Corwin

Yes, it uses that. Apparently the heat in the bubbles gets pretty extreme. Like fusion levels extreme.

wdog

interesting, but i believe that fusion can produce a nasty environment. gammas, a free neutron or two, maybe more. it won't be sqeaky clean

Corwin

No Gamma radiation to speak of, (ok, a few free neutrons.... but they're easy to absorb with minimal shielding... nowhere NEAR what a fission reactor produces...)

jpbrooks

But even if the results of this experiment are confirmed to be fusion reactions, how easily, cheaply, and "cleanly" could the materials used to produce fusion, at levels large enough to satisfy practical energy reqirements, be obtained? E.g., how economically can pure deuterium be obtained?

Friar Bellows

Don't get your hopes up just yet. The tritium that was produced was not in high enough quantities to prove the occurence of fusion, and there was no sign of the so-called "signature" of nuclear fusion, a peak in the energy spectrum at 2.5 MeV. Even if it really is fusion, so what? We've induced fusion before -- zillions of times! The trouble is that we've never found a sustainable (timewise) and economical way to do it. If this fusion claim is true, methinks it will run into problems of the same order of magnitude as all the other man-made sources of fusion.

Having said all that, I still think fusion will be our future energy source of choice.

Corwin

Deuterium is easy to get. Just separate it out of ocean water. (Deuterium, as an isotope of hydrogen, is found pretty much anywhere ordinary hydrogen is. I saw an estimate that in ocean water 1 out of every 7000 hydrogen atoms is actually deuterium. And since it's twice as heavy as ordinary hydrogen, it's not tough to separate out.)

Corona688

It's obviously possible, as many fission reactors use large amounts of heavy water; i.e. the D in CANDU stands for deterium.