[Joeviocoe]

Has any confirmed BSF experiment ever produced ANY neutrons and ANY energy level?

Is there ANY peer-reviewed (non-discredited) research that suggests that ANY fusion (even DT) can be achieved using this approach?

[Joeviocoe]

As of today, where is LPP in this list?

1) The “teeth that chew the sheath” tungsten crown to regularize the filaments – 10-100x yield
2) Full power output of Capacitors and to ‘Imitate’ the heavier mixuture of pB11 by using Deuterium/Nitrogen.
3) Shorter Electrodes, slower run down, more fill gas.
4) New Raytheon switches for more Current from capacitors – 10x yield.
5) Switch to pB11 (incrementally higher percentage from the D/N mix) – 15x yield.

[Joeviocoe]

vlad wrote:

true…. but the majority of the yield still comes from the fission reaction if I am not mistaken. The hydrogen allows for a more complete burn of the fissile material in each stage. Even Tsar Bomba was mostly fission yield.

afaik you ARE mistaken 🙂
In both issues.

Do explain please.well.. as for real tsar-bomb test, the total power of the explosion was estimated as approximately 58Mt (15% above predicted by design), and only 1.5Mt was from fission “fuse”. So about 96% of power was from fusion.

Most of modern nuclear weapons (except the weakest tactic level ones) are naturally fission- fusion, and usually the more powerful is the warhead the more part of its power is from fusion.

There is a method of increasing the power of fusion bomb – to cover it with U238 shell.
But it is rarely used. E.g. As for the tsar-bomb, it initially contained such a shell in its design, but it was removed and replaced with plumbum beefore the test.

Everything described above is AFAIR and AFAIK 🙂

Okay, thank you.

[Joeviocoe]

Lerner wrote: A fusion reactor can not be come a bomb for many reasons but one easy one to understand is that the amount of fuel in a reactoris incredibly tiny. Maybe a way of gnerating both education and publicity is having Fusion for Peace comittees to hand out flyers to Dark Knight moviegoers about how anuetronic fusion prevents nucfler wepaon development and why fusion gnerators cna’t become bombs.

I like this idea.

[Joeviocoe]

vlad wrote:

true…. but the majority of the yield still comes from the fission reaction if I am not mistaken. The hydrogen allows for a more complete burn of the fissile material in each stage. Even Tsar Bomba was mostly fission yield.

afaik you ARE mistaken 🙂
In both issues.

Do explain please.

[Joeviocoe]

true…. but the majority of the yield still comes from the fission reaction if I am not mistaken. The hydrogen allows for a more complete burn of the fissile material in each stage. Even Tsar Bomba was mostly fission yield.

[Joeviocoe]

zapkitty wrote:

Exactly what kind of ship were you trying to power with 7.5 million FF cores? 🙂

Well, I can’t tell you that. But I CAN tell you this… ‘That it’s no moon…’

[Joeviocoe]

vansig wrote:

Above about Mach 5-10 you’ll need internal mass to throw out the back as the temperatures will well exceed the limits of the materials we have today.

Starlite was a possibility, but unfortunately Maurice Ward died last year and as far as is public, he took the recipe with him.

As you state more speed/energy can result in reduced mass, but there is a limit, in the sense that, above a certain temperature you’re effectively throwing a hugely powerful ion beam out the back of the engine. This would (at least) create the same political issues as with flying a Fission reactor, if not more.

Actually,
my understanding is that Ward’s family holds the Starlite recipe, but that industry isn’t really that interested in dealing.
Starlite is an ablative heat shield, and adequate ablative heat shields already exist.

Apart from the NIMBY attitudes about anything “nucular”, the ion beam will have about as much environmental impact as a lightning strike. presently lightning is seen as good for the planet, as it replenishes the ozone layer and makes nitrates, which are good for growing plants.

What would be the impact of 200+ lightning strikes per second?

[Joeviocoe]

Thanks for the explanation James.

jamesr wrote:
Todd Rider’s thesis http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412 and subsequent work, showed that this bremsstrahlung issue effectively rules out all other fusion fuels except D+T, D+D, and D+He-3, and furthermore for nett gain has to be at or near thermal equilibrium. This is partly why I don’t believe any of the other innovative concepts such as polywells will work. However Rider did not take account of the effect of the quantization of electron cyclotron orbits in very strong magnetic fields http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau_quantization. This limits the transfer of energy from the fast ions to the electrons, and effectively keeps the electron temperature much lower than the ion temperature. Even so it is a tall order to reach the extreme fields needed to reduce the key collision parameter known as the Coulomb Logarithm from the
standard value of 15-20 beyond even Rider’s most optimistic value of 5.

Does the Polywell concept not achieve magnetic fields in the GigaGauss range? What parameter(s) are needed in a Focus Fusion device to achieve the needed field strength?

[Joeviocoe]

Hey Dave… have you read LLP’s writings on how the Quantum Magnetic Field effect is supposed to mitigate the losses to Brem? The X-rays are pretty significant with fusing just isotopes of hydrogen, but when you start trying to fuse Boron, things get really difficult. Boron has 5 times the charge of hydrogen and about 25 times the effect of braking the electrons (bremmstralung) which cools the plasma. But the QMF should kick in if the field strength gets high enough.

A lot of the objections you’ve noted don’t quite apply to pulsed power devices like Focus Fusion. Certainly to a tokamak, and somewhat still in a polywell. But LLP’s approach has the benefit of being only a couple dozen nano seconds long. Which can avoid many of the causes of plasma cooling. Also, since the energy is going to be extracted as direct electricity and captured x-rays… it is not so much a question of the temperature gradient.

Every fusion approach has it’s problems. With MCF, the science is proven, but the engineering may make it impractical for economic reasons. But I would not ever say the word, “impossible”. Just that Materials Science and other adjacent technology needs a lot of catching up first.

I really like how transparent Focus Fusion has been compared to the other innovative confinement concepts. Polywell has to be mostly hush because of the Navy funding though, so maybe they are making better progress than we know. But it seems like Lerner has been making great progress. The biggest challenges so far have been engineering problems. But what I like best is that they will know whether pB11 fusion using a Focus Fusion pinch is feasible within a year. If it is proven to be feasible, and they demonstrate some level of fusion using pB11… then the eyes, and pockets, of the world would be opened for them. 🙂

[Joeviocoe]

BSFusion wrote: @Joeviocoe,

Laser ICF projects like NIF have at least achieved fusion on some level… although it is doubtful they will ever get a complete and symmetrical burn of the fuel pellet.

That problem has already been solved, by BSF, using matter confinement, which is an extrapolation of the “exploding pusher” concept, as explained in Phys. Plasmas, Vol. 2, No. 11, November 1995:

No.

The inherent problems with NIF’s ICF confinement is now understood mainly because of the level of research, development and testing assumptions. They have actually done all the prior research papers, had them peer reviewed, developed models and simulations, got funding, built devices to test individual components, built a full scale device, etc.

BSF has not “Solved” anything. The BSF problems and limitations are not known because nobody in the scientific community has even looked at it yet. So to claim that a problem is “solved” is way too premature. A patent application cannot identify the shortcomings in the design or theory. You MUST write the paper. If not you, then you must find someone (not here) who has experience with other approaches to Bubble SonoLuminescence. Ask them to continue the research using your new approach. Have you done this yet?

[Joeviocoe]

BSFusion wrote:

Perhaps a list of obstacles facing BSF could be started, but, so far, no potential objections have even been raised. 😉 A peer-reviewed paper might be a good idea too, but what journal would publish it, and who would write it? Not me, I have neither the time nor the skill to undertake a major writing project. So, unless someone wants to volunteer, that idea is DOA.

No real objections CAN be made until a concise set of claims are made in some sort of a scientific paper. Plenty of objections over the last decade have been raised over other approaches to bubble sono fusion. But since yours claims to be very different, the scientific community would need to review those differences.

“So, unless someone wants to volunteer, that idea is DOA.”

Unless someone does the actual work… the WHOLE IDEA of BSF is DOA!

[Joeviocoe]

BSFusion wrote: I should point out that, none of these 15 are obstacles to Bubble-confined Sonoluminescent-laser Fusion (BSF).[/strong]

(continued from…)
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/378/

———————————————

The true obstacles are not even known yet since your approach to Bubble sonofusion has not even be tested in any way yet. It only exists on paper, and not even a peer-reviewed paper.
http://home.centurytel.net/bubbles/bubbles.htm
It is very likely that, although your approach is somewhat different, any device based on this would suffer the same problems as conventional bubble sonofusion that Professor Andrea Prosperetti of Johns Hopkins had encountered.

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Sonoluminescence_-_Mechanism_of_phenomenon/id/2110704
http://www.me.jhu.edu/MENewsletter2012.pdf
http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v67/i5/e056310
http://groupsites.ius.edu/physics/~kyle/P310/articles/sonolumin.pdf

Laser ICF projects like NIF have at least achieved fusion on some level… although it is doubtful they will ever get a complete and symmetrical burn of the fuel pellet. They are, at the very least, way beyond theoretical and hypothetical pondering.

It is VERY premature to start pointing out dozens of problems with Laser ICF, which as significant scientific credibility, actually achieves consistent results, and may have practical applications for nuclear weapons stewardship… and then try to present your own personal, untested, and highly speculative hypothesis that has more in common with discredited work than with real world research… and claim that it has none of the problems associated with devices that have actually been built, tested, and reviewed.

Sorry if that sounded harsh, but there is a cold reality that every innovator must face. And that reality is that you must have your own house in order and follow the scientific method, before trying to elevate your own theory above others.

I know you hate the comparison, but it is still a fair comparison… The scientific method is designed to weed out unsubstantiated claims. And bubble sonoluminescence has already one (once credible) scientist fail at the proper method for research and thus, his work was discredited.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/19/science/sci-misconduct19
So any sonoluminescence fusion concept, even if the approach is significantly different, must provide extraordinary evidence to be taken seriously.

[Joeviocoe]

“It should be based on currently accepted principles of physics
and reasonable technology extrapolation
(no cold fusion, matter/anti-matter, P-11B, worm holes etc.)”

This really bothers me. It either shows a complete lack of understanding about these 4 concepts… or a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from pB11 as a competitor.

Worm Holes don’t exist naturally close enough to Earth to use them. And the very scientists who hypothesize creating artificial wormholes know that it would take more energy than our whole sun contains to produce.
Matter/antimatter is not viable because it requires more energy to create than it would release. We cannot simply convert matter into antimatter.

Cold Fusion does not even have a credible hypothesis. But was discredited.

pB11 may not be a reality yet, but there is no physical law saying it can’t be done. If deuterium fuse, so can pB11. It just takes more energy.
We already know that Boron-11 fuses…. we have done it in particle colliders. So this concept is no where near the 3 others.

It truly seems like a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from pB11 as a competitor. They might be worried that aneutronic fusion may get the spotlight soon. And if LPP or others succeed, the funding for their project might dry up considering DPF does have space propulsion potential.

[Joeviocoe]

Seeing how the HyperV concept is already exploring this method, yet is much farther behind the DPF in meeting the criteria for fusion… I wouldn’t see a good reason to want to redesign the DPF at this point.

Electrode wear is going to be a problem, but an engineering problem. Let’s get to the point where we’ve proven Q>1 with fusion and/or aneutronic fusion with pB11… then we can see how much redesign is needed to make it practical for a power device.

Constantly redesigning is time consuming. If the physics prove feasible (hopefully within a year or two), then there will be an increase in attention to all the engineering problems. Electrode wear is not going to be a problem until after they cycle up to several shots in a short time. But I think that they can prove the physics before that.

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