Talk-Polywell.org

I want to start this by saying that, obviously, it's a bit early to do any kind of 'investing' in Polywell - we don't even know that it works yet! But, I've also been thinking lately, that some day in maybe 2 or 5 years, we *might* all wake up to have all the news media proclaiming the advent of che...

Makes me curious. What does the timeline of paradigm changes like relativity look like? How long is it usually between revolutionary ideas like that? I think a question like that is really hard to answer with any kind of meaningful response, because there's so many variables. I mean, think about it...

On the Issue of Giant reactors, where maybe one per state or one per region provide most of our power - I really don't like that idea. In addition to the limited points of failure argument others have raised, there's also an economics argument: I like a competitive market, not monopolies. One giant ...

This physical size of this fusion generator could be downsized by a factor of 600 if energy rich thorium was added in a fission fusion hybrid design, and still maintain or increase its thermal/electric power output. This would also provide a potential for direct nuclear power conversion to direct e...

Can anyone tell me if enough R&D has been done on deceleration grids (for the direct-conversion electric generation approach), to determine what sorts of physical limits there might be (at least, with the current generation of the technology)? What I mean is, I don't know this for sure, but I imagin...

How much does the entire planet use ??? 100Gw gee whiz. About 127,000,000 GW if my arithmatic is right! R~6400km. A~127,000,000km^2 Solar insolation ~1GW/km^2 Viola! Ok, the albedo may reduce that a bit, but not much. Call it 100petawatts. In other words, we'd need about a million of them if the su...

So how much sea water could be purified daily using the full output of a 100 GW power plant? Because, iirc, the value of the fresh water is greater than the value of the electricity to purify it once electricity gets in the 6 cent/kwh range. A modern reverse osmosis desalination plant, like the one...

Pardon a possibly stupid question on my part, but. . . It seems to me that, wouldn't one of the first things you would want to do is to put a polywell reactor on some sort of conventional rocket, and test what effects, if any, high-G acceleration has on the reaction? In a (relatively) stationary (of...

It's hard to imagine how the Deepwater Horizon oil spill could be worse, as it already seems like a worst-case scenario, but I ran across an editorial on the Wash. Post which raises some good points. The main point being, it could be worse if the responsible party, instead of being a corporation, we...

Hi, I'm hoping to tap the collective knowledge of this forum for information about the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor), and the GE S-PRISM. It is my understanding that the GE S-PRISM is a proposed commercial fast reactor design which was derived from the work done by the DoE on the IFR project in Idaho....

you are saying that a hypothesis should not be promoted to a theory till the experimental evidence is in. No, wrong, that is not what I am saying. How can you really, truly know that you have 'NOT found' something? Reference Karl Popper, pseudo-science, unfalsifiable hypotheses. I thought that's wh...

Anyone have a link to a good article on *why* ITER is now so over the original budget? Wasn't it originally slated to be about 5 Bn Euro? Now it's up to something like $15Bn?

How does that happen? Is there some sort of massive fraud going on somewhere involving contractors or something?

Polywells even using D-T will be fairly large. And they will be pretty much round or cubical, there being no sense to making the vacuum chamber have more volume than absolutely needed. So, no, it's not going to fit in a 10' wide truck. It's going to be about 15' cube or sphere. Which, unfortunately...

I'm of the opinion it will be a bit of a long, slow decline. Let's say that EMC2 and the Navy finish their tests, and release a press release to the world about the advent of plentiful, safe, clean, cheap fusion power. 1) Even assuming a capital investment frenzy in PW reactors (which isn't necessar...

One of the biggest initial problems for any fusion reactor design, will be public concern about the safety of a fusion reactor. They will probably, initially, think that fusion is like fission - dangerous, radioactive, risk of meltdown or explosion. I remember when I first read about WB-6, and how t...