Talk-Polywell.org

From my very limited understanding of the 1929 crash, the original problem was that the government took a laisez faire attitude to the collapse of the banking system, only intervening when it was too late. Sorry for perpetuating OT discussion, but Herbert Hoover wasn't a free-market libertarian. He...

MSimon wrote:It looks like the DoD has $2 million for Polywell.

viewtopic.php?p=18633#18633

This administration must relatively hate Polywell, because it has billions for everyone else.

Hey guys, I just read about a plasma-wakefield accelerator http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/smaller-and-more-powerful-particle.html and the description of its rather violent interactions between electron beams and plasmas led me to wonder whether wakefield interactions could be useful in inducing fu...

The comprehensive pursuit of MSRs, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LIFTERs), Electric generation of Neutrons (like Polywell) and Fast Sprectum, Nuclear waste eating reactors, would clearly be a destabilizing game-changer, for the current Nuclear Industry, their friends at the NRC, The Coal Indust...

Again, I may be missing something, but everything I have seen suggests Polywell should work, and if it does, would get there bf&c. I guess you haven't been reading my posts. I've spent a good deal of effort over the last six months explaining why, given everything I know about plasma physics, the p...

I don't know where the idea came from that tokamaks haven't been successful. It depends upon your definition of success. When I was in High School in the early 1970s, I read that we'd have to wait 20 years for tokamak-based nuclear fusion power plants. That was 36 years ago and I'm reading nothing ...

Not everyone is a physicist, or even an engineer. In any case I think he is correct about the politics. Bussard's hope when he started the Fusion section was that 20% of the resources would go to new ideas and stuff that was off the beaten track. It didn't happen. I don't think one needs to be tech...

You might like an old movie (comedy) based on that theme: "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" When I saw this movie a long time ago, I thought, "Every project management student absolutely MUST see this movie to understand how a project goes out of control, overspends, and (God willing) turns ou...

Assuming dry ice as a refrigerant, alcohol or acetone might be circulated for heat transfer.

Back in college I wandered past a lab and saw some friends goofing around with dry ice and acetone. They did most of the same fun things (e.g. shattering roses) you see done with liquid nitrogen.

I was annoyed by the notion of Nature deciding which theories are right, b/c it doesn't work that way. Nature presents phenomena to the observer. The observer is wise to record it accurately and then describe that phenomena in an organized fashion. When descriptions are organized well enough to use ...

Kudos to bwang. Two sites on my "check every day" list talk-polywell.com and nextbigfuture. If anything I've said about Hyperion contradicts bwang, believe him, not me.

You may have heard that Toshiba is giving away a small nuke to a village in Alaska. I think that north of the border is the ideal market for Hyperion (or nuclear in general). There's a real need for rural electrification throughout Alaska, the Yukon, and Northwest Territories. The politics in the re...

According to this article, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos the Hyperion is "based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use" I think there's some confusion about liquid metal. You can use liquid sodium as a working fluid ...

(My daughter is the nuclear engineer, not me. Don't take my word on this. Google "Hyperion" if this sounds hinky.) The idea is to set up a shielded hot-tub full of metal-hydride. And make the metal a fissionable material like uranium or thorium. This is a mix of moderator and fission fuel. If it fiz...

The wording "instrumentation to achieve spatially resolved plasma densities and spatially resolved particle energies" caught my eye, too. I probably read too much into it, but I was reminded of the Aristotelian notion of an "instrumental cause." To wit, the chisel is the instrument applied to marble...