Reply To: Toshiba's "Micro Nuclear Reactor" – it's not fusion, but it's here now

[TimS]

Couple things-

What’s wrong with cheap? Nothing like a cheap date.

Regarding conservation; I think new energy can be tied into conservation of othing things, like resources and land. I already posted about aluminum recycling, which means not so much material needs to be mined. However, people on this forum have talked about very high energy applications to manufacture out of whatever junk is available. I forget the words or exact technologies they were referring to, but they know who they are.

The non-fusion application of the LPP reactor, as an X-ray source, could be used to monitor old structures and so not need to replace them as often. Conserving the effort needed to replace them. This might conserve energy in the construction sector even if DPF never generated an excess watt-hour.

That brings up one thing. All of this seems to be focused on aneutronic fusion, as opposed to aneutronic DPF. I think it would be great if any aneutronic fusion contender was successful, I certainly don’t just support DPF or LPP. However, when I think of the FF society, I think of DPF. I would not want to limit the FFS in any artificial ways. But this is a community, within that community I pay particular attention to DPF, and the F in DPF stands for focus, not fusion. The DPF is a particular type of reactor. That doesn’t seem to be an artificial limitation, that seems to be what we are about. Here.

Like in the previous paragraph about conserving energy in the construction sector, there may be other applications for DPF that FFS wants to focus on that other aneutronic projects are not so concerned with (although I guess they all produce X-Rays, but there may be other applications).

I think this issue is affecting the discussion on this and other threads; specifically people are focused on the aneutronic reaction, p-B11. That is good, the reaction is important, but so is the reactor. Also it may not be great in terms of an outreach campaign if we want to get away from people seeing the FF effort as “nuculur”, and instead see it as an exotic device (the DPF) the size of a coffee can that works like a big high-voltage spark plug, has no radiation problems, and produces tons-and-tons of power without harming the environment. Wait! I did sell this to a non-technical friend of mine, just a couple months ago, in just that way.

Also, I want my ring with a plasmoid and plasma swirls, not p-B11.