Talk-Polywell.org

So you can' t use water as a fuel to make... water. You would require at least the same energy to electrolyze water into gases as you could hope to get by combining the gases.

The question here for the H2O example is about the efficiency of cracking it verses the energy recovered from the use of the O2 and H2 as fuel sources.

My fundamental point being, that you can store H2 "inside" something else.

Getting it out is another discussion.

Every once and a while some guy comes along claiming to have the self running electroysis machine that cracks water and burns the gasses to run a turbine generator that makes power to crack the water...

And for the record, that "getting it" discussion is the one the Greens tend to avoid as the resource expenditure costs to be green tends to overwhelm any benefit.

Assorted hydrocarbons seem a decent way to store hydrogen for energy.

hanelyp wrote:Assorted hydrocarbons seem a decent way to store hydrogen for energy.

If only we could find some sort of organic process for storing energy from the sun in the form of hydrocarbons...

And some sort of self-sustaining chemical reaction to release the stored energy...

Am I alone in feeling the hopes of 5 years ago were unjustified? The problem may be the understanding of the physics of fusion is fundamentally incomplete, or just wrong. The fact some fusion technologies are comparativelly cheap (single digit millions) makes all the more shocking there aren't more and better funded efforts.

And that's why Tri-Alpha stays secretive to the general public. People want news, then they speculate and make guesses, then those companies die because the public saps away the investors' desire to fund.

asdfuogh wrote: People want news, then they speculate and make guesses

I disagree.

The story here is not the "rabble making guesses." It's the fusion experimenters making promises they discover they can't keep. I'm not suggesting any wrong doing -- they probably can't do what they do without being optimists. But their predictions have been specific, and unambiguously not met.

This has happened for decades -- General Atomics predicted fusion was 20 years away (in the 1970s), and Spitzer in the 1950s (his plans for the never built successor to Alactor-C was supposed to be Alcator-D for "Demo").

And for that matter Bussard's contribution to Google-Talks shortly before Bussard died -- where he bemoaned those of little faith who didn't appreciate he HAD done -- based on data he reviewed after his last project was shut down. Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today, like the Queen said.

Or Focus Fusion predicting proof of concept in 2 years in 2008. The much predicted Tri-Alpha announcement expected in (when was that? 2010 if I recall). And NiF (and before that Shiva and Nova).

A few more decades of over promising, and, you know. A fella could get skeptical.

CBK

If only we could find some sort of organic process for storing energy from the sun in the form of hydrocarbons...


Coal!

CharlesKramer wrote:General Atomics predicted fusion was 20 years away (in the 1970s)

*ahem*

This chart is the same as the chart published in 1976, except it is inflation adjusted. As you can see the funding never got in the "fusion in 20 years range", rather it has pretty much always been in "fusion never" range, nobody ever promised fusion with piss poor funding in 20 years, so it's silly to imply that scientist and engineers somehow over-promised.


The original version of the same chart 1976

The other key point here is when you are in a program or process that does not have a concrete critical path and milestones, and you are asked, "when will you be done?". The answer is invariably a WAG with an attempt to dismiss the asker. In the case of fusion and other similar contexts(I see them all the time in my work), the response is "20 years".
I think folks pick that because they think it is long enough to get some breathing space, but not long enough that the asker loses hope in seeing an answer.
If they answered realistically, more often than not the answer would by non means be an acceptable timeframe for the asker, regardless of its validity.
Answers like, "Don't know", or "We'll have to see", or "We more than likely have a good 50(or longer) years of effort" are really not answers anyone wants to hear.
They want their burger now.

Think about what you tell your kids when the ask "How long?" and you know either there is not a good answer or the answer is going to ignite them.

Charles, you really are hung up on expecting a real answer when there isn't one. They simply don't know what they don't know and you are not willing to accept that, so you seek a hard answer.

There is no hard answer. It could be a week from now, it could be 100 years, never, or somewhere in between.

Personally, I think we(mankind) will be testing something viable at full scale(ie not ITER) with-in the decade.

hanelyp wrote:Assorted hydrocarbons seem a decent way to store hydrogen for energy.

Indeed. The question really is when will these liquid hydrocarbons run out, and what can replace them. It is a moving target as reserves are constantly changing, but for fossilized replacements, coal and natural gas are the obvious choices. Hydrogen only makes any sense if you have a non fossil fuel driven power supply- nuclear, hydroelectric, etc. currently. Fussion reactors could be the Ureka solution for this scenario, provided it doesn't cost too much (which Tokamaks may...). Bussard seemed to have a good engineering and systems understanding and he proposed using Polywells to power ethanol generation from organic feedstocks- corn, cane, grass, sea weed, etc. No mention of generating hydrogen by him. This is CO2 neutral like hydrogen (if both generated from non fossilized fuel power sources). And, it avoids much of the tremendous storage (including energy costs of storage) and infrastructure challenges of hydrogen.


Producing hydrogen and oxygen from water does provide useful reactants for energy production. Hydrogen as a fuel and oxygen as an oxidizer. But oxygen is extremely abundant in the atmosphere and presumably much cheaper to use than any electrolysis derived source of oxygen. It is essentially a waste product. This is of course a different story in a closed system such as a space ship. Here the oxygen is the valued product while the hydrogen is a waste product. Plants have the advantage over electrolysis as the hydrogen is tied up in hydrocarbons that can be further used as food and this also addresses CO2 issues. This could also be done chemically, but involves complex and perhaps more fragile and less sustainable processes.

Dan Tibbets

My understanding of photosynthesis can be summarized as cracking water with a photo-catalyst, then reacting the hydrogen released with CO2 to produce storable carbohydrates. An industrial process doing so outside green plants hasn't reached commercial viability yet.

Didn't someone recently make a breakthrough on cheap photosynthesis cells?

CharlesKramer wrote:

asdfuogh wrote: People want news, then they speculate and make guesses

I disagree.

The story here is not the "rabble making guesses." It's the fusion experimenters making promises they discover they can't keep. I'm not suggesting any wrong doing -- they probably can't do what they do without being optimists. But their predictions have been specific, and unambiguously not met.

This has happened for decades -- General Atomics predicted fusion was 20 years away (in the 1970s), and Spitzer in the 1950s (his plans for the never built successor to Alactor-C was supposed to be Alcator-D for "Demo").

And for that matter Bussard's contribution to Google-Talks shortly before Bussard died -- where he bemoaned those of little faith who didn't appreciate he HAD done -- based on data he reviewed after his last project was shut down. Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today, like the Queen said.

Or Focus Fusion predicting proof of concept in 2 years in 2008. The much predicted Tri-Alpha announcement expected in (when was that? 2010 if I recall). And NiF (and before that Shiva and Nova).

A few more decades of over promising, and, you know. A fella could get skeptical.

CBK

Well, you're giving great examples of people giving expectations and having that unmet expectation hurt reputation. Even though Tri-Alpha didn't even announce it, and they get lumped in because people were speculating that they would announce. I guess I'm not seeing where your disagreement actually concerns my point because I wasn't talking about experimentalists not meeting promises, I was talking about fusion researchers being prompted to speculate and then the public making even crazier speculations that can't be met. (For example, look at that stupid Dark Horse Trifecta thread. If that isn't an example of rabble making guesses..)