Reply To: Computational resources available from the DOE

[Earl of Plasma]

Comments on comments

1. What I mean with preheating is very different from what MagLif do. I mean that the core volume leak heat to the surrounding volume. Maybe hard to describe without a drawing, but I don’t give that now. Much better to leak heat passively then make electricity with losses and then heat the fuel.

2. The neutrons are annoying, but if they leak some heat to the fuel around it’s of some use, no matter how that happens. I’m not sure yet how they work, but if they hit an nuclei a big part of there energy should be transferred. I see them as small very hot and fast objects, why they should radiate a lot on their way out of the cylinder. Maybe a few of them even gets absorb by deuterium but that’s quite rare. Am I wrong, well frankly I’m not sure, but even if the heat from them can’t preheat the fuel other reaction products definitely can.

3. If a pinch process is best or another I have not decide. The important is to use some of the excess heat for the reaction. You could of coarse use electricity solely to every reaction period, but that has big drawbacks I mean. Efficiency is not yet enough in any method used so far. Should you really do a energy-balance from fuel to light in your light bulb, no method is even near to give an excess energy. Using heat directly in the process is at least twice as god as using electricity from the grid. In longer or more continues process like the Tokamak the cooling is so great it’s more or less blow out the reaction. Not good at all.

4. The way of preheating I suggest, gives small losses. You can almost see it as an insulated volume. In such a volume the temperature gradually decrees from the worm core to the colder surface. I can also mention an example. I was working with a sandbox that was about 1000 K in the core and 400 K at surface. The paint shop pumped in fumes from the paint shop into the sandbox to burn the fumes. They contained a lot of flammable and poison substances but also much air. To much to burn the substances, but in the box they burned well. It was very important to keep the heat in the box and preheat the fumes to run the burning. That’s quite similar to what I mean with preheat the fuel.