Talk-Polywell.org

Diversifying is good. Shooting the frontrunner in a foot race, however, never makes for a better race. 10B Euros over the next decade isn't too much to spend on ITER by any means, and US participation is vital to our moving forward on all of this.

My simpleton thought is that if you can't miss the cathode enough, make the problem the solution. Why not make the cathode out of boron11? Heh, interesting idea. It would melt/vaporize/ablate too fast to work, but still a neat twist. Wouldn't cold Boron just ionize and slow the fuel? Forget about t...

A Q=0.001 would be absolutely astounding at this early stage. It would move IEC up an order of magnitude, before any of the multitude of "tunings" are applied.

I'd be great if they could simply see their way to such a development.

Like I said before we should investigate all the different fusion approaches, but I certainly wouldn't advocate abandoning a high performing fusion machine until something that meassurably performed better was found. I completely agree. The problem is money. The tokamakkers are saying "we've done w...

.....we should investigate all the different fusion approaches, but I certainly wouldn't advocate abandoning a high performing fusion machine until something that meassurably performed better was found. The abandonment of other approaches should always be avoided. The highest performers should get ...

...will have no reason not to produce beasts as big as anyone could want. :shock: There seems to be an inexorable esclation for increasing vehicle size, really only limited by the cost of Energy. The driving variable seems to be the relative safety of the larger vehicles on the road. If BFRs work a...

A friend of mine, who doesn't believe global warming is mainly human induced, says that if Polywell works, enviro's will start to claim that the estimates of CO2 were off and we will need to cut back even more than thought. She thinks they will come up with new cut-back levels that will, convenient...

Problem is, nobody has developed a scalable enzymatic process for converting cellulose into ethanol. Cellulose is tough to crack for a reason. Cellulose doesn't seem to be remediated even by the plant that produced it. It is used for structure alone, never used to produce spore or seed; It is left ...

Will it come to violence? Nah, not likely. Again, the vast majority of people will benefit. The losers will be certain corporations, and corporations generally prefer lawyers and lobbyists to violence. I don't know.... I want to slap anyone who wants to confuse farm policy with energy policy. We sh...

These guys do it all - suck in CO2 and convert it back to hydrocarbons for burning again: Los Alamos Renewable Energy (LARE). You can do the same thing with polywells, and make the process continue even at night. Even trees can't do that! :) Atmospheric C02 is in trace quantities (although importan...

Roger wrote:

BSPhysics wrote: biodiesel bunk.

IIRC, Truckers can now drive the length of I-95 on the east coast of the US, and buy only biodiesel . Taking the fat outta a fryer and driving with it is a good thing, albeit a niche market.

What ratio do you need? Y'know McDonalds : Automobile.

One way to store hydrogen that works very well is to put it at the end of long-chain carbon molecules -- for instance, octane, cetane, etc. That is, the common components of gasoline and diesel fuel. These are much more easily transportable than hydrogen gas. Exactly. hydrogenated biomass to make m...

Anything makes more sense than to subsidize Alcohol, then burn massive quantities of Natural Gas to run the distilleries. Fermentation itself is a waste, as evidenced by the large quantities of Carbon Di-Oxide it gives off. We're better off burning the corn. I have doubt about Brazilian ethanol too....

Government will need to drive the whole thing initially; So far I haven't heard of any Venture Capital firms interested in any non-thermalized plasma regimens. Another VC firm sees Magnetic - Inertial regimen (MTF) as the route to Fusion: http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9866626-54.html?part=rss&tag...

I think the X-Prize for suborbital tourism should demonstrate that these sort of things don't necessarily get what they want accomplished. They seem to just bend the trajectories of existing organizations working on a problem, not creating much new. The other issue is, look at SS1. That ship can't ...