Focus Fusion Society Forum

NIF upgraded for summer campaign

2012-05-16T16:05:23+00:00

NIF released their April update halfway through May this month. Usually they’ve been very punctual. I thought the following quote of note:

A NIF Facility Maintenance and Reconfiguration period began on April 25 and was scheduled to continue until May 15. The NIF team’s goal is to upgrade NIF’s peak power to 500 trillion watts in preparation for this summer’s experiments.

Design Engineering article on General Fusion

2012-05-16T15:58:33+00:00

Design Engineering has an article on General Fusion, viewable online (click on the cover image). The Canadian company is hoping to achieve proof of concept in 2015 and have a commercial reactor available by 2020. The article mentions ITER and NIF, but a quote from Dr. Paul Wilson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison also appears to contain an oblique mention of other contenders:

“I think a horse race metaphor works well,” Wilson observes. “We’re probably going to see one horse pull ahead and then maybe another catch up and lead the group for a while, and so on. This will be an interesting decade.”

Where have I heard that horse race metaphor before?

(Hat tip to jcoady at Talk-Polywell.)

About FFS - Feedback request

2012-05-15T02:04:42+00:00

Hello Folks!

Check out the new "About FFS" page. Also attached as pdf and doc documents to this post. This draft spells out what FFS is, what it's trying to do, how it's different from LPP.

Warning: It's thorough. This one doc replaces 8 others.

Bold or italicized text is where a hyperlink will be.

I think this covers it. It will replace most of the information we have in the "about" section now, which is outdated and misleading.

Thanks for your feedback! A lot of it has made its way into this draft already!

Attached as pdf as well as .doc - hopefully one of them will work for you.

You can also wait to comment on the web version. This will take some time! If you have any tips on how to convert a word doc into an html doc - without all that crazy extra formatting that word sticks in there! - please let me know. It's going to be a while to format this and upload to the site.

Best,
Rezwan

Our Apps and Games Campaign

2012-05-15T00:50:02+00:00

Hello all,

What do you think of our emerging apps and games campaign?

More importantly, what kind of resources do we need to pull it off? And please don’t say “outsource” or “free volunteer labor” - enough wishful thinking fusion fans! What would a job description be for a program coordinator for such a campaign? What’s the going rate. We’d like to formally pursue this and get it as a line item in our grant proposal.

Of course, that person will then probably come up with a budget for the full campaign. And ultimately it would be partially open source with all the “free” labor to augment it.

[Also, note to early birds, I’m still uploading/formatting the campaign document, and there are a couple of other documents to upload that are related. Your patience is appreciated.]

Fusion Consumer Products Campaign

2012-05-15T00:30:34+00:00

Time to get fusion consumer products off the ground. Discuss. Per this article

New Mission Statement

2012-05-15T00:17:09+00:00

Folks, we’ve come up with a new mission statement for the Focus Fusion Society. Here it is:

The mission of the Focus Fusion Society is to bring people together to pursue the dream of safe, cheap, clean, unlimited energy from aneutronic fusion, to ensure that the ensuing technology is made available to everyone, and to foster a pro-research ethic and pro-fusion culture.

And our official tagline:

We bring people together to bring nuclei together.

We’re putting the emphasis on people and organizing over science and energy. It’s human beings (scientists) who do the science which may liberate the energy. Science doesn’t do itself. It’s other human beings who fund/support those scientists. Scientists don’t fund themselves.

Some have said that the specification “aneutronic fusion” is limiting, but we feel that the pursuit of aneutronic includes the pursuit of other types of fusion. In any case, our strategy includes a strong educational component that benefits the pursuit of other energy resources as well.

Note, the primary action verb clause is “bring people together to pursue…” and our energy dream is the best dream of them all.

AGW - GW debate capped

2012-05-14T23:57:11+00:00

Folks, we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time debating global warming on this website.

This is not the venue to discuss it at such length.

I am now instituting the Cap and Trade policy for the global warming discussion. You have until Monday, June 7 for your final posts within currently existing topics. Then they will all be closed, as this post is now.

The purpose of this website is to promote the exploration of fusion.

Let’s get back on topic folks!

Eric Lerner’s LENR theory

2012-05-07T11:31:06+00:00

I’ve gotten used to seeing photographs of Farnsworth fusors in star mode used to illustrate “cold fusion” on certain (particularly Italian) websites, but I still occasionally run across things that make me go “What the heck?” The title is fairly self-explanatory. The link is here:

http://gateway.djbarney.org/sites/default/files/ECAT_High_Tech.pdf

See slide 24. For those who are too impatient, here is the relevant text:

LENR Theories

• Eric Lerner, Plasmons, Bor → Helium

I figure “Bor” is boron, but I can’t say for sure where the plasmons came from. Dense, focused plasmons, perhaps? Surely something got mangled somewhere.

anode erosion

2012-05-06T09:37:16+00:00

They expect to run at 200 shots per second. That’s 720,000 shots per hour.

So they expect more than half a million shots to do less than $10 worth of damage to the electrodes? They expect to be able to run for how many million shots between electrode replacement?

cphoenix, http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/lawrenceville-plasma-physics-dense.html#disqus_thread

Opinions on that?

It doesn’t seem like a minor problem to me.

In fact, anode erosion is the one reason i have much more hope for polywell…

new volunteer task: DPF bibliography

2012-05-05T19:01:31+00:00

Here is a new task for some volunteer. The number of papers coming out on the DPF is increasing rapidly. It would be really great put up on the DPF Network website a list of all DPF papers published since Jan. 2010, with their abstracts. This would involve searching with Inspec for the terms “DPF”. “Dense Plasma focus”, copying the abstracts and paper descriptions (Journal, vol, page, date, authors, and affiliations) and compiling them into a single document—I suggest grouping them chronologically by month. We just don’t have time for it here, but it old is very useful if someone can get to a library that has Inspec. Any takers? If there are more than one, you could divide the task by year.