[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Just thought I’d chime in — haven’t seen any more data from the shots in a long time. Anything interesting coming?

Are you regularly checking the LPP site and FaceBook pages?
Murali’s mid-July June report is still MIA, and there is no substantive info on any activity since about Apr-May, other than tuning shots to work on the switches and camera, etc. The projected goals had FoFu reaching 100 joules by August 1. https://focusfusion.org/assets/lppx/graphs/ff1-yield-goal.jpg

Has the timeline been set back a couple of months?

You caught me slacking, Brian. As a card-carrying contributor, I’ll reach into my info-stash and update the FB site this afternoon.

[Aeronaut]

rashidas wrote: Here are some questions for FF devotees:

What sort of safety features would a prototype focus fusion reactor have? For example X-ray emission could be a problem.
How much would these features cost? What sort of training would power plant operators need? How long would state and federal permitting take?

Great questions. The biggest operational safety challenge that I can see is the potential lack of industry-standard NEMA and possibly IEEE approved enclosures and procedures for working with the high voltage pulses and the associated RF noise.

The unavoidable X-ray emissions will be contained within the outermost shield layer, comprised of ~2cm of lead.

The neurotoxin decaborane will also be confined to within the apparently massive shielding assembly, and limited to only a few pounds per year- probably less than a pound of solid fuel per maintenance cycle. The actual gas would be confined in a multi-walled fuel system within the core and vacuum chamber.

Since this fuel is a solid anywhere near room temperature, the gas should revert to solid form long before the core can be safely removed, which would eliminate the X-ray threat and all but residual capacitor charge issues if not engineered out of the system design.

Bottom line should be no realistic threat to industrial or neighborhood health not already faced by transformer substations and chemical plants or detergent manufacturers.

[Aeronaut]

nemmart wrote: Just thought I’d chime in — haven’t seen any more data from the shots in a long time. Anything interesting coming?

Are you regularly checking the LPP site and FaceBook pages?

[Aeronaut]

ALL STOP!!!

Some of us elders can remember a time when real people with real money in their wallets looked to their own communities to solve their own problems. The capitol was basically a place to send your taxes. Nowadays, at least Washington seems to be dead serious about removing any vestige of independent problem-solving ability, along with national identities as sweeteners.

Se habla poquito espanol, picked up a little here and there living in Texas for 15 years. If I really wanted to learn that language, I would. I resent being told to learn a language as much as I do being told I’m being forced to quit smoking “for my own good.” or that I have to ask permission to buy a house or a car or fund a business (think credit score). I’m sure our international friends feel pretty much the same about their countries, languages, cultures, and so on.

[end rant]

[Aeronaut]

Great post and link, JShell. My first read of “crowdsourcing” was the high profile and unprofitable social networks. It fits well with some similar ideas I’ve been developing. This just may be the fastest and least expensive way (overall) to commercialize at least the onion and promote the entire project. We’ll need to include ideas for developing political/regulatory, training/certification, tooling, manufacturing, and sales/service chains as well so that developers are encouraged to treat the entire project as a system which can capitalize on economies of scale to deliver the most benefits to the most people in the least amount of time for the least amount of money and hassle.

Basically we’d point them to a string of my more recent posts and see what options we can come up with for ~$1,000 or less, since there should be few if any hidden assumptions left to identify and challenge- i.e.- most of the “creative problem solving” may have been done already, becoming the crowd’s starting point more or less. For $5k we could post the gig to several of these crowds, and have a clean win in PR/publicity/advertising among a very influential set of communities.

[Aeronaut]

Wow! That’s going to be memorable for a lot of reasons, all good. Another way to frame the same story is as a reality show.

[Aeronaut]

Patientman wrote: Wisconsin is well known for their expo. I will research and post schedules of for the coming year. Minnesota has a “Going Green Expo” in May. The notification window is small unless you contact them first.

Both should be in a post-unity world? I’ll find a way to get there.

[Aeronaut]

Great idea about trade show, PM. The interest and concerns raised in such venues represent potential buyers. I’m in the Great Lakes region, roughly a 5 hr drive to Chicago or Cleveland, but will need a passport to do Ontario.

[Aeronaut]

The fastest way to double current is to halve the electrode length. Eric mentioned what seemed to be a very short anode in the Google Talks presentation.

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote: seems to have a preponderance of bio topics. will aneutronic fusion fit in the new paradigm?

How could they exclude a cheap, clean power source that can even make some of their radioisotopes in-house when built as an ordinary DPF?

[Aeronaut]

The inductance formulae make parallel branches our friend, as the Warsaw machine’s cap bank demonstrates. This idea also pre-supposes that the switching problems have been reasonably solved so it can re-direct the capacitive fraction (which would have been returned to the cap bank) and all outputs into firing the next stage while providing some useful output. Q would have to be >1.5, I’m guessing. But if we’re ever up against a cap lifetime issue, this may be a workaround to some degree.

[Aeronaut]

zapkitty wrote:

Inline dual-core designs double shielding size and weight, while unnecessarily shielding the cap bank. A tandem multi-core design does little to increase shielding size, yet keeps the caps and cores out where they’re fairly easy to replace during a service call. Reducing downtime is going to be a huge selling point, imo, figuring a quick swap on-site followed in the depot by a nearly complete tear-down to replace the electrodes.

Errr… nope… that was a block diagram, not a blueprint 🙂 The caps in my concept would be no more shielded than required. Actual shields would be in sections and removed as needed for DPF servicing.

As to placing two cores adjacent in the same shielded volume… how close can the cores be before interfering with each other via heat, EM fields, radiation etc ? How would your concept be laid out?

Not really sure about proximity calculations, my stronger suits are electronics and fabrication. If you design the cores as round cylinders they can be rapidly swapped similar to loading and unloading a torpedo tube. The shipping container is compact,stackable. and standardized. There’s a large pool of skilled techs. The cool down to background levels is slightly less than 13 hours- not sure what to expect for acceptable exposure limits or cool down times for maintenance pros and what types of protective gear could possibly decrease cool-down times, which would be the lion’s share of expensive downtime for periodic required servicing. As if we don’t have enough unknowns already :grrr:

The most cost-effective way I’ve found to build and shield a 320 or more core installation is to build a central water tank from 30′ by 4′ or wider plate steel cut for welding the core tubes, which would become a significant portion of the tank’s structure. Spacers from the tubes would help support the top deck which would be a great place to put communal machinery and cap banks. I think this can be done within 1 bank’s timing limitations and the entire system can make a serious bid for recycling a single priming pulse to greatly extend cap bank life.

What I really wanted in a recycling scheme was around 1,000 cores to optimize the timing, but as you can see, even 320 cores is going to have some serious cooling requirements. Rematog discussed the industry standard cooling tower if you’d like more details about cooling a centralized installation.

[Aeronaut]

Inline dual-core designs double shielding size and weight, while unnecessarily shielding the cap bank. A tandem multi-core design does little to increase shielding size, yet keeps the caps and cores out where they’re fairly easy to replace during a service call. Reducing downtime is going to be a huge selling point, imo, figuring a quick swap on-site followed in the depot by a nearly complete tear-down to replace the electrodes.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:
I can no longer locate the source posting, but I distinctly recall something (I think from Eric) indicating that the B10 was external, not dissolved. Something like 1″ or so thickness.

That was my understanding- a metal or plastic water tank containing a 1m (distilled?)water shield, covered by 10cm of boron (type unspecified), covered by 2cm of lead or boronated polyethylene. We discussed this with Eric and Rematog around March of ’09 iirc. Searching the site for boronated polyethylene may bring up the thread.

[Aeronaut]

jamesr wrote: When B10 absorbs a thermal neutron it doesn’t stay as B11. It is formed in an excited unstable state which decays in ~10^-12s to He-4 (1.47MeV) & Li-7 (0.84MeV) and a gamma ray photon (0.48MeV)

How does this translate for us laymen, Jamesr? Does the lithium accumulate, and if so, where and how fast does it accumulate? Does it need special treatment as a hazardous or commercial product? Is the boron coating weakened or diminished in any way by 5 years of operation at ~1khz?

Also, is the B-11 cheaply available as waste from refining boron into B-10? :question:

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