Yet another shot at Dense Plasma Focus......

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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BenTC
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Post by BenTC »

Edit: I don't have a feel for the magnitude of the numbers, but I do find their logo quite interesting. A "green" nuclear symbol! Nice juxtaposition.

Image
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Testing? Neutrons?

Peace (anti-nuclear) symbol?

I dunno. I think some one is confused.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

Soylent
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Post by Soylent »

Not even plants like green, that's why they reflect it rather than absorb it.

Nuclear weapons is why the cold war never became hot and why the India-Pakistan relations have chilled down even though there's a lot of pent up animosity.

ICBMs have this funny property no other weapon has. The old farts who would send young men who are barely allowed to drink booze to fight and die for them are the most vulnerable to a nuclear retaliatory strike.

Power producing civilian nuclear reactors are no good at producing weapons grade material in secret; that's why no-one has chosen to use them for this purpose.

Producing nuclear weapons is a very costly, long-term comittment that no nation chooses to make just because they have the technical capability. They do it because of a need for detterent that persists for many years.

If small, cheap, ubiquitous nuclear fusion does anything to nuclear weapon's proliferation at all it is to provide a cheap, highly concealable neutron source for weapons grade plutonium manufacture. ICF approaches could also reveal a good part of thermonuclear bomb physics.

The only long-term deterrent to nuclear proliferation is peaceful free trade relations and an abundance of cheap energy.(i.e. trying to force everyone down a path of wind mills, photovoltaics and scarce natural gas is very dangerous)

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

The Sun is green.

It doesn't look that way because of an optical illusion - we don't "see" green, we see "not-red-and-not-blue" as the proxy to see green, but as the Sun overloads our senses with everything in the spectrum, so it appears 'white'.

In fact, the Sun is the colour of vegetation.

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

The reality is that any fusion energy can be used for bad because *even if* a p11B reactor can be done (or my p15N option :) ) it'd still be easier just to bung some deuterium into the thing and away you go, death-ray level neutrons capable of generating masses of deadly isotopes from harmless substances.

As a thinking, open, creative and forward facing culture I think we just have to press on with our principles and hope others come to accept that creativity is better than destruction. I mean, I just don't see what the 'religious' arguments possibly are from wanting to descend back into medaeval times and power-by-[implied God given]-strength - God gave America "The Bomb" first, right? (Along with some refugees that escaped the Nazis) So if God gave the west The Bomb surely that means he wants us to use it on those that don't if we feel like it?

As it happens, our western cultural thinking is a little bit more sophisticated and respectful than this anthropomorphic imagery of this supposedly superior God, but only up to the point that people acting in His name come along with our constructive and progressive ride, else the way I see it any conversation involving what God wants or doesn't want will end in only one conclusion about what God wants us to do with The Bomb.

If religious types in backward countries think God favours them and their principles, then why hasn't God favoured them?

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

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 »

DPF has always been better at marketing than fusion. I doubt it's going anywhere useful.
And our Sun is not in the shape of a donut.
OTOH it's also a pretty crappy fusion reactor for its mass (iirc it falls about 2 orders of magnitude below the power density of a terrestrial fission plant). It's just really massive.

Robthebob
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Post by Robthebob »

I dont like doomsayers, but something, people, must understand. It's darn easy to make a bomb, it's near impossible to make a energy reactor, as most people here have already figured out. Sometimes, it's pointless to question why something happen, and it's even more pointless to answer such pointless question by saying God wills it. The wheel of history just keeps turning, as we ride into the unknown. Honestly, it is what it is.
Throwing my life away for this whole Fusion mess.

Betruger
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Post by Betruger »

The wheels of history turn because stuff happens. We make stuff happen. We're not along for the ride, we're at the wheel.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

40,000 people die in car accidents in the US allone every year.
That is a Hiroshima death- toll in just 3 years.
Any technology can do harm.
The question that we should ask ourselves though is: How many more people would die without this technology? After all trucks bring us food, farm machines help us produce more food, ambulances drive to bring wounded or ill to the hospital and firetrucks bring firemen an equipment to burning houses. Without all this, I am sure we would see a lot more deaths than 40.000.
The same can be said for any technology, including fusion reactors.
They are the two sides of coin. If you want to do without that, you would have to return to pre- stone age times, before men started banging rocks together to make a better knife...

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

TallDave wrote: OTOH it's also a pretty crappy fusion reactor for its mass (iirc it falls about 2 orders of magnitude below the power density of a terrestrial fission plant). It's just really massive.
That's truly mistaken.

22 orders, more like.

I did a post on fusor.net some time ago that read;

>>>>

Just to nail the misconception that "if we could recreate a miniature Sun on earth then we'd have a useful power supply";

Total power output of the Sun = 3E26W
Total volume of the Sun = 1E27m3

Total output of an Olympic swimming pool volume (2,500m3) of proton burning plasma, equivalent to normalised Sun plasma, = 800W

If you stick solar panels all over the top of a typical house, you'll get somewhere like 2 to 3kW of electrical power from polycrystalline types, which is around what the house actually uses. But you'd need ~14 Olympic swimming pool's worth of solar plasma to generate the same power! (assuming 30% thermal efficiency to electricity) That's quite a real-estate burden on top of building your house! And that's not counting the containment and power extraction facilities!

Let's consider a power station facility with a 3GW installed capacity; you'd need 1E10m3 of solar plasma which is, for example, a volume 10 metre high by 1 kilometre wide by 1,000 kilometres long.

Let's put it into a cube to minimise the surface area and thus the containment vessel materials. I believe we have about 80GW installed capacity here in UK, that'd be a cube 10 kilometres along each edge (taking into account heat conversion loss 1:3) or a sphere of 12 kilometres diameter.

Hmmm... a 10 kilometre high fusion core? US consumption was 800GW in 2007, so that'd be a fusion core twice as big!

In fact, if America were to dedicate one single State to the production of 800GW of electricity with a Sun-like plasma and let's say it is one of their really big states, conveniently in the middle of the country, like Kansas, then the Solar-plasma core required to power the rest of the US would cover the WHOLE of Kansas to a height of 11 metres.

The next possible, and most efficient way, to make use of solar plasma suitable for human use is to round up 2E30kg of hydrogen, allow it to compress itself under its own gravity and allow it to become incandescent under fusion energy emissions at its centre, then sit 93million miles away behind a dual magnetic shield and 100km thick gaseous shield and make use of radiated electromagnetic energy with photo-voltaic panels. Compared with keeping a little sun on hand, this configuration actually saves on real estate, as shown here, and has the advantage that most of the engineering has already been done courtesy of mother nature.

If mankind is intent on using terrestrial nuclear fusion for their energy production, it has to be a fundamentally different and an enormous improvement (in specific power terms) to what the Sun does.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

22 orders, more like.
Well, you're looking at volume rather than mass, but am I missing something? I think a swimming-pool sized fission plant would produce closer to 80KW then 8x10^18 MW.

But we agree it's not very a good reactor, by size or mass.
Last edited by TallDave on Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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