[Augustine]

Silly question but are you seeing results that are in agreement with your theoretical model?

[Augustine]

Breakable wrote: While failure of ITER makes other energy projects more competitive, the overall environment for fusion funding might degrade, as more investors will think of fusion as unreachable.

I disagree. Anyone who is investing in fusion right now is betting against ITER (and with good reason). It may also be the case that the possibility of ITER being a success (lol) crowds out venture capital because venture capitalists don’t like to bet against government programs. I’d take the money being spent on ITER, use half of it to reduce the debt and the other half to give to alt-fusion research.

[Augustine]

“Radioactive particles that slam into the gold push out a shower of high-energy electrons.”

Was it really so hard for newscientist to say if it was alpha, beta or gamma radiation? I can’t figure out if what they made is trivial (capturing energy from alphas/betas) or worthwhile (gammas). I’m guessing that it is gammas.

Unanswered questions:
What happens when high energy gammas don’t hit the gold particles but hit the carbon nanotubes?
Why Gold?

[Augustine]

Tulse wrote:

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

Exactly — repeatably demonstrating over-unity fusion energy would be truly earth-shattering news, an achievement well beyond what decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of conventional fusion research has produced. I would certainly hope that LPP wouldn’t use a monthly new update to announce such a thing.
.

If LPP achieves this then you need to do two things:

1. Upgrade the web site. You will be the most popular web site on the planet for a few days.

2. Make a better video explaining how this works (step by step, perhaps even baby step by baby step)

3. Constantly reinforce the point that there is no nuclear waste, only helium- the stuff in children’s balloons!

[Augustine]

KeithPickering 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.

Yes, it is the demonstration of net energy. Think of it this way, how many years until ITER shows a demonstration of net energy? Decades?

Just as important as the demonstration of net energy is the verification of the scaling laws. Scaling to the fifth power of the current would mean that you would have a reasonable reactor at 100Hz with 2MA.

And wonderful photos to boot!

[Augustine]

Aeronaut wrote:

that was a typo in the url. remove the final ‘l’, you’ll get the article.

Yeah, fixed.

Wow. Didn’t realize smartphone processors were that powerful.

I recall that:

iPhone 4: 800MHz
iPad: 1GHz

The more important question is if the problem being solved can be subdivided adequately so that it can run on multiple devices with little or more likely no interaction between devices. Things like SETI@home could work, complex simulations probably won’t.

[Augustine]

MTd2 wrote: The impression I have about FFP it is that it was not achieved 30+ years ago it is that no one thought it would suppress bremsstrahlung radiation with the magnetic field in the pinch. But after Lerner posted the idea a few years ago on the net, it would be very trivial to achieve that. Much easier than even design an atomic bomb or a ICBM, even if it is a fluke lauch. So, I dont think it is hard to imagine NK with a FFP.

Yes but so far the DPRK hasn’t done too well in the ICBM or nuke dept. Their nukes tend to fizzle and their ICBMs tend to splash.

And if they had a working fusion reactor, what would they do with it? Their economy cratered when the Soviet Union fell and they lost their subsidies.

[Augustine]

Well the drawback to VASIMR is that it requires a power source and that the power source will have mass. The best bets are solar with a stretched lens array that provides something like 250-500W/kg or nuclear power. Solar isn’t useful past the orbit of Mars and to get to Mars in a reasonable time period you would want a square kilometer of solar cells. Nuclear requires shielding and radiators, preferably to be used with a high temperature nuclear reactor (which can be used to minimize radiator mass).

I think that a DPF will have less mass than either option. I’m worried about the VASIMR magnetic field(s) mucking with the magnetic field of the DPF, and I am worried about how a ship does station keeping when its power source also produces some thrust (perhaps a bank of ion thrusters to counteract the thrust generated by the alphas?).

If you believe in Polywell (and I am pulling for them) then a Polywell reactor has the benefit of scaling to produce gigawatts of power, much of it as heat and alphas. You can dump the heat and current into water/hydrogen to produce enormous thrust which is handy for getting mass to low earth orbit.

[Augustine]

Why would you want to carry the weight of 37GW worth of DPPF’s to the star of your choice? If you can make electricity cheaply from fusion then make antimatter and use that to power your spaceship as the thrust to weight ratio is probably notably better.

For me I would settle for a DPF/VASIMR powered ship visiting Ceres or doing an Apollo 8 flyby of Jupiter. Barring these developments, I would like to be able to tell my daughter that I remember a time before fusion power when people used to argue over so many silly things that were solved when power became cheaper AND cleaner.

[Augustine]

One of my coworkers lives in Moreno Valley (CA) where the city has moved into the power business because they saw it as a source of revenue. His power is interrupted so frequently that he has considered buying a backup generator. He and his neighbors joke that they are living in the third world. At the same time we see LA DWP pushing for a rate increase where a good deal of the extra revenue would go to the city of LA to cover their budget woes. I’d prefer to not give local government a revenue generating local monopoly, in particular when their commitment to reliable transmission is in doubt.

I really don’t get why you think that SoCal Edison or PG&E wouldn’t use electricity from a FF device. Perhaps that is because I am a conservative Republican who thinks that nuclear fission is acceptable. As I am sure you all know CA has very expensive electricity rates due to heavy reliance on natural gas so it follows that if electricity from a FF device had the same cost as electricity from coal then that would be much cheaper than what we Californians pay and the cost savings alone would be a compelling argument. The only issue would be in educating people to get them over their fears of nuclear power.

As for using the ad money for R&D, imagine how much money could be spent if the utilities weren’t investing in power generation with such a low power density (solar) and were spending it on FF. I guess we can dream 🙂

[Augustine]

QuantumDot wrote: Here is a file from MIT on the expected price of helium3 taken from the moon or from nuclear decay. but from what i say they both need a temperature of about 100keV so boron11 should be cheaper, but at an expected energy price of about 7 dollars a gallon for the equivalent energy its better then gas but not boron.

ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Nuclear…/22…2006/…/helium3_fusion.pdf

the file is too large for me to attach

Neptune has helium 3 in abundance. I think that any fusion fuel that leads to a reactor with Q > 1 will win. If it is fusion then aneutronic that is nice but I think that human society can live with neutrons being produced.

Q > 1 and preferable Q > 3 (to give the engineers room to be lazy and to save money) is all that really matters. If you can demonstrate Q > 1 and provide the theoretical foundation then you have done something nobody else has done and the whole world will notice.

[Augustine]

Lerner wrote: I think the recylability will be near 100%. The metal vaporized from the anode will not really go very far. It will redeposit as a coating when the machine shuts down to change the anode. Eventually that build-up will have to be removed with a solvent, maybe once every few years or so. The electrodes themsleves will just be melted down and reformed. Induced radioactivity will be negligible, even after many re-uses. (It is all in the impurities anyway.)

In fact, with super-cheap electricity powering plasma torches, pretty much everything we throw out will get recycled at high temperature.

Do you foresee any issues with metal vaporized from the anode interfering with the subsequent pinches when running at full speed? I assume that the odds on generating any radioactive byproducts from the vaporized anode are very low.

As an aside- if I had $50k to invest, I would (I bet that you have heard that quite a bit).

[Augustine]

Dr_Barnowl wrote: Slashdot has a topic on NIF

I couldn’t resist a few posts about Focus Fusion…

Someone mentioned this article in Scientific American : Fusion’s False Dawn, which is pretty negative about the engineering challenges of DT fusion (and I agree with much of it, in that context)

I liked the paragraph on DT fuel pellets for the proposed LIFE reactor ; Rochester university makes similar pellets and they cost about $1 million dollars each.. and you’d need almost 90,000 a day for a NIF-like facility.

I also like the LIFE reactor not just because it burns the nasty nuclear waste but because it is a 3GW power plant. Yes I know that smaller is better but you have to admit that 3GW is a staggering number on the order of the Palo verde power plant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station

As MSimon says at talk-polywell, it doesn’t matter if the science for tokomak fusion works if the engineering is impossible. Hopefully FF can sustain the desired rate of pinches without destroying itself.

[Augustine]

Anecdotal story describing the damage the CRU data dumps have done to AGW theory and adherence:

I work for a large software development company. I’m an algorithms guy. Some of the greybeard programmers have taken to using “climatologist” to be a slur for someone who should be banned from interacting with a compiler.

[Augustine]

Do we have any idea what kind of thrust a FF pulse can produce? I recall that JPL funded FF to work in deep space which would imply that it isn’t capable of getting anything to LEO. Maybe if we are lucky you could get to LLO.

I’d love anyone who could give a reference to what kind of thrust a FF engine would produce. Does it produce 1N of thrust per pulse? If it pulsed 100 times a second then you would have 100N which is actually quite respectable.

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