Fusion power? YOU BET!

wont go boom. Pulling the power plug stops the reactions immediately. No risk of 3 mile island or anything nuts like that.

They plan on having a 100mW demo up by 2015. ANother 15 years to probably start rolling out plants. Without turbines and other heavy duty industry shit, these things can be manufactured and placed in towns fairly fast. (instead of the years and years of waiting for a fissin reactor)
 
Fusion can produce heavier elements from lighter ones up to and including iron. Any element > iron in the periodic table was formed in a supernova explosion. Which is a pretty energy inefficient way to make stuff, so there is no free lunch when we get energy from fission of heavy elements.
 
I don't what takes so long to roll these out. Why isn't the government throwing a shit ton of money at this technology? I mean, we have billions for bailouts, but we can't throw a few hundred million dollars at this to get it moving quickly? It's going to save everyone a fuckton of money in the long run, including the government.
 
lobbyists, oil companies, utility companies

they stand to lose a lot when fossil fuels get axed
 
Hell, I don't see why someone like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Donald Trump doesn't just drop some cash on this. It'd be a drop in the bucket as far as cost for them, and they'd get in on the ground floor of a technology that would potentially make them billions of dollars.
 
i mean, if i told you that...I wouldnt be able to bring news to the masses that dont give a shit :(

mainly nasaspaceflight.com (alternative launch vehicles and advanced concpets forums) directlauncher.com, earth2tech.com, and i just added a new one to the rotation dealing mainly with Bussard's fusion reactor. I dont have it on this comp though.

its about the polywell fusion reactor. WIki has an article on it and stuff.

i know some stuff about alt energy too! Mainly ocean wave power. Got some $$ invested with some companies.
 
DrJonez said:
Hell, I don't see why someone like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Donald Trump doesn't just drop some cash on this. It'd be a drop in the bucket as far as cost for them, and they'd get in on the ground floor of a technology that would potentially make them billions of dollars.
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Honestly i think a lot of people don't even know about these developments. Plenty of people want to keep these technologies quashed. Big wigs dont search the internet reading articles about polywell devices and crazy techs for space age propulsion

and i doubt they'd randomly run across it.

Although google did host Bussard in 07. I dont think anything came of it. Too bad.
 
Goshin said:
i mean, if i told you that...I wouldnt be able to bring news to the masses that dont give a shit :(

mainly nasaspaceflight.com (alternative launch vehicles and advanced concpets forums) directlauncher.com, earth2tech.com, and i just added a new one to the rotation dealing mainly with Bussard's fusion reactor. I dont have it on this comp though.

its about the polywell fusion reactor. WIki has an article on it and stuff.

i know some stuff about alt energy too! Mainly ocean wave power. Got some $$ invested with some companies.
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Thanks. Do you think Popular Science still does a good job with tech news, or are they too consumer-ish now?
 
i honestly can not comment, never read it

i'm about 3 months into reading tech news more or less

and very interested

somehow i fell into some great sites that hit on a variety of subjects. *nerd*
 
DrJonez said:
Hell, I don't see why someone like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Donald Trump doesn't just drop some cash on this. It'd be a drop in the bucket as far as cost for them, and they'd get in on the ground floor of a technology that would potentially make them billions of dollars.
Click to expand...

nuclear power is a completely different can of worms. there is so much government regulation that unless they are fully behind you, its not going to work.

then again, those guys could buy up some island out in the south pacific or Caribbean and try it.
 
But it is not nuclear. There's not crazy radiation waste, no chance of a meltdown due to no materials being in the chamber that is creating the energy, no weapons grade material being created.
 
farnsworth.jpg



"good news, everyone! My farnsworth fusion reactor is almost complete."
 
Goshin said:
But it is not nuclear. There's not crazy radiation waste, no chance of a meltdown due to no materials being in the chamber that is creating the energy, no weapons grade material being created.
Click to expand...

yeah, but have the laws been changed to reflect that? With a massive oil lobby and a completely clueless environment lobby, do you think they will? Its either got to have a government driver (DoD in this case) or its got to be so fucking obvious (i.e. another country is building them in mass) that the people on the whole demand it.

also, i found this showing how it works.
 
fusion is still a type of nuclear reaction, other direction of fission. still will likely fall under regulatory laws and whatnot
 
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It's not a farnsworth reactor. I had a bunch of shit typed up and i fucked up, so let me summarize

The farnsworth reactor was limited in potential due to it's power being contained by a grid system of material. Electrons were not being held well within the grid, and this was the limiting factor for the machine, and why it never was considered seriously.

Bussard's reactor eliminates this mess. By removing the grids, he removed the major obstacle in creating fusion power. Instead, he uses a sphere made up of magnets to contain the electrons, bending them all back into the center of his machine when the zoom towards the outer sides of the machine. This allows them to cross the center 100,000 times, a major milestone. Not only that, but the spherical nature allows the electrons to collide with each other in a natural way, which actually enables him to run the machine with less initial power start up to produce much bigger results than any other machines before him.

All of this is huge and new. It took Bussard and his team 12 years to figure out their mistake, which was a design flaw.

I hope the demo works out.


----
A better explanation can be found in the video posted above

updating first page with video
 
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Goshin said:
Bussard was a leader in creating the foundations for the ITER following back in the 70s. The reason he was a proponet of tokomak reactors was because they DoE would throw tons of money at the project. He could then use some of this grant money to proceed with the experiments he actually thought would be viable at some point. Thus, 35 years later, we have his fusion reactor. There were some problems that plagued them for 15 years, and those have all been (allegedly) ironed out.

Just like Nasa's shuttle workforce lobby (the reason we are using a shuttle based architecture and not a brand new thing - jobs and such), the tokomak lobby is huge. They have thousands of jobs and tons of very high ranking scientists have bet their careers on it. So of course countries with an interest in this already established job field are going to pursue a tech that, in 12 years, finally becomes operational. We won't even know if it is a good operation.

I quasi-touched on this in a previous post. For more info, go to Bussard's wiki, or follow one of the links i provided.
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yea but that doesnt make sense

i place my faith in occams razor here

does it make more sense that
a) the most viable fusion power solution based on collaborative research over the years is now being supported by multiple governments because its the most promising (aka ITER)

or

b) some dude with a small amt of grant money has created a working fusion plant where large research efforts with billions of dollars have failed despite the best efforts of lobbyists and big business who want to quash progress for the sake of short term profit

it may be that there is a simple, cheap solution to creating a fusion reactor (and it would be fantastic, life changing, the greatest technical achievement of man IMO) but i doubt it. signing up to conspiracy theory arguments over how big corporations want to quash all progress for the sake of a short term buck doesnt make sense for a host of reasons and any time someone brings that up as the excuse for why we havent seen 'x' technology make a breakthrough it quickly invalidates whatever point the speaker is trying to make.

bump this thread when broussards supposed successes are born out after some scientific scrutiny. If they are, it will be all over the news.
 
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