[dennisp]

Re: defense, it sounds like they’re talking about nuclear proliferation issues. Fusion powered ships would revolutionize the Navy…aircraft carriers are nuclear but all the support ships are fossil, and they hold the carriers back.

[dennisp]

Reminds me of something General Fusion is doing. They’re using steam to drive their pistons, but fine-tuning the timing with electromagnetic brakes.

[dennisp]

Will LPP license a general patent on focus fusion, or specific reactor designs? If the latter, ideas like Impaler’s original post are definitely relevant.

It seems like a pretty good idea that would help drive adoption….lowering or eliminating initial capital costs, and reducing the need for highly-skilled maintenance staff.

[dennisp]

True. I gotta say, I’m getting tired of seeing military bases on all the mountaintops.

But there’s more than one country…will America shoot down Chinese spacecraft to keep the high ground? Not if they want to avoid nuclear war.

Will the military in every country have enough political pull to stop civilian space industry? I bet not. Once launch costs are low, any country that opens space to private industry will quickly outpace countries that don’t. It’ll be the biggest economic boom in history, but only for those who participate. Those who do participate will be able to afford much larger militaries.

NASA is already getting out of the launch business and turning it over to private companies.

[dennisp]

But the question will be: Is it cheaper for others to try to steal our resources, or to go to space and get their own?

The solar system has millions of times the resources of the Earth. It’ll be a long time before fighting over them will be cheaper than going after the stuff that’s still free for the taking.

[dennisp]

Short-term, I hope we’re smart enough to reduce the military budget significantly when we don’t have to fight over resources so much. Maybe we’ll actually do it, if we can transition contractors to space-related activities.

Long-term, I’m guessing the space budget gets a lot bigger than the current military budget, but it’s mostly in the private sector. Things like asteroid mining are easy to make profitable when you can get to space for thirty bucks a pound.

The military budget gets bigger, and mostly space-based, to make sure none of those miners drop asteroids on us.

[dennisp]

Here’s another method of turning CO2 to CO:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/S2P

I also found this on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction

Also worth noting: the cost estimates for the “artificial trees” assume current electricity costs. Really cheap power would make it even better. I don’t know how much of the cost is energy, but if we assume half we’re talking fifty cents for a gallon of gas.

This article says that 250,000 artificial trees could absorb all current emissions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2784227.stm

Transportation accounts for less than half of CO2 emissions, so 100,000 artificial trees would be about the right ballpark for supplying all vehicle fuel. That compares pretty favorably to the number of windmills people are talking about building. According to a paper I read, one of these artificial trees would reduce net emissions about as much as 500 similar-size windmills.

In short, combining this technology with focus fusion would obsolete the entire fossil fuel industry pretty quickly. We’d still need the pipelines and gas stations, and probably refineries, but that’s it.

[dennisp]

I’ve seen other estimates that ended up with similar numbers.

You can take CO2 out of the atmosphere directly using “artificial trees”…google for “artificial trees CO2,” or ctrl-f on my climatecolab entry here:
http://climatecolab.org/web/guest/plans/-/plans/contestId/3/planId/12803

Cost is estimated at $150/ton carbon initially, dropping to $20 at scale. Each absorbs as much CO2 as around a thousand natural trees. So if our numbers are right, we could drop your estimated price about in half, and dedicate a lot less land area to the task.

One additional step is required this way, to convert CO2 to CO. Here’s one method of doing that:
http://www.science20.com/news/turning_carbon_dioxide_into_fuel_using_solar_power

Obviously with cheap fusion we don’t necessarily need to restrict ourselves to sunlight to power this.

[dennisp]

Yeah I got that, I was wondering if the high temperatures in this result had already proven it. Sounds like not quite yet.

[dennisp]

Another layman question: does this result prove that x-ray cooling isn’t a problem?

[dennisp]

Umm…wow. What he almost doesn’t bother to mention is that he may know how to cure all infectious diseases.

He does a 4-minute TED talk on that here:
http://onisoft.com/2010/07/kary-mullis-next-gen-cure-for-killer-infection/

For much more detail, a 30-minute talk here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mullis10/mullis10_index.html

Summary:

Normally, when you get in infection, it takes the immune system a while to figure out there’s a threat and make a bunch of cells dedicated to eating that particular threat, especially if it’s something new. In the meantime the invader is replicating, and then you’ve got a fight on your hands.

However…The immune system has about as many cells as the brain. Fully one percent of it is a standing army dedicated to eating anything with a certain molecule. (Fun fact, bacon has that molecule, whenever you eat bacon your immune system digests a lot of it.)

So Mullis looks at the target germ and picks out an achilles heel, some surface protein it can’t easily evolve away from. He uses an automated process to find a stretch of DNA that will stick to that protein. Then he attaches that to this molecule that the standing army is ready to attack.

Inject it and boom, it sticks to all the target germs and your immune system immediately wipes them out. So far he’s done it with anthrax in mice, and it works every time.

There’s no worry about resistance, and it works on viruses as well as bacteria.

The main impediment he expects now is getting through the regulatory process. Also the pharamaceutical companies aren’t much interested, but he found a big company in England to buy half his company and develop it.

[dennisp]

Vansig it looks like you’re talking projected electricity usage, I think MTd2 is talking total energy consumption, which includes oil and natural gas for transportation and heating…Wikipedia puts that a good bit lower at 15 TW. Their source is a spreadsheet published by BP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

If both numbers are correct then I’m surprised that electricity is such a small portion of the total. Maybe something’s still off somewhere.

I’m not sure you guys are talking about the same thing on FF efficiency either. Eg., laser fusion requires a steam cycle, so call it 50% efficient at recovering the output. But there’s also the power required to fire the laser. FF has a substantial power input as well.

If the researcher is correct, we just need 15,000 tons per year at current rates. If MTd2 is correct that his power output estimate is “a bit high,” call it 30K tons. But if energy is 50 times cheaper, we’ll use a lot more of it. We’ll desalinate lots of seawater, grow crops underground, holiday in orbiting hotels, and pull excess CO2 from the atmosphere. It’ll be the biggest economic boom in history, and it sure will use up some boron.

So we probably shouldn’t wait too long before investigating new boron sources. How much can we extract from a desalination plant? How much can we easily get from asteroids or the Moon? Etc.

[dennisp]

Let’s assume you’re right. That’s 20 years if the world runs entirely on FF. Since FF is so cheap I’d expect the transition to happen pretty quickly, but it won’t be instantaneous. Systems like hydroelectric dams with high sunk costs but low operating costs will probably keep going for a while. It will also take a while to convert transportation.

So let’s say based on known reserves we have 30 years from the time we get the first commercial reactor. That’s a fair amount of time to get new sources of boron.

The first thing we’ll do is look for new reserves in the ground. Seawater has already been mentioned. Beyond that, asteroid mining is easily economical when you can get to space for $30/lb. The solar system has millions of times the resources of the Earth; once we can get out there cheaply our resource issues will go away for a long time to come.

[dennisp]

I dunno, seems like people have absorbed that message, and responded with $10 billion tokamak projects.

Maybe “not as hard as you think” is the message that really needs to get out.

[dennisp]

1 in 10^8 still seems pretty small odds to me, unless you can show that life wouldn’t arise with an excess of lithium.

Maybe the Copernican Principle should always be tempered with the Anthropic Principle.

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