[Aeronaut]

There is no question in anybody’s mind that the primary cooling loop is required. The working fluid can be helium or possibly hydrogen. It’s cost is part of the system costs no matter whether the machine is sold as a heater, generator, or preferably both. Each of these design and marketing strategies will come as the installed system level technology matures. What I’m saying is that we’d better be at least aware of all of the technologies that can help the onion produce even more electricity.

Zap, the reason I keep coming back to how the also required secondary loop of the heat exchanger is going to dispose of the excess heat is that commercial heater, furnace, and low pressure boiler makers already design a very similar loop into their products which are already on the market. This type of product is what I was referring to as an existing heat sink- and we can specifically target the 8MWt class industrial heaters almost as soon as we’re over unity.

This paves the way for the PolyWell’s much larger heat dissipation requirements in what I call the multi-fusion world.

Now, for the accounting world, imagine being in the predictive history business. After all, none of us can guarantee that a fusion technology will be proven in our lifetimes- but for those who are willing to design businesses to cover this type of predictive bet go the spoils of truly adding value to the global economy. Creating wealth, much like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Ford did around 100 years ago.

Precisely what the business world says they want to do as they fight over the diminishing markets of existing, proven, safe technologies, lol.

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote: Just got a comment that putting the peace sign upside down is like flying a flag upside down – it’s a signal of distress or the opposite of peace.

However, looking at this site – http://www.teachpeace.com/peacesymbolhistory.htm

Who can claim rightful ownership of said “flag”? Forest Gump perhaps? I’d hazard a guess that most people won’t think twice about the resemblance.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Brian has yet to specify the nature and expense of his version of a dedicated cooling system. My approach is opportunistic- look for existing heat loads (like the JTEC in this case) to use as the FF’s heat-sink. Thus the accounting equations may not be the ones Brian was planning to use to justify resistance heaters. BTW, how would those be powered in a FF gen-1?

Ah, now we’re talking accounting! Since the cooling mechanisms must be there anyway, if they could be tweaked to make some worthwhile use of the heat they extract without adding more cost/kwh than the replacement with output from another FF would be, then it could make sense. But here the onus, in reality (i.e., $$ expended) as opposed to wishful thinking, is on those advocating such tweaking.

I don’t have to specify anything whatsoever about a “dedicated cooling system”, since it is inherent and necessary to any FF installation to keep it from melting down. That’s a given, the start point. Now justify making KW out of that extracted heat — and note that your added costs MUST BE less than ¼¢/kwh. (Even using the extracted heat for simple passive warming of buildings etc. must meet this test. And it’s a very difficult, severe, test indeed!) ,

If you don’t need to submit proof, then FF must also need no proof. A more coherent argument (not necessarily the best one possible) would be to link to Rematog’s cooling tower design and costing link, where Lerner also estimated the costs of using multiple car radiators. Either would provide sufficient cooling structure and cost estimation to convince me that you’ve done your homework. A non-purist’s viewpoint is to market what works until you can make the ideal, complete system marketable. JTEC gives us another potential way to turn all of that waste heat, which may turn out to be a crime in a multi-fusion world, into at least a stopgap way to make commercial quantities of electricity before the onion is marketable hardware.

Remember, it wasn’t really a crime to burn fossil fuels until the friendly folks at Dopenhagen politely requested we pay reparations for all of those decades of criminal neglect. :shut:

[Aeronaut]

Brian has yet to specify the nature and expense of his version of a dedicated cooling system. My approach is opportunistic- look for existing heat loads (like the JTEC in this case) to use as the FF’s heat-sink. Thus the accounting equations may not be the ones Brian was planning to use to justify resistance heaters. BTW, how would those be powered in a FF gen-1?

[Aeronaut]

jamesr wrote:

We are talking airplane design here. Right?

Neutron shielding is always going to be bulky (from the moderator/absorber part) and heavy (from the gamma shield), especially for the high energy neutrons from D+D or D+T. That’s the beauty of p+B11, the few neutrons you do get from side reactions are much lower energy. So you only need a relatively thin layer of borated polyethylene to slow & absorb them. After this you still need some heavy metal shielding to capture the gamma-rays produced in the neutron absorption reactions. The gamma shield will also partly double as a neutron reflector, as described above.

I’m sure if the DPF was in the tail or out on the wings it would be viable to put them in an airplane. The radiation levels would be down to below what pilots are getting from cosmic rays anyway. (cargo planes at least – passengers may take a little more convincing)

So we’re not stuck with a 1 meter water jacket? How thick of a borated polyethylene jacket would be required to match the water’s shielding properties? I know this won’t scale down to a car, but this could open a lot of bus and truck applications if the bulk is ~25% to 50% of the current water jacket.

[Aeronaut]

I think the reaction diagram flows better- more intuitively- headed up. Its also no stretch to see somebody leaping for joy.

[Aeronaut]

Brian has a blind spot which prevents him from readily acknowledging that the first salable FF units will be producing a thermal profit. Succeeding generations may or may not offer the onion. Depends on engineering not just the onion, but the production tooling for the experiments and the factories. Thus JTEC may play a part in FF validation and at least the early marketing.

[Aeronaut]

Yes, neutron moderator is what the water shield does. Water was chosen for the high hydrogen content and low cost, so reducing shielding weight will decrease it’s effectiveness. The ability to do this in good conscience will vary with each installation. In the case of mobile installations, I would think no reduction would be conscionable. In large aircraft installations, several hundred tons of fuel and fuel system are no longer needed, which helps immensely.

Point #2 I’m not able to comment on.

Regarding Point 3, the DPF can be designed with a single piece cathode, which could double as the vacuum chamber wall.

[Aeronaut]

Thanx for the research, Pat. I’m impressed that it wasn’t behind a paywall. Being a State fan, this could help me rethink my attitude about U of M 😉

I have two questions concerning the laser power requirements: How much power, size, and unit cost per switch, (very rough guesstimate, of course) and
Might it be more cost-effective to use a single large laser?

[Aeronaut]

Like Torulf said, “Size matters”. We’re distinct in the lack of magnets, and all we traded was scalability. But what does scalability mean in a non-proven design? Photo-ops!
Judo works along the same philosophy as the DPF- maybe a MMA tie-in? Go with the flow (Luke) 😆

Nor do we use radioactive fuels or create radioactive wastes to dispose of- excuse me, manage.

As for a captive audience, why not call some local principals and ask if their school would like to host a Fusion Fair? A principal announcing such an event would get instant news coverage that we’d never be able to get on our own.

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote: OK. It turns out to be pretty simple to get news feeds.

Just for practice, I’ve added feeds to the Journal of Fusion Energy on our “Learning Center” page. You have to scroll down to see the feeds. (Hiding in plain sight – so we can talk about it, but I doubt anyone will see it there.)

Take a look at the feeds. The longer one is all recent articles. The shorter one (200 character descriptions) is a feed from a search for “Plasma Focus”.

Questions:

Which works better, long or short?
Targeted search – or should we do all fusion?
Which other journals are “must haves” for the Plasma Focus page?
And what about other approaches to fusion? Do we aggregate by “fusion in general” and separate by journal, or do we get a bunch of different journals and search each of them for, say, “MFE” or “ICF” or “Polywell” or what have you?

Standing by.

I like the shorter format. Also, trying to do all fusion rather than just pB-11 is going to take a lot of staff time, while adding confusion to newcomers. Nobody comes back to a confusing site.

[Aeronaut]

Too much talk radio, Zap? I’ll cede the point about it being impossible to eliminate war. But a poisoned attitude will never find anything worth finding.

[Aeronaut]

zapkitty wrote:

I hate to be a wet blanket … but half a joule per pinch, even at a 100 hz firing rate, is just 50 Watts …

I guess it’s the demonstration of any net energy, no matter how small, that counts.

Wouldn’t “net” energy be any yield that exceeded the cap’s input energy?

I’d assume, perhaps mistakenly, that at this point they’re just getting started on the “we have fusion” part… with actual net power yields coming later.

edit: “started” for “stared”

To split hairs, repeatably producing more energy than the cap bank supplied (not contained at the beginning) just might count for the historic first of over-unity operation, provided it is presented in the context of a one-shot fusion research reactor. Still very flimsy to build a headline ariund. I’d use that well-documented accomplishment as at least one ace in the hole.

[Aeronaut]

As I understand it, powering a significantly larger DPF fusion reactor is going to take some serious power source engineering breakthroughs. Once the current generation goes into production we may be able to attract both the talent and other resources to tackle challenges like Cap 2.0, Switch 2.0, HV Buss 2.0, and so forth. The key thing here is that these are 2 entirely separate designs and technologies sharing the same theoretical underpinnings.

[Aeronaut]

Thanx, Zap.Yep, plenty of speculation around that darkish project…

[Author]

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