[Dr_Barnowl]

that runs on plentiful and cheap deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen).

I think they left a significant comma out of that one. Deuterium may be plentiful and (relatively) cheap, but tritium is anything but.

[Dr_Barnowl]

I think the big win might be desalination, in terms of the developing world.

Conservatively, a 5MW unit could desalinate 350,000 gallons an hour (at a cost of ~ 14kWh per 1,000 gallons [1]) ; maybe more if you were to use the waste heat as well.

If you assume American patterns of water usage, at 100 gallons per person per diem, that’s enough water for 84,000 people.

And it could even be the salvation of the West – if the primary use of the water is irrigation, that ties up a tremendous mass of carbon, gets the water cycle working again (all that transpiration == clouds == more rain == more plants). More clouds also means a greater albedo, and lower global temperatures.

Instead of spending hundreds of billions on oil wars, line the coast of the horn of Africa with desalination plants, turn the desert into an oasis, plant oil crops to feed the remaining internal combustion engines until electrical energy storage problems are cracked and people transition gradually to electric vehicles. No need to junk a whole generation of working vehicles, just go with normal obsolescence, and all that plant matter that’s not turned into fuel (stems, leaves, etc) is fixing carbon and literally saving the planet. There are even market motivations for this – if it was just food, there would be no market motivation to increase production so much without an attendant increase in population. But with the grease-guzzling giant of the Western automotive industry to feed, it’s not just an exercise in green-earth gardening, there’s a way to get big capital interested in funding it.

—

[1] http://www.livescience.com/4510-desalination-work.html

Note that this is the *worst* figure I could find for desalination energy cost. The Wikipedia article on desalination implies that most modern processes use about 3kWh per cubic metre (1,000 litres), which would be about 11kWh for 1,000 gallons, and that Siemens have allegedly invented a process that consumes only 1.5kWh per cubic metre.

[Dr_Barnowl]

I’m a Java developer with A level (UK college level) maths and science qualifications ; my maths ability is reasonable (sounds like most of what’s required is very basic calculus skills, but that’s just my unqualified guess 🙂 )

It does sound like most of the maths is done, actually, and all that’s really required is adjusting things for scale, and probably writing some routines to consume different data formats (something I do a lot).

I have experience of working on open-source projects also.

Drop me a mail (possibly with the source code) and we can communicate.

[Dr_Barnowl]

As soon as I saw the title, my thoughts were about the spectral wavelengths of elements involved. I suppose with tartan, you might also be able to work the actual gaps between the spectral lines into the design 🙂

[Dr_Barnowl]

Speaking from the UK, we’ve had a deregulated gas + electricity market for some time now. I’m currently with a supplier (Ecotricity) who project the unique selling point of investing all their profits in new wind farms, and they also do a mixed brown + green or pure green option. Here they promise to match the “brown” price of our top 6 electricity companies, so it’s not entirely infeasible that Viridian could offer a discount – especially in a market that is new to deregulation and hasn’t settled on a market price as opposed to a monopoly price.

I’m a little sad for you though – you’ll start to be bombarded by all the deeply annoying cold calls from people trying to get you to switch your energy supplies to their company, since all it takes to be an energy supplier now is an office, and because all it costs to move is administrative costs.

They’re also now selling bonds… I may actually buy a few. 7.5% is not to be sneezed at in the current economic climate.

[Dr_Barnowl]

The presentation in “The path to fusion” says the ZIP code is 08846, if that helps.

[Dr_Barnowl]

I wonder if you could tune This for X-rays ; it would certainly make assembly easier.

[Dr_Barnowl]

I think this is a useful topic, because people are devoting thought to how to raise a country out of poverty using energy.

My initial thought was that they could do worse than set up a few large ammonia factories – the Haber process could be run entirely without input of fossil fuel, if you get your hydrogen from electrolysis. Once they have a source of fertilizer, their agricultural base would improve, and their population would be better fed.

Indeed, they could use it as a liquid fuel (as I was made aware on another thread here recently), and run tractors on it.

Once you are working less hard for your food, everything else gets much easier.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Indeed… it could even be damaging, overall.

I see anything promoting the “Hydrogen Economy” as potentially problematic, mostly because the number one source of hydrogen right now is still fossil fuels. This technology is great in the context of storing energy from non-fossil origins, but it may remove the a barrier to widespread adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the sheer cost of the platinum catalyst. While an improved electricity / hydrogen / electricity cycle might actually make hydrogen vehicles more practical (currently, they look a bit sick next to battery electric vehicles), it also opens the door to fossil-sourced hydrogen, which I don’t view as being progress.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Further to your Rezwan’s “tokamak pork” comment, a pork meatloaf cooked in the ring mould would be great ; if you also want to stick with the gelatin theme… how about sűlt? It’s basically pig trotter and hock jelly, an Estonian dish. I saw it on one of our British cooking shows, the “Hairy Bikers”

Hmmph, the directions are quite complex. And it would seem that “sult” is a generic term for jellied meat….

Here’s a version with veal… http://www.foodgeeks.com/recipes/20196
And with pork ; http://www.inyourpocket.com/estonia/tallinn/Estonian-cuisine-55202f?more=1

[Dr_Barnowl]

Well, I can’t claim originality, but this looks pretty good (even if it’s a veggie burger).

http://funnfud.blogspot.com/2007/07/veg-grilled-pesto-burgers.html

Fusion cuisine…

[Dr_Barnowl]

How about a scene of the future… a vast green forest (of young trees) with a gleaming city poking out of the horizon.

There’s a clearing with a camp fire in the middle. An old geezer and his grandson are camping. He’s saying ….

“Of course, when I was a lad, all this was oil derricks and desert… until they built the fusion desalination plant.”

Fusion. Energy to spare for the necessities.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Brian H wrote: Inertial fusion necessarily involves implosion of individual ‘pills’ of material, doesn’t it?

The current targets are a gold “hohlraum” containing a small beryllium sphere with the cryogenically cooled fuel mix inside. Estimates giving a sensible reactor output are about 10Hz pellets.

It sounds like the worlds most expensive and heavily engineered machine-gun / laser / kettle. The “heavy weapon guy” in the popular game Team Fortress 2 boasts :

Heavy Weapon Guy wrote: She weighs one hundred fifty kilograms and fires two hundred dollar, custom-tooled cartridges at ten thousand rounds per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to fire this weapon… for twelve seconds.

Ok ; 10,000 rounds per minute is more like 166.66Hz … but $200 doesn’t sound unreasonable. So will a NIF-style reactor cost $120,000 dollars to “fire” for a minute? Or will it just never work because it’s too difficult to reconcile being a machine-gun, a kettle AND a laser?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Aeronaut wrote: Aquarius network

Want to sell a franchise to the UK (say, for oooh, one guinea and 1% of the gross?)

[Dr_Barnowl]

I think the comment from the ITER communications chief that you can’t use fusion for proliferation is bunk though – it’s true for these small devices, but part of the planning for tokamak reactors is to generate tritium using a breeder blanket … last time I looked, tritium was a key component of all hydrogen bombs, and for D-T fusion to work as a practical energy source you need to generate unprecedented quantities of the stuff. Which would seem to make it easier to make fusion warheads. Just sayin’.

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