Real potential energy vs. Virtual potential energy

[Richard Hull]

In keeping with my past posts I choose to return to a pivotal issue as stated in the title above.

Real potential energy. (PE) is extant if at some time in the past, for any reason, energy has been input to a system and stored there. This harkens back to the hunter gatherer scenario of energy procurement and use.

We gather up stuff, wood, coal, oil, uranium, thorium, etc and put just a bit of added energy to these products to "pull the PE trigger". Having done this, the energy continues to pour out of the system until the "fuel" is spent and it resides at some lowest potential energy, proof against any further, energy ouput at reasonable cost.

Gravitational energy need not be gathered up at all, but merely taken from an environmentally suitable point. (Water fall) This is the, lowest cost and most environmentally sound, massive energy source known to man here on earth.

Geothermal and tidal energies exist also in massive form, but the infrastructure to use tidal power is huge and exists in an ebb and flow situatuion against a continuous need by man. Geothermal is rare and not as conveniently located as water falls.

All of the above processes make use of real, easily released potential energy. Some are so green that only God could have wanted for more. Other's are abominably filthy and create continuing issues. In the mix is the fact that many of the filthiest solutions are also wonderfully massive of output and relatively compact, easily instituted solutions to get one's hand on a gang o' megwatts.

Fusion, at least at the core level, is a form of virtual potential energy. The energy is just not there. The seed energy to start the reaction is horrendous and the tendency for the reaction to self quench demands yet more energy. Finally, it is a poor performer volumetrically in easily started and continuously operated fusion systems. What energy is to be found in fusion is the result of the seed energy working real potential energy stored in the neutron to create what is euphemistically termed, "mass defect". The exothermic nature of fusion is a bit of a deception when operated by the hand of man.

Fusion's issues are many and, yet, remains proof against we hunter gatherers who are used to honest to God potential energy. So far, the price of the promise of virtual PE is too high and the methods to get something for nothing remain, as in the real world, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow the purview of stellar sized furnaces only.

As stated before, even in stellar fusion the first operation is an energy loser and NOT exothermic. Stars demand a continuous source of energy to keep burning according to stellar fusion theory.

Richard Hull

[Hector]

I believe that at one point the same was true for fission.

[Steven Sesselmann]

Richard,

Potential energy is just that, no real or virtual about it..

The whole universe is most likely created in the form of potential energy. What makes it hard for us to visualize, is that we occupy such a tiny region of the space and time that exists in the Universe.

If the Universe was likened to a skyscraper with 10,000 levels, we live on floors 9,998 and 9,999, and the elevator in most cases only travels to those two floors.

What you call real potential energy is riding the elevator from floor 9,999 to 9,998, but what we are trying to do with fusion is to hack the elevator electronics, to make it to go to one of the lower levels. I think this is what you refer to as virtual PE.

The elevator company has put strong passwords in the software, to prevent accidental travel to the lower floors, this is to prevent the whole structure from collapsing too fast.

Nevertheless, the system is not perfect, and every now and then the lift travels with a small load, to one of the lower levels.

The long term effect of this, is that the top floors are gradually eroding, yes.. material from the top floors is gradually making its way down to the lower levels, and the handsome
structure which once was 10,000 levels will eventually turn into a bungalow.

See, we are nothing but a bunch of hackers

Steven

[Richard Hull]

How so?

1. Hunter- Gather uranium
2. refine the fuel
3. Put the fuel together with a moderator and control rods

You are off to the races......

Total time from the discovery of the very existence of fission (1938) until the test electric reactor by the navy, (1952) and the birth to megawatts of controlled electricity... a mere 14 years.

From 1938 to Shippingport., PA which put megawatts on the electrical consumer grid (1957) only 19 years.

It took vastly longer than this to develop the oil economy!!!!

Fusion? Still out there twistin' in the wind many decades after discovery and 60 years past the first attempts at fusion reactor design!!!

Fusion - Zero electricity ever produced!
Fusion - Virtually zero over unity run times from billion dollar efforts
Fusion - No self-ignition, self run ever recorded
Fusion - 1952-1985 - real soon now
Fusion - 1985 to date - not quite so real soon now
Fusion - ITER "We will not produce electricity with ITER".
Fusion - The energy of the future and it always will be.

Fission is real PE stored in the nucleus via 100%, good, old fashion endothermic reactions. This is an overburden of energy just itchin' to get out. requiring little or no seed energy to start and continuously run the reaction.

Fusion is virtual or promised PE provided any number of near impossibilities and continuous energy inputs are met and controlled.The promise has always been super big, while the results have been just "wind over the decks".

There is no comparison between a real and virtual PE source. Thus, there is no comparision at any level between fission and fusion.

Richard Hull

[Richard Hull]

We see buildings that are millions of times larger self sustaining (stars)

We see that some of the already made star stuff in our building can be made to do star stuff and figure we can hack a 10,000 story building that is turning into a smaller structure into a larger edifice by a slight of hand. Continuously hacking and praying and hoping and believing. I get it now! I see just what you mean....it's a faith based thingy.

Richard Hull

[Steven Sesselmann]

Richard,

The analogy I used, was...

The Universe = Skyscraper with 10,000 levels (Building)

Our usual Domain = 9,998th. floor with no windows!

Einstein was the first person to tell us that we lived on the 9,998th floor, before him, everyone thought they lived on the ground floor.

Now only some people think we live on the ground floor....

....and I think faith might have something to do with that

Steven

[Hector]

I don’t dispute your facts, but I would interject that by historical accounts prior to Leo Szilard’s chain reaction solution fission was just as impractical and as inefficient as fusion is today.

Maybe if we had a multi-approach effort like World War II provided fission research with we might also have practical fusion today. Sorry I’m an optimist, and obviously in the minority.

[Chris Trent]

I wouldn't say you're so much the minority as you think.

Most of the rest of us are jaded with established fusion research channels, and rightly so. Fusion research today is stuck in a rut, Yes even for us.

For the time being, and for the foreseeable future, fusion really is and will remain the energy of the future. I'm just pleased that it is finally becoming evident what a money sink the major current approach to fusion really is.


Despite this disillusionment I am still confident that someday someone will have a happy accident, stroke of genius, or whatever you want to call it; and in an instant fusion will become the power of today, whenever that is.

[Hector]

I could not agree more; maybe I'm not alone after all.

[Starfire]

This thread begs the question - What is energy? and why does potential energy always seek a balance equilibrium?

answer these and your half way there.


Unlike sign charged particles will, in an absolute vacuum seek each other out - from the other side of the universe and beyond. Conversely Like sign particles or fields will go to the other end of the universe to avoid each other. ( in an absolute vacuum ) - now that's something.

But we have got the toys (Fusors ) to experiment with - or are we going just sit on our collective arse and talk about it for ever. Why not construct some serious experiments - My daughter had an experiment named " In search of the Triple" yet to be confirmed. -- three Neutrons ejected from a single reaction event?

Only needs a slow burning fusor and three detectors - - correctly positioned.

or even a simple double - a diametric Neutron ejection perhaps? The text books would have to be re-written.

[Richard Hull]

I have faith in many things, hunches about others, strong feelings that transcend science, but none of these feed th' bull dog.

I really believe that fusion will be mastered; just not by any method in use or dreamed of at the current moment in time.

Fission uses real potential energy in virtually the same way as burning a log. Fusion has none of these attributes. That is why fission was an instant success and a no brainer.

As regards the idea of the chain reaction being the tipping point for fission.......The idea came only months after the discovery of fission, itself, and the first net energy producing pile only 3 years later. No great, unseen, leap here. The meanest intelligence would have seen the chain reaction following the fission discovery in short order. Szilard was no lucky donkey here he just saw the obvious a bit faster than others.

Fusion languishes, yet, lo these many years later, lost and adrift. Fusion has no need of a modern day Szilard. It needs a true, lucky donkey and a new spin on fusion physics, itself.

Fission has produced terawatts on grid to you and me for the past 50 years and stands ready to continue to do it on into a distant future.

Fusion remains a very distant article of faith.

Richard Hull

[Chris Trent]

Richard,

I've been pondering this for a while and determined that the issue at hand is entropy. It is not a mater of whether the potential energy is real or not, it is clearly and measurably real. The issue at hand is whether or not the process would happen on it's own regardless of conditions.

Water will continue it's fall,
Wood or coal will eventually oxidize, even without flame,
Fissile isotopes will split according to their respective half lives,
Portions of the earth's crust will warm and cool just as they have for ages past.

Man has proven adept at harnessing energy that is already well on it's entropic path to meet his needs and has found ways of accelerating certain entropic systems to make them truly useful.


Deuterium on the other hand will remain deuterium age after age. Entropy does not play here. There is no natural process at work outside of the stars themselves. There is certainly nothing that can conveniently be throttled up to a useful state.


For my part I simply see fusion as the next step. In the past man has progressed through being passively affected by energy through influencing to harnessing energy already in motion. To succeed at fusion man will finally have to actively instigate the process instead of simply being a lucky beneficiary.

It won't be easy, but the opportunity is tremendous.

[Richard Hull]

The "virtual potential energy" was not meant to be a scientific term put forward by me, but more of in the vein in which Trent spoke. There is no way to release the potential energy and have it continue to burn. Deuterium is not a fuel in the classic sense.

Special if not ideal and precise conditions must be established to bring the energy forth. The energy is not a nascent potential energy in what we call the fuel, but a promised energy based on special conditions involving the fuel that are completely non-trivial and even go beyond an economically reasonable pale based on any other energy source where the energy is locked in and more than up to being released by relatively simple means.

With the volumetric efficiency of the sun, fusion looks bad. We would have to beat the sun at its own game.

As always in fission or fusion where mass is increased or decreased in the reaction, no charged matter particles are created or destroyed. The vaporous, non descript, "mass defect" is all that comes or goes in the E=mc^2 equation. A will-o-the-wisp that comes and goes to make the equations happy and work OK.

Richard Hull

[MikeDu]

Mr. Hull

Thanks for another fine philosophical physics thread, you all should get together and write a 'Nuclear Physic for Dummies' book (probably already out there); I think your musings are along the lines of Isaac Asimov's writings (trying to be complementary) and you could paint informative works for the public.

I am trying to 'search' the forums for some basic fusion reaction energy requirements.
Haven't found it yet, might have read right through it. Found the 'Lawson Criterion' and 'Fusion Energy Gain Factor' discussions on Wikipedia, however they are a bit abstract for me, not having great advance math skills.

If I take an 'ideal' energy reflective container, add four deuterium nuclei to it and just enough energy to get two of the nuclei to fuse yielding one He3 and that wonderful 'mass defect' stuff, is the extra exothermic 2.45 Mev enough to activate the remaining two D nuclei to fuse. I see the equations in the Farnsworth patent 3,386,883, but don't see the input energys required. I ask this naive question because you discuss 'virtual potential energy' that appears to be only extractable in the fire of a fission reaction to sustain the fusion output. This makes me think that there isn't enough resultant energy to keep man made fusion plus containment going in any form outside of a gravitation bottle. I'll look some more.

Thanks.

[Donald McKinley]

Chris,

I'm not so sure that your statement is accurate. While you are right that deuterium is very stable "age after age". There is plenty of evidence that there is spontaneous deuterium fusion everywhere that deuterium has a presence. It is a question of reaction rate and how favorable the conditions are.

For instance, there is no sharp cutoff within fusors for the reaction. The reaction does become very low below ~10k volts though. High voltage gradients are very common everywhere on the surface of the earth. (Just take off your sweater in a dark room and dry climate sometime.) If you delve into very small environments, high voltages are even more common and less apparent.

There is evidence that spontaneous transmutation occurs perhaps even at all times everywhere at a very low rate. My intuition (perhaps flawed) is that we are achieving measurable fusion because we are subjecting elements which by their nature spontaneously transmute, to an elevated level of energy which increases the rate but does not cause the transmutation. My guess is that the conditions exist for deuterium transmutations throughout the range of stable existence of D and it's transmutation products except perhaps at absolute zero and maybe at the very top.

With regard to Richard's idea

<Real potential energy. (PE) is extant if at some
< time in the past, for any reason, energy has
<been input to a system and stored there.

This is obviously true and evident on the face of it when you hear it spoken. It is also indisputably practical. However there is an unspoken both practical and philosophical suggestion contained here that I just can't accept. The suggestion is that it happened in the past and is not happening significantly now.

I think that this must be wrong. I have no practical evidence. However it doesn't make logical sense. The knowledge that anything exists at all is proof that mass is not dissipating overall and that the entire edifice known as the second law of thermodynamics is flawed in a basic but unknown way. This, of course, isn't practical because for practical purposes mass (energy) does dissipate insofar as we as consumers of energy are concerned. We will eventually dissipate. It's hard to argue with that.

But hope springs eternal. I think the fusion nut will be cracked. I don't think it will involve a self sustaining burn, and I also would be delighted if it would lead to a different understanding of thermodynamics (but it probably will not).

Don

[Chris Trent]

That's the problem with speaking in generalities, or making conceptual arguments, someone can always point out a technical flaw.


I am of course aware that even at STP, maxwellian distribution will result in a few deuterons reaching fusionable potential. I am also aware of the impressive potentials that can be accomplished easily on a microscopic scale. This would seem to translate into the reality that fusion happens all around us, all the time. Unfortunately these fusion events seem so vanishingly rare as to be for most instances and purposes unmeasurable, irreproducible, and nonexistent.

I would dearly love for someone to point out a common earthbound natural fusion process for us to study; unfortunately as far as I know our only natural example of an ongoing fusion process is, and still remains, purely celestial.

[Richard Hull]

Fusion is tough because, even with somewhat ideal conditions, it is probablistic based on cross sections of the fuel nuclei. The thinner the fuel density, the lower the probabilty that any significant fraction of your seed energy will be returned much less create a net energy outpouring.

This entire fusion scenario is nature's way of not having the protium in the universe go up like a tender box. Fusion is deliberately intended to be a volumetrically rotten source of energy, even at the stellar level!

The Lawson criteria tells the story of how fusion is the only game in town, on a universal level, and that you can't win, because the game is rigged. Yes, there is always a winner in the fusion lottery based on probability, but the losers abound, ad infinitum.

The answer to another question....Is there enough energy in fusion (d-d), given an ideal reflector to create another fusion ala chain reaction? Yes there is, many times over, ideally, and the idealists call it "ignition" in the fusion camp. Alas, there are no ideal reflectors and nature doesn't like ignition save in stars, where the Lawson criteria keeps the ignition temperature limited and unbridled fusion in check. (Thank Goodness!)

Richard Hull

[001userid]

Many men died in the cold before the mystery of fire was harnessed.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty will be chipped away, reshaped, maybe discarded. The super cold and the super hot will be studied at length. Better tools fashioned, providing added information to the ambient constructs. How accurately we interpret the "Qaunta Bones" reveals our understanding of what is real and sets the time scale for progress.

Mass into energy, energy into mass. Hot into cold, cold into hot. Opposite sides of mysterious coin that remains half understood, hence half spent at our hand.

Someday we may learn to stack and unstack the Qaunta bones as we see fit, provided we don’t perish in the cold with no understanding of fire….

[Donald McKinley]

C.

I could tell by your previous posts that nothing I wrote above would be a surprise or new to you. You're much more familiar with this material than I am by a good long shot.

I agree about the generalities idea. I just wish I had more free time and resources to pursue the more particular side of this business.

Don