More armchair physics

What the heck? Why not? May as well do some calculations even if they are incorrect, I have no reputation to consider. This isn't my career. Just speculation here, folks.

Let's go back to what I wrote yesterday about delivering power to this proposed fusion device. I calculated 100,000 electron volts and that would give us enough energy for fusion of a hydrogen atom to an atom of nickel's nucleus. What does that mean exactly? What is an electron volt? To answer that question, I did a little looking around on the web. Behold, a new calculator! Isn't the internet a beautiful thing?

So, I plugged in the 100000 electron volts and get back an incredibly small number for joules. But, remember this is just for one atom of nickel. A mole of nickel is equal to the atomic weight of the nickel, which to start with is about 58 grams. A mole is just a standard number which corresponds to approximately 6 times 10 to the 23rd power of atoms. In order to zap one mole of nickel atoms would require 100000 times this mole number of atoms. That number gets really big, as you may notice.

Let's look at the first calculation here for 1 atom again.

multiplying electron volts by 6 x 10^23  means to change the 1 to 6 and adding 23 zeroes!

Now, a joule is a watt, if I am not mistaken.  In order to zap an entire mole of atoms, you would need almost 10 gigawatts of energy.  However, we can relax.  You don't have to zap the whole thing all at one time, you just need to get enough power at the right place at the right time.  This means getting down to the nanoscale level as in nanotechnology.  You can hit a billionth of a mole with about 10 watts of energy and that will suffice, if I am not mistaken.  How you would be able to do that, I don't know.  Maybe that is an engineering problem.

How much is a billionth of a mole of nickel?  Recall that a mole weighs in at 58 grams.  Take 58 and divide it by 10 ^9 and that's how many grams of nickel you need to zap with 10 watts.  So, it's 58/10^9 grams.  That's a really small amount, so it takes a lot of control, it would seem to me.

Update:

I thought I'd add a little humor here. Young Frankenstein is one of my favorite movies. There was a scene in it where he says "it could work!" and I looked it up on YouTube and here it is





Update:

I am going to create another link in my sidebar, the interesting reading section, for this link. It tells the Rossi Focardi story in a bit more detail.