prior to thread going to ****, or maybe in a different thread, someone asked me to explain how the polywell could use existing coal plants and their equipment
There are 2 proposed ways for harnessing the power of the nuclear fusion reactions in the polywell; the heat engine method and the direct conversion method.
The first and simplest is the heat engine method. In this method, the nuclear reactions directly heat the interior of the reactor and that heat is transferred to a working fluid like steam. The advantage of this method is that polywell reactor plants can replace the coal burners or fission piles in existing plants while conserving the turbine and generator equipment, if of course it is economically useful to do so. Alternatively, and at higher efficiencies, the heat could be used to heat the gas in a gas turbine generator. Both of these heat engine approachs are tried and proven methods.
The second method uses the main resultant fusion reaction products, charged particles, as a way to directly energize an apparatus known as a deceleration grid. It directly converts the energy of the charged particle into electricity. This method has the potential to be much more efficient than the heat engine method but has not yet been tried and proven.
The direct conversion method would have advantages for space propulsion applications because electricity can be made in a non thermally dictated regime. Thermal power generation in space is difficult because the only practical heat rejection method in space is black body radiation which required very large radiators to get low teperatures. On earth, air or water can be used as a waste heat transfer medium.
The energy produced on a deceleration grid is extremely high voltage direct current which could make conversion to more useful AC difficult and expensive.
Ignition is a condition where the energy required to continue the thermonuclear reaction comes from the heating of the fuel by the fusion products. In the polywell the fusion products quickly leave the potential well and do not directly add energy to the reaction via heating. A net power polywell would indeed be sustained by the energy it produces but it is done indirectly trough the conversion of the fusion products' momentum into electricity which then powers the various systems of the polywell.
Ignition is an important condition for inertial confined fusion and for tokamak reactors. Without ignition, tokamak and ICF would never achieve net power.
so, needing that 192 laser beam field is unnecessary, as that is the ignition source for certain fusion reactors, but not polywell
i dont think you understand the difference between engines and fuel sources to drive said engines...
also you're making up quotes which is dumb
one of the biggest obsticles to using Thorium is the fact that North Korea owns a whole hell of a lot of it. Politicial realities being what they are, we dont' want to develop anything that allows north korea to export materials and gain wealth to support their crazy regime
sad but true
edit:
a 10x10m sphere wouldn't ever go into a plane
polywell fusion would be ship based, ground based, space based
Ahh the NK angle
A death, international intrigue, and a huge money pit supported by sekret DoE and DoD funding - gov't intrigue, scientists looking for $$$, world changing technology - I think you've got the makings of a good book, a story or even a thread oh wait
Also, I don't think you're sense of humour (sun on earth can work soon really!) or sarcasm (fushon on the lolerplane) is well developed.
Here's the thing Goshin:
You said it yourself, for just $200 million we could have the best shot at producing a functioning fusion reactor with the promise of unlimited power.
Do you fully comprehend how "game changing" that is?
Yet he can't raise $200 million
What does that tell you?
A death, international intrigue, and a huge money pit supported by sekret DoE and DoD funding - gov't intrigue, scientists looking for $$$, world changing technology - I think you've got the makings of a good book, a story or even a thread oh wait
Also, I don't think you're sense of humour (sun on earth can work soon really!) or sarcasm (fushon on the lolerplane) is well developed.
Here's the thing Goshin:
You said it yourself, for just $200 million we could have the best shot at producing a functioning fusion reactor with the promise of unlimited power.
Do you fully comprehend how "game changing" that is?
Yet he can't raise $200 million
What does that tell you?
That the people with money to fund this are tied into big oil?
It's the same process the sun uses to make energy, but that doesn't mean the same mass is used.
When you create fusion, you suddenly don't gain the mass of the sun, you're just doing it on a smaller scale.
It's like when you think, its a smaller version of when i think.
Or something you've heard a lot i bet from women, your penis is a smaller version of a mans penis. A diminutive penis.
That's fine, i hear women don't REALLY like to be stretched out.
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh
i really dont want to get into tech theory and readiness in regards to venture capitalists and funding, nor more into thorium nuclear fission and the north korea angle. NOR the fact that the navy only defunded the project for 2-3 years, and that was the only time they were trying to get funding. Wouldn't have happened if Bush hadn't cut program funding in 05.
I was planning to destroy this planet and its inhabitants, but this laser-star is intriguing. I will hold off on the apocalypse until we see where this goes.
Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum's ability to absorb the incident laser light; it absorbed about 95%.
But more than that, Dr Glenzer's team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.
The 130-tonne target chamber is kept under vacuum for the experiments
"For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more," said Mike Dunne, director of the UK's Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.
"I can't overstate how dramatic a step that is," he told BBC News. "Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now."
Fusion naturally occurs at the centre of stars where huge gravitational pressure allows the process to happen at temperatures of about 10 million Celsius.
At the much lower pressures on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius.
NIF will focus on a process known as inertially confined fusion, in which these extreme temperatures are achieved using ultra powerful lasers.
Quote:
Although NIF is only at the beginning of its experimental life, scientists are already planning its successor, a European project known as Hiper (High Power Laser Energy Research).
"The technology of NIF allows the laser to fire every few hours," explained Professor Dunne, director of Hiper.
"This is right for the demonstration of the physics 'proof of principle', but does not meet the requirement of a laser fusion power plant, which needs to operate a few times per second."
Hiper aims to lay the foundations of this continuous fusion cycle by showing it can ignite a steady stream of fuel pellets.
all goes well, engineers will begin to build the Hiper facility towards the end of the next decade, bringing the vision of a commercial fusion reactor one step closer to reality.
At approximately the same time, scientists will also get their hands on another mammoth fusion experiment, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), currently being built in Cadarache, France.
Iter will attempt to initiate fusion using a different method, known as magnetic confinement, in which a super-heated volume of gas is constrained by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped vessel known as a tokamak.
both laser and tokamak fusion are different from what was earlier gone over in this thread
exiting development though! I just don't know enough about it to offer much any other insight
national ignition facility is going to use a "laser" to create a "star" here on "earth"
A guy from that lab came to present a seminar here a few months ago.
They can create fusion by firing lasers at a stationary target but the problem is being able to shoot these targets into the chamber at a frequency high enough to produce significant power and to be able to ignite them with consistent success. Oh and they also have to make the targets for something like 50 cents a piece vs the thousands (or was it millions?) of dollars that it cost to make the initial prototypes.
Edit:
Quote:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been a world-wide leader in the area of solid-state laser systems development for several decades. Most recently, LLNL has completed the construction and commissioning of the world***8217;s most powerful laser; the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This system has the capability to generate 1.8 megajoules of energy and 500 terawatts of ultraviolet laser power. The goal of NIF is to achieve fusion by compressing and heating a pea-sized capsule (known as the ***8220;target***8221;) containing a mixture of deuterium and tritium with the energy of the 192 powerful laser beams. This process will cause the fusion fuel to ignite and burn, producing more energy than the energy in the laser pulse and creating a miniature star here on Earth.
Ignition experiments at NIF will set the stage for one of the most exciting applications of inertial confinement fusion ***8211; production of electricity in a fusion power plant. This advanced energy concept, the Laser Inertial Fusion Engine (LIFE), is under development at LLNL. Based on new physical understanding and the technology developed for NIF, LIFE has the potential to meet future worldwide energy needs in a safe, sustainable manner without carbon dioxide emissions. To achieve this, there are several major technical challenges to be overcome including the inexpensive, high volume manufacturing of fusion targets. These targets are meso-scale, three-dimensional, multi-material components fabricated with micro- and nano-scale precision. Currently, the fabrication of NIF targets, with similar geometries and specifications, require several man-weeks and several tens of thousands of dollars. The LIFE application will require novel manufacturing techniques that are scalable to high volume (hundreds of millions of targets per year) at a unit cost that is orders of magnitude lower than can be achieved today. In addition, the targets must be capable of surviving the 100 ***8211; 1000g accelerations required for rapid injection into the target chamber. This seminar is intended to provide background information on the LIFE concept and to elucidate the details of the target manufacturing challenges in order to explore potential collaborations with Nano-CEMMS that will seed new ideas aimed toward meeting these aggressive manufacturing metrics.
***8220;Plasma arc gasification is the next generation of thermal treatment techniques. By running a high voltage current through a pressurized, inert gas, tremendously high temperatures can be induced (up to 30,000 degree Fahrenheit ***8211; three times as hot as the surface of the sun) in an arc of plasma. This arc is capable of obliterating any type of waste ***8211; excluding some very rare, high-energy nuclear wastes ***8211; and converting them into elementary gases and an obsidian-like slag material. This process is highly exothermic so there is a surplus of energy produced; once the arc is initiated it ***8220;pays***8221; for itself and then some.***8221;
solve NYC trash problem and let the city make money bling bling, rather than pay $$ per ton of trash to remove to a dump