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You should be able to do this in the vicinity of large gravitational shear forces, such as those produced near the event horizon of a black hole.

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The way to reduce the x-ray cooling effect is to suppress x-ray emission before it happens, by suppressing transfer of energy from ions to electrons; which is what the gigagauss magnetic fields do.

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jamesr wrote:
In the case of DPF, I see the 400keV electron temperature as a bad thing since it leads to excessive bremsstrahlung radiation losses. The key will be if the proportion of energy going to raise the electron temperature can be limited enough with the switch to p-B11 fuel.

actually, seeing these 400 keV electrons represents a good opportunity to test and quantify the magnetic field effect. gigagauss fields should suppress them. so just how powerful is the effect?

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opensource wrote:
If about 1/2 of the energy from the fusion reaction is x-rays, then of what form is the rest of the energy?

about half is the kinetic energy of the charged particles, and there is also remaining heat to dispose of.

Furthermore, don’t the outputted x-rays vary widely in frequency?

yes, though this will be pinned down somewhat by the powerful magnetic fields.
the goal, with those, is to suppress high-energy x-rays.

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a quick look at the graph given in the article will not lead any sane person to extrapolate growth that way,
especially as you can already see a marked deviation at the top.

so the author is refuting the straw man argument that there will always be growth, but dwelling on it as though
we just don’t get it, and really need convincing.

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Tulse wrote: As I understand it, aneutronic fusion wouldn’t be much use for cleaning up fission waste, since what you want to do with such waste is transmute the problematic nuclei, which entails a neutron source.

you might be able to do a lot using proton bombardment

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Mike Weber Goodenow wrote: Before he died in 2007, Robert Bussard claimed that given 6 years and up to $200 million he and his team could build the world’s first real net-power clean fusion system electric power plant.

Is this true today of the ECM2 team or any other team? If not, what is the best guess?

as far as i know, scaling parameters for polywell have not changed

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Ivy Matt wrote:
1) The article for Physical Review Letters is currently being worked on, and will hopefully be submitted this month. It will discuss high ion energies and the evidence that the fusion neutrons are coming from the plasmoid.

Can we have the full citation for this article?

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if i recall correctly, the model, with various different parameters, predicts from about a third to half of input energy being emitted in x-ray.

the 80% figure for the onion capturing the x-rays might be unrealistic. if we capture its energy with photo-voltaic cells, we can get 10 to 20%. if we capture its energy with a heat engine, we can get about 55%. (but i have not fully explored the possibilities).

the present set of parameters for attempting break-even is going to try mostly to capture energy from the exit beam. since it consists of a pulse of charged particles, it can be transformed at high efficiency (today’s high voltage transformers routinely achieve 98% or better).

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The problem with Tungsten or any relatively dense conductor is the x-ray absorption cross-section. Lighter elements, such as beryllium or carbon, would be much more transparent to x-ray. Tungsten, even though it resists high temperature, would absorb too much x-ray and evaporate right away.

How about carbon nanotubes?

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Standard model without Higg’s Boson reminds me of the Ptolemaic system at about the time of Copernicus. The cracks are showing. We need folks like Galileo and Kepler to rearrange the whole thing.

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the 1m thickness of water + boron handles the neutrons; and a few inches thick of lead outside that should be able to deal with the occasional gamma

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delt0r wrote: That is a awful analogy and totally wrong.

But being wrong is good? 😛
My point was that we cant compare apples to oranges. Compton scattering and gamma emission might some day be shown to belong to a different regime. But, w.r.t their results, i should admit to you that i am *not* on their side, about this.

Never mind they also magically produce copper in natural isotope ratios […]

actually, this “production” of copper in natural isotope ratios is not really surprising, and yes it should make us all suspicious.

in a previous post i pointed out that trace elements found on their anode after their experiments looked to me to be just like what you’d find if, instead of using a solid nickel anode, you had used a nickel-plated aluminum anode that had suffered pitting during the experimental process.. since finishers will ordinarily apply an under-layer of copper to help the nickel adhere.

finding copper in natural isotopic ratios would seem to support my interpretation.

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delt0r wrote:
There is a lot of validated theory about the strong nuclear force and the structure of the nucleus. Yet for the Ecat to work is has to all be wrong. literally 1000s of experiments and mountains of data.

Actually, no it does not have to be all wrong.

I can give you a key and a shotgun, and tell you to open a lock. You could run thousands of experiments that confirm that if you fire the key at the lock with the shotgun, the lock opens, with particular probability, and the key escapes, with particular probability. But, decades later, someone else reports that you didn’t have to use the shotgun, after all.

If they are correct, your experimental results are not wrong; they were just made in a different regime.

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The experiments are presently showing scaling at I^4.7

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