[Tulse]

Their device is powered by gullibility, which is a seemingly infinite resource.

[Tulse]

I’m guessing that when there’s news, we’ll be told. LPP has been very open about their research. Patience is a virtue.

[Tulse]

AaronB wrote: Hopefully you all realize that you are paving the way for fusion implementation. Kind of cool when you think about it.

Although I don’t know how much I’m helping personally, I am delighted at the transparency of the FF team, and really feel privileged to watch first hand the development of what may be a hugely transformative technology. As someone else said once, it’s as if the Wright Brothers had a blog.

[Tulse]

Aeronaut wrote: if you take an empty factory (doesn’t have to be over 50,000 sq ft) and find a way to locally fund anywhere from 20 to 100 or more clean energy jobs using this building as a charter school/ research center, you will get a LOT of free local TV news coverage to kick off the local debate.

But be aware that, without careful planning and PR, the debate might start with “Company puts nuclear reactor using toxic fuel in local building.”

[Tulse]

The above presumes that the primary use of FF devices will be for non-grid power, generated directly at the site of consumption. Is that the most likely starting point for commercialize FF, or will instead we see it replace small scale generation stations? I wonder if industry is willing to take a leap into an unproved electrical generation technology and go off-grid — I think that, by contrast, power companies would be more familiar with the basics of generation, and be ready to swap out old tech for FF.

[Tulse]

rashidas wrote: Could this give Focus Fusion a run for its money?

Making electricity by boiling water to run a steam turbine is inherently inefficient and capital-intensive. Doing so with highly radioactive fuel that produces highly radioactive waste is not only inefficient and (even more) capital-intensive, but risky.

There is no way such technology could compete with successful Focus Fusion.

[Tulse]

Fantastic stuff! As someone else said, it’s as if the Wright Brothers had a podcast. Hugely exciting.

[Tulse]

Brian H wrote:
Well, a steady-state reactor requires continuous power input for magnets, etc., which pulsed does not.

But a pulsed device does require power input for each pulse — surely it is reasonable to define Q as simply the ratio of the amount of power produced by a fusion reaction to the amount of power required to produce the reaction. That definition is agnostic as to whether the reaction is steady state or pulsed. At the very least, we can integrate over a period of time for pulsed devices to make such issues irrelevant.

And I think it is a red herring to factor in the energy fed back into the FF device, since a steady-state device over unity could also feed its own energy back into maintaining the plasma, just not as directly. (And there is no reason in principle why the FF capacitors have to be charged directly from the device itself — that is just the potentially most efficient way to do so.)

[Tulse]

Brian H wrote: My understanding is that since FF powers itself once initiated, the Q would be infinite.

Presumably all above-breakeven fusion devices would be able to power themselves, and thus under that criterion have infinite Q. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding something here.

[Tulse]

Isn’t Q more generally the ratio of power out vs. power required to run the reaction? That presumably would apply to transient fusion as well as steady state.

[Tulse]

Very nice! This is a great start! A bit of explanatory text or voiceover and it will really get the idea across.

If you will permit one small nitpick, it appears that the plasma casts shadows on the “ground”.

[Tulse]

I’d be careful about touting lack of toxins — decaborane is poisonous. It should be relatively easy to handle such a substance in a standard industrial setup like a running FF reactor, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t toxicity concerns.

[Tulse]

KeithPickering wrote: Looks like hokum to me. The fuel collapses gravitationally? And the electrical repulsion, which is 10^36 times stronger than gravity, is overcome … how, precisely?

Well. the sun does it that way 🙂

[Tulse]

Augustine wrote: Think of it this way, how many years until ITER shows a demonstration of net energy? Decades?

Like all Big Fusion projects, twenty years. It’s always twenty years.

[Tulse]

Aeronaut wrote: repeatably producing more energy than the cap bank supplied (not contained at the beginning) just might count for the historic first of over-unity operation

Exactly — repeatably demonstrating over-unity fusion energy would be truly earth-shattering news, an achievement well beyond what decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of conventional fusion research has produced. I would certainly hope that LPP wouldn’t use a monthly new update to announce such a thing.

Those closer to the project may correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like we’re still very much in the “shakedown” phase of the research project, basically getting to the point where the equipment functions reliably. It’s only after the gear is solid and stable that things can progress to the more interesting work (and presumably, with reliable equipment, that progress can be very rapid as one tweaks variables).

[Author]

Posts