[delt0r]

Stop being so lazy and look it up yourself. Or even better. Do the math yourself. Its not a mystery, its not magic and its something i would expect any senior year high school students to be able to work out.

[delt0r]

And because of space charge effects, inductive effects and others, you can’t make them fast with high stand off voltage and high current. Its not like high power vacuum tubes aren’t a thing. They still are and often need very fast closing switches to prevent arcing and permanent damage.

[delt0r]

If you can do a fast opening switch then inductive storage becomes pretty attractive. However fast opening switches just don’t exist. Lots have tried. Diamond switches seems to hold some promise, but haven’t yet delivered. There are a number of reasons fast opening switches are much harder than fast closing switches. For example is it much easier to have a fast breakdown and a increases in charge carriers, but you can’t make a ionized gas recombine and stop conducting without reducing the current to near zero.

As for the kickstarter. Well it looks like rubbish. No details, and sounds like pie in the sky. Also it sounds like the person doesn’t know what they are doing. I got personally spammed about it.

[delt0r]

Oh lord. (in Leela voice). No a particle of plutonium or uranium will not give you cancer. Its too small and the dose too low. Oh and you have shit like that in dirt, in dust and especially in rocks. You are just jumping onto the radiation boggy man hype without understanding yourself.

Sv is a measure of *absorbed* dose. As in active tissue has absorbed the ionizing radiation. Your exposure is calculated taking all that into account! Yes absorbed dose including bio available materials and there respective bio half life. Bio accumulation is not magic, We understand it and can calculate and measure it. The vast majority of radioactivity from spent fuel or a bomb are in the form of elements that don’t bio accumulate much at all and all have quite short half lives.

If this is the level of understanding here… We have no hope.

[delt0r]

I think you don’t understand what i am saying at all. A Sv takes that into account. Neutrons for example give a much higher number since they do more damage. Alpha radiation *outside* the body give you zero does as it does not penetrate the dead skin. All elements have a half life in the body and don’y stay there forever and typically far far less than a half life. I worked around radioactive isotopes. It not inaccurate.

Did you even watch the video I posted?

[delt0r]

Err yes it does. Otherwise you get *nothing* from a banana. Most alpha and some beta emitters give you *zero* does outside the body. Since they lack the energy to penetrate the layers of dead skin.

And no it does not even get close to accumulating permanently. Many of these elements have quite short biological half lives. The best example being Iodine.

[delt0r]

This is also good to show people. I would like to think most people here know this.

[delt0r]

Ok so it seems a bit more reasonable. The 1.1GW is pulsed only for just 1 sec. That seems far less hinky.

Also yea its a fairly good presentation.

[delt0r]

These numbers seem very hinky. 1.1GW thermal output can’t be that cheap. Even the switching equipment will cost a lot more. Just a shielding building is going to set you back all of that to be even remotely compliant. And with that much neutron flux you want them to be compliant.

A 1GW gas power station cost south of 1B. 300M is just not much money. For something of that scale. And no amount of magic can change 1GW no matter how much faith you have.

[delt0r]

The critical parts are *not* proven. You can’t run a Thorium reactor if you can’t breed fast enough and that was *never* even tried. Even in theory you need in situ reprocessing for the very tight neutron economy which was also never tried. So the entirely critical part of any LFTR has never been tried at all and certainly not proven. It may not even work. At all.

[delt0r]

Molten salt reactors are not restricted to Thorium, in fact you get all the same advantages (and disadvantages) with U in such a design. For example reprocessing U cycles give very similar waste.

Indeed molten salt was proposed to fix many of the issues with thorium. But lets be clear. It is *not* proven. A small demo reactor (or 2) was operated, *without* breeding and *without* in situ reprocessing. There was corrosion problems and fixes proposed but not validated. To get to a proper deployment status your talking about 10-20 years full size demo first. And that is a estimate from the industry, you know the people that actually build these things.

Right now there is a lot of blue sky about Thorium that just doesn’t add up to the science.

[delt0r]

Plasmas don’t allow for cooper pairs (not crystal lattice for the “phonons”). So no it can’t happen in a plasma.

[delt0r]

No, it has not been shown to be false. It is hypothesised that with strong magnetic fields there is a mechanism that would suppress bremsstrahlung radiation. It has not been shown that such fields are really present, or that such suppression is happening.

[delt0r]

I missed this thread. Here was a post i made in another:

Indeed interesting. Sunkworks is reputable. But .. hmmm

first some better links.
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/news/press-releases/2014/october/141015ae_lockheed-martin-pursuing-compact-nucelar-fusion.html
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20140301519
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20140301518
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20140301517

Now from the patents, this is a cusp field configuration. Not really that new. However they are trying to recycle the particles that escape from the cusps around the internal magnets. Only the end pole (mirror) losses are present in a first order approximation. So this is a cups/mirror system which is not new. They are high beta, but then so are reverse field configurations. And I can’t see anything that prevents flute instability around the mirrors. Unless they are doing the gas dynamic trap trick (the Russians still do mirror fusion work).

It will be interesting to see how it works. As it stands we have seen nothing to indicate that it has worked better than any other cusp configuration. And that was worse than Tokmaks or whatever.

[delt0r]

Indeed interesting. Sunkworks is reputable. But .. hmmm

first some better links.
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/news/press-releases/2014/october/141015ae_lockheed-martin-pursuing-compact-nucelar-fusion.html
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20140301519
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20140301518
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20140301517

Now from the patents, this is a cusp field configuration. Not really that new. However they are trying to recycle the particles that escape from the cusps around the internal magnets. Only the end pole (mirror) losses are present in a first order approximation. So this is a cups/mirror system which is not new. They are high beta, but then so are reverse field configurations. And I can’t see anything that prevents flute instability around the mirrors. Unless they are doing the gas dynamic trap trick (the Russians still do mirror fusion work).

It will be interesting to see how it works. As it stands we have seen nothing to indicate that it has worked better than any other cusp configuration. And that was worse than Tokmaks or whatever.

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