[KeithPickering]

vansig wrote: As of today, 20 April 2010, how many orders of magnitude short of unity can we say FoFu-1 is?

As near as I can tell, it’s impossible to say from data available on this site. About all we know that good shots produce .5 KJ in the electron beam and 1 KJ in the plasmoid. But that’s not much energy in the first place, and we have no idea how much energy is used to create a shot.

Perhaps someone else has seen something I’m missing somewhere.

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote:

…
The global warming debate will go on, partly genuine, partly a diversionary tactic for the big oil and coal industries. Global warming deniers have made contributions to this debate and in these forums on other topics as well, but I fear what I see.

The images you have fixated on are, of course, selected. Science, however, depends on clean data, not emotive mental images.

Here’s some info about how unclean the AGW data is: http://69.84.25.250/blogger/post/ClimateGate-Data-Series-Part-I-A-break-down-of-large-data-file-for-manipulating-global-temperature-trends-from-2006-2009.aspx

Kids and teens call it “making shit up”.

Kindly point to any datum published in any peer-reviewed journal which has been fabricated, falsified, or “made up.” If you can, it will be a first: climate deniers have been taking a microscope to these emails for months and so far we have precisely zero such cases.

This is a scandal?

[KeithPickering]

theanphibian wrote: And why are there so many apparent filaments at the top and bottom? Isn’t the number of filaments equal to the number of outer Copper electrodes?

The filaments are created in counter-rotating pairs, with one pair per outer cathode. So the number of filaments is 2 x electrodes.

See this image:

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/6/

[KeithPickering]

Hopefully-final-update:

NGK’s catalog claims that “nearly all insulator cracking and electrode melting can be prevented” with the semi surface discharge type of plug. Don’t have experience with them myself … just sayin’ …

I also note that the semi-surface discharge type plugs are available with nickel alloy electrodes only.

[KeithPickering]

Lerner wrote: We use automotive spark plugs as the trigger electrode in our spark-gap switches. We are making progress in getting the switches to all fire together, but we are beating up on our spark plugs a lot. The ends of the electrode seems to be melting. What we needs is a spark plug with a somewhat thicker electrode to spread out the current–something like 1/8″ in diameter rather than the 1/12″ we have. Or we could maybe use the iridium types, but we have only found those with very small electrode tips, which will make the problem worse. Anyone out there know a lot about spark plugs?

Further update: NGK’s racing catalog is here:
http://www.ngksparkplugs.com/docs/racing_catalog.pdf

Not many 12-range plugs available, but most are available in range 11, including platinum and iridium electrodes. For comparison, my car would use an NGK plug with heat range 6, which is 5 ranges hotter.

[KeithPickering]

Lerner wrote: We use automotive spark plugs as the trigger electrode in our spark-gap switches. We are making progress in getting the switches to all fire together, but we are beating up on our spark plugs a lot. The ends of the electrode seems to be melting. What we needs is a spark plug with a somewhat thicker electrode to spread out the current–something like 1/8″ in diameter rather than the 1/12″ we have. Or we could maybe use the iridium types, but we have only found those with very small electrode tips, which will make the problem worse. Anyone out there know a lot about spark plugs?

Electrode erosion is a common problem in automotive spark plugs too. You need a “cold” plug to help prevent this. “Cold” plugs typically have a larger insulator (on the combustion chamber side) to help carry heat away from the electrode better.

NGK kindly provides a guide to tell how to find a colder plug, here:
http://www.ngk.com/glossary.asp?kw=How+do+I+find+a+colder+or+hotter+plug?&manID=1&pt;=

The disadvantage of cold plugs in an engine is that carbon is more likely to build up on the electrodes. For the gas switch this should not be a problem, so I would go ahead and get the coldest plug you can find for your threading. That would be heat range 12 for NGK, or heat range 37 for Denso. You may have to hunt to find plugs that cold; racing engines (which run hot) need cold plugs, so you might try a racing supplier.

Another thought that occurred to me is that perhaps the SF6 is ionizing during the spark/switch process? If so, the presence of flourine ions would certainly explain a lot of the erosion you’re seeing. Perhaps a non-corrosive metal for the electrodes might help; platinum electrode spark plugs are available from some manufacturers.

[KeithPickering]

A few key points:
1. The NIF breakthrough here is being able to use the plasma itself to focus the laser energy. The announcement today was basically that they’ve figured out how to do that. Which leads them to be confident that they will be able to achieve theoretical net gain by (I’ve read) sometime this summer.
2. There is no way to turn this device into a practical electrical generator, as the posts above make clear.
3. The real problem is one of headline-stealing and meme creation. I’m reminded of Langley vs. the Wright brothers in 1902/03. Langley had Smithsonian big bucks behind him, he built the big expensive, heavy machine, and it failed. The Wrights had nothing but ingenuity and the right approach. The Wrights did succeed, but nobody knew and nobody took the story seriously. If Langley failed, it must be impossible, right?

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote:

Talk about Occam’s razor!

Nope. Reading error. The sun has no effect on the surface temp of Venus, day or night. All its radiation is rejected by the cloud cover etc.!

If that were true, Venus would have an albedo of 1.0, while its actual albedo is 0.6 — so what happens to that other 40% of incoming sunlight?

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote:

About 3% of incident radiation reaches the surface of Venus, as far as most sources can tell. Significant ground re-radiation in longer wavelengths absorbed by CO2 and then re-re-radiated (?!) thus doesn’t occur, which is the basis of any “greenhouse” effect.

So if there’s no greenhouse effect, why is Venus hotter than Mercury? I’ve got a theory that explains the phenomena. You’ve got bupkus.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter whether the incoming solar radiation is absorbed by the surface or the clouds. Greenhouse works either way, because there’s still a lot of CO2 above the cloud layer. (Cloud tops of Venus are at about 50 km, pressure 0.1 bar, with a 96% CO2 atmosphere, that puts roughly 300 times more CO2 above Venus’s cloudtops than above anywhere on the surface of the Earth.)

And that 3%? What happens to it? It gets radiated away in IR, then gets absorbed, re-radiated, absorbed, re-radiated, until it eventually hits a CO2 molecule that absorbs the energy and keeps it as heat. So much, much less than 3% of that 3% ever gets out again. Which is why the surface is so hot.

It certainly cannot be taken as any kind of “example”, cautionary, horrible, or otherwise.

In other words: you’ve got bupkus.
“Ever gets out again”. You’ve really lost it. All even the most classic simplistic GH mechanism can do is introduce a lag, like directing a hose into a pail which fills then overflows, instead of directly hosing the ground beyond. Once the pail is full and overflowing (which would have happened long, long, ago – and very quickly) the total flow-through is exactly the same as the source volume from the hose. In other words, no run-away. [See above for explanation of why the positive feedback loops are mathematically, historically, and empirically imaginary.]

“keeps it as heat”. O Rly? Still just a temporary energy boost, a small temperature increase (on Earth) overall; contact transfer and convection take over right away. Net energy is on balance always moving from surface to atmosphere, employing every available mechanism (contact, convection, evaporation (if applicable and available), and radiation. All stronger from down to up than up to down. All.) The reason Venus is hot is most likely simply that the convection and heat transfer mechanisms in the absence of water are so slow, making for a longer lag. By the by, the boffins are still resorting to double-talk about instrumentation anomalies trying to explain why sensors suggest much more energy flux from than onto Venus. LOL

It can be argued that the main reason that Venus is so hot is because there is no mechanism to rapidly move surface heat above the cloud layer. As a result, it does not matter if the atmosphere is mainly CO2 or not, the planet is hot because the atmosphere does not contain a substance that is liquid at surface temperatures and condenses to form clouds above most of the atmospheric mass.

and

The fact that the Venusian surface temperature is the same after 58 days of sun light and 58 days of darkness is really the main reason I claim that the Sun does not heat the surface. (Venus rotates with respect to the Sun once every 116.75 Earth days.)

On Earth, the minimum expected difference would be 50°C for a 2,800 hour day, on Venus, no difference is reported.

The “official” explanation for Venus having a constant surface temperature is strong winds – I am not convinced and I have not seen any evidence to support that position.

IBID
The winds operate only miles above the surface anyway, where the thick and heavy gasses move very sluggishly, if at all.

Based on the available facts
–No Surface wind
–Constant surface temperature
–Extremely slow planetary rotation
I conclude that
–The Sun has no effect on the surface weather
–The temperature of the surface is driven by internal heating
–Because the atmosphere has only a single green house gas, the surface temperature is much cooler than would otherwise be the case.

IBID

So Venus doesn’t have an atmospheric heat pipe. But neither does Mercury. So why is Venus hotter than Mercury? Your only remaining shot seems to be: internal heating (i.e., volcanic processes). So how come the volcanoes operate more at night on Venus than during the day? Because the surface temp of Venus is the same, day and night, and the Sun is only heating the daytime side. And, by your own admission, there are no surface winds to move the heat around to the night side. So now you need a mechanism that causes volcanoes to shut down when the Sun rises.

Talk about Occam’s razor!

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote: About 3% of incident radiation reaches the surface of Venus, as far as most sources can tell. Significant ground re-radiation in longer wavelengths absorbed by CO2 and then re-re-radiated (?!) thus doesn’t occur, which is the basis of any “greenhouse” effect.

So if there’s no greenhouse effect, why is Venus hotter than Mercury? I’ve got a theory that explains the phenomena. You’ve got bupkus.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t matter whether the incoming solar radiation is absorbed by the surface or the clouds. Greenhouse works either way, because there’s still a lot of CO2 above the cloud layer. (Cloud tops of Venus are at about 50 km, pressure 0.1 bar, with a 96% CO2 atmosphere, that puts roughly 300 times more CO2 above Venus’s cloudtops than above anywhere on the surface of the Earth.)

And that 3%? What happens to it? It gets radiated away in IR, then gets absorbed, re-radiated, absorbed, re-radiated, until it eventually hits a CO2 molecule that absorbs the energy and keeps it as heat. So much, much less than 3% of that 3% ever gets out again. Which is why the surface is so hot.

It certainly cannot be taken as any kind of “example”, cautionary, horrible, or otherwise.

In other words: you’ve got bupkus.

[KeithPickering]

Brian H wrote:
In part, this says that any given CO2 molecule may or may not re-radiate energy it has gained from either thermal contact or IR influence. It may just bump a nearby molecule and lose its excess energy to some other gas. If it does re-radiate, it will be in some random direction, possibly back to space, possibly sideways, possibly down. This does not permit any kind of averaging computation.

Bingo. The more CO2, the more absorption. The more absorption, the more downward re-radiation. The more downward re-radiation, the less gets through to warm the stratosphere. Therefore the stratosphere cools, the surface warms. Exactly what we are seeing.

[KeithPickering]

The “greenhouse effect doesn’t exist” hypothesis has ALREADY been falsified. The midnight temperature on Venus is warmer than the noontime temperature on Mercury. QED.

A formal refutation can be found here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0802/0802.4324v1.pdf — but a more readable explanation of G&T’s major gaffe can be found here: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/farley040110p.html

Meanwhile, there are quite a few pieces of evidence which, if they existsted, would falsify the greenhouse effect. For example, if the stratosphere were cooling, that would falsify the theory. But it is cooling. Or, if the diurnal temperature range were not decreasing, that would falsify it too. But the diurnal temperature range is decreasing.

[KeithPickering]

This is such utter nonsense. I got as far as the first paragraph in your pdf link before finding the first error, which undermines the authors’ entire thesis: the atmosphere and environment are certainly NOT in equilibrium, nor are they claimed to be. That’s the whole point. That’s why the atmosphere is getting warmer.

In fact, the Earth’s radiation budget is currently out of balance by about 1.5 Watts per square meter. Here’s the science: http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/~tak/wong/f20m.pdf

Sure, the CO2 fraction was 2000 ppm half a billion years ago. But the Sun was a lot cooler then, too. So let’s not use that as a pseudoscientific “proof” that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas. If it’s not, perhaps you can explain why Mercury, which gets three times the solar radiation as Venus, has a cooler surface than Venus. Oh, and by the way, the shortwave (visible) radiation doesn’t have to reach the surface for the greenhouse effect to happen. If it’s absorbed in the atmosphere, that works just as well. The issue is the difference in blackbody temp between the Sun and the planet, which causes the difference in radiated wavelengths. Oh, and by the way II: visible light DOES in fact reach the surface of Venus. If it were not so, the surface would be dark and photography impossible. Soviet Venera probes have photographed the surface many times. The albedo of Venus is about 60%, which means that 40% of the visible light reaching it is absorbed.

Perhaps you can also explain what’s causing the long-term cooling trend in the stratosphere, or the decreasing diurnal temperature range here on Earth. (Hint: if you’re not considering increased greenhouse effect, you’re missing the boat.)

[KeithPickering]

Phil’s Dad wrote:
By the way there is nothing “Scientific” about “Consensus”
Scientific Consensus said the world was flat for a very long time.
Scientific Consensus said the Universe went round the Earth
Scientific Consensus said… (add your own)

Scientific consensus is right nearly all the time. Atomic theory of matter? Newton’s first law? The existence of Neptune? Structure of DNA? All part of scientific consensus. We remember the exceptions because they’re rare. It takes a revolution to overthrow scientific consensus.

[KeithPickering]

ptrubey wrote: Can anyone point me to a paper or post that discusses the expected net energy output of a reactor based on this technology taking into account energy input, X-ray cooling losses, conversion losses, etc. I read many of the papers here a while ago but don’t remember seeing such an analysis.

Since the posted reply contains a no-longer active link, try this one instead: http://www.arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0710/0710.3149.pdf

It’s EL’s zero-dimensional simulation. Should contain most of the answers you’re looking for.

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