[dennisp]

I’ve developed a pretty good lead on votes, with a lot of help from thorium supporters. Not so much that the competition couldn’t overtake me. Voting continues until Tuesday…

[dennisp]

Well I’ve made finalist, and along the way expanded the fusion section a little. Here’s the proposal:
http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/5/planId/15204

Out of five National proposals, one will be chosen by popular vote and one by judges.

I also have one of three Global proposals. That one’s here:
http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/4/planId/15203

My National proposal is the only proposal that advocates any form of nuclear power, much less fusion. There was a thorium proposal under global, but that got kicked out in the judges’ final review. My global proposal is just a combination of the winning proposals from last year.

When I won last year, our visit to the U.N. team turned into a 20-minute free-form discussion, so even if I only win on the Global proposal, I hope to have some opportunity to talk about fusion and thorium.

[dennisp]

The bill in question does allow a higher limit when companies supply audited financial statements.

And it wasn’t exactly the small startup companies that crashed the economy and wiped out investors in 2008. The bill makes no changes to regulations of large companies or financial institutions.

[dennisp]

Yep, it’s an American law. I can’t invest in most startups unless I’m an accredited investor, which means either I have net worth over a million dollars or income over $200,000/year. That’s why on the LPP investors page it says it’s seeking “foreign and accredited US investors.”
http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=94&Itemid=116

There are a lot of things that Americans can’t do which are perfectly fine in other countries.

[dennisp]

Awesome. It’s passed the House:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-2930

Might be a good idea for people to contact their senators.

I read the bill, it’s a little hard to tell its full effect because it’s written as changes to existing law, so really you have to look up the law as well to get the context. But I didn’t see anything about previous investments. The limit is up to $2 million if you provide audited financial statements. Those are annual limits. Individual investors are limited to $10,000 or 10% of their annual income, whichever is less.

[dennisp]

To me the key isn’t SEC registration, it’s being able to take investments from people who aren’t “accredited investors” (ie., millionaires). That way I could invest, if FF chose to go that way.

[dennisp]

Does an internet forum count as an “event?” 🙂

I’ve been wishing for a couple years now that the government wasn’t so uptight about “accredited investors.”

(But don’t worry, it was nothing you said.)

[dennisp]

Cost overruns? Nothing severe I hope…

[dennisp]

Overconfidence is rampant in the energy fiield, from ultracapacitors to cold fusion. The FF team’s honesty about potential failure is refreshing, and one of the things that initially convinced me they were real scientists rather than flakes.

[dennisp]

Renewables are “here now” only if you’re talking about using them for, say, 20% of the nation’s power, with fossil fuels or nuclear handling the rest. (Well, hydroelectric can handle baseload too, but we can’t build that many more dams.)

To make wind and solar handle everything, you need affordable grid-scale storage, and that is definitely not here now.

Here’s an article that highlights just how big of a problem that is:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

The assumptions there are probably overly pessimistic, but even so, the sheer scale of the problem boggles the mind.

[dennisp]

Rooting for all of them of course!

My favorite is FF because the costs are so low. A reactor for the price of a house, electricity an order of magnitude cheaper than today. I’d expect commercial rollout to happen very quickly once it’s available. Also of course, aneutronic fusion is an advantage over some competitors. Seems like I read something suggesting that cathode erosion wouldn’t be a terrible problem with the right materials. A commercial reactor would probably make them easily replaceable.

Polywell is best for large reactors, can also do aneutronic, and at scale could get really cheap as well.

General Fusion doesn’t do aneutronic but the sheer ballsiness of their steampunk approach appeals to me. They’ve got two pistons firing with the precision they need, and rather than build the full device right now they’re planning experiments with explosives. Making it reliable might be a challenge, but if it’s the first to get working fusion I’d expect a lot of money to go towards solving that.

Helion looks interesting but doesn’t currently have the funding they need. Tri-Alpha is somewhat similar and has lots of money, but is very secretive.

FF and Polywell could both make really good launch rockets. GF, not so much. A cheap path to space would pretty much solve our remaining resource issues.

FF is the only one that gives frequent, detailed news on their progress, which definitely makes them the most fun to follow!

[dennisp]

Cool, thanks! If I make finalist I’ll post something.

[dennisp]

Judges pick the finalists then anyone on the site gets to vote (between Nov 1 and Nov 15), each category (national and global) gets at least one winner picked by judges and one picked by the public.

[dennisp]

I wrote about focus fusion and other alternative fusion projects here:
http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/5/planId/14629

Just ctrl-F “fusion”. I can still edit this so please let me know what you think.

Some background (which hopefully won’t get this thread capped!):

MIT is running a contest to crowdsource solutions to global warming. Last year I was one of three contest winners with the “carbon rights” proposal:
http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/3

As a result, I got to present my proposal to congressional staffers and to the U.N. Secretary General’s personal advisory team on climate issues. The latter was especially gratifying…after the formal presentation we sat around a conference and discussed the ideas for another twenty minutes. So, there’s a chance that if I were lucky enough to be a winner again this year, the SecGen will end up aware of FF.

Over the next few days, a team of scientists will look over the proposals and comment on them. After Sept 30, judges will select finalists, and we’ll get one last span of time to edit the proposals. Final winners will be chosen in part by judges, and in part by votes of users on the site during the first two weeks of November. Details on this year’s contest are here:
http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/current-contest

[dennisp]

No idea what their budget was. Given their scalability requirements I suspect it was fairly high, but on the other hand I think it was mainly one guy who built the initial site.

Don’t know of anything off-the-shelf for this sort of thing. Wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate anyway…eg., it’s hard to imagine broad telemarketing or neighborhood canvassing being effective. Better would be to target specific groups involved in related issues, like environmentalism or energy independence. Also, networking in the silicon valley startup culture, and among physicists and engineers in related fields.

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