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Are MacKay’s numbers for energy released, or [em]usable[/em] energy released? DD produces a lot of energy, but it’s primarily in the form of speeding up neutral particles, i.e., heat. Heat can of course be used to produce [em]usable[/em] energy, electricity, but a lot of it gets tossed out of cooling towers. The practical efficiency of aneutronic reactions like pB11 is greater than might appear when comparing the raw energy released from various reactions.

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Why month-day-year, instead of year-month-day? Is the hope that everything will be wrapped up by the end of December? 🙂

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JimmyT wrote: Even if we eliminate all diseases as a cause of death, we will not have become immortal.

Very true. However, my guess is that once all disease is eliminated and people can [em]potentially[/em] be immortal, the issue of fatal injury will become [em]much[/em] more important.

(Disclaimer: I work for an injury-prevention non-profit…)

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And the cathodes should be able to be rehabilitated, or at least recyclable. The problems as I understand it are with changes to the surface shape of the cathodes, and not any effects on the actual composition of the material. It’s the equivalent to a knife getting nicks on its cutting edge (again, if I understand correctly).

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How do those numbers compare to, say, coal generation?

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Henning wrote:

Cheap power makes a lot of things [em]possible[/em], but that doesn’t make all of them [em]attractive[/em].

Same holds true for colonies on moon and Mars.

Granted, but to paraphrase Kennedy, we don’t colonize there because it is easy, but because it is hard. There are other goals in extra-terrestrial colonization besides just creating additional living space.

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Ivy Matt wrote: I wonder about that “direct conversion” in the title of his proposal.

My guess is that it refers to direct conversion of the fusion reaction to thrust, and not conversion to electricity.

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Brian H wrote: FF is transformative almost beyond conceiving.

Just how much cheaper are you expecting FF to be compared to conventional power generation? More than an order of magnitude? I’ve never seen a good breakdown of the anticipated costs of an FF plant compared to the costs of, say, a conventional coal plant, so I’m unsure of claims of huge cost reductions.

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Breakable wrote: I find your lack of imagination disturbing. Believe me we will be able to colonize EVERYTHING once we have fusion power.

But why would cheap power make Antarctica [em]more[/em] attractive than less remote locales? With cheap power we can, for example, make the US Southwest bloom with desalinated water, and build there far more cheaply than digging in ice, and with none of the drawbacks (such as having to live completely underground, with no ready access to commercial transportation to the rest of the world).

Cheap power makes a lot of things [em]possible[/em], but that doesn’t make all of them [em]attractive[/em].

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But why dig down at Antarctica? Why not use cheap energy to dig down in, say, Manhattan, or LA, or London, or Beijing?

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Why bother? What makes Antarctica an attractive colony location? I would think there are far less remote, more hospitable parts of the world that could be made habitable with cheap energy (e.g., large parts of the US Southwest, large parts of Africa and Asia).

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Joseph Chikva wrote:
500-600MeV protons hit as Iknow beryllium target.
I did not hear any other way for producing pi-mesons.
Rest mass of pi-meson (pion) 140MeV
Then they decay into muons (rest mass about 100MeV).
They need really 5000MeV for creation of each muon.

The alleged breakthrough here is some method for the efficient creation of pions, which presumably is designed to get around the energy problem you outline. However, without any details on this “breakthrough”, it’s impossible to tell how plausible it is. (The lack of detail itself may speak somewhat to the plausibility, however.)

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These folks seem very light on details — their website is a paragon of vagueness.

And again, this is all just to create neutrons to create heat to boil water to turn a turbine to turn a generator. (And presumably produce long-term radioactive equipment in the process.)

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dennisp wrote: Given such low energy costs, oil and methane could be produced from the CO2 in the atmosphere at lower cost than it can be pumped out of the ground.

My guess is that the cost of FF would have to be [em]extremely[/em] low to meet that criterion, although I’d welcome some hard numbers.

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These problems almost always occur with forums. Given my experience running a board, I would strongly encourage not allowing anyone to post who you have not manually vetted. Otherwise, the forums will be swamped with spam.

It sounds like you have found a good compromise, Rezwan, in allowing new accounts to read but not post. That way you don’t lose any real readers, but don’t encourage spammers. I would be very much against requiring any personally identifying information for registration, as the issue of spamming goes both ways, and you don’t want to be collecting unnecessary info that could be used nefariously if your database is compromised. You really are only trying to confirm the legitimacy of the membership request, and those details don’t really do that, unless you are going to manually check every phone number and address you collect. Spammers work on volume, and requiring a direct request for posting privileges takes too much time and effort for almost all spamming operations.

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