[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Ask not what your society can do for you, ask why you, as a mere individual, have earned the godforsaken right to burn your societies’ precious resources.
…

Uh, who else? Does “society” create/own resources? Does it exist distinct from the individuals it comprises? People who ask and phrase questions like this are presuming to speak for society, and implicitly claim the right to make decisions on its behalf. Arrogance excelsior!

And who’s to say that a person has to be a citizen OR an industrialist? The honestly blended person will design organizations for the least amount of effort expended, not just the least amount of capital OR the least amount of energy, and other metrics. The us-vs-them mentality wastes a lot of energy moving (too much) ammunition, ferinstance.

[Aeronaut]

dennisp wrote: Beyond that, asteroid mining is easily economical when you can get to space for $30/lb. The solar system has millions of times the resources of the Earth; once we can get out there cheaply our resource issues will go away for a long time to come.

Wonder what we’re going to use for landfills out there?

[Aeronaut]

Tulse wrote: So is the scaling of individual units primarily limited by heat? I presume there must be some limits beyond that relating to the plasmoid formation and/or other basic aspects of DPF.

First we need to remove excess heat. The higher the trigger pulse rate, the more electrical and thermal power generated. Next comes producing commercial amounts of electric energy. Beyond that come school/labs, theoreticians, and perhaps a somewhat larger version.

But in a multi-fusion world, FF will favor isolated and/ or stand-alone power plants which may or may not be grid-connected. Polywell favors centralized power generation, and boy are they going to have some cooling challenges! Anybody recall their target MWe and MWt figures?

[Aeronaut]

Ask not what your society can do for you, ask why you, as a mere individual, have earned the godforsaken right to burn your societies’ precious resources.

I’d rephrase the JFK quote along the lines of “Ask not what your society can do for you, ask what you, as a mere individual, can do to lead it in a saner direction.” Right up there with something else one of his speechwriters wrote: “Some men see things as they are and ask ‘why?’. I see things as they are not and ask ‘why not?’.

About your political chances, Micheal Bloomburg in NYC, and the California Governor’s race are showcasing a move away from career politicians, at least in this election cycle. Who knows what’s possible or impossible?

[Aeronaut]

The world can’t get better until the idea leaders and or sufficient numbers of the masses are led to the questions of “What do I know?” and “How do I know this?”. In other words, the basis of scientific thought and experiment design. The path must then flow effortlessly back into the self-reliant frontier cultures’ “How do I/we profit from applying this refined information?”

Without sustained problem solving on all three of these questions, average people of all abilities are going to blindly do what marketers sell them to do which fits their hidden assumptions concerning what can and can’t be done. They can’t help themselves. Following is just civilized human nature.

[Aeronaut]

zapkitty wrote:

What do you do with the steam besides make electricity? Is steam absolutely required for your heating requirements? FF is a lousy candidate for making the high pressure, high volume steam for driving turbines, but it is well suited for making low pressure hot water industrial and institutional boilers. The energy mix is expected to be ~5MWe and 8MWt, and none of the heat is required for fusion power generation.

8MWt? I thought it was ~5MWt?

If so then that’s ~3.2 MWt for the 2MWe container… that crowds the single fan cooling iteration a bit. Dual fans will cover 3.2 MWt easily, and at less electrical overhead, but I was hoping to save the volume…

edit: “will cover 8MWt” typo

In the fine print, making 5MWe @ 42% expected thermodynamic efficiency also produces ~8MWt. So the real total system energy production is more on the order of 13MW at around 330 hz. Made to order for cogen plants that don’t need huge volumes and pressures of superheated steam.

[Aeronaut]

What do you do with the steam besides make electricity? Is steam absolutely required for your heating requirements? FF is a lousy candidate for making the high pressure, high volume steam for driving turbines, but it is well suited for making low pressure hot water industrial and institutional boilers. The energy mix is expected to be ~5MWe and 8MWt, and none of the heat is required for fusion power generation.

[Aeronaut]

Great to see that math all in one place, since I’m not a physicist. I’m sure that a successful aneutronic fusion program would lead to a lot more people looking to find more boron. But in any event, a FF used as a desalination plant can recover boron from its waste stream. A breeder reactor in a good way, for a change. I’m not worried about running out of fuel.

[Aeronaut]

Henning wrote:

Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

Won’t work. For every job created, two are lost – or take any other arbitrary multiplier. Could be 2 like in this example, 5, 10, 0.5, -2, or whatever, depending on the agenda of the speaker.

Two or five jobs are lost in other energy programs (such as wind or fossil fuels) my be more apt if I understand it correctly. Considering that training the regulators, engineers, technicians, even those teachers, is going to be a huge industry if FF works, I’d look for manufacturing to end up as a smallish sized piece of the pie.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Now that they have the most powerful laser(s) on the planet, and presumably the mirrors to control the output, I guess it’s safe to aim at fusion. should they actually achieve ignition, what might happen to their chamber? Also, have they any idea how to capture and use all that glorious heat? If so, is that part of the 3.5 to 5G$ already budgeted?

From what is revealed and known, it’s independent blips of “ignition”, with a complete replacement of the bead after each cycle.

IMO, this may achieve ignition, but the harnessing of such an awkward heat source is a real beast. The whole project kind of irritates me; it seems so impractical.

To me it seems impractically named and “justified”. Same’s ITER being all about cheap, clean power. Wait till the tritium cat’s containment record gets out of the bag.

[Aeronaut]

The problem with Michigan is the flipside of the mass manufacturing heritage- it is and will likely remain a part of this state’s self-image for another 20 to 50 years.

Marketing and selling gets a lot easier if you ignore or have no conscience. I believe the reason most “stuff” sells poorly is that it isn’t really needed or wanted, hence the marketing and sales letter shenanigans. FF is an oasis in that desert. Also, FF will need to manufacture wear parts, while most revenue will come from the service of providing electricity.

A few potential taglines:

Clean Up Your Act With Focus Fusion!
Discover The Focus Fusion Green Career Generator!
Train For The Focus Fusion Future at ____________ (diploma mill’s name goes in the blank)
32 Ways Focus Fusion Can Fix _______________ (name your soapbox issue)

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

…

Yes, the patent referred to 1khz, in the context of upper cooling limit perception at that time. The real engineering feat in the onion is to support, cool, and wire the whole contraption for a stream of pulses over 1MW each. I suspect your cooling proposal may have a similar wiring challenge.

Well, it’s easier to control current than heat! 🙂

I’d rather sell electric output than thermal. Don’t forget to coat the wiring, too. 😉

[Aeronaut]

“”And get poor Charlie off the MTA”

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the refrain from the old Kingston Trio song MTA. Might make a fitting campaign song, as could their Merry Minuet song.

[Aeronaut]

Here in Michigan, it’s all about creating manufacturing jobs. Preferably green collar jobs and careers that a single breadwinner can raise a family on. Governor Granholm should have brown cheekbones for how closely she’s aligned the state’s energy policies up with Obama’s.

Saving a lot of money on heating and electric bills is also very important here, as is protecting our Great Lakes and outdoorsy tourism industry. Politically, the west half of the state is highly conservative, while the east half (each half of the population is in ~5 to 6 counties) is equally liberal.

But however you slice it, we have a lot of automation and tool and die shops both in production and in mothballs, along with a lot of mothballed talent to run them. Thus the economic benefits of putting Michigan back to work could be a national selling point.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote: IIRC, Eric was talking about Hz on the order of 1500+ or so initially, with 25MW output — limited by cooling efficiency, not anode length. Electrode cooling with a micron-thick layer should be fairly trivial to engineer, IMO. The coating can be made of just about any molecule/material that can be structured into a ‘forest’ of vertical chains, so X-ray transparency should also be easy enough to manage. And every bit of recovered heat adds to the ‘profit’, so I am sure Q can be hugely increased.

Yes, the patent referred to 1khz, in the context of upper cooling limit perception at that time. The real engineering feat in the onion is to support, cool, and wire the whole contraption for a stream of pulses over 1MW each. I suspect your cooling proposal may have a similar wiring challenge.

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