About fusion;
Dave S. is correct to state that materials able to withstand fusion are not going to happen.  This, IMO, rules out what I call the “meso-fusion” (human-scale) regime.  Stellar mega-fusion and micro-fusion remain.  Until we become a Type II civilization, able to harness the full output of our star, mega-fusion is not accessible (as a direct tool; I’m not talking about converting radiant energy to electricity).  But micro-fusion, now ....

There is a firm, LPP, Inc., which is working with a process called Focus Fusion. Containment is magnetic, within a sub-microscopic “plasmoid” generated by kinking a magnetic filament in plasma just so.  It is completing its preliminary D-D calibration runs and tweaks now, and will be moving into the final proton-Boron11 regime within a couple of months.  This is a waste-free, non-neutron-emitting fusion.  It claims to have solved (in theory and simulation) the X-ray cooling problem by tuning the High Magnetic Field Effect some had predicted so that electron heating is minimized.

It won’t be free, but the planned “product” is a 5MW generator installed in about the housing size of a home garage, with capital per-watt costs and output pricing at source per kwh both around 1/20 of current best N.A. retail, or maybe 1/50 of European prices.  It is easily adapted to distributed generation, and could end up bypassing most of the current grid, if necessary. 

Timeline around 3-5 years to come up with a proven licensable design, to be made openly available at reasonable prices to all manufacturers wanting to produce and distribute it, world-wide.

The growth in demand and use he is predicting is staggering; given availability of FF, I suspect he may even be low by another factor of 2 or so!

a.

Focus Fusion being commercially available would mean that virtually every warship of any size would have virtually unlimited range and endurance limited by food supply for the crew. This would include ALL submarines.

So the nuclear sub would no longer be limited to major powers. Any country that can now build or buy a diesel/electric sub would be able to have a nuclear sub. And FF power subs would be extremely quiet.

And how about this thought. 5 MW is about 6,700 hp. This is not really that much in terms of warships (not even a small destroyer). But…..what about an large automated “torpedo” with unlimited range. Picture an underwater cruise missile. It could be launched from a country’s own ports, the travel anywhere in the world underwater. Conventional or nuclear warhead. Capable of extremely silent operation (no pumps, etc…essentially solid state power) and then a high speed dash to a target, be that a warship or a city harbor….

Plowshares into swords, eh…

Most jobs will be in supply and training chains and their supply and training chains. Here’s a rough bill of materials required to assemble 20 million FF generators per year:

* 240 million high energy, high voltage, high speed pulsed power supply capacitors. These are the big blue boxes in the picture. These are bulky, heavy, expensive, and cantankerous to work with. The industry has plenty of room for expansion, especially for companies who can progressively minimize one or more of these problems.
* 240 million HE/HV/HS capacitor switches. This sleepy little niche is getting away with reliability and price/performance problems that only the R&D world will put up with due to the current lack of competition.
* 20 million PLC-based ignition systems and firmware. Look for controller firmware to be the opportunity, since so many companies already make PLCs for demanding mass production applications.
* 160 million stamped steel HV delivery plates. Again, look for established tool and die shops to own this niche.
* 20 million water jacket tanks and frames. This is a relatively low-precision part that can be manufactured by local fabricators and/or installers.

Ample Opportunity Will Also Spring Up Supplying:

* 20 million base plates. This part is a precision machined part built mainly using automated laser sintering and machine tools, which will soon become immense markets in their own right. The real winners in this niche will be the tool builders who can make these machines do ever more for ever less money and energy. The metals listed for these parts are currently preferred, but not absolutely required. Look for differing architectures to specify differing metals.
* 20 million beryllium/copper anodes. This part can be built using laser sintering and/or traditional lost foam casting and machining, depending on the anode geometry. Expect geometries to become ever more complex, like apartment building rooflines over the last 30 years, as DPF numeric modeling software tools become more refined and memory prices fall.
* 320 million beryllium/copper cathodes. See anode, but expect more price pressures due to much larger volume. There is an option for the cathode to be one continuous ring, however. This will allow cathode vendors to specialize by which company’s architecture they wish to align with.
* 20 million stainless steel vacuum chambers about the size of a 5 gallon bucket. Pretty much the same as the electrodes, except using thick walled stainless steel.
* 20 million vacuum pumps. Again, this is currently a sleepy little specialty market whose price/performance ratios are about to be turned on their ear.
* 20 million turbo-molecular pumps. These glorified vacuum pumps remove the last few traces of atmosphere, hence contamination, before the fuel gas is injected. These manufacturers are also in for a brawl.
* 20 million stainless steel inductive converter tubes. An extension of the vacuum chamber, these may or may not be integrated into the body design.
* 20 million copper tubing coils with cooling and electrical connectors for the inductive recovery subsystem. This part is essentially a wave guide. Expect the cost of wave guides to fall and the market for their tool makers to explode.
* 20 million heat exchangers and associated plumbing. Come and get it! This is one of the key areas for the ongoing size, weight, and price reductions that will define the more mature DPF marketplace.
* Countless fasteners and sensors, etc.
* 3.6 billion photovoltiac converters for generator applications. The X-ray to electricity converter is much simpler in theory than engineering or production. It’s known as the onion due to it’s thousands of thin foil and insulator layers. It’s expected to be made on leading edge and next-generation chip making machinery, so once again, this is a tool maker’s paradise. Cooling around 2MW of electrical power in a package this small and complex, along with the X-ray physics requirements, are going to keep the onion makers in challenges and profits until the DPF is replaced by an even better technology. Hard to believe, but that’s the way innovation has played out down the millennia.
* 20 million cap bank controllers may or may not be integrated into the PLC controller package. Each capacitor is charged and monitored individually, but generally fired in unison. Since this type of capacitor is currently a very finicky and quirky device that needs a lot of pampering, any firmware/hardware that can improve cap bank reliability and delivered charge repeatability is going to clean up.
* 20 million output power conditioning modules. These translate the very high voltage, high current pulses of only a few tens of billionths of seconds into commercially useful voltages, frequencies, and currents. Clever design may be able to justify the cost of the entire DPF generator module by eliminating the transmission transformer(s), especially in larger arrays.
* 20 million transmission transformers for commercial power applications. As noted above, this will have to integrate the power conditioning module in order to earn it’s spot on the team.

Expect “Because that’s the way its always been done” to become financially suicidal in the 21st century business environment, if it isn’t already.
* Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Also mentioned above, the tool makers for a number of industries will also need designers, engineers, technicians, assemblers, installers, service teams, and so on.
* All of these people need to be trained, and many will need to be certified. Tech schools will flourish.

But this morning it dawned on me that with only 10 licenses, as well as the speculative nature at this point, I should be aiming mainly at the people already making vacuum pumps, stainless steel plumbing, and all of the various parts that comprise an operational system, including financing a huge expansion of several industries in order to mass-produce FFs Detroit style (by the millions).

So my question is if anything other than the baseplate and electrodes are covered by the patent? The patent’s claims add up almost as if you have a patent for the DPF, lol.

Garbage, sewage and agriculture waste are a plentiful source of organic matter, many attempts are being made to salvage this vast amount of literally thrown away energy and organic feed-stock. A technique called Hydrogenated Pyrolysis could make all other technique to extract oil substitutes and energy from these sources pale in comparison. Hydrogenated Pyrolysis consist of placing any organic matter under pressure and heat, add hydrogen and the organic matter will convert into petroleum and water (CxOyHz + H2 -> CxHn + H2O), the process is very efficient as even carbon dioxide will be converted into petroleum (CO2 + H2 -> CH4 + H2O), but Hydrogenated Pyrolysis is highly energy negative (requires much more energy in then comes out) because of the need to make hydrogen to fuel the reaction, because of this Hydrogenated Pyrolysis is at present not considered viable, if only there was a cheap energy source that could provide heat and electricity to make hydrogen and power the pyrolysis, this is what DPF fusion could provide if it becomes viable.

Imagine a world were all organic waste is recycled into oil: no more landfills, no more complex and energy expensive sewage treatment and wasted dry sludge, all of this becoming oil (assuming non-organic waste like metals and ceramics are extracted and recycled separately). This fusion powered waste to oil (“fusion oil” for short) could power all of today’s systems invisibly with no infrastructure changes; fossil fuel oil could be phased out gradually with no repercussion. Because fusion oil is made from organic matter initially from farms all the carbon dioxide produced by burning fusion oil is reabsorbed by the growing plants to make more oil, the process is recyclative and no net green house gas (carbon dioxide) production occurs, in fact the process will likely be net negative in carbon dioxide because some of the fusion oil will go into making plastics and composites which won’t be burned.

Fusion oil likely be more lucrative then making electricity from fusion only. Especially as world demand from fossil fuel flies over limited extraction rates. Hydrogen will likely be cheap in a DPF fusion powered world and could replace some of oil’s uses, but the rest that hydrogen can’t replace, fusion oil can. Fusion oil would thus make an economic transition to DPF fusion power viable and smooth without any shock.

As an existing or potential stock market investor, how much of your money are you going to leave/put in oil, automotive, transportation, or similar shares?  If you own, say, $1M of Exxon, how much will it be worth tomorrow? 

It would, of course, take years to build out the FF infrastructure to replace power plants and so on, but just knowing that oil has no future will hammer the value of MAJOR players on the world financial scene.  Stock prices for many business types will plummet, and the “money” will have simply vanished. 

When FF is proven, where would/will you/others invest?

DC is much safer than AC, and it loses less in transmission as its primary means of leakage is via ion migration rather than electromagnetic radiation (and ion migration is very slow, and draws very little power as well as being mostly mitigated with modern materials).

data-centres are now moving to DC server rooms, putting the transformers outside the server room, and reducing their losses hugely.

Cyclical processes in both industry and the home, solid-state or otherwise, do not often have a sweet spot at 50 or 60Hz:
  audio 48KHz
  video 120Hz (v) / some KHz (h)
  steel presses - several Hz to (1/several) Hz
  etc

Is there still any good reason to deliver 110V@60Hz or 230V@50Hz AC to the home or can we deliver 24V,12V,5V,3V,1.5V and their negative counterpart DC rails?
Can we also deliver 400V/200V/100V/50V DC to industry?

What EMF could focus fusion deliver?
And while I’m at it, what would its internal resistance be?

The interactive site is at http://www.nextgenerationnuclearplant.com/facility/index.shtml . Even though this is an INL site, the project has its own URL and site with slick interactive graphics.  They’ve covered all of our energy, environmental, and economic bases, except they use nuclear fission rather than nuclear fusion to do it. We should look this good and read so well.

https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_329615 is the INL page showing the co-generative turbine.

I’ve spent the last few days going through the 2009 budget, House Committees, Senate Committees, Cabinet officers, and the President’s own scientific advisors, and I’m getting mixed signals- the budget says its looking for innovative energy solutions and provides for anticipation and deployment funding of these projects, while the DOE site plainly explains that they aren’t in any hurry to make electricity using fusion reactions. Maybe the red herring designed to test how determined a DPF approach is to find its demo/grid integration funding.