Does anyone know if any progress is being made on producing a practical working Helium-3 fusion reactor?
99339
Take a look at the article found at the link below.
1076179
Wow.  Three responders came up with the same smat*** joke.\n\nCold fusion has been performed in laboratory settings, in a reactor.  So yes, it has been made.  There are no large-scale operations.  That are public.
232862
It would take a lot more energy than is generated in one fusion bomb.  Watch the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
201980
The current shortfalls are lack of long range coherence and huge power consumption.  Work to weaponize this technology has been going on for at least ten years that I know of, and it still is of very limited use.  The bomb clearing application is a fairly clever one, and actually makes use of the poor long range coherence of the beam.  The charged plasma can be projected a short distance, at which point it will try to find the lowest resistance path to ground.  Metal objects, especially ones with sharp edges, will attract this charged plasma strongly, and so hidden metal objects within close range will draw the strike to themselves.  So, for this it seems to work quite well.  It's still a large, cumbersome, and power intensive piece of equipment, however, without much record of successful use in the field.  The goal, ultimately, is to turn this sort of thing into a full scale beam weapon, but I think that's quite a ways off and possibly self-defeating.  Lasers typically convert <10%, and often <5% of the power they consume into laser light, so they're very inefficient.  The idea with LIPC is that a fairly high power laser, one powerful enough to ionize the air but not so powerful that it's particularly dangerous to armored vehicles, can be used to open an ionized channel in the air which will conduct electricity, and can then be followed by a significant current of high voltage electrons.  It's something like artificial directed lighnting.  Instead of generating a high enough voltage difference that the air spontaneously ionizes in a random branching pattern, the laser provides guidance and the plasma, which can be generated more efficiently but is difficult to control, provides the power.  It's potentially more efficient than a laser powerful enough to do serious damage, but it's still a whole lot of power and isn't likely to yield an easily portable weapon any time soon.  The current bomb finder has very limited range, and has to move very slowly in order to scan the area, and is almost as large as a tank.  So, is it practical?   If moving ten miles an hour with a vehicle that sucks down fuel at a tremendous rate is worth the tradeoff of possible hidden bombs, it makes sense, but this only makes sense for limited areas where bomb threats are especially high, and for moving especially high value troops or materials past the point.  Can it be made smaller and more efficient?  Probably, but not by much.  The technology is inherently a high power consumption device.  Lasers are not likely to get much more efficient.  Two-component mixed chemical excimers can be used to at least remove the power generation need for the laser, but then you're limited to the number of shots you can provide, whereas an electrically powered laser can be used with fairly high duty cycle and is much more suitable for the sweeping function of detecting bombs.  But, all the same, the technology does work, and can be made to work in fairly rough environments.  Lasers can be delicate machinery, true, but they've got a good history of use on the battlefield for signal use and can be made sufficiently durable.  Likewise with the electron guns used to produce the plasma.  It's a somewhat complicated device, yes, but not that much different as far as the fudamental technology than that used in plasma cutters which are widely used in industrial metal shops with good uptime.  \n\nThe real question is whether or not the system meets a real military need given the limitations of slow speed and huge power consumption.  Of course, the military has been known to spend huge amounts of money on devices and systems that are complete crap, just because they sounded cool, but if the company is to ever really be successful, they'll have to have something that has a real world usefulness.  It's not clear to me that this device, as clever as it is, really provides that.   This is going to be the real question, and the
478122
The world's first practical nuclear power plant was put into successful operation in May 1953 at Arco, Idaho, where a prototype power plant for the U.S. Navy's nuclear-powered submarine had been under construction for several years. Electric power has also been obtained from other nuclear reactors both in this country and in England, but merely as a by-product of the operation of the reactor. Thus much of the research and engineering required to solve the unique problems peculiar to a highly radioactive environment has been done and it now appears feasible to construct a power plant for the production of industrial power. Last year the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) let contracts to four leading industrial firms to make independent nuclear power feasibility studies and their reports have been uniformly favorable. However, as yet no private business has announced its willingness to risk its own capital on such an enterprise. Therefore, in order not to lose the nuclear power race at the international level, the Federal Government has agreed to finance such a project. The first nuclear power plant designed primarily for the production of industrial power will accordingly be built by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation and should be in operation in 3 or 4 years.\n\n© 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
77567
Cold fusion has not been achieved.  Someone is pulling your leg about that.  "Hot" fusion reactions have been achieved in the lab, but only under very limited circumstances, not sustainable, and not at the break-even point in terms of energy production.
9879
Q:What would be the soonest fusion power could be operable in Europe if funding were increased, and energy funding diverted from fossil fuel energy research, and finally, if the fusion research projects of the USA, EU, and Japan were combined, what is the soonest fusion power could be efficiently operated?\nA: The next step from JET (and the other tokamak research being undertaken around the world) is a device called ITER, an international tokamak project, 2-3 times bigger than JET, costing several billion pounds and capable of producing significantly more fusion power for longer periods. This will demonstrate the feasibility of the plasma physics and fusion engineering of a potential power plant and, given the present funding, is planned to be built in the next 10-15 years - an eventual commercial power plant probably being 30-40 years away. However, if the present international funding for fusion were increased, ITER could definitely be built more quickly and fusion power could be a reality much more quickly - in possibly half the time if the present funding levels were increased significantly.\n\n \n \n \nQ: What developments in fusion technology are likely to take place in the future, say 10, 20 years from now? \nA: The next step device following on from JET (called ITER) is currently being designed and should be operational in 2020. This will demonstrate burning plasmas (with Q ~ 10 where Q is the ratio of the output fusion power and the input power required to keep the plasma going) whereas JET has achieved Q~0.6. It is then anticipated that a working, electricity producing reactor should be
6409
Yes, bombard it with neutrons and it will release energy...\n\nWill it be efficient.. NO. but you can do so.
298027
The most obvious reason is that you need a huge load of energy to create anti-matter in the first place. Anti-matter does not exist in a stable condition anywhere close and we have to create it. We can't just harvest it from the environment. It's also true that storing it is a major pain in the a$$.\n\nFusion is a much more realistic possibility. Try searching the internet for ITER (the first fusion reactor to be built in France by an international collaboration, currently under design).
786008
research is currently being carried out on this area. materials which work better at room temperature and have similar properties to a semi conductor are already being developed. giveit another 25-30 years we may have some. who knows.....
389806
Several reasons:\n- The USA hasn't been building any new nuclear reactors since the Three Mile Island accident. \n- Fast breeder reactors are more complicated, more expensive than normal reactors\n- Sofar only experimental breeder reactors have been build. Look up Superphenix, for the problems the French had with one.
686501
It needs a massive amount of energy. Just to give you an idea, the lowest temperature at which one can occur would be 40,000,000ºK (Hydrogen into helium, as on the surface of the Sun).\nAs far as I know, the highest (controlled) temperature we've acheived so far is only about 3,000,000ºK using what's called a tokamak, and it does require A LOT of energy.
35367
I believe it will be possible. The first application of the development of such technology will be the transportation of mass amount of fluids, and solid materials from one place to another. Granted, these materials will probably be simple materials without complexed molecular structure but, it will be the place that other developement will continue from.\n  The technology is centries into the future if it is that soon. The general idea is simple. Breaking down atomic structure in a trasmitable format, transmitting, then reconstituting teh transmitted. It then is a matter of what atomic partical belongs on what part of the carrier wave of the radio/or microwave transmitter. Another additive to the  complexity, is actually getting the particals on the carrier wave. However, if modern modems can convert digital signals into anolog, and analog into digital signals, then other parts of a "transporter" is a matter of time.\nSide note on this: If it will require the power produced from anti-matter generators, then it should interest all that a few anti-matter atoms had been produced. It took more energy to produce those few anti-atoms then they could produce themselves, but it does illistrate that Star-Trek to Star Wars technologies are not entirely impossible.
507799
Good Project:\n\nThere have been different attempts all need to be developed yet.\n\nThe attempts include:\n1.Solar energy through silicon cells.\nThis is of more importance in hot regions with maximum sun shine.\n\n2.Ethanol by way of combustion.\nStill an economical method is to be discovered for extracting ethnol from sugarcane.\n\n3.Hydrogen by combustion.\nHydrogen is to be obtained by decomposition of water.\n\n4. Nuclear energy at small scale.\nSo far techniques on domastic production have not been successful.
1093288
well science & technology has so many things to talk 'bout ,theres no specific thing.......regarding nuclear technology i feel itz a really good move as it causes no pollution ,renewable ,& will help in consrvation of depletable energy resources......we will benifit greatly 4rm it once itz developed to itz full potential......only problem is regarding safety as itz very dangerous if something goes wrong ........but if we are able to find a way 4r this .......then our energy problems will be solved 4rever
160185
try this website, I just did a search and this came up:\n\nhttp://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html
513289
To add to rya's answer: fusion doesn't leave radioactive waste, but we don't know how to do it yet.