Talk-Polywell.org

According to Wikipedia, ITER is under the auspices of the IAEA, which in turn reports to the general assembly and security council of the UN. But thanks, I had to look it up: I was foaming at the mouth instinctively before you asked.

Some people clearly think so: Armory Lovins: If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. (1977) Paul Erlich: Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be like giving an idiot child a machine gun...

The fact I failed to relay from the paper is that the Ni 62 concentration is over 98% in both samples. Maybe I've been following this for too long: I recall earlier that when people thought nickel was being transmuted to copper, copper was found in the ash. Now they find Ni 62 when that's the theory...

I'm keen to be convinced, but the isotope analysis of the Nickel screams fraud. They opened the reactor just at the moment when all of the Ni isotopes had been turned to Ni 62? Was it just about to burn out? No, I don't buy it. I believe the ash was fake (sadly).

[oops. VFB seems to need 2 different electrolytes, so I'll modify my guess on the 2X200L tanks to one for each!] Speaking of infrastructure for this, it isn't clear whether spent fuel can be turned into unspent (charged) fuel simply enough that you might be able to have a fuel re-former on-board whi...

Looks like Vanadium is about $25 per kg and global demand a few years back was 61,000 Tonnes.

RE: D Tibbets Refuelling a flow battery at a 'gas station' would involve loading an expensive charged chemical, and unloading and expensive uncharged chemical. If you deposit the spent fuel with the gas station, the net cost is the cost of the charging, plus some unknown factor for inefficiency. You...

I think the 'Salt Water Car' is more PR than anything else, the website just says this is a flow-battery using 'metallic salts'. It is recharged by taking the used fuel and recharging it off-line. Worth noting is that the 373 miles is with 2X200 litre fuel tanks, presumably one for fuel and one for ...

Duh! Why do these pennies take so long to drop these days? Be vapour in the reactor looks like it might be a supplement to the Boron fuel. The natural isotopes are Be7, 9, and 10. If the most prominent reaction is proton capture, Be7->B8->2He, ie more aneutronic fusion. Be9 and 10 just produce stabl...

For some months at least the plan has been to try a tungsten electrode before Beryllium. This doesn't seem to me to be a change of plan. I guess the question is why do tungsten at all. Maybe they hope for better data which will attract more funds.

Today emissions are 35 bn tonnes CO2. That's from roughly 2bn industrialized inhabitants. So suppose 10bn people emit 5 times that. At the moment CO2 is rising about 2.8 ppm per year. In the worst case scenario, it would be rising at 14 ppm per year. It would rise linearly, because CO2 per head has ...

The gravitational behavior of antimatter is still unknown...... I read about experiments being set up to test that years ago. Not seeing a followup I presumed a 'null' result of antimatter acting exactly like normal matter to within the precision of the experiment. I keep looking, but AEGIS has not...

I had intended to post this reference in respect of the AEGIS comment. EPL (Europhysics Letters) Volume 94 Number 2 M. Villata 2011 EPL 94 20001 doi:10.1209/0295-5075/94/20001 Abstract The gravitational behavior of antimatter is still unknown. While we may be confident that antimatter is self-attrac...

Couple of points: 1. I'm far from a physicist, but I recall that 'Hawking Radiation' is caused by gravitational effects near an event horizon tearing virtual particle pairs apart. So the assertion that virtual particles don't gravitate is at least suspect. 2. The AEGIS experiment at CERN is working ...

Apropos various remarks: 2 kW/kg was rather arbirary and used to calculate N/kg, aka acceleration. So higher thrust per watt reduces the specific power requirement. Higher thrust/Watt may be entirely sensible, per others comments. Also, do you agree the proposed skunkworks generator is about 1kw/kg?...