The Rogues Gallery

Super-Dense Material Advances Fusion Research?

You know that list of potential future fuels you hear so much about?

You know…Hydrogen, biofuel, compressed oxygen, water, bigfoot droppings….well now there may be another one to add.

It’s called ultra-dense deuterium.

It’s 100 thousand times heavier than water; so heavy that a cube with 10cm sides would weigh 130 metric tons which makes it…get this…denser than the core of the sun.

Its existence is being claimed by scientists in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

If you’re not familiar with deuterium…

Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen. Its nucleus (called a deuteron) contains a proton and a neutron whereas regular hydrogen (protium) contains only a proton at its core. It’s not a rare isotope either. There is one deuterium atom for every 6,500 hydrogen atoms in the ocean. So there’s lots of this stuff available.

Can this atom then replace a normal hydrogen atom in a water molecule?
Yes it can, and I bet you’ve heard about it…it’s called heavy water (which is different from hard water).
Heavy water therefore consists primarily of D2O molecules opposed to those H2O molecules we’re so familiar with. Water made of D2O as you might imagine is heavier than regular water by almost 11 percent. Ice cubes made of this would sink if it was placed in regular water.

If someone offers you a heavy-water energy drink I wouldn’t drink it (talk about gaining water-weight). It probably wouldn’t hurt you though; you have about 5 grams of it on your body right now. If 25 to 50% of your body’s water was replaced with heavy water though, it becomes toxic and you die. This is because deuterium alters what’s called the bond energy of hydrogen-oxygen in water. Just one little extra jimmy neutron in a hydrogen atom changes the physical and chemical properties which of course includes  its biological properties. Bacteria can tolerate it (I’m not surprised) but our complicated little eukaryotic cells (with a nucleus) can only handle small amounts of it.

Heavy water has many industrial uses but what good is this ultra-dense deuterium stuff?
Well, It’s believed that ultra-dense deuterium may play a role in the formation of stars. Some claim that it has the highest energy content of any combustion fuel. This makes sense since this is some dense shit.

The distance between the nuclei of bound atoms is called the bond distance. This distance is usually expressesed in picometers which are trillionths of meters. For Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen these numbers respectively are:
154, 145, and 148 picometers. For ultra-dense deuterium, the bond length is 2.3 picometers.

So you’re not going to throw this stuff in your fireplace to burn it but you may be able to throw it into your fusion reactor.

Leif Holmlid Professor in the Department of Chemistry  at Gothenburg has said:

“One important justification for our research is that ultra-dense deuterium may be a very efficient fuel in laser driven nuclear fusion. It is possible to achieve nuclear fusion between deuterium nuclei using high-power lasers, releasing vast amounts of energy”

The fusion he’s talking about is not debunkable cold fusion or the more respectable Magnetic Confinement Fusion like a tokamak reactor. It’s another potential way to make fusion work called Inertial Confinement Fusion. This method shoots many lasers at a small pellet of fuel to make it implode and create such heat and pressure that fusion starts like the center of the sun. In fact, the U.S. National Ignition Facility has a setup with no less than 192 lasers.

“If we can produce large quantities of ultra-dense deuterium, the fusion process may become the energy source of the future. And it may become available much earlier than we have thought possible”, says Leif Holmlid.

Holmlid and his homies think they can also tweak this process to make it safer so that only harmless hydrogen and helium are byproducts. They also hope to avoid the commonly used tritium in the fusion process which is the evil cousin of deuterium. It has one proton and two neutrons and is radioactive.

But now it’s time for the Buts…

Holmlid has said that it is very difficult to make the deuterium so dense in any volume because of the cryogenic temperatures needed, something like 14 degrees Kelvin.  In fact, they claim to have only made microscopic amounts of it. Even this may be an overstatement. The researchers are measuring the energy of fleeting particles spectroscopically. I don’t know how they can measure something so small and then “round it up” by describing it as “microscopic” amounts (which no normal microscope could hope to resolve).

Even more problematic is the lifetime of this stuff. They claim it lasts for only nanoseconds or less. This means that you’d have to actually produce the stuff within the laser fusion reactor itself nanoseconds before you obliterate it with the lasers. If you separate the reactor from the production of the particles then you would need more than nanoseconds for the particles to make their way to the reactor. You’d likely need a lifetime on the order of microseconds to accomplish this.

I really do hope this works. Fusion energy would be so beneficial to people it is hard to overstate it. This technology however has been 50 years away for far too long.

I unfortunately have to agree though with commenter MATT:
“I’m skeptical. Sounds like a hopelessly exotic material and a scientist’s attempt to grab the spotlight and get funding”.