Reply To: Need of beryllium and other rare materials for Focus Fusion

[Ivy Matt]

Nuclear Meltdown!

How’s that for eye-catching? 😉

Looks good. The parts that interest me most are the input parameters and the bill of materials. With four or five wildly different reactor types, I’m wondering about comparisons between the approaches, and the game’s balance in particular. Clearly an even balance is not desirable. If the game’s purpose is partly educational, I suppose the bill of materials for a realistic design for, say, a commercial laser-induced fusion power plant should be, well, educational. But perhaps the balance can be fair without being even. Is there some advantage to the large conventional approaches which the smaller fusion alternatives have trouble matching? (Political clout, of course. Anything else?) I’m thinking designing this game may require temporarily becoming a tokamak advocate, a fission advocate, etc. just to understand the benefits of each approach. That said, I think the game should err on the side of realism more often than not, even if it means that nobody wants to build an inertial confinement reactor, for instance. If an approach has almost no benefits, perhaps it should be scratched off the list. The only exception I would leave to this rule is the tokamak, just because it seems widely assumed to be the future of fusion energy, and pretty much every alternative approach to fusion compares itself against it.

The other part that interests me is the math, if only because it seems to me to be the great unknown factor. Given that most, if not all, of the reactor types in the game are still experimental in the real world, to some extent the terms “modeling” or “conjecture” may be more apt than “simulation”. From Talk Polywell I get the impression that there are still a lot of questions about what exactly goes on inside the plasma in a Polywell device. If those questions have been answered, the answers are apparently not public. Of course, secrecy is going to be a problem with many commercial and military technologies. With what is “known” about the math behind the various approaches, I think it will be necessary to strike some compromise between realism and simplicity. The more realistic it is, the more effort it will take to design, and the more likely you’ll just be duplicating the work of the people in the labs who are actually modeling these devices. However, I think it would be nice if this game turns out to be a very simple, yet functional plasma simulator. Of course, I don’t know what kind of effort that would require. It would probably be easier just to make a basic mathematical model of each device that avoids dealing directly with plasma dynamics.

My apologies if, as is likely, I’m simply restating what other people are thinking or have already thought.

Oh, and, since I’m going on as if some unspecified person (or perhaps epimenide) is going to be doing all the work, here is a list of things I can probably handle:

1. Editing
2. Writing
3. Research (But somebody else will have to comprehend the large formulae with numerous variables.)
4. [del]Programming[/del] (I can try it, but I guarantee I will spend at least half the time learning to use my tools.)