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Creative commons, share-alike with attribution, is flexible enough for wikipedia. The most illustrative of the above images i think are
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/66/
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/14/
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/111/
but there should be an image, specifically for the focus fusion wikipedia article, that illustrates the magnetic field effect that distinguishes focus fusion from the more rudimentary DPF devices. if i remember correctly, there was such an image in Eric’s google tech-talks video.

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That makes me more comfortable.

at, say 97.5% recovery, (assuming 1 kg per anode), then:
for focus fusion to meet Weinberg’s “age of substitutability”, of ~60 TW globally, or ~7 kW per person,
( http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZaxLsdJ_ABEC )

then only ~ 5000 t beryllium will be needed, replenishing with 125 t/y from ores and other recycling.

descendants will still want to explore the solar system for additional beryllium. but they’ll have more time.

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what’s the actual recyclability of the beryllium anode?

if 1 anode = 1 kg beryllium, and if focus fusion must consume beryllium,
essentially destroying it through wear by the odd neutron,
such that the anode cannot be refurbished,
then consuming 250 t/year beryllium supports only about 250 GW energy production:

250,000 kg / 1 kg per anode = 250,000 anodes
/ 12 anode replacements per year x 12 MW per reactor
= 250 GW

Overall global beryllium resource estimates are thought to be approximately 80,000 tons with the Americas, Central Africa and Eastern Europe having the most concentrated and economically viable deposits.
— http://www.ibcadvancedalloys.com/s/AboutBeryllium.asp

at 250 t/y, this would yield 320 years; but as of 2010,
global consumption of beryllium is now already 620 t/y.

80,000/620 = 129y to gone
80,000/(620+250)= 92y to gone

we must plan to search for more beryllium, on other planets and asteroids

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Aeronaut wrote: I’d almost forgotten the Sam’s club membership business model. In this case, membership levels would range from $100 to $1,000 annually with no securities involved.

so, what are the privileges of membership, then?

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Brian H wrote:
It has been asserted by some here that the NRC and other regulators will use every possible remotely applicable bureau-rule to delay and drive up the cost as far as possible, certainly by a factor of 5, or perhaps even 10. My response to that has been to suggest that no state and even the US is not the world, and any jurisdiction that played such games would find itself “sucking gas” when others used the huge cost advantage to their advantage, instead of trying to protect local monopolies, etc.

yeah; that “drive up the cost” tactic is the committed goal of the anti-nuke lobby, which is partly nimby, and partly legitimate anti-proliferation lobby. the good news is, we’re on their side, on this one. to quote Eric: “focus fusion is very anti-proliferation”.

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Breakable wrote:

Here’s that marketing black-magic: if $250K for a 5MW reactor piques peoples’ “too good to be true” filter, then tell them $1M for 1..15 MW. People have come to expect incremental improvements, not revolutionary ones. We know it’s revolutionary. Let’s downplay that. Later, when the technology triples their expectations, we all win.

For a quite long time I was suggesting to go for the fusion-fission hybrid approach. Its essentially the same as going the high price road, but does not involve lying about the price.

it isn’t “lying about the price”. it’s “setting expectations”. we expect that the $1M will deliver the whole 15MW plus a spare generator. they (investors, licensees) expect marginal increase in value over what is currently available.

we have not yet met their expectations by demonstrating a working generator.

so let’s give ourselves some head-room, by testing receptiveness to the concept. the other day i had a chat with a guy from the local power generation company, and told him about the above spec, without mentioning that it is fusion. He was quite receptive, and suggested that a 15MW generator is in the zone for a typical university or industrial campus. my conclusion: an easy sell.

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Here’s that marketing black-magic: if $250K for a 5MW reactor piques peoples’ “too good to be true” filter, then tell them $1M for 1..15 MW. People have come to expect incremental improvements, not revolutionary ones. We know it’s revolutionary. Let’s downplay that. Later, when the technology triples their expectations, we all win.

The push toward smart grids will help get these online faster, same as it helps any other company producing small generators. So the only major hurdle, as I see it, is the social one: that mindset of “nuclear = bad” in the eyes of the public.

The public is conditioned to believe that any power generation must be massive, expensive, polluting and dangerous. The pitch should be able to show that all of these are misconceptions. But without entering the “too good to be true” head-space.

We should be planning threat-risk scenarios and safety demonstrations for NRC.

Scenarios should include { fuel spills, shielding failure, improper fuel used, electrical fire, theft, sabotage, terrorist attack }, and should quantify maximum extent of damage, and maximum radiation exposure to operators and public; and should compare them to existing power generation methods.

The safety demonstrations should simulate each of these, as well, using independent teams, role-playing their responses in live-action drill

Brian H wrote:
I directed Jerry Pournelle to the site. Here is an excerpt from his Dec. 29 Current Mail column:

A little energy ‘rithmatic

In your Dec 18 view you note, “One hundred 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plants should cost about $150 billion (the first two might cost $25 billion each, but the hundredth will be less than a billion).”

Taking the low end of your scale, the capital cost per Watt is $1. I remind (and update) you about my own fave candidate, Focus Fusion. It has just received paltry ($1.2 million) but adequate funding to push hard for the next 2 yrs. or so to prove break-even plus with proton-Boron11 aneutronic fusion.

At ~$250,000 per 5MW generator, that’s $0.05/Watt. Or 1/20 your best case nuclear (fission) plants. And zero waste disposal costs.
[…]

Brian Hall

I had some correspondence with Mr. Hall, but it’s not really relevant. Obviously I would love to have electricity at a much lower investment rate; and I know there is a lot of theory about Focus Fusion. To the best of my knowledge they haven’t actually generated any electricity with the system, and the numbers look too good to be true. Of course many things that look too good to be true turn out to be true — alas a lot more don’t.
[…]
The following is from the June 2008 issue of Discover:

A focus fusion reactor could be built for just $300,000, says Lerner, president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in New Jersey. But huge technical hurdles remain. These include increasing the density of the plasma so the fusion reaction will be more intense. (Conventional fusion experiments do not come close to the temperatures and densities needed for efficient hydrogen-boron fusion.) Still, the payoff could be huge: While mainstream fusion research programs are still decades from fruition, Lerner claims he requires just $750,000 in funding and two years of work to prove his process generates more energy than it consumes. “The next experiment is aimed at achieving higher density, higher magnetic field, and higher efficiency,” he says. “We believe it will succeed.”

I wish him very well, but my experience has been that even if it works as advertised it will be a decade or more before there is any practical application, and two decades before this system puts power into the grid. I sure hope I am wrong on that, but I don’t think it would be prudent to abandon more conventional power generation means in hopes that this will make such investment needless. It hasn’t yet broken even in energy input/output, which is the first demonstration that will be needed. Once it does that, we can get very excited; but it will still be a while after break even before it adds energy to the grid.

The US is in the Coming Energy Crisis I predicted back in my columns in the 1970’s. It will take us time to get out of it. New technology will help, but I doubt we’ll get out of this on the cheap. That would take a miracle.

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digh wrote: I have been following every-ones debates about radioactive cooling. I don’t claim to be a physicist but I do have questions.
Super volcanoes have spewed forth massive amounts of deep magma in the past . Is Yellowstone National park decidedly more radioactive? If that’s to close to the surface there was a catastrophic deep magma upwelling in Siberia hundreds of millions of years ago. Is the magma material in Siberia more radioactive? I’m just asking?

if your neutrino detector can tell what direction the neutrinos are coming from, then you stand some chance of finding the source. perhaps there is a map, somewhere, of neutrino anomaly by location on earth’s surface?

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Aeronaut wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_fusion
[…]
Also it would be a good idea to link to some press releases and/or papers that cite “Focus Fusion” name. Any good ones?

[…]
This may be enough to take it beyond the stub phase and I believe is well-suited to Wiki’s spirit- not necessarily the political bias in their editing wars.

Complaints i see on the article’s talk page are about the specific wording of the term, its distinctiveness, and about whether it’s a promotional gimmick. So the fastest way to dispel those is to find and post more links to published papers that are independent from those authored by Eric, Lawrenceville plasma physics, or the focusfusion.org website.

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Aeronaut wrote:

Yes, excellent stuff! Actually, it’s on the LPP site, too.

Interesting excerpt:
“The electron beam carried about 0.5 kJ of energy and the plasmoid held about 1 kJ of energy, nearly half that stored in the magnetic field of the device. So, this is evidence that a substantial part of the total energy available is being concentrated in the plasmoids and transferred to the beams.”
The electron (beta) beam is not the one to be exploited to extract energy, of course; it’s the alpha (helium) beam, which is not mentioned. I’ve been wondering how that beam is being handled in this experimental rig. It seems not to be used or measured in any way as far as I can tell.

Yes, the “missing” ion beam sticks out. I think he was thinking that we all know it’s balanced by the electron beam’s energy. The drift tube has a Rogowski coil at each end, last I heard. I doubt LPP’s ignoring that output, since it can provide electrical unity in one of Eric’s break-even scenarios.

this opens some questions..
is any actual fusion occurring at this early stage?
are the direction of the beams consistent?

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Brian H wrote:

There is a tipping point in there, somewhere, that could be good for some plants, but may be associated with past mass extinctions. The scenario is: CO2 spike triggers massive algae bloom, which carpets the sea floor, destroying ecosystems; then absorbs huge amounts of CO2, and drives Earth into an ice-age. I’m not trying to scare anyone, i would just like to understand these complex, nonlinear feedback mechanisms better.

http://www.physorg.com/news189066777.html
http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/CO2/caco3.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_7_162/ai_91040540/

The “tipping point” rhetoric is pretty much nonsense. There have been wide excursions (many times anything we could possibly cause, even with maximum effort to do so) of temp and CO2 in the last few hundred million years without any positive feedback runaways. This is because the postulated mechanisms are actually “unphysical” (meaning contrary to scientific law) in part, and in part because if such mechanisms existed we wouldn’t be here to worry about them (the ‘anthropic principle’).

The one actual climate danger is the implementation (at ruinous cost, naturally) of some hare-brained geo-forming project which actually works and we discover that you must be VERY careful what you ask for, lest you get it!

the scenario above isn’t a positive feedback runaway. it’s a negative feedback catastrophe. and there is evidence that it has occurred in the past.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/a/algal_bloom.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algal_bloom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Devonian_extinction

there are algae markers in every mass extinction period
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s…ryId=114081479

the anthropic principle doesn’t work, here, because not-all species become extinct during these events.

i actually favour the following particular hair-brained geo-forming project:
-> restore the Sahara desert to its former, lush savanna, by desalination and irrigation projects that use fusion energy.

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Dr_Barnowl wrote:

You seem to have misunderstood something. since what i am trying to describe is basically a form of afterburner for the DPF

Energy is conserved – you can’t buy additional kinetic energy by adding inert mass.

kinetic energy, E[k] = .5 mv²; so with constant E[k], if you double the m leaving the nozzle, then v is necessarily reduced (factor .707). but under conservation of momentum, mv has therefore increased by 1.414. so adding inert mass increases thrust, but costs a lot more propellant.

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Breakable wrote:
I wonder where would FF be on this chart?

FF isn’t so much a neutron source, but an xray source

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Brian H wrote:
The sea ice and acidification and methane scares are all hooey.
[…]
–The slight predicted reduction in the alkaline balance of the oceans (not “acidification”!) is a small fraction of the range experienced by ocean organisms throughout paleohistory, while they were evolving – including many types of coral.
[…]
–Finally, MUCH warmer periods in history have been boom times for humanity, with expansion of population, culture, wealth, and nutrition. Vice versa for cooling periods. So — pray for warming!

Well, recent trends in both northern and southern sea ice can be found at
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/n_plot_hires.png
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png

These are consistent with the ~21,600-year Milankovitch cycle, which alternates longer-or-shorter winters versus summers for northern and southern hemispheres…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Precession_and_seasons.jpg

Re ocean acidification: calcium carbonate is the main buffer of pH in the ocean. I found a chart of
calcium carbonate solubility as a function of CO2 partial pressure, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate#Solubility

P(CO2) atm pH solubility [Ca2+] (mol/L)
3.5 × 10^-4 8.27 4.70×10^-4
10^-3 7.96 6.62×10^-4

If i’m reading that right, then at 1000ppm CO2 in atmosphere, ~40% more CaCO3 will dissolve, which (some insist), drives shellfish and corals into crisis and degrades the ocean’s CO2 absorption capability. Decreasing the pH from 8 to 7 increases the maximum Ca2+ concentration by a factor 100.

There is a tipping point in there, somewhere, that could be good for some plants, but may be associated with past mass extinctions. The scenario is: CO2 spike triggers massive algae bloom, which carpets the sea floor, destroying ecosystems; then absorbs huge amounts of CO2, and drives Earth into an ice-age. I’m not trying to scare anyone, i would just like to understand these complex, nonlinear feedback mechanisms better.

http://www.physorg.com/news189066777.html
http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/CO2/caco3.html
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_7_162/ai_91040540/

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Brian H wrote: Well, you know my take on all that, PD. We should be using much MORE energy, supplied by FF. But I worry that we will short-change the atmosphere of CO2. It needs as much as it can get. If it were possible, we should pump up levels to 1,000 ppm; agriculture and gardening would be SO much easier. Have to mow the lawn a lot more often, tho’. :coolgrin:

So if i understand you, Brian, you want sea ice to disappear, and the tundra’s methane to be released? it looks like it’s headed that way, no matter what humans do. The Milankovitch cycle is indicating continued warming in the northern hemisphere for the next ~2650 years. The risks now are: ocean acidification (since the ocean can hold about a hundred times the concentration of CO2 as the air), and large-scale shifts in gulf stream and jet-stream, which cause rapid changes to local ecosystems.

What’s your take on this stuff, http://www.johannhari.com/2010/01/25/ignore-james-hansens-climate-predictions-at-your-peril ?

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