Questions regarding DPF.

[Transmute]

Duke Leto wrote:

Why not just make oil out of waste using fusion power to provide heat and hydrogen and run conventional aircraft off of it with no infrastructure change?

Emissions is my worry.

Well there will be no net CO2 emissions, NOx will still be a problem but as others have mentioned: we replace building heaters/boilers with electic heaters (running on fusion power), replace all fossil fuel powerplants with fusion, replace large ships and train powerplants with fusion, replace small cars and buses with hydrogen/battieres or some other electrochemical storage fuel, that means that we cut 100% of all coal burning, almost all natural gases uses (aside for sporting goods uses) and 40-45% of oil uses (making gasoline), all you need “Fusion oils” for is heavy machinery, sports craft and goods, aircraft, asphalt, plastics and other commercial material. All this at the sacrifice of having to retain a small percentage of our present day NOx pollution, oh and at the sacrifice of all our garbage and waste… and sacrifice in CO2 as it is sequestered from plants into making food and waste, which is transformed into oil and then into plastics and asphalt, ripped from the carbon cycle. So we could even reduce and stop global warming and make commercial products at the same time, what a horrorable idea!

as for all your other questions, they should be answered at
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/102/
or even better post them there.

[Duke Leto]

You may well be right Transmute, but I’d much prefer to pull some CO2 out of the atmosphere for a certain period after the emissions stop to put the breaks on warming.

[Transmute]

Duke Leto wrote: You may well be right Transmute, but I’d much prefer to pull some CO2 out of the atmosphere for a certain period after the emissions stop to put the breaks on warming.

Elaborate?

[Duke Leto]

Like I said, if you can synthesize fuel from atmospheric CO2 and water, then you’re not digging up trash fuelizing it and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. The optimal thing would be to make extra oil and pour it back down the wells, trapping the carbon back in the geosphere where it originally came from.

[Transmute]

Duke Leto wrote: Like I said, if you can synthesize fuel from atmospheric CO2 and water, then you’re not digging up trash fuelizing it and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. The optimal thing would be to make extra oil and pour it back down the wells, trapping the carbon back in the geosphere where it originally came from.

You ask to extract CO2 from the atmosphere correct? Well lets see: plants get CO2 from the atmosphere and make up most of their dry mass from it, we eat the plants or make them into paper products, if we take the waste and used paper and make oil out of it and then make that into asphalt or other commercial products then we have successfully extract CO2 from the atmosphere, not to mention that we solved several other problems such as waste management and profitability. No one is going to make oil just to pump it back into the ground, they want to make a buck, so let them. We could also make oil from CO2 directly out of the air or water (there is far more CO2 in water then air), a fusion powered seawater desalination plant could make clean water for people and farms, as well as mine mineral salts, and extract CO2 and organic matter to make oil. Or if you really bad wanted to remove CO2 you could just run wires in the sea, run a current through them and grow limestone, make limestone to sell or make artificial islands.

[Duke Leto]

I apologize for my naivete, I’m a philosopher-programmer and not a chemical or environmental engineer. My concerns with reconverting biomass are twofold:

Firstly, I’m not sure there’s enough material in the domesticated biomass to be used as fuel in the emissions null scenario you describe. I understand Ethanol is quite land intensive, and even if we converted all the hydrogen and carbon in all our agricultural, industrial and residential waste, we might not have enough to fuel our present transport needs, and would cut off a source of fertilizer, I think. (Fertilizer is mostly nitrogen and phosphorus by weight, I think.)

Second, in that case, I’m worried that the mass in the existing landfills would need to be cannibalized, which would mean that carbon outside the ecosystem would re-enter it and therefore the atmosphere.

To my understanding, for what it’s worth, pulling carbon from the ocean would only somewhat accelerate the uptake of atmospheric carbon by the ocean, so the lime scenario is less efficient then I’d like to see.

[Duke Leto]

I apologize for not seeing your linked thread, as it does address a lot of the issues I mentioned. I’ll continue the discussion there.

[Transmute]

Cellulose from ethanol still produce mineral fertilizers (phosphorus) nitrogen has to be added as is. In fact many cellulose to ethanol plans run on

[Duke Leto]

Transmute wrote: I hope your already aware of the power of methane as a greenhouse gas?)

Quite. My concern about methane trapped in permafrosted swamps threatened by global warming are one of the things impelling me to argue that cutting emissions to zero or negative ASAP is a very good thing.

Transmute wrote: Simple equilibria: CO2 (air) CO2 (water) H2CO3 (water).

I naturally realized that the CO2 equilibrium between air and water was in play, my point was that an imbalance between atmospheric CO2 and sea CO2 would not resolve itself instantaneously, and that removing emissions from the air directly cut out the middle man as it were.

It may be a moot point.

Like I said, let’s take this over to your thread.

[Torulf]

Back to the boron neutron shielding.
If I have understan it corect it works in this way.
Neutron react with B10.
n+B10 —> Li7+He4+gamma.
You replace neutron with gamma. Is it better?
Water slow down neutrons with termic colisions.

[Lerner]

No, the thermal neutron just is absorbed, yielding B11. Some gammas are produced as the water thermalizes the neutrons, but they don’t get out of the water. At the outer surface of the B 10, it should be down to background.

[Duke Leto]

Stupid, weak, puny gamma.

It’s amazing you can even obliterate cities with that pissant radiation.

[Lerner]

No, actually it’s the blast wave and the fireball that wipes out cities. You have to use quantitative calculations to reach correct conclusions in physics. 97% of even 3 Mev photons are absorbed by 1 meter of water and very few of the photons will be that energetic. As I said, at the surface, the total radiation level will be around background.

[Duke Leto]

That was sarcasm, my dear Eric.

I am but incompetent with General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, when the Physics is Newtonian, I know a hawk from a henshaw.

😉

[JimmyT]

I have kinda been wondering to what extent the pulse rate of the reactors hooked up to the power grid could be varied. A lower pulse rate could result in cooler electrodes and less frequent maintaince. The trade off is, of course, lower power production. But the pulse rate could be increased to the nominal maximam only for the short time daily needed to meet peak grid demand. In other words: should the pulse rate necessarly be regarded as a constant?

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