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Matt M wrote: The thing to remember is the MSLT reactors were operationally 35 years ago.

Molten Salt Reactor Experiment at ORNL from 1964–1969

Matt M wrote: They have successfully replaced coal fired plants. They are a lower cost option to Coal and Uranium.
And, if Focus Fusion is never successful Thorium reactors could be a great fallback position.

errr… you seem to have combined molten salt power reactors with thorium power reactors.

All thorium power reactors to date have been solid fuel reactors, although India hopes to change this.

And thus for your waste burners you would still be stuck with bringing online an entire new class of fission power reactors.

If fusion fails… if there’s nothing within maybe 3-8 years, a decade at most… then there won’t be time for anything else to make a difference.

edit: important distinction of power reactors

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JimmyT wrote: Thorium breeder reactors will never be able to compete cost-wise with power production by focus fusion. Not by several orders of magnitude.
But molten salt thorium reactors can use high level nuclear waste as part of their fuel supply. Producing power from it, not consuming power to destroy it.

There is lots of material on-line about molten salt nuclear reactors

Errr… I meant existing (and defunct) fission power reactors and their waste.

But if you limit nuclear waste disposal to new fission power reactors you needs must, are required, absolutely have to add to the cost of handling and moving the waste the cost, time, and complexity of designing, licensing, building and operating new fission power reactors.

… as opposed to setting up dedicated FoFu’s (what a name) and the associated disposal units wherever the waste happens to be.

And the meme of “contributing power” as opposed to “consuming power” becomes meaningless when cheap Focus Fusion power turns nuclear waste disposal into a manageable chore… as opposed to its current status which is that of a Sisyphean task requiring that you extract power from the waste just to get political cover for getting this very necessary job done.

Yes, I said political cover… because the power generated from the waste can not possibly cover the total cost of designing and bringing online an entire new class of fission power reactors and the cost of handling and moving the waste to wherever these new fission reactors are allowed to be built.

This is not going to be an argument that thorium reactors can win on the economics… and aneutronic fusion units simply won’t need the political cover.

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Fusion Irony Theater episode XXVIII

The energy to dispose of the waste from a given nuclear fission power reactor will exceed the power that was generated by the reactor in the first place… and yet aneutronic Focus Fusion units can power accelerator-driven disposal units cheaper and faster than any of the proposed attempts to use the waste to generate more power.

This has been this week’s episode of…

Fusion Irony Theater

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MTd2 wrote: I thought these were the rods:

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/gallery/image_med/72/

I mean, these do look like copper rods!

The tweet just said tungsten rods.

We know direct from the source that the trigger electrodes in the switches have been changed to tungsten.

It would seem that the trigger electrodes in the switches are rodlike as well.

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MTd2 wrote: But the only advantage of using Tungsten at this time is to avoid eddy currents.
…
Other than that, I cannot think of another reason since tungsten is more resistive than copper.

Any other idea?

?
If we are talking about the “rods” being part of the triggers in the switches then the primary conductor would be the ionozed gas in the switches.

FYI the triggers are tiny switches within the switches.

The triggers would not need extreme conductivity in and of themselves… just enough to carry a spark to trigger the breakdown of the gas.

The two physical properties of tungsten that immediately come to mind that would apply in this case would be strength and resistance to heat.

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Brian H wrote:
Thorium reactors have the advantage of being able to “burn” existing waste isotopes from uranium reactors, and may well be cost-effective on that basis alone. They might be able to “give away” their electrical output at FF prices. But that depends on gubmint willingness and rational choices for waste disposal.

errrr… wouldn’t an aneutronic DPF be able to power dedicated disposal units that are both faster and cheaper than a thorium-based reactor could dream of?

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MTd2 wrote: So, there is an upgrade going on FoFu-1, according to LPPX’s twitter, to upgrade from copper to tungsten. So, I am confused now. What is the reason to choose Tungsten?

If you mean…

http://twitter.com/LPPX/status/18373950400630784

… perhaps the “rods” mentioned are the trigger electrodes in the switches that Lerner-hakase referred to? Not an upgrade to the FF core but rather rebuilds of the existing switches?

Interpreting brief on-the-fly technical tweets can be tricky but I’ve gotten the vague impression that they’ve been having to repair and/or upgrade the new switches a bit as they up the power in the test unit… this is only a supposition on my part but if it is so then I wouldn’t find it surprising.

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MTd2 wrote: Is the best really Tungsten? It seems to be the least resistive element which is not diamagnetic nor ferromagnetic. But, what about composite materials?

Tungsten? The governing factor for the electrode material is x-ray heating… and tungsten is used to produce x-rays.

That leaves beryllium, which is pretty transparent to x-rays, as the metal of choice.

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rashidas wrote: Here is a link to a portal for information on thorium as an alternative means of nuclear fission:

http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/index.html

Will the development of thorium compete for scarce funding for the development of new energy technologies like aneutronic fusion? Is there enough financial support for both technologies?

Economically speaking thorium can’t compete with any of the lower cost fusion alternatives such as FF or Polywell. The only reason to pursue it as a power source after a successful demonstration of net power from fusion would be the oligarchs trying to impede commercial implementation of fusion.

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MTd2 wrote: Weird, just tried to get the file now, and still doesnt work.

The link by Francisl is to 2168_11

http://www.plasmafocus.net/IPFS/2010 Papers/2168_11.pdf

Your link is to 2168-3

http://www.plasmafocus.net/IPFS/2010 Papers/2168-3 lee insights scaling props to scaling laws ppt.pdf

And here’s all the papers… wheee! 🙂

http://www.plasmafocus.net/IPFS/2010 Papers/

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MTd2 wrote:

This is from a workshop put on by S Lee and S H Saw in November 2010. Very nice color slides with technical explanations.

http://www.plasmafocus.net/IPFS/2010 Papers/2168_11.pdf

This link is not working anymore.

It still works for me and seems to download the same paper as before… a file that is both smaller and rather different in content from the one that you link to.

MTd2 wrote:

http://www.plasmafocus.net/IPFS/2010 Papers/2168-3 lee insights scaling props to scaling laws ppt.pdf

A coincidence in titles might be the explanation.

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Brian H wrote:
Your thumbnail expands to show an identical thumbnail size image…

… errr, nope. All is as it should be in the message and in the way it displays here. Perhaps something went awry on your end?

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Sometimes explaining it seems somewhat cryptic… perhaps even a bit arcane…

Attached files

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vansig wrote:

Well… how many useful things could be investigated without using a DPF at all?

tinkering with computer models? if there is source code available online?

designing the exit beam energy capture? if the right magnetics modeling tools exist?

I was wondering about R&D experimentation that might test its results using existing sources that are kin to what an FF is supposed to generate… even if the output isn’t to the same scale as an FF.

Very handwavy, I know, but I had a notion that this might advance auxiliary FF research projects while LPPX-1 and successors are being worked on.

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ronh1066 wrote: I thought having 12 capacitor banks ment that one was connected to each cathode, but I count 16 cathode pegs. How exactly is the power from the capacitors brought to the cathode?

The capacitors feed into a common bus which is the base plate holding the cathodes.

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