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MTd2 wrote: For ice shift, this is why I thought in positioning it close to the transantarctic moutains. But it is too far away of the cost so I don’t think climate change will be a problem.

Earthquakes would probably tend to think in different terms 🙂

Even shifts at the coastal edge will have repercussions throughout the continent and, more importantly, ice sheet losses will not be limited to the coasts. The coasts are just where it has started.

As science-fictional as it sounds we’re now facing those kinds of planetary changes when you speak in the time scale of building cities in the ice.

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More important is the rate of wear and the minimum time of a maintenance cycle.

Per current LPP estimates an electrode assembly might last a month.

Also per LPP estimates it will take about 9 hours for an FF unit to “cool down” to less than background radiation levels. So that’s ~9 hours cooldown, plus a couple of hours for unbolting and replacing prefabricated solid metal components. (And any other maintenance that might be needed by that unit.) Close it up and start it up.

So, given currently available information, unless actual electrode life turns out to be measured in hours and not weeks then erosion isn’t going to be a show-stopper for FF plants.

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International treaties.

Earthquakes induced by climate change.

Your artful ant farm of a city won’t be quite so artful between quakes, ice shift and ice loss.

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Rezwan wrote:
I suspect there’s more we can do with the registration form to weed people out – .

As you may recall I’d solved the problem at the software coding forums I admin by shutting off registration and processing manuaIly any emailed reg requests. Nasty solution, and turned out to have severe drawbacks… but I was being overwhelmed and the optical captchas were both useless against the bots and an obstacle to the visually impaired.

But recently I found a solution hiding in the default forum software that works well, does not require visual acuity and does its own filtering.

In phpBB forums it’s called the Q&A captcha and it simply requires an answer to a question… but the question should be one that requires human cognition to solve and can’t be autogoogled by a bot.

(heh, he said “autogoogled”…)

In the forums mentioned above the questions are simple ones about the game we work with. Anyone with an actual interest should automatically know the answer or can find out quickly.

I turned registration back on and haven’t had a single bot slip through. And they try, oh do they keep trying…

Of course for FFS you’d want your own question/answer sets. Lerner-hakase’s SAT scores. Aarons shoe size. Why Derek is wearing that ridiculous tie (still hoping for a resonance cascade-type scenario here)…

Anyways, it does work very well and should continue to work well with the right question/answer sets.

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jamesr wrote:
Also since Focus Fusion never intends to use D-T using neutron count long term will be pointless (since we want as low a neutron count as possible with pB11)

If pB11 works out as hoped then there will be some interesting looks on some faces when the Big Fusion backers are told that high neutron counts have suddenly become an indicator of waste, not efficiency.

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“on the choise president/board”

… should be “choice of the president/board”

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modernsteam wrote:
Rossi, and perhaps Focardi, have been funding their E-Cat project entirely on their own, with no one else’s money.

This falsehood has recently been shot down over at talk-polywell… which fact may go far in explaining you suddenly popping up here.

http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/MacyDefkalion.pdf

http://ecatnews.com/?p=126

… apparently Defkalion is not spme sort of an “independent” company but is actually a collection of Rossi investors.

$200 million euros already and selling licenses for a technology even the inventor says won’t be actually validated until next year… if ever…

… funny that you didn’t mention any of that.

Seems as if T-P has a dual personality… the posters can and have done quite credible work in deconstructing questionable scientific claims such as E-cat… as long as scientific subjects don’t touch on wingnut hot-button issues such as climate change 🙂

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Tulse wrote:
The mere fact that we don’t even [em]know[/em] if it works at this point, while Rossi et al. are to the point of selling rights and talking factories, seems extremely suspect to me. This is not the historical development path of [em]any[/em] successful technology that I know of.

… it does, however, remind me of the “historical development path” of Blacklight Power for some odd reason…

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Breakable wrote:

Space travel… we [strike]lose[/strike] gain more fusion reactors that way…

To put things in perspective:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=967311
Anyone wants to put fusion budget in comparison?

Not counting what’s eaten by ITER?

About zilch. The amount left over for non-oligarch approved fusion research is not even a rounding error in the NASA budget.

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Space travel… we [strike]lose[/strike] gain more fusion reactors that way…

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Ivy Matt wrote:
Then there’s this puzzling paraphrase of Mike Dunne of LLNL:

Washington is comfortable that this technology provides no opportunities “for nuclear proliferation or advancement of other country’s weapons capability,” said Dunne. The development of commercial fusion, he says, has no defense applications.

Apparently the US Navy disagrees; otherwise they wouldn’t be funding EMC2’s research.

Note what he said: “commercial” fusion.

What is “commercial” fusion from a Foggy Bottom point of view?

ITER.

How much of a military threat is ITER?

You can stop laughing any time now;…

But it does point out the very real threat, despite treaties to the contrary, of an “official” fusion process vs. “commercial” plants. in an inverse analogy to the telecoms and broadband in the U.S.

(The telecoms were allowed to suck in extra fees from customers for decades for the express purpose of building up nationwide broadband while simultaneously refusing to do that and gambling the money away on Wall Street… only to turn around and declare that only the wired net was actually the “public” internet and that the new wireless nets are now the “commercial” internet… all the while simultaneously dropping future wired net buildout and going full speed ahead on wireless.)

So, a possible future in which ITER gives the world nothing for decades and then very limited fusion access for the public while fusion-powered aircraft carriers float by overhead…

… the plutocracy at the top of the oligarchic heap would love that scenario.

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NIF should serve well as a bomb code testing facility, which is what it was designed to do. The rest of it, LIFE etc and its undoubtedly earnest scientists, amounts to de facto greenwashing.

If inertial confinement can be made to work for a practical power plant the result will look almost exactly unlike the NIF.

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Rezwan wrote: Note that the point isn’t to dismiss one energy source or another. After all, Games have been defined (in that very same slideshow) as “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. So if there’s an energy source you’re trying to eliminate, that’s not what we’re striving for here. We’re seeing how far we can go with each, and what the spread is like.

I understand such rules very well, “inveterate gamer” being one of my sordid character traits, and I have nothing against solar. Fusion will stand on its own merits easily enough given a level playing field.

I’m just pointing out the unmistakable fact that some of the conditions that affect all of the players, some of the “rules”, are changing and they are changing fast. And the changes do not affect all players equally.

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Brian H wrote:
You must be anticipating serious cooling. That’s when storms ramp up: when the contrast between poles and tropics is at a maximum, the the polar gyres move towards the equator. I’d prefer warming; that produces calm, benign weather and climate.

And adding energy into a system that already has built-in temperature differentials? But you knew that…

Structures that extract energy from the environment will have to be built to handle the changes in the environment. Wind turbines can handle excessive gusts of wind fairly easily but solar is going to have to be built to handle hail that it would in the past have been regarded as an exceptional occurrence, either that or be built to be repaired/replaced cheaply.

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Ivy Matt wrote:
aneutronic fusion – A fusion reaction that produces no neutrons.

That simplification could lead to misunderstandings when you later say that the meter of shielding around the unit is to stop neutrons and other forms of radiation.

I’d think it best to go with a [em]quick[/em] paraphrase of the more correct “a fusion reaction which generates less than 1% of its energy in neutrons” or something vaguely similar.

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