A team of Rensselaer scientists, along with researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have developed a potential new method for producing fusion energy that could generate as much power as the sun.
While the sun requires temperatures of up to 15 million degrees to produce its own fusion reaction, this new experiment is induced by ultrasonic waves which generate enough heat to initiate a reaction.
Such developments in fusion energy could lead to significant practical uses. Essentially, fusion could furnish enough energy to power large cities and industries that current renewable energy sources can not provide.
“A lot of the problems that exist with nuclear technology … many of those problems would go away,” Richard T. Lahey, Jr., Edward E. Hood Professor of Engineering at Rensselaer and one of the authors of the research that will be published in the March 8 issue of Science, said Tuesday.
Fusion waste is much more environmentally friendly than other nuclear wastes. It does not produce any air polluting emissions, providing a quality alternative to current power sources such as coal.
“It’s hard to know at this point what the ultimate importance of this discovery will be. However at this time, it looks promising,” said Lahey.
“Right now [the experiment] is pretty small … we can use it for high temperature chemistry experiments. This builds on [those experiments], but at much higher temperatures.”
Lahey emphasized the collaboration and support RPI researchers have gotten from the Institute. “We’ve been doing it jointly. Work has been going on for the past three years.”
Other participants in the study included Rusi Taleyarkhan, one of Lahey’s former Ph.D. students, and Robert Nigmatulin, a visiting scholar at Rensselaer.
Lahey mentioned that the really interesting part of the project is “the prospect of scaling it up so that we can enhance the neutron yield [and] get a chain reaction … we have ways that look promising to do that.”
Robert Block, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering, helped to set up and calibrate a neutron and gamma detection system that will be used to determine the experiment’s validity.
Lahey encouraged other researchers across the globe to “go into their laboratories” to learn more from this recent study.
