Talk-Polywell.org

There are enough other practical neutron sources that can do the same job when powered externally and are easier to obtain (e.g. fusors), so building a Polywell for that purpose might even be overkill. A fusor and many other approaches will make neutrons, but they produce relatively few neutrons. I...

However, if Dan is right, I think I would be a bit worried about Iran, N. Korea, (or whatever the aspiring nuclear states of tomorrow will be - we can *hope* that Iran is still just *trying* to get plutonium by then), etc using some of these reactors to breed plutonium. That sounds like a realistic...

ITER is good science, bad economics. It's not the energy solution for 2160. 2110 is unlikely. It's way too expensive for the state of our welfare states. True. I'm still betting a keg of beer on the fact that we can get 500MW of fusion to grid before the first bucket of concrete for ITER is being p...

This could mean serious improvements and peer reviews for Polywell tech. Remember, ITER is backed up by tons of university research projects, including material sciences, plasma physics and electrical engineering. If ITER is going to be cancelled, these projects will need to find a new 'target' and ...

I expect there is a lot of the same going on a SpaceX, the Delta Clipper was built that way (and flew fine until NASA took it over), and you will find Skunk Works mentality at Scaled Composites building the Space Ship One and Two. And you will find it at EMC2. Falcon 9 flew without a lot of trouble...

I'm thinking alpha-charged (no down-conversion) electric-arc airflow heaters* with coaxial anodes and cathodes, flow-shaped, with the heater assembly coaxial with and internal to a VCCW thrust chamber. A crude working assumption is that electric arc heating would give similar behavior to chemical c...

DavidWillard wrote:When times are tough, the tough get going.
Needed a shop to store the computers, tools, power tools, dangerous chems, and miscellanous that I dont want my Autistic son to get into.

Hey, stop picking on us autistics!

That guy might be able to crack the math to get Polywell past Q > 1...

I don't feel comfortable with the statement that your body does not react with the tape measure on two fronts. With special relativity, the body and tape measure interact in the sense that the maesuremant you get will depend on the relative velocityof these two objects. (...) He doesn't mean the ta...

Now, can someone explain why a gamma ray microscope would do holographic imaging? I don't care if it's destructive or not right now, as JCee said that's pretty standard for this scale anyway. I think the uploaders don't care either, as long as the process is precise enough to capture all relevant i...

I'd be more interested in the safety aspects of this thing. You are talking about a tremendous energy density, about the same size of a small fuel tank, and you don't want to witness any catastrophic failures first-hand. So I wonder how this thing would react when faced with overcurrent, short-circu...

Not that I'm a big fan of toks and related systems, but it's refreshing to see that people are also thinking small. A stellerator the size of a car with Q > 1 might give the Polywell a run for its money. If both manage to reach their goals and go to market, development for both systems will accelera...

I understood a gamma laser would offer the possibility of a holographic scan of living tissue, at molecular detail. So I'm always interested when the word "gamma ray laser" drops. Digital data can be stored alot securer then a lump of dead brain. I fail to see the method in which a gamma ray laser ...

Reading the article, it sounds like they're trying to use a jackhammer to carve a hammer, and hit a nail in the process. Figure this: You have a bunch of positronium (anti-hydrogen, p- and e+) and you get it to annihilate with regular H2, so you produce gamma rays through annihilation. That's one of...

I'm a fan of Vernor Vinge's science fiction. One of his short stories, Run Bookworm Run!, takes place in a future where cheap energy has been developed, all old energy tech is obsolete, but its going to be several years to get industry converted to the new technology. The result is an economic Depr...

So, to have called this 'cold fusion' is a media invention of phrase. From the media's POV, any fusion that's not 'promised' to work (in practice: anything except toks) is called "cold fusion", possibly to emphasise the negative urban-myth load it has. Sadly enough, experiments that actually have r...