Talk-Polywell.org

This! This needs to happen! A lot of funding for fusion and not just Tokamaks! This would be wonderful!

https://www.fusionindustryassociation.o ... ion-energy

https://amendments-rules.house.gov/amen ... 424342.pdf

IIRC, I read that they are still many orders of magnitude away from Q~1. The whole lattice confinement idea is not really all that new either. I remember reading about it a decade or so ago. Color me skeptical.

It could mean a lot if things.
E.g. it could mean that the thing is just jerking back and forth.
It could also mean that you need to increase power as you accelerate.

The "resonant frequency" thing is what I find really off putting.

Once they start doing orbital test launches with Starship, there will probably be plenty of room to have small payloads like these launched for cheap, or even free...

Unfortunately even without a reactor, you're probably still going to need at least one nuclear certified person on board, and probably all the paperwork related to having a reactor, aside from the greenie opposition. And you need a source of strontium. Agree about the nuclear certified person. As I...

First that is way to low power. When driving a car easily needs 15-20 kW constant power and an EV like the Tesla Model-3 has 225 to 360 kW maximum Power. For that 225 kW power @ 20W/kg an 11.250 kg (!) battery would be needed. That car would be as heavy as a truck and have a very bad efficiency due...

Nickle has a density of 10 grams per cm3. Carbon 14 is 1 grams per cm3. So we get somewhere between 1 uW/g and 5uW/g power density. Pretty awful... Now, I have done some digging on my own and what I found to be a near perfect beta emitter in terms of half life (~29 years) and power density is Stront...

It's not carbon-14 alone. They plan to use a blend of different isotopes to achieve different power density targets. A table was provided in their investor pack, but that's been taken offline. Some have not only shorter half lives but also generate more energetic beta particles, so even if present ...

ThunderF00t also has a great debunking of this. It is a complete nonstarter. Unfortunately "tech journalists" these days are not tech savvy at all and unfortunately also not real journalists. Any real journalists would have for one requested information about the numbers and would have done some num...

For those who have not seen it yet, here is an update on the progress, challenges and upcoming research at ZAP:
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0004228

ZAP BETHE Kickoff- presentation: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/Day1_1415_ZapEnergy_Nelson.pdf New prototype in the works: FuZE-Q I presume that the Q is a reference to Q=1, but I might be wrong. BETHE tasks: ▸Build and commission new, more capable, SFS Z-pinch FuZE-Q ▸Improved diagno...

Well one gram of Carbon 14 should (by my calculation) emit 2x10^11 beta particles per second at about 49 keV each. So we are talking 9.8 x 10^12 keV/second or 3.528 X 10^16 keV/h and that translates into 0.00157013295726 Wh. So you need a 1kg for 1.57 watts of power. That is assuming that their syst...

From what I see they have partnered with Orano, which is a very large company that does nuclear fuel and nuclear waste processing. I am not sure how much Orano has invested in them, though. My biggest problem with them is that there are no numbers. I am most interested in the power density. From all...

Helion is very tight lipped about these things right now. What I can say is that their new reactor is significantly larger than Venti. Venti was supposed to get close to notional break even with 20 Tesla magnets in Phase 3 of Alpha, which they skipped in favor of the new prototype. So you can make y...