Talk-Polywell.org

I will fo an ‘unboxing’ video for every thorium salt reactor i get through the post...

Had to share this smile: looking for something to read this morning, I typed 'thorium salt reactors' into Bing. Second result was:

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Wow. That certainly snuck up on me...

Salvatore - Saviour
Pais - Country

If the internet is correct, a wafer weighs 128g. So this is roughly 50 Wh/wafer, 0.0685 Wh/cm^2. A solar cell at 20% efficiency is max 0.0272 W/cm^2. So a layer of this battery behind a solar cell would store circa 2.5 hours peak power from the cell. My 2.5kw roof cells modified (replaced!) like thi...

If all they have done is increase the effective life an order of magnitude at constant outlay it seems quite significant. Li-ion even at $100/kWh is 1-10 cents per kWh with a lifetime of 10,000-1,000 cycles. The bottom end of that range gives very expensive power. If they really can deliver 25 years...

https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/tokamak ... committee/

On the face of it quite a heavyweight in the field. Looks like they mean business...or want to look that way...

That's why I put 'aneutronic' in quotes. 11B+11B is said to lead to an average of one neutron over many cases. There is also p+11B->11C+n, 12C+gamma, and alpha + 11B -> 14N+n or 14C+p. It generally looks like thrifting the 11B in the fuel mix will make for a cleaner burn, as long as you can get the ...

If someone succeeds with 'aneutronic' direct conversion power, then much of the work at ITER on how to deal with massive neutron fluxes, get thermal power out if the reactor, and handling tritium is surely largely moot. They would be solving really tough problems which don't need solutions any more.

That ties in with what I recall of Dennis Whyte's presentation at the Tokamak Energy event at the Royal Society. He said that the HTS had changed the game so that instead of fields being limited to a few T (by superconducting transitions IIRC), the field limit shifted to around 22T, and the practica...

On a closing note to the above, TE reports in a brief email exchange that elongation with Kappa greater than 3 produces a very unstable plasma, and that increasing the height of the toroid at fixed major radius will increase costs.

Daniel Clery's talk was a very quick canter through most of the major competitors. NIF, TAE and GF got mentions, I don't believe Helion or Zap Energy did, but LPP did, maybe a slide or two on each. The overall impression was that this was a matter of form, to mention other approaches before complete...

For completeness a few recollections of the second day of the Royal Society event. Day began with John Menard and Dennis Whyte giving pretty upbeat presentations on low-aspect ratio Tokamaks and the impact of HTS. John's talk showed a ton of data on modelling and simulation, making a tough argument ...

Oh, and of course, TE don’t accept the premise of a multi GW plant, they propose multiple smaller units sharing turbine/balance of plant.

Further to the conference first day: mostly consisted of lots of bigwigs from ITER arguing that (they weren’t stupid and) a Tokamak power plant had to be the size of ITER - about 8 m major diameter. The premise was that they needed to generate 1-2 GW electric, breed enough tritium to be self suffici...

I’ve been at the Tokamak Energy conference at the Royal Society today, and I took the chance to ask a couple of people from TE ‘Why did you stop at spherical?’. Two answers. 1) the plasmas naturally forms a ‘D’ shape as the current flows through the toroid. Constructing the coils in a ‘D’ shape mini...