"Gang of 10" energy bill compromise ~$10B research

Discuss funding sources for polywell research, including the non-profit EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation, as well as any other relevant research efforts.

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MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

if fusion funding had stayed high we might be putting the finishing touches on WB-100 this week.
WB6 was conceived what three years ago? Despite 11 years of work on Polywell.

So we have lost at most a couple of years due to funding restrictions. Probably more like 10 months.

We are doing about as good as can be expected.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

And Free Market is a misnomer, its signed sealed and delivering to the richest few, who consistently go trampling off in the wrong direction twice a century.
Nope.

The only way to make a country work economically is that the poor don't steal from the rich (USSR) and the rich don't steal from the poor (your typical kleptocracy).

You are mistaking a perfectly efficient economy (not going to happen) vs a most efficient economy (can do).

Here is a nice short piece on the most efficient way to handle private water rights (read ownership):

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0878/inves ... flow.shtml

The same principle is true for all ownership situations.

Private property (for the rich and the poor) is the secret of American wealth.

As to oil subsidies: they need to be phased out slowly since economic decisions were made based on those subsidies. Canceling them over night would be a waste of capital.

The same goes for wind power subsidies. Phase them out over a decade (the current average life of a wind project).

Look at how T. Boone Pickens is scamming government:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,395304,00.html

He has bought a license to steal. Literally. He couldn't do it without government guns enforcing his grab.

*
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

MSimon wrote:
if fusion funding had stayed high we might be putting the finishing touches on WB-100 this week.
WB6 was conceived what three years ago? Despite 11 years of work on Polywell.

So we have lost at most a couple of years due to funding restrictions. Probably more like 10 months.

We are doing about as good as can be expected.
Oh, I don't know. I think Bussard could have achieved what he did much quicker if he'd been receiving anything like tokamak levels of funding. They might have been testing multiple designs in parallel rather than in series.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

They didn't do it by ethanol. They did it by drilling for oil.
They did it by harnessing the free market to allow both, by mandating flexfuel and drilling offshore. When oil became far more expensive than ethanol, they were perfectly positioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Last edited by TallDave on Mon Aug 04, 2008 2:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

I thought the problem is the free market, which spent the last 30 yrs revving up like a 757 on takeoff, and has headed in the wrong direction for 30 yrs.
The "right way" is always towards more economic growth and efficiency, driven by individual choice. That means people have more of the things they want: more food, greater mobility, bigger houses, better lives. The free markets always do a better job of this; if central planning was viable the Cold War wouldn't have turned out the way it did.
If the so called "Free Market" had turned the the right way 30 yrs ago, we wouldnt be here, oil wise
Well, when a billion people in China embrace the free market and start wanting the same benefits we've enjoyed, it's not surprising commodity prices spike. That's no reason to pooh-pooh 30 years of economic growth.
Wasting 30 yrs of time is no way efficient.
It's hardly been wasted, at least in the private sector. Living standards all over the world have vastly improved over that time. What failure there has been, has mostly been on the part of the gov't planners, which is why we have no nuclear plants being built and wildly fluctuating fusion fundiing.

ravingdave
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Post by ravingdave »

TallDave wrote:
Well, I don't know; when petroleum is cheapest it probably makes sense to use petroleum. There are certainly upsides, but higher fuel costs might have meant we'd have had 1-2% lower GDP growth over those decades, which means real pain for real people. Let the free market find the efficient solution, which it is now doing.

That said, the government could certainly have planned better on the research funding, rather than having such a short-term, knee-jerk reaction to oil prices. If Brazil can get off foreign oil, we certainly should be capable of that as well, and far more. Who knows, if fusion funding had stayed high we might be putting the finishing touches on WB-100 this week.

I wasn't objecting to the use of petroleum, I was objecting to the quantities and purposes. If it is all coming from domestic production, fine and good, but when it is coming from relatively hostile foreign nations, it is a bad thing. Why on earth would we want to build up the economic strength of potential enemies just so we can go hither and thither just for the thrill of it ? Much of America's fuel usage is frivolous, and the middle east is a powder keg, with the potential to start WWIII and kill millions of people.

The less money we send over there the better, and in my opinion we ought to have a cold war philosophy regarding the middle east. If we are at war, then what of a little sacrifice ? Let us cut back on our usage as much as possible, and find better ways of using what we do have.

The internal Combustion engine burns fuel around 2500 degrees F, then it uses water to cool the engine down to a functional 220 degrees F.
Heating and cooling the same chunk of metal at the same time, with the obvious loss of efficiency. Sounds like a Government program, but it's lasted over a 100 years so far. Americans can do better and we should.



David

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

ravingdave,

Auto mfgs spend enormous amounts of money for tenths of a mpg. If there was an easy way to do it, it would already be done.

It makes no sense to go with an engine that would double auto efficiency at an additional cost of $20,000 a vehicle. Heck even an additional $5K a vehicle is stretching the economics. And economics represents the total energy cost. Production plants, engineers, factory workers, etc.

Economics says that we are doing as well as we can under current conditions.

As to sending money to our enemies, I agree. Drill, drill, drill.

The Democrats are taking a big gamble with their no drilling attitude. They may hand the Congress over to the Rs.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industrie ... hore_N.htm

Are the no drillers on the Saudi payroll?

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... yroll.html

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... eason.html
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

If it is all coming from domestic production, fine and good, but when it is coming from relatively hostile foreign nations, it is a bad thing.
It certainly is a shame we funded heinous regimes in Iran and Iraq, and fuelled the Saudi Wahhabist movement. OTOH, if we had taken the moral high road and refused to do business with them at all, they might have gone Communist and propped up the Soviets another 20 years while we struggled to find enough energy to keep our economy growing. Really, no good choices. But we probably could have done better, esp post-1989.
The internal Combustion engine burns fuel around 2500 degrees F, then it uses water to cool the engine down to a functional 220 degrees F.
Heating and cooling the same chunk of metal at the same time, with the obvious loss of efficiency.
Heh, those were the same objections people had to the ICE in the 1800s. But nothing else has the requisite power density to work well for mobile applications.

ravingdave
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Post by ravingdave »

MSimon wrote:ravingdave,

Auto mfgs spend enormous amounts of money for tenths of a mpg. If there was an easy way to do it, it would already be done.
Auto mfgs DO spend a lot of money for insignificant improvements, and in that regard a large enough private beuracracy begins to equal the incompetence of regular government beuracracies. The auto industry has made a mountain of blunders in their history. The fact that they can't seem to do something != it can't be done. Look at the money spent on iter so far. Polywell might not work, but if it fails, it has still cost a lot less.

MSimon wrote: It makes no sense to go with an engine that would double auto efficiency at an additional cost of $20,000 a vehicle. Heck even an additional $5K a vehicle is stretching the economics. And economics represents the total energy cost. Production plants, engineers, factory workers, etc.

Of course it makes no sense if it is not first economically feasable, but I believe engineers have too long been subject to "intellectual phase lock." I think it is possible to push engines closer to the carnot efficiency limits, but too many engineers have been thinking inside the box. (rankine cycle)

There are some really good ideas out there in engine land, then there are some ideas that just constitute "another way to burn gas." While I don't see it achieving significant thermal improvement, the Coates engine valve system seems to be a significant improvement in volumetric efficiency as well as greatly reduced friction losses.
http://www.coatesengine.com/technology.html

The Scuderi engine design looks like it could improve thermal efficiency if they can actually get those valves working as well as they claim.
http://www.scuderigroup.com/technology/ ... ation.html

Then of course there is also turbine truck engines, which is interesting.
The weak spot to me is the efficiency of those turbine wheels.
http://www.ttengines.com/technology.htm l

None of these guys may ever go anywhere, but they are thinking outside the box.


David

ravingdave
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Post by ravingdave »

TallDave wrote:

Heh, those were the same objections people had to the ICE in the 1800s. But nothing else has the requisite power density to work well for mobile applications.

The Brayton cycle engine actually predates rankine by about ten years I think. It had a decent power to size/weight ratio, and the brayton cycle is the basis for Jet engine designs. And with a Brayton cycle you can recycle some of your wasted exhaust heat.

If the Brayton cycle is so good (you may ask) why didn't it win instead of rankine ? I think the rankine builds more power for it's size than does the Brayton. In 1880 people didn't give a fig about efficiency, so the larger power in the smaller package won. That's my theory anyhow.


David

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Post by 93143 »

Minor quibble: Car engines don't use the Rankine cycle; they use the Otto cycle. Truck engines use the Diesel cycle.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

I believe engineers have too long been subject to "intellectual phase lock."
There is a lot of capital tied up in production machinery. It is not just a matter of thinking outside the box. It is a matter of revamping the whole system. Which is why incremental improvement takes precedence over revolution.

BTW saw this in a NASA tech brief:

http://www.irisengine.com/

Now consider the production process to build it.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

ravingdave
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Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2007 2:41 am

Post by ravingdave »

MSimon wrote:
I believe engineers have too long been subject to "intellectual phase lock."
There is a lot of capital tied up in production machinery. It is not just a matter of thinking outside the box. It is a matter of revamping the whole system. Which is why incremental improvement takes precedence over revolution.

BTW saw this in a NASA tech brief:

http://www.irisengine.com/

Now consider the production process to build it.

Just looked at it. Yeah, that's gonna work. Not!

I gotta admit it's inovative though, but I've seen plenty of inovative engines that I don't see going anywhere. The quasiturbine is one.

http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/


My overall favorite engine design that i've seen so far is the starrotor.
http://www.starrotor.com/Engines.aspx

I think this thing could actually work, but I find it difficult to believe that they can ever produce it economically. The tolerances and the gear drive system I would think are excessively difficult. I've been watching this engine design now for at least 4 years, and it still hasn't gone anywhere yet.


David

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