period of time, quickly decaying back into normal matter, and the fusion reaction must take place before this happens. Will they be able to make a power-pro- ducing fusion reactor out of this particle, but like a © wave, or a ripple. | You can view the — electron as a type of | smeared-out | entity, almost like © a piece of fog. Asa ~ result, even though — it doesn’t weigh | much, it is spread — out over a fairly © large volume. It is — the electrons that — determine the size © of the atom, even ~ though it is the © neutron and pro- | tons that deter- | mine its weight. Order From: Aboriginal SF Set #3 P.O. Box 2449 Woburn, MA 01888 Back Issues And Save : Get Issues 10, 11, 16 & 18 mi for only °18.% Aboriginal Science Fiction — Summer 1998607), CG DOO KS.Gain