[Warwick]

Hi Andrew,
I do not know the US system well but I think that to do a PhD, the grant award linked above is not your best port of call. It is almost guaranteed that they will only award it to a PI with years of postdoctoral experience (in all probability, if we’re honest, someone who is already known to a decision-maker). Those awards are not, I think, intended to fund PhD fellowships.

Depending on which year you are in now, I suggest you have a look e.g. at this:
http://scgf.orau.gov/
It is closed for this year but I’m not sure if you were intending to start a PhD this fall or not.

See also
http://www.profellow.com/fellowships/how-to-fully-fund-your-phd/
http://www.hertzfoundation.org/dx/fellowships/eligibility.aspx

There must be many similar resources. Also maybe consider studying in a country where it is unusual for PhD students to pay to study e.g. with
http://www.fulbright.org.uk/fulbright-awards/exchanges-to-the-uk/postgraduates
Again they are looking for 2014-15 now. Hope you can find what you are looking for.

[Warwick]

This may be an ignorant question, Andrew, but which of the 5 headings are you intending that this should relate to?

[Warwick]

Congratulations James! Are you intending to do a postdoc next?

Are you still near Cov? (reply as pm)

Warwick

[Warwick]

ikanreed wrote: How do you validate the simulation?

It’s nice to know that we’re working on simulating plasmas better, but how can you validate that the simulation was programmed correctly? As a software developer myself, I know that every piece of code has at least a few bugs. Is there some kind of well known test-case to compare against?

The code for the next iteration will be open source so there will be some scope for interested people to try and spot mistakes for themselves.

[Warwick]

jamesr wrote: Just watching the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg3KU8pkoEc. I see the shock issues are still there to some degree. Do you not have any shock viscosity term? I thought this would be essential, unless you go to a more involved (but much better physically) Godunov type scheme with an iterative Riemann solver.

It would also be interesting to see in addition to the density & temperature(s) evolution, the pressure, magnetic pressure and total pressure evolution (and plasma beta), as there are stages where across the shock it switches from high temperature/low density to low temp/higher density suggesting the shock in pressure is much weaker. This is also, I seem to remember, why a lot of codes use density and ion/electron pressure as their fundamental variables or even density and total energy, rather than density & temperatures.

I do not know what exactly you mean by a shock viscosity term. The approach here is simply Backward Euler, applied to a spatially discretised scheme that is not exactly finite volume, but has a finite volume sort of feel to it. The approach presently being investigated for 2D is different.

The red curve on the bottom left plot is thermal pressure.

[Warwick]

jamesr wrote:

The link to the PDF is fixed now, sorry for the hang up.

I realise the paper is still work-in-progress, and the model as a whole seems a pretty solid 1D scheme. But one thing struck me, you seem to be assuming the ions are singly charged, so the quasi-neutrality condition is simply n = n_e = n_i, and subsequently the current is J_z=qn(v_e – v_i). Would it not be easier to set the ion species charge as q=Ze, so
n=n_e = Zn_i and J_z=en(v_e – Zv_i). The step up from a deuterium plasma to one with a higher Z_effective is then carried through in all the equations.

You can say these simulations are for deuterium so Z=1, but having it explicitly in the equations always seems clearer to me.

You make a valid point, but the model changes to do p-B11 will actually have to be a lot more complicated. We are now contemplating a model with many different species (still in context of deuterium) which clearly would be different with decaborane.

[Warwick]

vansig wrote:

At least LPP don’t have to fear for their lives for the time being, until the big boys feel threatened. (Maybe it’s a good thing there’s little coverage!)

‘Quiet’ black helicopter hovering over your current location? 😉

i guess you’re not a somebody until you have a predator drone after you.

🙂

I was thinking more along the lines of corporate espionage by blue chips. They may have taken over government to the point of being handed billions in corporate welfare, but commandeering military assassination squads sounds improbable. More likely an ex-con or ex-merc with no idea whom they are really working for and not asking too many questions. If I was about to threaten the likes of RWE or PG&E, I’d be hiring that security firm with the navy seals.

[Warwick]

AaronB wrote: It astounds me that we have received so little coverage in the media.

That is because there are a lot of dodgy things such as e-cat, and without sufficient knowledge, media judgements may be based on ‘does it sound too good?’. Besides, they don’t get much advantage from covering something ahead of time, unfortunately all they want is to pip someone else to it at the last minute.

tcg wrote: Their interest in nuclear fission was understandable if slightly suspicious because they would soon need some an alternate means to generate electricity. Rezwan’s presentation of their fusion effort brings a new angle to this discussion. If they want electricity and will forgo bombs, then they may be heading in the right direction. A DPF installation cannot present the same threat to nearby, nervous neighbors (name starts with an “I”) that a fission installation could.

Their interest in nuclear fission is understandable because their neighbour got invaded less than a decade ago, despite posing no obvious threat to any other country, and it is common knowledge that they in Iran were slated to be next. Countries with nukes don’t usually get invaded, think North Korea. Notwithstanding Ahmedinajad’s unpleasant rhetoric, or the anti-Semitic/nationalistic politics that he uses to keep the masses on side against all those democracy-craving liberal middle classes, the bona fide situation is that the US (with the UK) has given the Iranian govt obvious reasons to want to be nuclear.

And of course fission generation has always been a superficial cover for getting nukes. But Thatcher leaned on that at a time when North Sea oil was massively expanding and the UK was massively invested in coal production, so I don’t think it’s an argument that has to depend a lot on the situation.

Rezwan wrote: Thanks to Aaron for the note:

Well, I knew my homeboys had a DPF, but it looks like they’re flat out going for fusion! Rock on Iran:

رييس پژوهشكدهي فيزيك پلاسما و گداخت هستهيي با اشاره به ابلاغ طرح ملي گداخت هستهيي گفت: در چند ماه گذشته تحقيقات در پژوهشكده شتاب بيشتري گرفته به نحوي كه اخيرا موفق به ساخت دو نمونهي ايراني دستگاه هاي گداخت هسته يي پلاسماي كانوني به روش مدر و فيليپوف و همچنين دستگاه گداخت هستهيي به روش محصورسازي الكترواستاتيكي اينرسي شدهايم.

Which means, of course:

“The head of the plasma physics and nuclear fusion research institute, with reference to the national nuclear fusion plan said: In the past few months research at the institute has accelerated in such a fashion that we were recently able to build two iranian plasma focus nuclear fusion devices per the method of Mather and Filipov and likewise a nuclear fusion device per the method of inertial electrostatic confinement. “

…

“Iranic” if they get fusion first : )

Yes, irony indeed. Let’s hope no one bumps off the people doing it. At least LPP don’t have to fear for their lives for the time being, until the big boys feel threatened. (Maybe it’s a good thing there’s little coverage!)

[Warwick]

I know nothing about this, but graphene?

[Warwick]

zapkitty wrote:

The article extrapolates to 10^17 W in 400 years, 10^18 W in 500 years.

Yes, any arbitrarily large number can be too big to deal with 🙂

I was speaking of a hypothetical point where FF use grew enough to have an appreciable input on global temperatures… a concept which is pure SF at this time but solutions still seem quite possible.

The article speaks of something far beyond that and gets there through extrapolations I myself find unlikely. I can play the game and handwave something clever but that’s all it would be… Perhaps the borg of that era will use the oceans as part of a vast liquid droplet radiator system with gigantic water cannons shooting streams of seawater into the exosphere and catching the droplets as they fall… 🙂

According to you, an appreciable impact would be 10^17 to 10^18 W. Are there reasons why FF could not produce this? So why is it pure SF?
Projecting 400 years into the future is too far for reliable predictions, but then, so is 400 days to some extent. And he makes quite conservative assumptions, it could be 250-300 years before you’d see some problems.
Do your water cannons take less energy to power than the increase in radiation they achieve?
I think probably radiation is a red herring and you’d instead need some kind of clever way to recycle some proportion of the heat being created back into other forms of energy.

[Warwick]

zapkitty wrote:

… But what if sufficiently abundant energy caused heat to be produced on earth faster than it could radiate off, shifting the overall temperature in and of itself? It’s not enough to say that greenhouse-gas-related climate change is mitigated…

But you are actually speaking of two different things and they have two different solutions. The Earth is actually a big spherical radiator that easily handles thermal inputs in the 122 petawatt range. This is closely balanced by solar input… more or less… and the planet stays habitable for us.

The article extrapolates to 10^17 W in 400 years, 10^18 W in 500 years.

Against that you have that heat radiation is a nonlinear increasing function of temperature.

I guess if you could localise the energy use, you could indeed put up towers into the atmosphere to conduct the heat upwards, but I’m not sure if that would work.

[Warwick]

zapkitty wrote:

The problem is that once you start living off aeroculture or aquaculture food, your population will develop significant deficiencies. You need mineral soil for … minerals, amongst other things. Magnesium, calcium, there’s a reason they’re called alkaline earth metals. And once you think of adding something to the water, there will probably be something else you haven’t thought of.

Sorry, but that’s just not true. Hydro- and aeroponics systems use tailored mineral solutions to start out with. What deficiencies are you speaking of?

Some organic farming enthusiasts and lobbyists tend to treat ‘ponics as a competitor and a few occasionally go a bit overboard. Factoids get into the wild that have no relationship with what actually goes on in a ‘ponics farm.

… and yeah, a hobby when I was younger 🙂

Well I guess if you get the basics right then it might be feasible; soil itself obviously varies in mineral content and often has deficiencies. But I’m sceptical that nutritional science is actually advanced enough for us to predict every mineral that is needed.

In your hobby experience, I imagine you found that the water gradually becomes clogged with algae? I’ve never grown anything in water without that happening eventually. How do you plan to then dispose of the water, given that it’s still full of Miracle Gro?

[Warwick]

I think the point about earth overheating is the one in that article that has the shortest timescale and therefore the most pertinent. As zapkitty points out, population stabilisation should help to stabilise energy consumption. But what if sufficiently abundant energy caused heat to be produced on earth faster than it could radiate off, shifting the overall temperature in and of itself? It’s not enough to say that greenhouse-gas-related climate change is mitigated; you can still overheat. We would need some way of either, on a massive scale, converting heat back into another form of energy, or some way of increasing the rate of heat transfer away from earth.

[Warwick]

… have been reading about window farming and ran across the following link:

dutch-plantlab-revolutionizes-farming

It seems like the major inputs for this type of farming would be: energy and water—using FF and desalination, both are cheap.

Now, it’s also true that FF would transform traditional farming—farming is very energy intensive—so why switch to … let’s call it “warehouse farming”?

Well there are a few reasons:
1) vegetables that don’t have to be designed with a long shelf life just taste better.
2) world population is expanding—many places already don’t have enough farrm land / proper climate and must import food
3) depletion of top soil at existing farms
4) the world is eating up pristine forest for farm land, that’s a terrible trade off
5) the run-offs from traditional farming are creating vast dead zones in the oceans

The problem is that once you start living off aeroculture or aquaculture food, your population will develop significant deficiencies. You need mineral soil for … minerals, amongst other things. Magnesium, calcium, there’s a reason they’re called alkaline earth metals. And once you think of adding something to the water, there will probably be something else you haven’t thought of.

1) with more energy, transport the vegetables around more frequently and you don’t need the long shelf life. (Or irradiation)

3) is caused by cutting down trees, very unfortunate and short-sighted practice by farmers, which re-regulation needs to prevent. Nothing a private individual can do about that, it’s a political issue. Cutting the trees also causes podsolisation which causes earthworms to die off, destroying soil fertility. Leading to the need for more chemicals…
The only way, outside of direct regulations, that this is going to be changed, is if there were a widespread return to small-scale high-quality agriculture with less emphasis on spatial economies of scale.

4) Yes, it truly is terrible but hopefully kicking biofuels in the bin should make a big difference.

5) Organic arable farming doesn’t create these runoffs. Again largely a political issue, especially since animal farming is being heavily subsidised by the taxpayer in many places, and this includes factory farms which are amongst the worst polluters.
http://www.pcrm.org/media/news/usdas-new-myplate-icon-at-odds-with-federal
Factory farming, in turn, means that there is then less food to go around for humans, because it takes a lot more arable land to feed up an animal. Traditional pastoral farming was exactly that – pastures on marginal land, not having a big impact on the human food supply.

Of course, the person that said you get 40% less yield from organic rather than chemical arable farming is right, the yield is somewhat less, as anyone knows who has tried both ways. In the short term (until organic gets going properly) the difference can be even greater. But globally there isn’t a shortage of arable land just to feed humans – it’s biofuels and factory farms that we can’t afford.

2) is the rub – nothing wrong in principle with importing food if you have something to export. Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen wrote extensively about how shortage of funds, rather than shortage of food, is the real reason for food poverty. Can focus fusion impact the distribution of wealth between countries? How much can it impact it?

[Warwick]

Warwick wrote:

A more apt comparison might be that going all “renewable” will require vast changes in the infrastructure of society and too many ordinary people will be forgotten or swept aside in the struggle to make that change happen. Fusion will make that change both easier and more egalitarian. Fusion will help renewables.

The key here being that to many people “renewable” has become a religion… to the point where they try to fit things into that category that aren’t actually renewable and will respond emotionally to anything they regard as a threat to their concept of what is renewable. And I’ve learned by experience that all too many regard any fusion funding at all as a threat to renewables.

It takes some time to explain to them the irony… that this is what the energy oligarchs [em]want[/em] them to think.

I think the general attitude you get from FoE and co is that “fusion … unproven …. better invest in wind/solar/wave … now, now”. Talking to people in the UK Green party I have usually had “fusion … but it’s always 30 years away … better invest in [my favoured technology of choice] … blah blah”. (Although those people were a fairly rightwing fringe and maybe not representative.)

I wonder what Prince Charles thinks about fusion.

[Author]

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