Ivy Matt
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Ivy Matt
ParticipantHere’s a fairly new one for a general audience:
A Piece of the Sun: The Quest for Fusion Energy by Daniel Clery
Published June 27, 2013. Clery was a news editor for [em]Science[/em] magazine who decided to write a book on the history of fusion. He shelved the idea when he heard his former colleague, Charles Seife, was working on a similar project. When he read Seife’s book, however, he decided to go ahead with his project, presumably partly as a response to Seife. I haven’t read Clery’s book yet, but I am interested, although I don’t know to what extent he covers alternative confinement concepts and aneutronic fusion. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a table of contents or index online.
From Clery’s blog I found a reference to another recent book:
Star Chambers – The Race For Fusion Power by Melanie Windridge
Published September 21, 2012. It’s a very basic introduction to fusion, based on a series of blog posts Windridge wrote as the Institute of Physics lecturer in 2012. It focuses on tokamaks, which is not surprising, considering Windridge did her PhD research at JET.
EDIT:
[em]A Piece of the Sun[/em] table of contents courtesy of WorldCat:
Why Fusion? —
Britain : Thonemann and the Pinch —
United States : Spitzer and the Stellarator —
Russia : Artsimovich and the Tokamak —
Tokamaks Take Over —
Fusion by Laser —
One Big Machine —
If Not Now, When?July 3, 2013 at 1:33 am in reply to: volunteers needed to map out environmental, clean energy news sites #12772ParticipantDoes it usually take Google three weeks or more to post their Solve for X videos?
ParticipantAnd some publicity here:
From the Cosmic Log article:
“The only answer to the ‘always 30 years in the future’ argument is that we simply demonstrate it,” Slough said. And that’s what he and his colleagues intend to do this summer, at their lab inside a converted warehouse in Redmond, Wash.
The key experiments are due to take place starting in late summer, at the UW’s Plasma Dynamics Lab in Redmond. If everything works, that would give the researchers the confidence to scale up the laboratory apparatus. For example, they’d use lithium rings instead of aluminum rings to increase the efficiency of the reaction.
ParticipantJapan (Kyoto University, Kansai University, and Tokyo Tech) and Australia (University of Sydney) would be two. Not sure who the other two would be, but there’s a list of countries that have pursued IEC technology at some point in the past on page 5 of this presentation.
ParticipantI haven’t really commented yet on my opinion of Keshe’s overall credibility, but there’s a reason I placed the topic in this forum. After looking through his patent applications, I’m still not clear on how a physical embodiment of his invention, assuming one were to exist, would perform useful work. On his website Keshe touts an evaluation of his concept by a professor of mechanical engineering, who gives a rather confusing opinion. He says that the concepts behind energy production are feasible, but at the same time he strongly recommends that an expert in the field of nuclear energy production give a second opinion on the practical feasibility of the project, as his research does not concern nuclear energy production. That recommendation was made in 2005. I see no such second opinion on Keshe’s website, suggesting he either never sought it, or received it, but didn’t like the answer.
ParticipantBreakable wrote: It seems they are exploiting some sort of URL redirection in expression engine just to pretend it is part of focus fusion website
I’m not sure I understand. To give a little more context, most of my post (i.e. the long quote) was a verbatim quote of a comment M.T. Keshe posted in his own forum. In turn, the subject of Keshe’s post was the video of LPP’s presentation at Ernst & Young in New York on October 12th. Anyway, I was quite amused (though indignant at times on Dr. Lerner’s behalf) by Keshe’s strange interpretation of the significance of the video. But what really bowled me over was Keshe’s claim that the DPF fusion reactor (as conceived by Torulf Greek) was his own concept.
However, I have since taken a look at Keshe’s patent applications, and I can see how his claim might be an innocent (if not terribly bright) mistake: after all, Keshe’s concept consists of two concentric spherical chambers, and Torulf’s conception of the DPF fusion reactor has the spherical “onion” X-ray collector, surrounded by a spherical water jacket.
ParticipantI am somewhat skeptical of Hirsch’s recommendation. After all, it was a similar push by him to narrow the field back in the ’70s (plus unforeseen, if not unforeseeable, budget cuts) that got us the tokamak monopoly. On the other hand, I’m not sure how much good is being done by the DOE’s present overwhelming focus on tokamaks. At any rate, I think it’s a good thing the New York Times is hosting this argument, rather than only covering the latest developments related to ITER and/or NIF. Even if the DOE is unwilling or unable to expand its focus much, a wider audience is thereby made aware of other options.
The full EPRI paper mentioned by Hirsch (and of which he was a co-author), “Criteria for Practical Fusion Power Systems”, can be found here, along with other papers related to the economics of fusion reactors (mainly tokamaks and IEC).
ParticipantParticipantParticipantOn a historical note, the term “splitting the atom” originally referred to some of the better-known aneutronic nuclear reactions. “Fusion” originally referred to the D+D nuclear reaction.
ParticipantIt’s a nuclear reaction. 😛
ParticipantHere’s another article, from optics.org:
NIF ‘tantalizingly close’ to ignition breakthrough
No new estimates of when ignition will be achieved, only a repetition of what Mike Dunne said back in January. However, unnamed NIF officials say the project is “75% of the way” towards achieving ignition, whatever that means. I would guess they’re using number of shots as the metric, but who knows?
ParticipantThe House passed the FY 2013 Energy & Water appropriations bill. New Jersey representatives Holt (D) and Frelinghuysen (R) made an appearance at PPPL to announce the bill’s passage. Frelinghuysen is the current chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies, which was responsible for drafting the bill. The Senate, which has yet to pass an energy appropriations bill for FY 2013, will review the legislation.
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