[Aeronaut]

benf wrote: Proposition 16, the New Two-Thirds Requirement for Local Public Electricity Providers Act is on the June 8, 2010 ballot in California as an initiated constitutional amendment.

Wouldn’t this be a problem for FF if it wins in California?

http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_16_(June_2010)

Sorry, Benf, that’s a dead link. In general, the higher the official pressure for clean energy at an affordable price, the better we’ll look when we emerge with the solutions to many problems such as bio fuels, the tooling chain’s ability to lower the cost of solar cells, and desalination, to name just a few.

If that really is designed to limit taxpayers’ right to vote, that’s supposed to be unconstitutional. If that’s the case, is it being challenged as such already?

[Aeronaut]

There was a rallying cry a few years ago- “It’s about the children!” This could be the top level topic we’ve been looking for. What better way to begin a conversation about a brighter potential future?

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote: Check out the post on Social Currency. What do you think? All part of developing a “fusion way” strategy.

Spot-on, Rezwan. People care about what could benefit them, with the least investment of time, energy, and/ or money on their part. And advertising is a slow, expensive, way to get a small percentage to maybe respond, so that’s out.

But what are the big problems of the day? Employers are having problems finding enough people who can read written instructions and will work for their terms; Businesses that never learned to eliminate hidden assumptions in their planning and got paranoid about a number of imaginary issues; Dollar diplomacy practiced within US borders has conditioned us to expect Washington to solve problems that we can and should be solving ourselves. Clean water is another huge problem, as is peak oil (or at least the rumor of it this decade), and the global credit crunch, just for openers.

What we really have here is an idea so big and universal that almost anybody’s dream(s) can be woven into and around it. The trickiest part is to get people wondering out loud if there might be a better way to power the world and society. Maybe a lead-in of something like “Why does the 21st century look, feel, and act like the 20th century?”

[Aeronaut]

I read your recent posts on the front page, and believe you’re right that marketing fusion directly is the wrong approach. I’m a little over 50, and all my life, the govamint’s been telling us that fusion’s “just a decade or 2 off”. This sets up the conditioning that either the government’s flat out lying (very likely in most peoples’ minds) or that fusion’s so difficult that if the government can’t do it, then how can anybody else?

Against that predominant world view, polling for benefits of cheap, clean electricity would be more likely to engage people. What are their pet interests that the cost of energy gets in the way of? Clean water? air pollution? Maybe they need to strike a blow at the Oligarchy- this was referred to as the military/ industrial complex in the 60’s, and seems to be fueling the Tea Party, egged on by the Outrage Industry known as talk radio.

My guess is that after you get somebody to rile themselves up about what the price(s) of energy are costing them, you can ask a question about “what if there might be a solution in the next year or decade?” You may also draw a crowd before you pop the question. 😉

[Aeronaut]

I think DEMO’s currently scheduled to be producing electricity by 2050. Haven’t been to ITER’s site recently. And to my knowledge, nobody else is talking about their fuels. Hope I’m wrong about that, but until then, once we achieve goal #7, the FF bet gets a lot more secure.

Achieving goal #7- pB-11 fusion- sets the stage for the last march to the peak of this mountain. The deuterium-fueled experiments are required for calibration and machine shake-down, as well as verifying theory, but they equate to an army of porters moving a trainload of supplies up a mountain like Everest. Demonstrating pB-11 fusion will be like igniting the 3rd stage of a rocket, which may or may not go on to achieve orbit. So again, signs are good, but there’s no way to accurately predict, only report what did or didn’t happen at a given point in time.

To achieve goal #8, we need to demonstrate more joules out than joules in. Thermal and electrical unities are further milestones, if I understand this correctly.

General Atomics is one site manufacturing this type of cap. Their big boys top out around 10 or 12 uF and 100kV (with a design life multiplier curve that rewards lower applied voltages).

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote:

I’d almost forgotten the Sam’s club membership business model. In this case, membership levels would range from $100 to $1,000 annually with no securities involved.

so, what are the privileges of membership, then?

Big picture benefits come from a network of at least 1,000 communities in the US, pledging around $1G combined to send signals that they believe they can handle education, fusion, and clean energy research challenges quicker, cheaper, and with better odds of success than the 20th century centralized decision making structure has been able to do since NASA was tasked with the lunar missions in 10 years.

I’m teetering on the edge of a flag waving rant :smirk:

Local benefits come from blurring the lines between public and private sectors to pool intellectual capital to reduce time and cost of testing solutions. Again, the national network is where this intellectual capital gets exponentially multiplied in good cases. Those forums would be automatically policed by a $100 cover charge. Some type of meritocracy would need to be designed in from the beginning.

Other local benefits come from employing undergrad students as tutors, blurring the lines between what grade a student is in and when that student has earned various degrees. Happening in the local Center, this would also make rising talent visible to leaders in public and private sectors. Hopefully, within 5 years this is going to be a very happening place in every community, raising reading and math performance without the Feds “helping us out” with standardized testing and “No student left behind” type programs.

The easy way through school will become the longest, and lead to menial labor jobs. The earlier a student begins exploring his or her limits and learns team-building, amplified by the network, and the more that group apply themselves, the shorter their formal schooling, and the bigger the impact they can have on solving a problem.

And when aneutronic designs begin announcing unity, this network and it’s nodes will have at least a 1 year jump on funding and co-coordinating all of the experiments that will be required to prototype the onion.

Onion building in the experimental and production phases is going to depend on developing new tooling to make it economically and QC practical despite the fast track.

1,000 or more of these centers will also request an experimental license from the NRC, who will be able to get more experience in less time than ever before in history.

Politics is automatically dealt with by spreading the pork sandwich spread so thickly and evenly that nobody can vote against it who wants to be re-elected. Since virtually all business owners and boards can gain competitive advantages from cheap, clean energy, very few should be lobbying against.

This type of stark targeting could either neutralize their budget or start a national riot. Welcome to the 21st century, special interest groups.

[Aeronaut]

I’d almost forgotten the Sam’s club membership business model. In this case, membership levels would range from $100 to $1,000 annually with no securities involved.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

…

That thought can be expanded, given our nearly universal market potential, to have individual investors organized at the local level who have a vested interest in seeing pB-11 work, even if it does take 5 or 10 years. And with their contributions being in the $100 to $1,000 range, and possibly tax-deductible, this network can spring up rapidly, sending clear signals from Main Street to Wall Street, and from there to Washington. The idea of as little as $100 sending an enormous signal is salable in it’s own right.

The need for working hardware is a hidden assumption that I’ve challenged in other threads. Today we sell Hope. If all stays on schedule, the world’s going to have one heckuva New Year’s party.

Don’t get too far ahead of yerself, Aero! There are VERY strict SEC limits on what you can do in the way of soliciting investments without being a registered ‘vehicle’ and so on. I suggest you have a wee dialog with Aaron or Eric before you get too far along in such plans. They may well be flat-out illegal at this point.

Point very well taken, Brian. I should clarify that people would be investing in their own community’s ability to rapidly fund confirmation of any aneutronic design that claims to have achieved unity or better. Thus it bets on the horse race rather than any particular horse.

But I will put legal counsel on my near term to-do list. What I think I’m describing is a scaled up Junior Achievement and/or angel network where each local node is registered as a unique privately-owned business.

[Aeronaut]

Very good backgrounder. All the more reason to rethink the “need” for the Clubs’ approval(s).

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote:

Here’s that marketing black-magic: if $250K for a 5MW reactor piques peoples’ “too good to be true” filter, then tell them $1M for 1..15 MW. People have come to expect incremental improvements, not revolutionary ones. We know it’s revolutionary. Let’s downplay that. Later, when the technology triples their expectations, we all win.

For a quite long time I was suggesting to go for the fusion-fission hybrid approach. Its essentially the same as going the high price road, but does not involve lying about the price.

it isn’t “lying about the price”. it’s “setting expectations”. we expect that the $1M will deliver the whole 15MW plus a spare generator. they (investors, licensees) expect marginal increase in value over what is currently available.

we have not yet met their expectations by demonstrating a working generator.

so let’s give ourselves some head-room, by testing receptiveness to the concept. the other day i had a chat with a guy from the local power generation company, and told him about the above spec, without mentioning that it is fusion. He was quite receptive, and suggested that a 15MW generator is in the zone for a typical university or industrial campus. my conclusion: an easy sell.

The 1st MW is going to take the longest and be the most expensive to deliver to a load, where it can solve a large number of real-world problems. But we’re still assuming one or a few large investors who will be looking for proof that FoFu1 actually works. The higher the individual contribution, the higher the expectation of a “sure thing”, which we all know can’t exist. All that will ever exist is a set of probabilities which will be interpreted differently by each individual.

That thought can be expanded, given our nearly universal market potential, to have individual investors organized at the local level who have a vested interest in seeing pB-11 work, even if it does take 5 or 10 years. And with their contributions being in the $100 to $1,000 range, and possibly tax-deductible, this network can spring up rapidly, sending clear signals from Main Street to Wall Street, and from there to Washington. The idea of as little as $100 sending an enormous signal is salable in it’s own right.

The need for working hardware is a hidden assumption that I’ve challenged in other threads. Today we sell Hope. If all stays on schedule, the world’s going to have one heckuva New Year’s party.

[Aeronaut]

QuantumDot wrote: is it true that the output power is suppose to be 5 times the input power?

What is the highest power that you have put in so far, how much do you plan to do before this project is over, do you think that you might put in move then a megavolt per shot or for money or parts would that be too much?

The highest voltage caps I’ve found so far are rated at 100kV but last a LOT longer in the 30kV to 40kV range. I’d look for megavolt caps, cap controllers, switches, and HV plates in a 2nd or 3rd generation derivative designed for a heavier fuel in order to get a 5:1 energy gain.

[Aeronaut]

Henning wrote: Art Carlson is mainly following the “Ryder Argument” (somebody called Ryder did a rather highly valued Ph.D. thesis about the feasibility of fusion attempts, which Art happened to proof-read). That argument mainly says, only tokamaks work. So he was sceptical to polywell too, just that Dr. Bussard was a much more renowned figure than Eric Lerner. Now after some time he supports the polywell effort, but also that took some time.

And he even buys Eric’s argument about the magnetic field effect.

I value his opinions rather high, although I’m not sharing all them regarding focus fusion. He is a sceptic, and that’s good.

And he lives in Munich. Maybe it’s time for a beer (I hate beer).

So that explains the bias. I respect Art’s expertise as defined by his license, and honest skepticism is to be encouraged. One way I see that is when somebody asks “Why” and “How would” types of questions- that indicates an attempt to understand new concepts.

But honest skepticism and petty finger pointing are entirely different. That’s why I looked up the Polywell article today. Because any fusion technology with a decent chance is going to be described favorably in Wiki or any objective media.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

P.S. A belated welcome to Aeronaut to the exclusive Croaker Club; membership has now doubled! :cheese:

Gasp! When did that happen?
When you hit 500 posts. :snake: :coolsmirk: Barely over a year for you; linear extrapolation suggests we’ll both pass 1000 by the end of the year, and thereafter you will build up an insurmountable Volubility Gap. :zip:

Why wait til then?

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

P.S. A belated welcome to Aeronaut to the exclusive Croaker Club; membership has now doubled! :cheese:

Gasp! When did that happen?

[Aeronaut]

Ever try to learn the rocket equation from Wiki without knowing what that funny looking e in the equations is? Wiki articles are inherently flawed in their lack of an integrated, big picture articles aimed at those without degrees.

I Google links to an AIP (great source) that doesn’t mention which fuel is used. Nothing on page 1 that seemed to apply mentioned the fuel, so I doubt they’re directly applicable other than demonstrating that we are not entirely alone in this line of investigation.

I’m only recently learning my way around the PolyWell site, where I’ve questioned Art Carlson, who seems to have the biggest problem with the technicalities of this article and the last one that we edited. While he is a licensed atomic engineer, he has a noted aversion to FF and/or Lerner, as well as an affinity for the Polywell, that makes his objectivity highly questionable in this case.

A good sign is that most of the criticism seems to be looking for a few thousand words while in gestation. I’d like to add a backgrounder establishing the horserace between FF on the low end of the power output curve at ~5MW if/when it works, CBFR ~50MW(?) if/when it works, and PolyWell at ~100MW if/when it works. We could continue by mentioning that the higher outputs come at the price of cryo magnets, whose capital and maintenance costs erode their ability to make cheap, clean electricity.

They also undermine the fusion field’s ability to create clean energy jobs, and they lack any schedule other than “one of these decades”.

The Polywell wiki entry is subject to the same criticisms that Art Carlson is attempting to level against FF. They just have a more developed and polished sales pitch article. And how do you describe an object or procedure, and the times it was developed in, without selling it in the process? If it’s an improvement, you’re going to be writing promotional copy, just like the PW article did.

We need a BOY I’M STEAMED icon, btw.

As pioneers, we have no direct peers at this point. We do have illustrated theory which the PW gang hasn’t been able to match. That, I believe, is our edge at this point. We want to link to the equations, while keeping the article accessible to the people without technical degrees, and we need to plan this article’s development so that we’re always a step ahead of our times with a design that’s so elegant that we’re still under $2M total funding.

That means not subject to the whims of Navy or Wall Street funding. No wonder nobody else can show a complete game plan and schedule. [/end rant]

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