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I’d be curious to see some solid analysis of the economics of harvesting lunar He3 for use in terrestrial fusion plants. My guess is that the mining, He3 extraction, and transport costs would vastly outweigh any economic advantage of using He3 versus conventional D-T fusion reactions, much less pB11. I’d wager that, if we had such in-space industrial capabilities available, it would make far more sense to construct solar power satellites instead.

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Brian H wrote:
Considering there are many thousands of compounds tested and rejected for each that shows promise, and that full validation trials etc. set back the company by hundreds of millions (much of that due to heavy bureaucracy), there’s some reason for being protective.

Of course there is, but that is the antithesis of open research — in other words, you seem to be agreeing that, in this case, corporations stifle free exchange of research (for perfectly understandable competitive reasons). My point was simply that you can’t expect private companies concerned with profits to be open with research that has competitive implications.

As for free flow of information, compare the frustration, and even lawsuits demanding info, over at talk-Polywell (government funded) vs. the openness of LPP and FFS (privately funded).

I think the critical difference is that the Polywell research is funded by the military. I certainly would not expect that all military research would be presented openly.

And, to be honest, while I am personally delighted that LPP has made so much information freely available, if it were a regular publicly-held company and I were a stockholder, I’d be pretty appalled at the amount of disclosure and the possible competitive advantage that such might give to other, better funded competitors.

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But theoretical unity should be easier to demonstrate with He3, or even deuterium, right? The FF device isn’t designed to extract useful energy out of these reactions, but it should be able to show theoretical over-unity with these fuels at much lower temperatures than pB11. From a funding/publicity perspective, is there any value in demonstrating over-unity with these fuels before going to pB11, or would those just be distractions?

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The Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes a number of very well-respected open-content journals, although their work is all in biological sciences. PLoS is one of the leaders in the movement to open-source research. And the venerable arXiv.org pre-print archive has been around for over two decades, offering pre-prints of articles primarily in physics, math, and computer science.

Journals are definitely a barrier to free access to research findings, but the academic community is rapidly questioning why, in the age of the Internet, they are still giving publishers their work for free and letting them make money from it.

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Aeronaut wrote: If I’m helping fund that science, why are universities so uptight about their intellectual property rights, and why do SpringerNet, IEEE, and IOP want $30 per article?

The problem with article costs is the private publishers, and not the government. The open access publishing movement has not come from private companies, but primarily from university researchers.

I think if their really is any flow of information between scientists, it’s informal or the result of some of them changing jobs. Hopefully I’m misunderstanding this…

Journals are where a lot of the free flow of information happens. If researchers were paid for discoveries by purely private companies, there wouldn’t be such journals period, as there is no incentive for private companies to share proprietary information. It is only because universities traditionally have been open with research, and uninterested in asserting control over findings, that we have such a tradition of open discussion of research results. Of course, as you note that tradition is changing as universities realize they can patent and make money off of research findings….

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And we all know how sterling the research done by private pharmaceutical companies is.

And you can be damn sure that the only reason we have any free flow of information among scientists is because their research is paid for publicly — no private companies would want their material spread to competitors.

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The problem with pure BEV isn’t the cost of electricity, it is the charging time and range. While cheap power will always make things better, it is not the main hurdle to getting practical BEVs.

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Hyperion’s technology is licensed from Los Alamos National Laboratory. I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that LANL technology is snake oil.

Regarding the quote from Inc. magazine, every new nuclear technology faces daunting regulatory hurdles, including DPF fusion, and in many of the envisioned use-cases for Hyperion (foreign countries, non-US military bases), regulation is not as much of an issue. Every company faces issues of capital when building new nuclear designs. Hyperion isn’t designed to be “efficient”, but to be simple, “right-sized”, and portable. And being a tiny start-up is no black mark, again as DPF proponents should realize.

It looks like the recent DARPA RFP for a 5-10MW portable nuclear reactor is pretty much targeted at Hyperion. While the US military is certainly not immune to snake oil, it looks to me as if this is a vote of confidence for this general type of technology.

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What makes you believe military bases are exempt from such licensing?

Would bases on foreign soil be subject to NRC regulation? The most obvious use-case for these kind of self-contained, transportable reactors are for installations where there is no reliable grid. This is not a problem for US bases, but for those in war zones, power is a major concern (especially given the cost of transporting fuel).

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I don’t see LENR ever being a serious challenger for grid power, because as the label says, it’s “low energy” — the power density just isn’t terribly impressive. You’re not going to drive a turbine generator with LENR reactions; at best you might run your home water heater off it.

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It would also be helpful to non-physics newbies to have a very brief explanation of what the instruments are and why they will be used (i.e., what they measure).

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Here is my two cents:

In my opinion, the home page is WAY too busy. The main horizontal menu needs to be more hierarchical, as many of the current menu items could be grouped under a single menu item (“What is focus fusion?”, or “About focus fusion”). Having TWO right sidebars makes thing extremely cluttered, and I’d suggest merging them. The “far” right sidebar has a lot of stuff that seems unnecessary on the main page (I’d put the links under the “What is focus fusion?” menu item, dump the Intrade, Baby has a Name, and Focus Fusion is Not: sections (the latter could again go under the “What is focus fusion?” menu), and move the Apparel section to a menu item (perhaps collapse it with the Donate section and put both under a menu item like “Support”). The “near” right sidebar content should be put into a simplified single right sidebar.

The left sidebar is currently almost completely unused, and probably isn’t actually needed (getting rid of it and merging the right sidebars would clean up the design considerably).

The whole page does not seem designed for newcomers — the blog format suggests that it is far more for regular visitors. If you want something that is more focused on newbies, I’d suggest shrinking down the blog bit so that by default it only shows the latest posting, and put above it a static section containing the most central, most important bits for newcomers (perhaps extracted from the “What is focus fusion?” section).

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The forums are fine (although the template-y look of the design could be freshened up). However, I find the actual website to be extremely “busy” visually, with way too much stuff on the main page. There is no clear path or (ironically) “focus” for the design, and so I find it a bit bewildering as a visitor. If a redesign is contemplated, I think the first place to start (as always with these kind of projects) is determining what the purpose of the site is, and what are the main messages to be conveyed. Once you’ve got those, they can help guide the design process.

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Thanks for the update — I was wondering about the sudden silence regarding progress.

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The blog Idaho Samizdat has an update on four next-generation small fission reactors (as does NextBigFuture). This looks like a pretty active area currently, although I think it is quite uncertain when any of these will be licensed by the NRC. I suppose that isn’t necessarily a show-stopper, however, if a company targets markets in the developing world and/or venues that are exempt from such licensing (such as military bases).

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