03/24/2004
Tiny Bubbles Revisited
In last week’s column I described the trauma I experienced when I picked up what I thought was a dead starfish, found it to be alive and then witnessed its demise. I closed my column stating that I would never pick up a starfish again. I lied. Yesterday I found a young starfish of the same type only the size of a quarter. I picked it up. This time, however, I threw it as far as I could back into the Gulf. I’m assuming that it still survives and that I’ve atoned for my earlier actions. This morning, I passed a young lady proudly carrying a large starfish of the same species. So the cycle goes.
Continuing in this downbeat mode, I found a follow-up item on carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere and global warming, the subjects of two recent columns. In last Sunday’s (March 21) Naples Daily News, there was an article by Charles Hanley titled “Carbon dioxide buildup said to be accelerating in Earth’s atmosphere”. For a half a century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate monitoring laboratory, which operates the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, has been monitoring the carbon dioxide levels there. The levels peak each year during the winter months.
According to the article, on last Friday (March 20) the CO2 level was about 379 parts per million (ppm) compared to 376 ppm last year. This increase of 3 ppm may not sound like much but it’s three times the 1ppm annual increases when measurements began half a century ago. It’s also about twice the average annual increase recorded over the past decade. This acceleration in the rate of adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere could be an indication of positive feedback, in which a process feeds upon itself so to speak. The more carbon dioxide, the more global warming; the more warming, the more CO2 vented into the atmosphere, etc., etc.
I must say that yesterday I felt no evidence of warming here on Marco Island. The temperature at 6 AM, when I started my walk, was only 52 degrees Fahrenheit and it was “breezy”. I’m sure the wind chill factor was making it feel like it was 40. Here in Southwest Florida, the weather forecasters don’t seem to know the term “windy”. It’s always “breezy”. Incidentally, I realized that, during that cold walk yesterday, I saw not a single bird of any kind on the beach. Obviously, they had more sense than I had, especially as I made my way back to our condo shivering in the face of a driving “breeze”!
In the global warming scenario we discussed recently, one of the consequences is predicted to be an increase in storminess and windier conditions. Old-timers here all agree that this past winter here in Florida has indeed been much “breezier” than in past years. If we could drastically reduce the carbon dioxide we produce, perhaps we could slow down or halt the warming. To do this we need a major new alternative energy source to replace the oil and gas we burn. Two years ago, in my column of March 21, 2002, I discussed a paper in the March 8, 2002 issue of Science that offered a glimmer of hope in this regard.
In that paper, Rusi Taleyarkhan at Oak Ridge National Lab and co-workers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reported the attainment of “desktop” nuclear fusion in a liquid. The claim was that under certain conditions involving ultrasonic vibrations, cavitation, in which tiny bubbles form and collapse, can be made to generate extremely high, very localized temperatures. Furthermore, the temperatures were high enough to initiate nuclear fusion of hydrogen, just as occurs in our Sun. I had written previously about studies in which cavitation was postulated to generate high local temperatures and about actual measurements of high temperatures in these collapsing bubbles.
To many, this “sonofusion” sounded a lot like “cold fusion”, discredited by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. Sonofusion was greeted with great skepticism, even by some of Taleyarkhan’s colleagues at Oak Ridge. In the intervening two years, I saw no definitive work pro or con on the subject. Now, almost precisely two years since the publication of the Science paper, new work from Oak Ridge and Rensselaer has surfaced. Taleyarkhan and his coworkers have repeated the experiments using better equipment and claim confirmation of their earlier work.
According to an article in the March 3 New York Times (called to my attention by Brian Trumbore), at least one severe critic of the earlier work has been convinced that there may be something to this sonofusion. Lawrence Crum of the University of Washington is quoted as saying the new work is “much better” and that “It’s getting to the point where you can’t ignore it.”
Taleyarkhan is now a professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue University and, on the Purdue Web site, he reveals details of the recent work, performed while he was at Oak Ridge. The common organic solvent, acetone, was the liquid used in the experiments. The acetone was not ordinary acetone, but acetone in which the hydrogen was replaced by deuterium, so-called heavy hydrogen. Deuterium has both a proton and a neutron in its nucleus, while ordinary hydrogen has only a proton.
The “deuterated” acetone was subjected to pulses of neutrons lasting 5 thousandths of a second, also the length of time between pulses. The neutrons generated cavities in the liquid. At the same time, the liquid was subjected to high power ultrasonic vibrations that caused the cavities to form tiny bubbles. These bubbles then expanded to about 100 thousand times their initial volumes. The expanded bubbles were visible to the naked eye. The expansion of a bubble to such an extent stores up very large amounts of energy. Taleyarkhan likens the effect to stretching a slingshot from our Earth to the Sun.
This large amount of energy is released when the bubble collapses, heating up the local area around the bubble. The researchers estimate that the local temperatures reach 10 million degrees Centigrade. They also think the local pressures are in the range of a thousand times the pressure of our atmosphere here on Earth. These extreme conditions are what they believe initiates the nuclear fusion of the deuterium. Now, fusion reactions generate certain products. This was one of the failures of the cold fusion experiments. Initial claims that fusion products had been observed proved to be highly questionable. In reality, “fusion” products were found by other researchers to be present in the background environment.
The Oak Ridge/Rensselaer researchers claim that they found tritium, an even heavier form of hydrogen that is formed in the nuclear fusion of the deuterium. When deuterium fuses, tritium, gamma rays and neutrons of certain energies are formed. Taleyarkhan states that all three of these fusion products have been observed in agreement with theoretical model predictions. In the work two years ago, they could only follow the reactions for only short periods of time during the experiment. With the new, more sophisticated detection equipment, they can follow the process continuously. According to Taleyarkhan, the statistics now are such that, whereas the earlier results had a one in a hundred chance of not being nuclear fusion, the statistics from the new studies point to a one in a trillion chance it’s not nuclear fusion. That’s pretty good odds, if true!
When the bubbles collapse, there are flashes of light, the well- known phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. Taleyarkhan says that they have detected neutrons coming off at precisely the time of the light flashes, further evidence for nuclear fusion. In addition, they have run the same experiments with ordinary acetone containing no added deuterium and found no effect. If I remember correctly, it takes a significantly higher temperature to fuse ordinary hydrogen than to fuse deuterium. I worry about the fact that neutrons are used to seed the bubbles but the light flashes and accompanying peaking neutron emissions occur between the neutron pulses.
I certainly am not qualified to judge the merit of the new work but, on the face of it, it seems quite promising. So far, the experiments have been carried out using glass canisters stated to be about the size of two coffee mugs, one on top of the other; sounds like between a pint and a quart of liquid. The real test of whether or not sonofusion will be a possible practical source of energy is to exceed the break-even point. That is, you have to obtain more energy out of the experiment than the energy you put into the experiment. This break-even point has not been achieved. Taleyarkhan says that they will try to scale up the experiment and work to find a way to get rid of the expensive equipment needed to supply the pulses of neutrons.
If a sonofusion company ever comes into existence I envision the entrepreneurs using the song “Tiny Bubbles” in their commercials. I love Hawaiian music and the young Don Ho’s version I heard on our first visit to Hawaii back in the 1960s.
Allen F. Bortrum
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