Talk-Polywell.org

"Critical" in the bad sense is a construct of Hollywood and the mass media I can't reconcile that -- a view of criticality as a continuum -- to the Slotin accident at Los Alamos (criticality by fleetingly and accidentally joining the two halves of the demon core) and the Cecil Kelley centrifuge acc...

More detailed explanations for me to ponder - thx! Interesting that Arne Gundersen's speculation about criticality may have been wrong. I am not sure why you are seemingly fixated on the word "critical". It only means that a core is producing enough neutrons to sustain its operating power level I gu...

I beleive the crack was blamed on an H2 pop in the donut. It was not due to the slag. I think there were two explosions (Unit 1 and Unit 3). I don't know which one has the crack in the cement containment. I believe Gundersen speculates the Unit 3 explosion was due to criticality. Here's Gundersen i...

paperburn1 wrote:http://www.mazurinstruments.com/Comparison_Matrix.html

Too cool! Thx for the link.

Tobacco apparently absorbs lead when it grows, including lead-210 which is present in higher concentrations when phosphate fertilizer is used. Apparently tobacco is also contaminated with even more dangerous polonium-210 (which I believe is a daughter product of the lead). I think those isotopes are...

Thanks to you (and all) for patient and detailed answers! And for the links, which I will read. Still... a scary situation. Even if the slags are unlikely to melt into the ground water, they were (are?) hot enough to threaten it indirectly (by cracking the cement part of the containment). Apparently...

Thanks. You know stuff. And I understand some of the reportage about Fukushima is -- apart from silence -- hysterical. But... Even once you shut down a core, it still has residual heat as the daughter products burn off Shutting the core down means inserting control rods. But is that not irrelevant i...

Fukushima went non-critical very quickly when the quake hit and control rods were inserted. Except there were meltdowns -- three of them. No one knows where the cores are, or the extent of the damage, but muon imaging suggests at least one of the meltdowns is 100%. https://www.rt.com/news/316593-fu...

Is there a fission physicist in the house? I realize Chernobyl (graphite pile) and Fukushima (boiling water with metal containment vessel) are different technologies, but both had meltdowns, and both contain tons of melted nuclear fuel that no one knows how to remove (let alone "clean up"). Chernoby...

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/baumer1/ "At the beginning, NIF was expected to achieve ignition with room to spare. But as of February 2015, the best results at NIF are a factor or three short of achieving the Lawson criterion. [9] How did NIF end up missing its ignition target by an o...

ps.uci.edu/memorial/rostoker UC Irvine professor Norman Rostoker, the father of breakthrough clean nuclear fusion energy techniques via plasma-based accelerators, died on Christmas Day [2014] in Irvine, Calif. He was 89. In addition to serving on UCI’s faculty, Rostoker co-founded Tri Alpha Energy w...

http://fire.pppl.gov/Science_US_Fusion_ ... 121814.pdf
19 DECEMBER 2014
sciencemag.org

Dysfunctional, broken, in complete disarray: That’s how numerous insiders describe the United States’ research effort in fusion...

The artcle also says "The idea of using plasma in controlled thermonuclear reactors actually dates back to the 1950s, when the institute's founder Gersh Budker proposed such a method." This may be one of those funny examples like "who invented the telephone" (or light bulb, or radio) where the answe...

AcesHigh wrote:There was already a thread about Dynomak... created just yesterday
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5632

Didn't see that! Thx for the link! interesting stuff there. I would be happy for this to be merged in.

So is it possible that we may one day get them down to car engine in size, or is that bumping up against solid physics (as opposed to engineering) barriers? Pish posh lad, fantasize big! Why not fusion generated electricity within a semi-conductor? There may well be answers to that question (someth...