[texaslabrat]

not to mention untold billions spent (and yet to be spent in the form of medical care for those involved) on the two Gulf Wars 😉

[texaslabrat]

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

[texaslabrat]

Axil, you want FF to be a Tokamak when it really, really isn’t for a very good reason. You’ve completely missed the point and the elegance of aneutronic fusion. Deuterium may be the “holy grail” for you…but it’s not for those who want fusion without the downsides that D-D fusion brings.

Neutrons are not to be feared from an engineering et al perspective? Yeah, I guess if you don’t mind the structure turning brittle and becoming long-lived radioactive waste..I suppose that’s true. Good luck finding someone who wants to maintain your gear in that scenario though…and the long-term radioactivity will GREATLY reduce the appeal and rate of adoption of the technology into the mainstream. Nobody wants a fission reactor in their neighborhood…and a D-D FF reactor would have many of the same negative traits.

Great idea about thermalizing the neutrons with heavy water so the reactor vessel won’t be damaged. So, instead of just going with nice and clean aneutronic Boron-Hydrogen reactions and getting a direct-to-electric conversion in a setup that has such simplistic elegance that a refrigerator factory should be able to mass produce it…you want to try and put a heavy water shield around the plasmoid (which is a pumped vacuum, btw), and THEN capture the energy as heat (and requiring all structural components be designed to withstand the high temperatures that you want to transfer to the molten salt loop..and what happens to the heat captured in the heavy water shield if you want to eventually heat salt to 700C? You putting in an electric heat pump to step up the temperature too or do you plan to run it at earth-core pressure?) and THEN run everything through a Carnot-limited heat engine attached to a mechanical generator to eventually produce….wait for it….electricity? Great solution if you were the captain of your school’s “Rube Goldberg” device team. And then there’s the tremendous additional capital costs of such a setup that is orders of magnitude higher than the as-envisioned FF system. Ever priced a gas turbine engine?

Let’s just assume for a moment that a Brayton-cycle based power generation scheme WAS more efficient overall from a pure watts produced from a certain amount of fuel burned (and I’m not convinced that it is..just playing devil’s advocate as you are) perspective. Is that the metric you are using? Ok…assuming that’s the case…and let’s say it’s even 10 times more efficient. Heck, let’s say the deuterium is FREE in this scenario. What does a year’s worth of Boron fuel cost versus a year’s worth of deuterium? Congratulations..you’ve saved a couple thousand dollars a year (or in that ballpark). In the process, you’ve made the actual total device 10 times larger (at least), made it far more complicated to manufacture, and thus at *least* 10 times as expensive (or if you forgo the neutron shielding, you’ve now made the manufacture a little cheaper but now the NRC requirements will make it 100 times more expensive due to the radioactive waste you will create over time). It’s going to take a lot of years of that few thousand bucks/year to make up for the additional $3million-plus you’ve sunk into the system (compared to a $300k FF system of equal electrical generation capacity). Nevermind the huge increase in ongoing maintenance costs for all the additional mechanical components (and very tight-tolerance, expensive ones at that). Or you could have just built 10 FF systems and had 10 times the power output for a nominal increase in fuel costs (either way the fuel costs are negligible in the larger scheme of things when you are talking a few kg a year that produces millions of kilowatt-hours of sellable power).

I know if I had $3million to invest in one setup versus the other..I know which one I’d pick. I’d pick the one that put out more power and made the most profit for me for that $3 million spent…and that one sure as heck isn’t the one that requires a gas turbine engine 😉

[texaslabrat]

dash wrote:

a world where an AK-47 can be had for under $100

Do you have a source for this? I’d like to buy 20 at that price.

Most any gun show around here…but they are the cheap Chinese versions not the Russian ones. Not that it matters much.

[texaslabrat]

Axil wrote: I do not intend to offend anyone; this is only a devils advocate argument.

A sub-national group steals an unguarded FF reactor from an unattended site. They then modify it to burn deuterium instead of boron. In this conversion process they replace the multi-layer foil electric generator with a beryillium/U238 blanket. They then operate this reconfigured reactor covertly for three months. They then chemically reprocess the Be/U238 blanket to extract plutonium.

Is this not possible?

What design provisions are necessary to preclude this scenario?

They’re gonna rack up a heck of an electric bill doing it that way (effectively, due to the energy budget of the process and the fact that no electrical energy is being made here, you are basically supplying all the energy for the reactions from the wall socket in a brute-force sort of way)…and 3 months is really quite, quite generous considering the amount of plutonium needed for a crude base-line implosion fission weapon (~10kg) with this sort of transmutation technique :p Unless this group also owns their own power plant and thus has access to unlimited free electrical power (how many did they steal? These things are small but they’re not THAT small!), you are probably looking at 30 years rather than 3 months if this is supposed to be done “on the sly” in some warehouse in the industrial district. The mechanics of fusion pinch reactors has been known for a long time (assuming your goal is not to have net positive energy production but instead just want to make high-energy fusion products)…yet everybody still makes their plutonium pit material (of those who are making them..N Korea for example) from breeder reactors. There’s a reason why. Plutonium can be made in particle accelerators too…but there’s no outcry about regulating those by the IAEA for non-proliferation issues. And the efficiency rate would be about the same as the modified FF device you’ve proposed from what I can surmise.

And I’m far more concerned that the sub-national group has obtained a large amount of refined U238 with which to attempt Pu239 production without drawing attention to themselves. Perhaps they went on a scavenger hunt in Serbia digging up expended A-10 round fragments from the soil? Creating a neutron source is relatively trivial these days for a group with a decent amount of financing…you don’t need a FF device to do that. What you are effectively asking is what design provisions are necessary in the manufacture of kitchen knives that will prevent violence in a world where an AK-47 can be had for under $100. A valiant goal yes..but not likely to make a difference in the big scheme of things.

[texaslabrat]

Axil wrote:

A Focus Fusion reactor can be configured to produce heat on a very large scale and be a hot product in the electric power market.

Holy missing the point, Batman!

[texaslabrat]

Tulse wrote: My guess is that regulations will demand that each site have at least one person there 24/7, if for no other reason than the decaborane fuel used is highly toxic. But perhaps I’m wrong (or the amounts used will be so small as to be of negligible risk — perhaps someone more knowledgeable can clarify).

That could very well be the case…at least at first. But transformers have some pretty gnarly stuff in them too…don’t see folks hanging around them except when they blow up. But…as I said a couple of posts ago..I’m sure the regulations will err on the side of paranoia for quite a while, so the subject is pretty much moot until overall social and regulatory acceptance is achieved. Until that time…it’s going to be centralized power or nothing with respect to FF.

[texaslabrat]

Tulse wrote: 50-100MW may still be too small in terms of maximizing the value of FF — check out Rematog’s amusing example of the importance of labour costs:

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/139/P30/#3121

The problem is that as the cost of physical plant and fuel goes toward zero, your biggest cost is going to be operations and maintenance. What is needed is to size plants so that they are most efficient in terms of human resources. Presumably as you scale up there is a point of rapidly diminishing returns, but that point may still be larger than 50-100MW.

Of course, that presumes that the goal is only to produce power at the lowest cost. One might also value distributed generation for other reasons (such as making the grid more robust), in which case having the lowest price per KW-hr may not be the only metric.

Yep, I’ve read it and agree with most of what Rematog has said. However, as you’ve surmised..the goal of having point-of-consumption power generation (or close to it in the case of sub stations) makes far more sense than trying to build out a super grid..even if the labor costs are a bit higher. If done correctly, the FF generators should be very similar in operation to the current sub-stations anyway….nearly completely autonomous except for scheduled maintainence and emergency repair with remote monitoring keeping tabs on the various performance and health metrics of the equipment. In that, a single team (multiple shifts, of course) should be able to monitor 10’s of gigawatts of generation from a central location, and ditto for the repair crews. I think the labor issue will be much less than is anticipated due to the lack of a need for 24/7 on-site baby sitting.

Or so goes the theory, anyway.

[texaslabrat]

Tulse wrote:

FF might take care of the scale issue (since it *should* be reasonably economical even in relatively small installations)

I think it depends on what you mean by “relatively small” — the analyses others have posted in the forums here suggest that basic labour overhead costs mitigate against very small installations. There really is value in size, although arguably efficiencies of scale in operating and maintenance costs don’t require installations of the size of modern powerplants.

I consider “relatively small” on the order of 50-100MW or so….again, I’m thinking substations, not one on every street corner. Probably overkill in the short term, but as cheap power becomes common expect the consumption to rise to meet the supply 😉

[texaslabrat]

distributed power and point-of-consumption generation has ALWAYS been preferred in an idealist’s world. Nothing new about that…that’s just common sense. However, things like economy of scale, pollution, and safety have made it difficult if not impossible to realize. FF might take care of the scale issue (since it *should* be reasonably economical even in relatively small installations), but the fear of a “Nuke-you-ler” accident will keep it far from residential areas for decades by the just-smart-enough-to-be-dangerous elected officials and regulators. Would be nice to have one in every substation, IMHO…kind of a nice compromise in many areas (substations aren’t generally inside residential areas, but are close enough to eliminate most of the distribution concerns). Maybe folks will come around once they understand the differences between aneutronic focus fusion and the nuclear fission of 3-mile-island and Chernobyl fame. Give this country’s current rankings in the math and science scale…I’m not holding my breath.

[texaslabrat]

Brian H wrote:

I wasn’t suggesting China was a democracy, only that it would be at war only when and if it decided to suppress the local democratic opposition (Taiwan, S. Korea, Australia). It is an ideological tyranny morphing into a kind of oligarchy. Check out de Mesquita’s lectures on the core contrast between the two models: essentially, how small a percentage of the country gets to appropriate Public Goods (defined as the gross output of all individuals living there). In tyrannies, a small fairly well off ‘Selectorate’ keeps an Inner Circle very well fed, which supports an individual tyrant who dispenses favors. Recently, China managed to change tyrants without actually killing the old one, for the first time. A very rare occurrence.

As for Israel taking out Iran, it wouldn’t glassify the country (though it could; Iran should be VERY careful about tweaking that wee tiger’s tail!) The dispute is not resource-based, though the restraint on a democracy defending itself against a tyranny may be. Which does not support the thesis that resource shortage causes wars, quite the contrary! Israel, like Japan, uses brains to easily earn and thus afford all the resources it can use.

OK, thanks for the clarification re: China. I was worried about you for a second. And I didn’t mean to insinuate that Israel taking out Iran would be resource based (I thought I made that clear in my “zealot” preface, but I guess not)…but rather the fact that they HAVEN’T yet is a testament to the fact that we need Iran’s oil more than we need for Israel to be safe from a country that has repeatedly called for Israel’s complete destruction and that seems to be working on the means to accomplish that. Without oil in the equation, most of the world would turn a blind eye to whatever Israel felt it needed to do in the name of self-defense. Because the world DOES need oil, we in turn have turned a blind eye to much of the mayhem that Iran sows throughout the world in the form of funding terrorism and attempting to destabilize Iraq and Afghanistan (funded with oil money, btw). Because the world DOES need oil, we have a permanently stationed garrison in the Middle East which perpetually inflames zealotry against the West. On and on it goes. Extremely cheap power means all that goes away as excuses for conflict. If Iran gets nuked post “cheap power” era…doubt many of the West will lose much sleep over it. Hell, not many in the Middle East will either (Saudia Arabia, for one, will probably mark the day as a national holiday).

[texaslabrat]

Brian H wrote:

texas is right to some extent — where war is caused by desperation or actual imposed inequality. This is the minority of cases, of course. Try coming up with examples. There aren’t many.

Coming up with examples where competition for resources was the underlying cause for war? Um, WWII pacific theater (Japan attacking the U.S. largely out of desperation from the embargoes set on it by America). Both Gulf Wars (do you really think we would be involved in the Middle East if we didn’t need the oil?). The current “cold war” brewing with China at the moment. The attempted assisted coup in Venezuela not too long ago. And that’s just in the past 60 or so years that we personally were involved in. Leaders might rally the troops with calls of service to a higher power or whatever…but in the end it’s usually about money or its equivalent in natural resources. Extremely cheap power mitigates that to a very large extent. As I said, exceptions to every rule but history is chock-full of examples of this.

A huge breakthrough in solar power would also be welcomed (I don’t see that one must exist to the total exclusion of the other)..though that obviously has a capped limit in the amount of power per square meter that falls on the earth. Every watt helps though! Especially given the very real possibilities of the decades it might take for FF to be fully commercialized and socially accepted….solar and other renewables can prove valuable in the mean time.
Japan wanted both the resources and its military adventures (the embargoes were not just for fun or out of meanness!), and couldn’t have them. You will note that since it began depending on brains instead of guns, it is able to afford all the resources it wants.

As for the ME, oil was important for the globe, not just the US. Saddam in charge of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was not something anyone could accept. And the “cold war” with China is not a war, and won’t become one unless China decides to eliminate the local non-Communist competition. Democracies do not go to war with each other. Tyrants go to war with democracies (and each other), however.

As for Venezuela, it’s been controlled by a coup leader since Chavez took over, made especially clear by his permanent negation of any Constitutional restraint on his tenure. Despite its oil wealth, it is speeding into the economic dumpster (22% inflation, growing fast, with store shelves empty because retailers refuse to lose money on every sale under government controlled pricing), for reasons explained long ago by the first Secretary General of OPEC, a Venezuelan, who noted that every country dependent on the Devil’s Excrement had debased social and economic and intellectual conditions as a result of the ‘rentier’ mentality plentiful oil engenders. Chavez, of course, has the full proceeds of his (mostly expropriated) oil sales to throw around and foment mischief with, regardless of the state of the country. Whatta guy!

Yes, all that is true (with the exception of your assessment of China. A democracy? ROFL!)..however, it doesn’t counteract the fact that it was the natural resources that was the pivotal point in the conflicts I mentioned 😉 Hence my point that when the scarcity of said natural resources is taken away, most of the excuses for conflict either go away or become much less important 😀 There will always be the zealots who want to wipe somebody off the map “just because” (*cough* Iran vs Israel *cough*) but when nobody needs the natural resources they provide, nobody will care if someone preemptively turns them into a glass parking lot. Just sayin’.

[texaslabrat]

Brian H wrote:

texas is right to some extent — where war is caused by desperation or actual imposed inequality. This is the minority of cases, of course. Try coming up with examples. There aren’t many.

Coming up with examples where competition for resources was the underlying cause for war? Um, WWII pacific theater (Japan attacking the U.S. largely out of desperation from the embargoes set on it by America). Both Gulf Wars (do you really think we would be involved in the Middle East if we didn’t need the oil?). The current “cold war” brewing with China at the moment. The attempted assisted coup in Venezuela not too long ago. And that’s just in the past 60 or so years that we personally were involved in. Leaders might rally the troops with calls of service to a higher power or whatever…but in the end it’s usually about money or its equivalent in natural resources. Extremely cheap power mitigates that to a very large extent. As I said, exceptions to every rule but history is chock-full of examples of this.

A huge breakthrough in solar power would also be welcomed (I don’t see that one must exist to the total exclusion of the other)..though that obviously has a capped limit in the amount of power per square meter that falls on the earth. Every watt helps though! Especially given the very real possibilities of the decades it might take for FF to be fully commercialized and socially accepted….solar and other renewables can prove valuable in the mean time.

[texaslabrat]

Tulse wrote:

The D-D reactions are just to clarifying that fusion actually happens.

I understand that — I was just wondering if it was also possible that such reactions could end up at theoretical breakeven. That would seem to me to be a huge validation of the FF approach, even if D-D (and D-T) is not the final intended fuel for a variety of excellent reasons.

I would venture to guess that the answer would be “no” if “positive power production” means electrical output due to the nature of the products made from D-D fusion versus Boron-Hydrogen. If one just wants to see a general energy out > energy in no matter if it’s heat/x-rays/electrical or whatever…then maybe a series of shots could show that with D-D if instrumented carefully enough in an adiabatic chamber. However, from the pictures I’ve seen so far…I don’t get the impression that such an environment is present so careful heat exchange analysis is not in the cards. I could be wrong of course…I am basing that conclusion on admittedly very limited information.

[texaslabrat]

Breakable wrote:
One thing what I am concerned about FF in comparison to renewable energy sources is that it makes military technology cheaper and more advanced. I just hope this will not lead to more rounds of cold war, so that all the economical advantages would be negated as result.

A valid concern, but on the other hand the general availability of very cheap power eliminates many of the causes of war to begin with (competition for resources). When there is no more need to burn dead dinosaurs for transportation or industrial/residential power (which of course leads to ever cheaper manufactured goods among other things)…when fresh water can be cheaply desalinated and pumped where it is needed…etc…then the pressures to engage in warfare to provide those resources to one’s people subsides. There will, of course, ALWAYS be SOMETHING that people will fight about…but when basic material and sustenance issues are taken care of through universal availability of cheap power perhaps the scale and intensity of such disagreements can be contained. One can hope, at least.

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