Search found 58 matches

by Aeronaut
Tue Apr 13, 2010 10:50 am
Forum: News
Topic: Lawaranceville E-Newsletter
Replies: 880
Views: 527162

I found the sketches showing the electron and ion guns, along with the alpha collectors. Nothing so far like a PDF or powerpoint illustrating the machine's operation. The only thing I can see at this point is steady state for centralized energy production, especially selling to European Combined Hea...
by Aeronaut
Tue Apr 13, 2010 1:16 am
Forum: News
Topic: Lawaranceville E-Newsletter
Replies: 880
Views: 527162

This is something like telling Henry Ford that he shouldn't go into the auto business when there were hundreds of competitors, and then telling him there was no future in building them for the masses. So far there is not one fusion plant delivering power to the grid. Or anywhere else. Quite right. ...
by Aeronaut
Mon Apr 12, 2010 11:29 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Lawaranceville E-Newsletter
Replies: 880
Views: 527162

a mathematcian friend of mine once claimed that the (compound) 'knotting' behaviour of a simple rubber band when you wind it up and wind it up, remained (as of a few years ago at least) one of the great remaining unsolved chalenges of mathematical modelling. Pretty clearly the most minor peculiarit...
by Aeronaut
Sat Apr 10, 2010 4:26 pm
Forum: News
Topic: Lawaranceville E-Newsletter
Replies: 880
Views: 527162

8 months is longer than mine, too, but there is peer-review to consider. And a lot of work to be done engineering the X-ray converter and its production tooling.
by Aeronaut
Sat Apr 10, 2010 9:53 am
Forum: News
Topic: Lawaranceville E-Newsletter
Replies: 880
Views: 527162

I am still convinced that the Polywell has a more sound physics in respect to LPP hypothesis. Yet I have to take my hat off to the accomplishments and openness of LPP people. They are burning the ground in their experiments, and if Eric Lerner is right they might beat anyone else to accomplish Fusi...
by Aeronaut
Sat Apr 10, 2010 2:22 am
Forum: News
Topic: Lawaranceville E-Newsletter
Replies: 880
Views: 527162

@kurt9, everybody's skeptical. Seems to be a Bremstrahlung thang.... The donut shape is a simplification. It's really more like an 8 or 16 tip spark plug, so the current sheath is shaped more like a daisy's petals. Then the geometry gets complicated. The design is so small, light, and inexpensive si...
by Aeronaut
Mon Jun 08, 2009 11:25 pm
Forum: Theory
Topic: Do Thermal Neutrons Irradiate Their Shielding Water?
Replies: 16
Views: 11984

No need to look it up- I was just wondering if you've had the same thought or had heard something about how atomic science got started. Put another way, whose shoulders did the Manhattan Project build on? I saw a brief brief blurb about Madam Curie and her workers' health problems on the tube a few ...
by Aeronaut
Mon Jun 08, 2009 11:12 am
Forum: Theory
Topic: Do Thermal Neutrons Irradiate Their Shielding Water?
Replies: 16
Views: 11984

Thanx again, MSimon. Sounds like a string of really small numbers to my lay eye. What blew me away was that the article you linked to was dated 1952. (!) Was there organized radiation and shielding research before 1910?
by Aeronaut
Mon Jun 08, 2009 3:02 am
Forum: Theory
Topic: Do Thermal Neutrons Irradiate Their Shielding Water?
Replies: 16
Views: 11984

Thanx for the reality checks, everybody. I was hoping for a perfect machine (no tritium).

Shoulda outa known better. :wink:
by Aeronaut
Sat Jun 06, 2009 5:10 pm
Forum: Theory
Topic: Do Thermal Neutrons Irradiate Their Shielding Water?
Replies: 16
Views: 11984

On a submarine you use one heat exchanger to prevent radiation from getting into your turbines, on a normal plant you use two heat exchangers for safety. You can go direct and gain efficiency, but you lose big on the radiation damage to your turbines. The impurities in the water absorb the neutrons...
by Aeronaut
Sat Jun 06, 2009 11:07 am
Forum: Theory
Topic: Do Thermal Neutrons Irradiate Their Shielding Water?
Replies: 16
Views: 11984

Do Thermal Neutrons Irradiate Their Shielding Water?

Can the shielding water be used to co-generate directly useful heat, or will that require a heat exchanger?
by Aeronaut
Sat Jun 06, 2009 9:54 am
Forum: General
Topic: Aneutronic fusion
Replies: 31
Views: 8650

Do thermal neutrons make their shielding water radioactive?

Seemed like a simple enough question, but the best Google could do was send me here, and using lots of ANDs on the board's search function hasn't narrowed it down that far. To be clear, I back pB11 fuel in the Focus Fusion reactor, which self-generates its containment fields, and directly converts t...
by Aeronaut
Sat Jun 06, 2009 12:23 am
Forum: Fund-Raising
Topic: Allen and Gates as philanthropists of fusion energy
Replies: 15
Views: 37844

What do you think he meant by "the regulatory climate was too restrictive" ? Fusion gets averaged in with fission in most peoples' minds, so if any pB-11 design should produce a salable design, the regulatory model will almost certainly begin based on how fission sites are treated. [dark undertones...