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the politics are only vicious when the stakes are very low

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i’ll watch for this. it was definitely sporadic, sometimes occurring until i added a newline at the bottom, sometimes occurring on three of four attempts

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and with lots of extra room

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Ok, it’s monday, already, and i don’t see it on the Solve for X site.

not to be a complainer, i’m just eager to see the news, too

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Patientman wrote: Does sequestration have an inherent problem? When you put all that CO2 some place, it would seem sooner or later it would need to come out. Just like a melt-down or an accidental release of radioactive clouds. If sequestration is a choice, then wouldn’t processing into separate elements be a step to a solution? Just a weird thought.

i think my calculation, above, showed that it is impractical to use focus fusion for processing that much CO2 into separate elements

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meemoe_uk2 wrote: Hopefully the rapid advance of super capacitors will help reduce the size of future FF devices.

while researching capacitors i found some practical advice that must be kept in mind: focus fusion requires caps that are pulse rated.
here is a discussion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1SN3rMTFok

this will impact whether we can use super capacitors for it.

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to use fairly round numbers,
4.4 Gt / yr = 10^14 mol CO2. at -427.4 kJ/mol std enthalpy change of formation, it would cost 4 x 10^8 TJ per year, or 2.7 million of the 5 MW reactors.
kind of a lot

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ok, so i still dont have the actual figure for % yield for carbon-11, but if it were 0.1%, then the amount in a reactor when you shut it down will equal the equilibrium value reached during continuous operation; as above, we have 7.18 x 10^18 reactions per second; hypothetically * 0.001 = 7.18 x 10^15 carbon-11 atoms created per second. (x 20.334 minutes = 8.76 x 10^18 atoms created during one half-life period).
at equilibrium, decay rate equals creation rate, so there would be twice this, or 1.752 x 10^19 atoms in the reactor, when you shut it down, or 320 micrograms.

make adjustments for actual yield

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zapkitty wrote:

Let’s imagine you accidentally ingested 11 grams of the stuff; that would be 6.022×10^23 atoms; all of this would be gone in 79 half-lives = 1606 minutes or about 1.11 days.

… er… that number is pretty meaningless without the dose rate and, while I’ve not done the calculations for an FF unit either, I [em]do[/em] know that carbon-11 is [em]hot[/em] while it lasts.

So it’s a good thing that the 100% conversion of fusion product to 11C that you speculate on is simply impossible 🙂

Very small amounts of 11C are safely used in PET scans but anything like the “11 grams” you mentioned would be near-instantly fatal inside a human.

we weren’t calculating the dose, yet. i had only gotten far enough to show that the isotope could not possibly build up in the reactor

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Let’s imagine you accidentally ingested 11 grams of the stuff; that would be 6.022×10^23 atoms; all of this would be gone in 79 half-lives = 1606 minutes or about 1.11 days.

Chance of this much collecting in the reactor? none; how much of this could collect in the reactor? we can calculate this if we know the % yield of carbon-11.

[ let’s take a 5 MW reactor with system efficiency ~ 50%, so that’s 10 MJ/s of fusions. At 8.7 MeV energy release per reaction, ( = 1.39389361 x10^-12 joules) that would be
7.18 x 10^18 reactions per second; if carbon-11 yield were 100% it would take, neglecting decay, 83940 seconds or 0.97 day to build up the 11 grams, above ].

so it turns out that at above 87% yield, the carbon-11 concentration would be able to build up; but any less than that and it just cant. it turns out that yield is much lower,
(i dont have the figure, so i can just guess that it would be in the amounts of nanograms to micrograms?).

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Maya wrote:
The Coulomb barrier guarantees that in order to get _that many_ reactions in, say, one cubic meter of space, you have to compress that fuel somehow. The forces required to compress that fuel that much are either:
1.) too great to achieve with any known materials science in higher power outputs
2.) too great to make it economically viable in lower power outputs

point 1.) is correct. and that’s why focus fusion does not use a solid material to achieve the extremely strong magnetic field. yet the fields already obtained with the device, ie: in the gigagauss range, are much stronger than the inter-atomic forces in any known materials. and instead of one cubic meter, you have volumes on the order of the head of a pin.

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you elide heavy with extreme; it is incorrect.

as an analogy, notice that as you inflate a rubber balloon, the pressure inside it falls.

smaller is better

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i was once asked for some help, by a person who believed his ideas were great, and wanted to share — but please sign the NDA; which i did. and that’s when the trouble started. because perhaps my questions lead to exposing flaws, and my suggestions for fixing them were regarded by the other as ostensibly trivial, and obvious, and not departing from the original intent of the inventor, only a source of greater costs.
i ended up writing large parts of the patent application, without which the thing just would not work; and i was not paid for my input, nor did i receive my name on the final draft.

in my opinion, fraud had occurred, and i am the victim. it was a powerful introduction to the paranoid world of the proprietary, and an important lesson to me, not to allow myself to be trolled by such things.

this forum is for free and open discussion.

if you really want something to exist in the world, lose the need to own it.

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the article ignores aneutronic fusion, yet claims to cover all research. that doesnt add up.

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http://i2.minus.com/i1SjC3pAs50Ta.jpg

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