A “practical” way to harness vacuum energy

Ok I normally don’t tackle advance physics topics on here. That is not because I don’t enjoy pondering them, but because a lot of it is very very abstract. I have a great theory that unifies relativistic and quantum gravity, but it is not easy to understand, or it sounds like total BS...

However, I do post about alternative energy, and this is about alternative energy. One more disclaimer and I’ll get to the post. When I say practical this referenced against that tapping vacuum energy is currently impossible, so this isn’t practical in the sense you will see plans for a vacuum energy generator in Popular Mechanics.

Basically to tap vacuum energy all that needs to be done is to confine matter in a very small area of space and heat it to the point that the matter breaks down and quantum foam forms, and then maintain that state indefinitely. (In theory you could heat a vacuum, but I am not sure how one accomplishes that task.) When I say heat it I am talking about billions of Kelvin, so a toaster oven isn’t going to do it. Once a quantum foam forms the particle pairs that form, and are annihilated will generate a flux of high energy particles, mostly very energetic gamma rays, and neutrinos. As long as the system produces more heat than is required to maintain it, we should be able to extract energy without destabilizing it. From this system it will be possible to extract more energy than exists in the matter put in. This extra energy is the vacuum or zero point energy that is believed to represent the left over energy from symmetric baryogenesis after the universe came into existence.

Regardless of the temperature at a very low probability virtual particle pairs are forming and being annihilated all over the universe. This tiny leak of energy from the vacuum might be minimal, but a stable quantum foam would allow the particles to become real long enough to make the energy flux that could be massive. Considering there is more than a million times more energy in the vacuum than there is in all the matter in the universe, we don’t need to worry about running out for a while.

Lest you think this is half baked BS there is evidence from some ultra high temperature experiments done in the Z machine that support my theory. At >2 gigaKelvin they got more energy out than they were suppose to, however the authors of the paper claim MHD is the cause. However, this claim is widely disputed, and not just by me.

To be practical for energy production I would imagine that a quantum foam a couple of nM (10^-9 M) in diameter would be all that is necessary. A quantum foam just a few Angstroms wide could still produce large amounts of energy, remember all this happens at near Planck’s length (10^-35 M), so there is plenty of room to work. (If Planck’s length was 1 meter, two nanometers would be larger than the size of the visible universe. Like I said there is plenty of room!) Still is a tall order to stably maintain these kinds of temperatures, regardless of the volume. As you have undoubtedly noticed I have not put equations on here, so I can’t be sure of the energy production per unit volume, but remember the foam would be contained in much larger heated volume, but I'll come back to that.

The issue would be how you design a confinement field that won’t use more energy than you can produce. The magnetic field in the Z machine collapses almost instantly, so it would require a totally new design to form the quantum foam and extract energy from it.

While unmaking matter and bring extra energy into our universe sounds dangerous, I don’t think there is much of a possibility for a run away reaction. Sure you wouldn’t want to touch it to you tongue, but if the confinement failed the quantum foam would cool, and release its heat as photons.

When I first started writing this I was unaware of the Z machine experiment, so this idea was just something that made sense.

he real problem is not how do we generate gigaKelvin heat, it is how do we extract energy from this system without disturbing it? You can’t very well put a water jacket around it, to make steam. If we can’t extract the energy then this is just an expensive trick.

So I’ll take a crack at this one too.
In the super heated volume surrounding the quantum foam, we use the heat and field lines to do “heavy” element fusion (Be, Li, C, etc). This would utilize the “waste” heat to drive fusion and create an even more energy rich plasma stream. This secondary plasma could be cooled by impinging it with gas to create a "cooler" plasma stream that could be utilized directly for power generation. If a more direct means of cooling were required elements heavier than Fe or Ni could be fused by the intense heat. This type of fusion requires energy to be spent, since above this transition the elements created by fusion are heavier than the two elements that formed it. If the right elements were fed into the system it is possible to generate elements that will decay rapidly producing usable amounts of heat, or be completely stable and hopefully more valuable than the ones that went in.

With either system I see a need for a plasma turbine, where spinning plasma would induce a rotating magnetic field that would impinge on another field thereby doing work. By allowing the plasma to directly do work, the efficiency of a plasma turbine could be >60%. Then the much cooler non-ionized gas could be feed through a regular turbine, to extract more energy, and if necessary the last little bit of heat could be extracted by boiling a liquid and turning a steam turbine.

The reactor housing could be cooled by a helium stream that could dump its heat into system that could drive endothermic chemical reactions (like C02 + 2*H20 --> CH4 + 2*02). Since the helium wouldn’t actually be used in the process, it can be recovered by gaseous diffusion through a membrane, and methane used for chemical feed stocks.

If the plasma turbine or similar can be built then the next generation of power generation has a future beyond being ultra high tech steam engines.

As for my vacuum energy theory only time will tell if it is sound or not. I will close like I began with a caveat. I am not a particle physicist by training so I have attempted to explain my theory using what I believe to be the correct terminology, but I likely got the names of things wrong. So, do dismiss the idea because of a terminology mistake.