Talk-Polywell.org

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...

Thanks for that. Apparently this feature is known as plasma 'elongation'. It seems that the question of Tokamak plasma shape has been an active field of research. Who knew... Going back to Wiki on Spherical Tokamaks, I see this in the section on plasma stability : "Using this in the critical be...

Tokamak Energy is investigating Spherical Tokamaks. Reading a little yesterday, I couldn't come across a reason why high aspect-ratio tokamaks stopped at spherical. Put a little more formally, one can conceive of an 'ellipsoidal' tokamak where the length of the central column is substantially greate...

I think the LPP offering is for the purchase of non-voting shares, a useful trick I think.

Can't argue with that. Subtract volatile renewables from volatile demand, and you get smaller demand which is more volatile. Must be bad for any base load supply which is not easy to adjust. Ironic that renewables are working against carbon-free nuclear power. You can probably work up an argument th...

I think the assumption that regulation was cleared up-front is questionable. The assertion from Thorcon was that 1970s nuclear costs were lower than coal. That must mean currently many billions of costs per plant are due to regulation, which can hardly be from a careful review of plans. More likely ...

Not enough information. I think it depends on the relative launch costs of an F9 payload with the two platforms. Costs probably just means operating costs, as the capital cost of a launch of each is the same - a fiftieth of the cost of a BFR, if you will never replace the F9. If you always make more...