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Brian H wrote: E.g.: a recent remark posted somewhere I was outlining FF was along the lines of listing all the high multiples of temperature etc. that pB11 fusion had to achieve, and the comment that it was dreaming to try and master it before “garden variety” conventional fusion.

One response to that: a dream that costs four to six orders of magnitude less to research than has been spent on “garden variety” fusion is a good gamble.

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Thanks for the big info-dump, Rezwan — it’s great to be kept up to date, even if most of what is going on right now is more prep work than actual experimentation.

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Aeronaut wrote: And apparently with none of the original investors ponying up further capital.

I must have missed this in the original report — where is this info?

I agree with vansig, though, that the confidence that investors show through multiple rounds of capital is telling.

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vansig wrote: would the oxygen or the sodium in borax create problems in the plasmoid?

I would presume that reactions with those elements would not be aneutronic.

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Tri-Alpha Energy receives $50 million in funding. Given their previous round of VC funding, this puts the whole project close to $100 million so far, without any publicly reported results.

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zapkitty wrote: An FF transport would not even be as fast as a 747… mach 0.72 as opposed to mach 0.85… but the transport gets the chips to ITER before any other commercial carrier could because it does not stop. Does not refuel.

That’s a very good point — for long-haul flights the time saved avoiding landing for refueling could be significant.

Does not have to transfer the package to another aircraft.

And that’s an especially interesting point — FF might make it economical to fly cargo with smaller planes more directly to smaller airports, avoiding stopovers and the mess of larger airports, and the need to use long-distance ground transport.

So here’s the question: how small can a plane be and still use an FF powerplant? Does it have to be large passenger-jet sized, or could one make a smaller cargo plane using FF?

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Aeronaut wrote:
Quite right, Tulse. We have our own Easy Button.

Exactly!

And Rezwan, it really should be big and red.

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Could we get a shot of the switch for the gallery? I’m guessing I’m not the only one who thinks that would be cool.

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Aeronaut wrote: They seem to like polywell for its scalability.

I’d think the modularity of FF would have an advantage over polywell — with FF, one has scalability in effect “on the fly”. With polywell, the scalability results in each individual reactor being a specific size, and having to be constructed at that size, while with FF, one can produce identical small units and gang them together. (That also reduces problems of maintenance and even combat survivability — a problem with one or a few FF units doesn’t mean all power is lost.)

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Aeronaut wrote: The US Navy is already backing Polywell, which may actually be better suited for their needs.

How so? I presume that, although the Navy may be funding EMC2 currently, they will take whatever fusion solution they can get. And Polywell (theoretically) works best at large sizes, while the Navy does have smaller craft it may want powered. Plus, FF runs off huge capacitors, which would also be handy for dumping power into the railguns the Navy is planning.

I’d also guess that, regardless of current funding, if one of the major alt.fusion frontrunners succeed, there may not be much room in the market for further research on a different unproven approach. I think “first-to-market” advantage here is going to be huge, since any aneutronic solution will be vastly better than what currently exists, and any additional aneutronic solution will be only a marginal relative improvement.

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The earliest adopters of successful FF will likely be the military, as they have a lot of infrastructure in un- and under-developed locations (and which are under less stringent regulatory oversight) that need inexpensive and easily transportable power generation. FF would also be a huge boon to the electrification of military assets in general, such as ships (which are pressing for electric solutions both for propulsion and weapons such as railguns and lasers).

My guess is that a basic FF system could fit in a standard shipping container or two. With something that transportable, actual price becomes less of an issue.

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belbear wrote: The conventional approach for fusion-powered flight is to use a fusion-manufactured fuel like liquid H2, But apart from the CO2 issue and fuel cost, little would change.
So I like more the idea of a direct-fusion powered aircraft. That would revolutionize commercial flight as much as the transition from props to jets did.

I’m not convinced the economics and engineering involving in putting FF directly on planes makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of numbers tossed around here, but I’m doubtful that any of them indicate it is better to fly directly with FF rather than using it as a fuel source. Anyone have a convincing analysis (or have I missed a convincing analysis already presented)?

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dennisp wrote: There’s nothing else remotely that cheap.

Is there a good source for solid cost estimates of FF? I’ve seen some general statements made about being one-tenth to one-hundredth the cost of current electricity, but I don’t know what’s behind those figures.

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I’m not sure that “works at small scales” is all that necessary — distributed power generation has some advantages, but certainly isn’t necessary to achieve the scenario you lay out.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think that of all the possibilities currently at play or under research, FF seems by far the most attractive. But subsets of its attractive features are also possessed by other power sources.

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The scenario you lay out is attractive, but it really has little to do with FF, since it could also be realized with any sufficiently power-dense renewable power source. For example, you could replace FF in your scenario with fission plants powered by seawater-extracted uranium, and little would need to be changed. Ditto for a solar/tidal/wave/wind/geothermal/OTEC-powered community. Ditto for a community powered by solar-power-satellites.

While FF is hugely interesting, it isn’t ultimately magic — it’s just a potentially somewhat cheaper source of electricity and heat.

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