"The verdict is positive"

[MSimon]

Simon,

The implication is that there is no rule set that can effect the speed and magnitude of "bubbles", is clearly a non-starter. Futures trading, a boon to commerce for both suppliers and purchasers of commodities, needs to be properly 'tuned' to avoid the very volatility we have just seen in oil.

If you drop the cost of marginal futures contracts rates to 0%, then the market would be extremely volatile, and if the amount of money needed for a contract was 100%, then producers and suppliers would be left to the vagaries of market and nature. There is an optimum, which shouldn't be left to the "players" whom would enhance volatility to increase the amount of cash that can be extracted from the system without doing any actual commerce. Commerce is hard. Playing is easy.

Commodity contract margin rules can clearly effect bubbles, to either enhance or diminish maximum magnitude and their speed of growth.

We know what the rule set is. All participants in the market tell each other exactly what they are doing and why. Also the players must not change and they need to have confidence in each other. Perfect knowledge and experience eliminates bubbles. Good luck with that.

Don't be a luser - RTFA.

[Josh Cryer]

Don't be a luser - RTFA.

Take your own advice (re: being off topic).

[tomclarke]

Simon,

If people were super-clever, super-knowledgable & rational a "no rules except disclosure" strategy would work well.

People are none of these things, nor can be. So in real world rules are about what gives best compromise between freedom & protection. You don't even have to view protection as being for people - it is equally for the whole system - if you want finance to provide the lubricant on which business can grow it helps to reduce the magnitude of the bubbles/crashes.

I have heard the argument than in any system remotely like ours we need frequent crashes.that is the only way in which bankers can learn appropriate caution. Too long without a crash and new people have no experience of this, maybe also old ones forget. Current gobal problems good example. We all knew that borrowing more than you can pay back was bad idea. Didn't we? So the magnitude of the crash will always tend to be be proportional to length of time from previous one.

Best wishes, Tom

[rj40]

A few basic rules seem reasonable to me. Yeah, so many people and organizations borrowed more than they could pay back. Not very rational. Bizarre actually. So, perhaps a few different rules are in order. Sort of like the FDA. I’ll bet without the FDA the market would still function. A drug company produces something that kills a lot of people, and so that company goes out of business. But, I like regulation that attempts to stop people from getting killed BEFORE the market punishes the bad guys.

[chrismb]

I must object to the Polywell following being described as "cult-like".

It doesn't seem to me that it was. The "cult following" was a reference to the fusor community — but the polywell is not a fusor (and the failure of Seife to understand the distinction just indicates to me that he hasn't looked into it very deeply).

My $0.02,
— Joe

A cult :"..a usually small group of people characterized by great devotion to [an] ..idea..." Merriam-Webster doesn't actually appear to indicate any pejorative association with the word 'cult', in point of fact.

However, two reasons his comments apply to Polywell IMHO: firstly, cults tend to be associated with a belief and a consequent claim not founded on the existence of a full complement of facts. secondly, the article talked about power-generating devices, and no-one if the fusor community believes a fusor will generate power whereas those in Polywell do.

On the whole, fusion-power devices tend to elicit such devotion and for good reason; they offer the idea of a future which looks like it could be more sustainable for us energy-hungry humans. But Polywell proponents [particularly Bussard himself] have spoken about it in such a specifically assuming way, e.g. that there are no problems short of installing it in a ship, or even in an intergalactic cruiser, that credulity has been stretched for those outside Polywell community.

For example;

"The U.S. Navy wants to convert the entire fleet to electric ships. For the Navy, we focused on clear fuels such as p + 11B, 2H + 3He, 3He + 3He fusion reactions that produce no neutrons. The Navy system would look like this:[figure 37] There are some engineering challenges, for example, we need Westinghouse to make standors that can hold up to a sustained 2 MV output."


Some engineering challenges!!


How about showing a steady fusion rate first?? Is that really a more minor engineering challenge??

One quality I would associate with a cult is having faith in a belief of a future reality which is not based on predicate consequences from existing facts, and which is more presumptive than being possibly described as just a future speculation.

(PS: p+11B and D+3He both do produce neutrons from secondary reactions - particularly D+D in the D3He mix - and even the secondary 4He+11B is likely to be comparable with the 2% neutron emission from fission reactions. [The fact that only 2% of fission energy output is neutronic seems to come as a surprise to many folks. I would presume this level of neutronic output has to be considerably bettered to justify moving away from the USN's well-proven and robust 209MW fission reactors.])

[TallDave]

Chris,

However, two reasons his comments apply to Polywell IMHO: firstly, cults tend to be associated with a belief and a consequent claim not founded on the existence of a full complement of facts

That's actually just a description of any religion. A cult is a religion with a small number of followers -- and all the major religions began as cults.

What separates religion from science is empiricism. The belief that Polywell will definitely work could certainly be described as religious, as there's considerable doubt that it will given what we know. The belief of most here, though, is simply that it's worth funding the attempt at a 1.5M Polywell reactor to find out whether it will work. Polywell does not rest on any novel (i.e. nonempirical) physics.

BTW, by this argument the tokomak fusion supporters are considerably less rational. They are asking for tens of billions in funding for a design everyone knows can never be economically viable as long as fission fuels are available (at least a thousand years). Polywellers are asking for orders of magnitude less for a design that could be economically viable if it works.

How about showing a steady fusion rate first?? Is that really a more minor engineering challenge??

If the physics are sound, yes. Now, some engineering challenges are so difficult as to be impractical, but they are nonetheless just engineering challenges. For example, building a vehicle that can travel at ten times the speed of light is impossible by theory. Buidling one that can travel at .999c is merely a very difficult engineering problem.

(PS: p+11B and D+3He both do produce neutrons from secondary reactions - particularly D+D in the D3He mix - and even the secondary 4He+11B is likely to be comparable with the 2% neutron emission from fission reactions.

You may be considering the thermal-tail reactions. These probably don't apply in a Polywell, where the energies should be more focused around the desired cross-section.

[tomclarke]

I think this board has posters with different ideas about Polywell.

I suppose all hope it will work.

A few post as though they are convinced it will work and assume that the more extreme versions of it (P-B11) will work. When it may be that it will be viable for D-T fusion but not P-B11.

Some are fascinated by the physics and the fact that from what we know now we can't say it won't work - furthermore to test whether it does is so easy! Ten million not ten billion dollars.

And we all know that if it is energetically feasible there is lots of fun technology that will make the difference between it being commercially feasible and not - but with a big prize if it can be solved.

Best wishes, Tom

[Skipjack]

I guess, I am one for the few here that are for law and order instead of anarchy. It is funny how many here are for deregulation and letting the market regulate things by themselves. Some even talking about people diing due to low regulations being acceptable somehow.
I cant agree less... I personally consider this anarchy of the worst kind. The laws of the strongest. Individuals would not stand a chance and corruption would flourish. Lets look at Siemens, e.g. These people think they can do whatever they want. They bribe to get government contracts and then they bribe some more in order to keep small comepetitors down. They were recently fined to 1 billion Euros for this, which is again way to little, as their profits from all this were much, much higher (they even said that they expected at least 3 billion in fines).
Their books are basically uncheckable by tax agents. Millions disappear there every year. And one hundred thousand Euros are rounding errors even in a smaller department.
In the other direction individuals have no way of defending themselves anyway and if they do even small missdemeanours they get hit by with much harder fines and even imprisonment.
Now this is an example of to little regulation, not to much regulation.
I cant see how less regulation would improve things here, e.g.

[TallDave]

Skip,

The problem isn't so much regulation per se but what kind of regulation. Large companies like Siemens actually lobby to create more regulation, to keep competitors from challenging them.

If you look at the largest companies in Europe, most of them have been around for decades and have all sorts of regulations designed to keep them in business. In America, things are less regulated in this regard, so we have companies like Google and Oracle and Microsoft and Yahoo that can spring up overnight at the expense of established companies.

Ask the NYT and Tribune Company what they think of Google and Craigslist. If they could have, they would have passed regulations to strangle the upstarts in the cradle.

The free market is inevitably going to create bubbles and crashes, because no one can accurately predict the future and progress demands less efficient competitors die painful deaths. The alternative is stagnation, corruption, and monopoly.

[chrismb]

You may be considering the thermal-tail reactions. These probably don't apply in a Polywell.

You're probably thinking that I am thinking of the p+11B->11C+n reaction with 0.3barns at ~6-9MeV, which is occasionally noted.

No, I'm thinking of the 4He+11B->14C+n which is ~0.1barns at ~4-7MeV. The thing with this reaction - remember Polywell is predicting a huge flux of alphas coming out of the reaction at 5MeV. So neutron emissions from this reaction will be significant.

It's been mentioned before ( viewtopic.php?t=523) , but I'm not sure it was done whilst recognising that 4He's would collide with the magrid and be further reaccelerated into the reaction zone as fuel products. I could do a basic calculation if you like with a few assumptions about how many 4He's get left behind, but probably fruitless as there is no experimental information on how a Polywell might actually work, even if it works perfectly, and that's what counts.

Which simply further shows Bussard's comments were not made with particularly good judgement or clear objectivity, but with his flare for showmanship. It would seem the new encumbents carrying the Polywell torch have decended back down to earth and are facing up to the awkward realities, but the reputation of the Polywell community has been gained from what has been declared previously, not what is being said today. The narrative needs to be rational, based on facts and in pursuit objective goals in realistic timescales, and if this can be done and maintained then any negative associations with prior declarations in extremis may pass with time.

[Skipjack]

It will take a little more work to convince me.
As I said, I prefer law and order, that way everyone at least knows what to expect (or should know since laws are to often not executed correctly).
Of course, if some company sells my wife a drug that kills her and I can then go and kill some managers in that company, then this is just (as in justice) anarchy. But wait, thats not how it goes. The big anarchy loving companies would make sure they get away with paying a small fine and the husband gets sued to death and put into prison if he only says something against the company out loud. Thats what total deregulation would do. Thats why anarchy can not be fair and that is why there have been laws established over the long time mankind has been arround.

[MSimon]

Simon,

If people were super-clever, super-knowledgable & rational a "no rules except disclosure" strategy would work well.

People are none of these things, nor can be. So in real world rules are about what gives best compromise between freedom & protection. You don't even have to view protection as being for people - it is equally for the whole system - if you want finance to provide the lubricant on which business can grow it helps to reduce the magnitude of the bubbles/crashes.

I have heard the argument than in any system remotely like ours we need frequent crashes.that is the only way in which bankers can learn appropriate caution. Too long without a crash and new people have no experience of this, maybe also old ones forget. Current gobal problems good example. We all knew that borrowing more than you can pay back was bad idea. Didn't we? So the magnitude of the crash will always tend to be be proportional to length of time from previous one.

Best wishes, Tom

Which would tend to argue for less "protection" making bubbles more frequent. Once burned twice shy.

[MSimon]

No, I'm thinking of the 4He+11B->14C+n which is ~0.1barns at ~4-7MeV. The thing with this reaction - remember Polywell is predicting a huge flux of alphas coming out of the reaction at 5MeV. So neutron emissions from this reaction will be significant.

Uh no Chris. Have a look at the literature again. Two alphas at 2.4 MeV and one at 2.9 MeV.

In addition the reactor will be H rich and B11 lean. In a ratio of about 9 to 1.

Of course all this doesn't mean no neutrons. It does mean the flux will be considerably less than a fission reactor. To get the flux below 1 n/sq cm at the reactor shield wall you will need a shield wall about 5 ft thick (assuming concrete and a 1/10th distance of 6" (which is conservative) now this also assumes a water moderator of 6" or 8" followed by a wetted borax absorber (the wetting to eliminate voids) of another 6" to 8". So the shielding will mainly be for the X-rays given off by the boron absorbing neutrons. It will also attenuate any neutrons that make it past the boron absorber.

I did a bit on this a while back based on Dr. Nebel's estimates of neutron flux from a pB11 100 MWth reactor.

[tomclarke]

Simon,

Other than the fact that temperamentally you are somewhat to the right of Atilla the Hun and I probably would prosper and approve of a Brave New World - type controlled society we do not disagree so much.

But the real issue with rules is one of Control Engineering: is the system more or less stable? Or rather, are the inevitable instabilities amplified (large crashes) or damped (small crashes)? And which rules you have make a difference to this.

Best wishes, Tom

[MSimon]

Skipjack,

The alternative to letting people die from no regulation is letting them die from too much regulation. Stasis.

Nothing is certain in life. I'll take my chances. And I'll let my kids take theirs.

IMO the best protection for fools (of all kinds) is danger. It makes folks more cautious. The question is: what is the optimum amount?