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vansig wrote:

are you proposing heating via electric resistance? I think we just invented the flying toaster! 🙂

No. A 5MW Focus fusion generator, operating at 50% efficiency, will generate 5MW heat. Use that in your “jet” engine.
If FF gets too efficient I think we can add microwave heating with oxygen or nitrogen resonant frequency.

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dennisp wrote: Hmph. Ok maybe I should retract my “too bulky” comment.

How would the jet work? Propeller plane is easy, just electric motors, but we’ve got no burning fuel to inject into a jet engine.

Just another engineering problem. Would be interesting if some reaction-less drive would come online
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive

still even if not, then:
1) propellers,
2) turbines,
3) or just heating the air can be substituted as a reactive drive

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Just an idea how the shielding requirements can be reduced depending on the amount of radiation and safety requirements.
Basically if the reactors would be operated in flight only, special airports would be used and all other planes would be equipped with x-ray detectors then probably only the passenger side could be shielded.
Otherwise the shielding can be still reduced more than normal if the passengers and reactors are separated by wingspan.
Edit. Drawing:
http://imgur.com/vUx5D
It was a hell to paint it with mac trackpad

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I guess the amount of resources available after FF will make a lot of fictional dreams come true, such as undersea cities, flying castles, cosmic ships…
Hopefully this wont enable another WW. Still I guess a WW can start in any case – high resource or low resource – does not matter.

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vansig wrote:
Fuels can be made:
first, electrolysis splits water: 2 H2O -> 2 H2 + O2; then heat CO2 with the hydrogen, in absence of oxygen, to get a variety of simple and complex hydrocarbons.

Once it becomes cheaper to do this, than to mine fossil fuels, the carbon cycle closes.

Exactly.
This is just one simple example.
EVERYTHING IS ENERGY!
Food, water, oxygen, materials, work, though (processing power), travel, housing, war … etc.

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Phil’s Dad wrote: Most of it’s in limestone Mr B.

How much exactly is most? I guess all the scientists did not know that most of it is in limestone and there is no danger of GW?
Actually they did check that and if you want to see where it actually went you can do some calculations yourself (I did).
And it is enough to check the recoverable coal to see that our friend is not right on this:

If every gram of known coal, oil, and natural gas were burned they would add about 1/3 to the current CO2 content of the atmosphere…

Still probably this thread will get closed because it went off track. I wish I got a ban as well so I can finally have some rest from all the GW debate.

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Brian H wrote:
I think if you look at the options (other than modular nuclear), from cradle to grave, and include all the associated “backup” costs (the sun/wind variable sources must have quick-response 100% conventional backup available, because the chance of drop-off to very low, even zero, output for even brief periods is intolerable), plus the subsidies, the EROI for any plausible improved versions still are terrible.

There are solutions to backup issue without sacrificing much EROI.
1)Combining CS with existing (or new) gas plants to preheat or boil water when sun is shinning and turning up the gas when it is not should be probably done with minor engineering and cost investments. And the cost is minimal because most of the infrastructure is shared,
2)Hydro is being used as storage capacity for a long time.
3)Smart grid or just simple planning (adjusting demand side, instead of supply) should soften some issues.
4)New generation of renewable’s are going to have cheap inherited storage, that is better than baseload – “dispatchable generation”:
Molten salt
http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2009/04/why_csp_should_not_try_to_be_coal.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night
Underwater compressed air
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUhlsV32iHk

Also how do you include the cost of lives, health and businesses lost in the humanitarian and ecological disasters?

Brian H wrote:
The arguments against using every bit of fossil fuel available before resorting to hyper-expensive renewables are nonsense, of course. If every gram of known coal, oil, and natural gas were burned they would add about 1/3 to the current CO2 content of the atmosphere, with a hypothetical maximum temperature impact of a degree or so over the course of a century.

The only rational course is to make efficient use of hydrocarbon fuels until FF or some equivalent is available, and then, as Eric indicates, use the hydrocarbon supplies as feedstock for useful stuff (organic molecules of all sorts).

That area is off-limits.
Please dont go there, especially with incorrect information and bias.
Just look at the historical chart how much co2 we had historically in the atmosphere and where it is now. Magic isn’t it?

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I think ITER’s purpose is to learn more about plasma dynamics, although I am not an expert.

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Tulse wrote:

There sure are going to be a lot of embarrassed “experts” & “leaders” if FF delivers as promised.

That’s true in general — just think of the poor folks who demanded billions for ITER and NIF!

Truly, if FF delivers, it will be a revolution.
From scientific point of view ITER and NIF are still going to make sense. The energy part of them is probably just to sell the science part to illiterate bureaucrats.

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Brian H wrote: The entire industry is “gamed”, since none of it has current or prospective economic justification. …

The only way this could be true if the EROI for renewable was less than 1, which it is not (except for some bio-fuel).
There might be better investments for now, until there is no serious energy crisis, but the subsidies are changing that.

Yes EROI for renewable in most situations is much lower than fossils, Coal or Nuclear,
but their EROI is decreasing with not much perspective.

Where renewable EROI can only go up in evolutionary (bigger, more, simpler, efficient, cheaper)
and revolutionary (intrinsic storage, high altitude wind, orbiting pv) ways.

So unless FF or some revolutionary nuclear comes online, it might be the only energy option.

Even after FF comes online it might be the cheapest option for some time,
considering that most materials, transportation and production prices are based on energy.

So basically the production costs for renewable generator factories will drop and profits will have to be increased
by decreasing price and increasing sales volume.

Basically what I expect FF to achieve is to make energy a non issue.
You might be running a diesel generator at home,
but the diesel will come from a factory that produces it by using a FF generator and co2 from air.
Alternatively you can generate energy from wind, solar or modular nuclear which will be comparably cheap as using FF (or other) grid electricity.

The entities who will have the most pain are going to be energy providers who bough energy production capacity by using loans,
because energy prices will drop and there will be no way to repay the loan. So they will probably go bankrupt,
but somebody else is going to acquire their capacity for fraction of the cost and probably just keep running it.

So basically yes, I would agree that installing more renewable capacity now does not make much sense if you thinking FF has good chances of success,
but there are always risks in business, so you can still build the installations and short energy futures at the same time to hedge your risk.

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Would be nice to have a way of simulating all kinds of reactions and find the optimum fuel mix within specific parameters.
It is probably very hard to make a full DPF simulation?
What about 0-dimensional with only a few atoms of each fuel (hundreds or thousands)?
Would it be a lot of work to develop and computationally intensive calculation to make this type of simulation
and run a genetic (or just exhaustive) algorithm on all the atoms/ions/isotopes in the table
and finding out the best parameters for ignition and output?
I believe it would be pretty easy to make this run simulation on distributed network in case its computationally intensive, but does no require supercomputer.

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There are some challenges involved in subsidizing renewable technology.
If installations are subsidized, then they can be build cheap/low quality and in non-competitive areas.
If energy price is subsidized then energy from non-renewable sources can be repackaged as renewable to game the system.
Ending fossil fuel subsidies, creating a carbon tax (or other system) and letting the market adjust itself would probably slow down the economy.

Still I wonder on what scale is the system being gamed, I would expect it to be a pretty modest amount as most of the people should be fair and others would not want to get caught.
Also the subsidies are being reduced already, because they did their job of starting up this sector:
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/7865/germany-reduces-solar-subsidy/

Of course in case FF comes online I will know which sector to short in the first place.

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Bioremediation

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vansig wrote: trading power across long distances could work if transmission losses are minimized.

I learned today that, because Ontario’s nuclear generators need to run continuously, Quebec buys off-peak power from Ontario at a substantial discount, stores the energy by pumping water, and then sells power back to Ontario at 4x the rate to cover peak usage.

Interesting fact.

There are some ways to minimize the losses for now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hvdc
Later maybe superconductivity will get affordable.
And even for ac grid they don’t seem very high:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses
Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 and 6.5% in 2007

Some discussion of Nuclear vs Renewable’s
http://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html

Still if FF gets done ~5 years probably most solar will be irrelevant, except for some people who wont be able to afford a fusion generator (Africa?).

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Any calculations that can be made are currently pretty rough IMHO.
The cost of any technology goes down with time, where the efficiency goes up.
This should be true for PV, CS, transmission, storage costs.
Also the economies of scale can reduce the price a lot.

How much exactly storage, transmission, area or efficiency is required I don’t think is currently clear,
especially when transmission/storage can be interchangeable in some situations as well as efficiency/area.
Maybe for now a maximum cost limit can be calculated, for a single home-based installation in this case I would agree to about ~$5-8 usd/watt (payback 15-30 years),
but it should get better with new technologies (i am betting on roll-to-roll manufacturing for everything – from PV (now) to batteries (later) to control electronics (much later)).
Of course it makes sense for well insolated areas such as Africa, Middle East, Australia, southern USA.

Still probably the best costs can be seen after the implementation stage (for any project).

Also I don’t see a problem for Europe to get most energy from Africa-Middle east, because there would be some competition by energy providers,
home sources (Europe based PV vs Africa based CS), as well as it could make poorer countries richer.

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