[zapkitty]

willit wrote: wouldn’t it be great if Obama had the balls to put a fusion goal out like John F Kennedy did with the man on the moon mission? hopefully his replacement will.

?

Non sequitur. No candidate will seriously challenge the oligarchs’ literal grip on power. And Obama has been a most dutiful servant of the <1%. He will be rewarded with re-election.

But any of the candidates will authorize fracking in your backyard before they authorize funding for something that might disturb the powers that be.

No fast track for fusion research and a drill rig in your yard. [em]That[/em] will be the result of the 2012 election regardless of who wins.

[zapkitty]

vansig wrote:
nope.
forcing logins doesn’t work at all.
spammers will happily obey and create accounts, before they spam.

If they can. In a related thread I mentioned a solution that works well for forum registrations given the right questions.

vansig wrote: instead,
you should force image captcha solving to post any content containing links.
that’s what works for mediawiki.
( note that math captcha also does not work.)

reCaptcha may well be just the right service for this..
http://code.google.com/apis/recaptcha/docs/mediawiki.html

If captchas can be avoided they should, as they can be a real impediment to those of us with impaired vision:

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/forums/viewreply/8777/

[zapkitty]

Rezwan wrote: Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired has said:

Leaving aside Wired’s trail of oft-printed fluffers and apologia for the PTB, I give you four words: NDAA

Anyone who speaks of “the occasional whistleblower” when O’s administration has and is prosecuting vastly more whistleblowers than banksters is truly in the pocket of the <1%.

[zapkitty]

Breakable wrote: It seems we cannot make wiki use math extension with our current hosting, so we will have to think about VPS in case we want to take full advantage of wiki.

MathJax
http://www.mathjax.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathJax

On-server math text processing. Javascript-based so you can install it even on shared hosting:
https://focusfusion.org/mathjax/test/
Additional page of sample equations
https://focusfusion.org/mathjax/test/sample.html

And the obligatory Mediawiki MathJax Extension:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MathJax

[zapkitty]

asymmetric_implosion wrote: What is pulse power?

I’m rather afraid that, [em]despite the best of intentions[/em], that it may wind up being an excuse by vested interests to add an unneeded $5,000,000 talking point to any discussion of FF funding and applications.

And I ask again: if what FF has built up is working now why insist on talking up the 5 mil solution?

[zapkitty]

To Ikanreed and James,

Sorry, but your logic is seriously flawed in several respects. Fatally so. I’ll put together a detailed response to you both later this evening but for now consider this:

You’ve failed to address how your rather optimistic pro-fission future proceeds with the unlocated corium masses still seething somewhere underneath Fukushima Daiichi reactors 1, 2 and 3.

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/index-e.html

That’s not my primary disagreement with your arguments, which I find as a string of false equivalences, but I [em]also[/em] find it fascinating how the reality of what has happened and is happening with Fukushima just vanishes from your responses.

I have chores and dinner but I shall return 🙂

[zapkitty]

Why a Sandia-class power system if what they’re building up from scratch works for their particular needs at a fraction of the cost?

[zapkitty]

opensource wrote: On Wikipedia, it says, “If the plasma is optically thin, the bremsstrahlung radiation leaves the plasma, carrying part of the internal plasma energy.” Does this mean that if it is made to not be optically thin, that bremsstrahlung cooling won’t occur?

How would you do that? In fusion “optically thin” is in reference to x-ray photons.

[zapkitty]

opensource wrote: We never got to the bottom of this. So, JamesR, who was right – zapkitty or delt0r? Is the amount of radiation 20 minutes after shutdown the same as background?

Er… ~20 minutes is the [em]half-life[/em] of C11. It will take several hours for the totality of any C11 produced to decay back into non-radioactive B11. Then the core chamber should be safe for maintenance.

[zapkitty]

[em]heat [/em]
global insolation watts 1.73E+17
albedo 0.3
global absorbed watts 1.21E+17
insolation variance +- 0.1%
variance in watts +- 1.21E+14
anthropogenic waste heat 1.80E+13

4% global absorbed 4.84E+15*
*Note: cf Chaisson, direct anthropogenic heating equal to 4% of absorbed insolation = 3 degree global temp rise… it can serve as a marker anyway…

FF efficiency 0.45

electric
global 2011 watts 2.08E+12

FF scenarios
[em]heat equivalent watts electric watts heat [/em]
waste as FF heat 8.10E+12 9.90E+12
variance as FF heat 5.45E+13 6.66E+13
0.1 c rise 7.27E+13 8.88E+13
0.2 c rise 1.45E+14 1.78E+14
0.3 c rise 2.18E+14 2.66E+14

[em]population[/em]
pop1 – 2011 7,000,000,000
pop2 – levels out 9,500,000,000
pop3 – 2011 x 2 14,000,000,000

[em]watts electric per capita 2011[/em]
global per capita 297
gaza per capita 0.02
iceland per capita 3,152

FF watts per capita – electric (thermal)
[em]FF scenario pop1 pop2 pop3[/em]
waste as FF 1,157 (1,414) 853 (1,042) 579 (707)
variance as FF 7,785 (9,515) 5,736 (7,011) 3,893 (4,758)
0.1 c rise 10,380 (12,687) 7,648 (9,348) 5,190 (6,343)
0.2 c rise 20,760 (25,373) 15,297 (18,696) 10,380 (12,687)
0.3 c rise 31,140 (38,060) 22,945 (28,044) 15,570 (19,030)

current fossil fuel cost per day (2008) ~$15,068,493,151
current electric cost per day (2008) between $4,082,192,000 and $5,890,411,000

[em]FF electric cost per day[/em]
current electric as FF $99,792,000
waste as FF $388,800,000
variance as FF $2,615,760,000
0.1 c rise $3,487,680,000
0.2 c rise $6,975,360,000
0.3 c rise $10,463,040,000

edit: goofed the costs section copy’n’paste
edit Jan 09 2012: forgot 2008 estimated elec cost per day

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: According to you, an appreciable impact would be 10^17 to 10^18 W.

Well, what I gave was a numberless figure… “sufficient FF usage to start causing problems”… because I’m a lazy kind of guy 🙂

And I usually try to qualify the “zap” as a measurement of energy reserves and not as an indicator of actual power usage.

I’d not run the numbers on this before so I just tossed out rough ideas. I’ve got some numbers now and they are interesting…

Warwick wrote: Are there reasons why FF could not produce this?

None that I’m aware of.

Warwick wrote: So why is it pure SF?

The purpose of the article was to provide a proof that energy use expansion, and by corollary economic expansion can not continue indefinitely because of physical limits.

Which is true.

But It’s one thing to extrapolate a trend as a thought exercise aimed at the supporters of the <1% and another thing to continue to do so in disregard to other potentially limiting factors such as declining population increases with increasing prosperity, thermal load carrying limits and planetary engineering options. Which the author acknowledges.

So, yeah, straight line is SF 🙂

Warwick wrote: Projecting 400 years into the future is too far for reliable predictions, but then, so is 400 days to some extent. And he makes quite conservative assumptions, it could be 250-300 years before you’d see some problems.

But in an future where FF works his predictions run into and are mooted by limits defined by other scenarios. I’ll get to those numbers in my next reply.

Warwick wrote: Do your water cannons take less energy to power than the increase in radiation they achieve?

What if you postulate hollow beanstalks that can hold pressure up to LEO altitude where they become open frameworks on their way to GEO? If that scenario works then you’d just need to prime the pumps 🙂

Warwick wrote: I think probably radiation is a red herring and you’d instead need some kind of clever way to recycle some proportion of the heat being created back into other forms of energy.

What I was thinking of was radiators expansive enough to both increase the FF heat dumped directly to space and to alter the global albedo equation. The radiators would alter their surface parameters as needed. One common idea is to turn deserts into farms, so do that… but make them enclosed multi-story plantlab-type farms and turn the roofs into radiators as well.

Any heat you can recover as electricity is good for your electrical needs but will still come back as heat. Albedo alterations will result in petawatt-range increases in cooling (or heating) but in the end will, again. run into limits.

Coruscant, Trantor, Borg Central… call it what you will, it won’t be Earth as we know it.

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: In your hobby experience, I imagine you found that the water gradually becomes clogged with algae? I’ve never grown anything in water without that happening eventually. How do you plan to then dispose of the water, given that it’s still full of Miracle Gro?

My very green thumb?… well, let’s talk about how the pros do it instead 🙂

One, you keep light away from the water. Period.

Two, see my post about FF-powered desal/sewage reclamation units above. A large plantlab-type farm might well have an FF unit of its own and recycle the unused minerals for its own use as well as the water.

… FF Fusion would be a recycler’s dream come true…

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: The article extrapolates to 10^17 W in 400 years, 10^18 W in 500 years.

Yes, any arbitrarily large number can be too big to deal with 🙂

I was speaking of a hypothetical point where FF use grew enough to have an appreciable input on global temperatures… a concept which is pure SF at this time but solutions still seem quite possible.

The article speaks of something far beyond that and gets there through extrapolations I myself find unlikely. I can play the game and handwave something clever but that’s all it would be… Perhaps the borg of that era will use the oceans as part of a vast liquid droplet radiator system with gigantic water cannons shooting streams of seawater into the exosphere and catching the droplets as they fall… 🙂

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: … But what if sufficiently abundant energy caused heat to be produced on earth faster than it could radiate off, shifting the overall temperature in and of itself? It’s not enough to say that greenhouse-gas-related climate change is mitigated…

But you are actually speaking of two different things and they have two different solutions. The Earth is actually a big spherical radiator that easily handles thermal inputs in the 122 petawatt range. This is closely balanced by solar input… more or less… and the planet stays habitable for us.

But with GHGs we’ve essentially been painting that radiator black and we have created a feedback loop that has the temperature skyrocketing. But [em]we[/em] are not generating that heat ourselves… the [em]Sun[/em] is. We need to stop painting and let the black paint flake off. The Earth will gradually cool on its own… if we’re not too late…

But here’s the important part: the Earth will still be a radiator with a frickin’ huge capacity and the heat generated by FF units will still be radiated to space either directly or indirectly.

Dropping the use of all carbon fuels means that even with [em]increased[/em] total human energy usage via FF the temperature will be dropping back towards the normal Earth energy budget. That means both ice ages and hot spells. Both of which are eminently survivable by humans even without fusion power.

As for heating the planet via FF… if it’s ever going to be an issue it will take a very long time for human energy usage to build up to that level. When you’re talking enough FF units to affect the heat balance of the planet you’re talking of a entirely different level of human existence. It can only be guesswork at this point

But I’m silly, so… without the “black paint” effect feeding back on itself it should be easy to make needed modifications in time to avoid problems. One such might be installing radiators at large FF complexes as auxiliary cooling units for use at night… radiating much of the nightly heat output directly to space. And also by then we should be able to generate and dismiss clouds on command…

… and if nothing else we can always paint the roofs white* 🙂

*One of the suggestions for dealing with global warming was painting the roofs white… that was analyzed and found to be both insufficient and inappropriate to the problem of climate change… but should be fine for FF direct heating issues in that future time.

[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote:

The problem is that once you start living off aeroculture or aquaculture food, your population will develop significant deficiencies. You need mineral soil for … minerals, amongst other things. Magnesium, calcium, there’s a reason they’re called alkaline earth metals. And once you think of adding something to the water, there will probably be something else you haven’t thought of.

Sorry, but that’s just not true. Hydro- and aeroponics systems use tailored mineral solutions to start out with. What deficiencies are you speaking of?

Some organic farming enthusiasts and lobbyists tend to treat ‘ponics as a competitor and a few occasionally go a bit overboard. Factoids get into the wild that have no relationship with what actually goes on in a ‘ponics farm.

… and yeah, a hobby when I was younger 🙂

[Author]

Posts