[zapkitty]

Warwick wrote: Get on the lulz boat … preferably not one powered by a pop tart though … a fusion boat.

Actually, marine craft are more easily adapted to fusion than other modes of transportation because of the inherent cooling advantage of a waterborne craft.

1: Don’t worry about the fusion aspect.

2: Design the best possible ship for your desired purpose.

3: Drop enough FF units in the hull to power your design.

4: Profit! 🙂

[zapkitty]

MTd2 wrote: Despite FoFu being 100% now, there has been a lack of good news on twitter for the last weeks and the report for October is late. I won’t ask for details, but what is happening now is awful, bad, so so, good, or awesome?

… actually, no 🙂

lppx-1 has had a time-out to repair a broken electrode and the team is at a fusion conference this week. An update is due soon, though.

[zapkitty]

In speaking of actual implementation of a new source such as boron fusion it will be important to emphasize two truths:

One truth is that the new source will be displacing current sources with a more efficient and less harmful source. This gives humanity some much-needed breathing room to handle oncoming climate-induced upheavals without condemning entire populations to death.

The other truth is that long before humanity starts using enough raw energy to make heating a global concern – we’re currently nowhere near that point and the problems so far have been the result of the chemistry of carbon-based fuels – long before the problem stage is reached we’ll have the resources needed and the time tneeded to implement a full solar power regime on Earth if we so desire.

This is the truth and should satisfy the greens.

[zapkitty]

KeithPickering wrote: Got it. A Zap is 1 megawatt-person, for an assumed population of 14 billion. Or, 1 Zap = 14 billion megawatts = 14 million gigawatts = 14000 terawatts. Current worldwide energy usage = 16 terawatts.

… for a thousand years.

A measurement of the energy reserves of a given source that should be somewhat more relevant to a discussion of whether it’s a source worth switching to than, say, measurements with vague parameters that give results in time frames longer than life has existed on Earth.

vansig wrote: 1 MW per person would have some impact on heat dissipation.

to maintain temperature below about 50 C, users would have to dissipate
around 620 W/m^2, which implies a spherical surface 23 meters diameter… for each person, for a radiator.

We’ve already got a big spherical radiator that handles inputs in the 122 petawatt range… the Earth. Even if we were actually using 14 petawatts additional (the zap is a measure of energy reserves, not a mandate for use) we’d just have to paint the roofs white.

The current heating problem is due to the pcrats insisting on painting everything black 🙂

[zapkitty]

KeithPickering wrote:

As for the thread concept I, myself, find it pretty meaningless. The X megawatts for X persons for X aeons is too displaced and too subject to gaming.
…

And the answer will be measured in MW per person per millennium.

I hereby call this number the Zap.

I like it! The Zap. Has an electric feel to it as well.

Now to get widespread use of the metric.

Oh, if only you had been minding your units. Watts already has a time element in it (Joules per second). So should a Zap should really be one MJ per person per millenium? But that works out to a measly 3 x 10^-5 Watts per person!

So how about a Zap is 1 MW per person, period? Or a Zap is 1 megaWatt-millenium per person? The first being a unit of power, the second being a unit of energy.

🙂

… more seriously, I was thinking that if we can’t safely set up a better and longer lived power source in any given thousand year period then there’s no hope for us at all.

We could double our population and go all-solar and still provide megawatts per person… if we could buy ourselves a few centuries to build the proper orbital infrastructure.

Of course the population could easily more than double in a century, much less a millennium, but leaving the projected population undefined gives too much slack in the concept for my taste so doubling the current population would seem to be a good marker.

So slightly rephrased:

“Can we, acting in an environmentally responsible manner, safely get enough energy from a given source without shorting ourselves in its other uses to see double the current population through until the next, longer lived, energy breakthrough?”

“environmentally responsible” and “safely” should have been factored in under “sustainable energy” but the thinking behind that concept is actually more tilted towards renewables at the moment and isn’t set up for aneutronic fusion yet… but it’s the closest to what we seek, I think.

And so, more formally. the Zap would measure how much energy a sustainable source can provide for double the current population, from birth until death, for 1000 years and it would be measured in megawatts.

… and an average of 1 MW per person would basically solve all current energy and material resource issues.

As an example in the U.S. an average of 1 MW each for the current population would mean a total available energy budget of 308 terawatts. We could get some things done then…

… that is, if the ruling plutocracy is not allowed to lock it down “for our own good.” And they will try. Having openly seized power they will not give it up willingly. After all, why should they?

[zapkitty]

Brian H wrote:

It would be an error to imply that Canada’s oil is any more deadly than Saudi oil, or Alaska’s oil, or Gulf of Mexico’s oil.

I support the notion of using nuclear energy, (even fission) to help extract oil from tar sands with less waste, and less harm to the environment.

?

Are you implying an equivalence between tar sands extraction (and consequences) and salt dome extraction (and consequences)?

There are no tar sands in Canada. Only oil sands. The phrase is disinformational. Of course.

Sorry, Brian, but bitumen resembles tar and although the term is technically inaccurate bitumen-laced sands have been referred to as tar sands in common usage since the 19th century. The greens didn’t start it and blaming them for the current connotations of the term is actually just another form of political correctness.

[zapkitty]

vansig wrote: Boron (as boric acid or borate ion) is a by-product of desalination and dietary-salt extraction from sea water, and is a well-known contaminant in fresh water wells. So you’ll be starting with a waste product, that is ordinarily regarded as a pollutant, and reversing the economics of dealing with its disposal.

http://www.trusselltech.com/media/1.pdf
http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/water/boron/boron-and-water.htm

Yet, boron is not in short supply. “About 500,000 tons are produced per year for a price of about $700/ton.”

With current commercial reserves of over 10,000,000 tons…. i.e. that’s just what they’ve staked out [em]at the moment[/em].

As for the thread concept I, myself, find it pretty meaningless. The X megawatts for X persons for X aeons is too displaced and too subject to gaming.

A more relevant comparison will be

[em]”Can we, acting in an environmentally responsible manner and without shorting ourselves in its other uses, safely get enough boron to see us through until the next, longer lived, energy breakthrough?”[/em]

And the answer will be measured in MW per person per millennium.

I hereby call this number the Zap.

belated edit: current commercial reserves are held at 10 million tons, not 10 thousand 🙂

[zapkitty]

vansig wrote: It would be an error to imply that Canada’s oil is any more deadly than Saudi oil, or Alaska’s oil, or Gulf of Mexico’s oil.

I support the notion of using nuclear energy, (even fission) to help extract oil from tar sands with less waste, and less harm to the environment.

?

Are you implying an equivalence between tar sands extraction (and consequences) and salt dome extraction (and consequences)?

[zapkitty]

Well, we can’t use it all up for ourselves. We’ll have to hold back enough to be able to move the Earth to a more comfortable distance when the Sun starts misbehaving.

Of course for current purposes being able to allocate a a couple of megawatts per person will do for the day-to-day basics for the forseeable future.

[zapkitty]

Brian H wrote: Lots of agreements and disagreements…

Problem with that rosy, almost Randian future: what’s to keep the elites from seizing it and maintaining their current rule?

Unions arose from those willing to fight abusive plutocrats and union members gained a living wage and livable working conditions from that struggle; not only for their members but for other workers as well. And yet today the union leadership has been corrupted and co-opted from the inside out by the very forces they originally arose against… as has government, the media and most everything else in public discourse.

Who now will fight an entrenched plutocracy that is not only vested in the status quo but is intent on regressing matters as far and as fast as they can? They are currently aiming for broken governments and an unending recession as the new status quo… quite relaxed and profitable for them, not so much so for the un-elite.

In short: we’ve seen what thirty-plus years of the “trickle-down” BS brings and trickle-down fusion won’t fare any better.

[zapkitty]

delt0r wrote: … At any rate high quality vacuum is a PITA.

Just take the gear into orbit and problem solved 🙂

[zapkitty]

Someone somewhere in the forums recently requested FF’ish designs that were more DPF oriented and as I’m currently somewhat bedfast I tinkered with stuff I’d previously done. (learning experience: keyboard and mouse management not so easy while prone )

Now with added anode and toroid:

also attached huge res png and transparent laver version of same in zip.

Attached files

z-getfusion-neo-bw-outline-xxxl.zip (153 B) 

[zapkitty]

Tri-Alpha is still supposed to be aneutronic last I knew.

That pdf appears to be a rather specialized report on the development of just one aspect of their concept. Tri-Alpha is supposed to achieve aneutronic fusion by combining the Field-Reversed Configuration concept with the Colliding Beam concept. Collide two plasmas into one FRC and then collide ion beams in the plasma. The C2 experimental device is for developing the FRC part of that and apparently does not (yet) have the colliding ion beam stuff. The use of deuterium would be a natural part of such testing.

But this mixture of techniques, combined with Tri-Alpha’s secrecy, seems to have led to a great deal of confusion among those who follow fusion tech, as one D-T fusion concept uses the colliding FRC variant to achieve neutronic fusion on its own. That’s what Helion Energy is attempting, as a matter of fact.

So this report does not necessarily conflict with Tri-Alpha going for aneutronic fusion.

Edit: a link to an old NBF article that mentions this…

Tri Alpha Energy raises $40 million in Venture capital for nuclear fusion

[zapkitty]

Agreed, mostly, but this part:

vansig wrote: … and whether the technology can be turned into a weapon by people like Dick Cheney.

… I think the best tack to take would be that an aneutronic reactor such as an FF unit just can’t be made into a bomb or used directly for proliferation for the same reasons it would be safe to use domestically.

[zapkitty]

annodomini2 wrote:
One expansion of this, could be having a machining laser in the chamber to re-profile the rods and as you state an actuator to push the rods in a bit more once this process is complete.

There would probably need to be some form of 3D scanning technology to tell the laser where to cut and how much material to take off.

However the reactions would probably have to stop to perform this action.

Much too expensive… you’re running away from the primary strength of the DPF: its cheapness 🙂

Such a laser machining setup would literally cost more than the reactor itself. It would be simpler, faster and cheaper to replace and recycle the electrodes.

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