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Do you think we'll ever see Nuclear Fusion power stations in our lifetime?

Jonti said:
Even so, any way to get to even the nearer stars and back would have to accelerate every particle of the ship at the same rate. There's no other way to get to the velocities needed quickly enough, without smearing the astronauts into a thin bloody film at the back of their space vehicle.

It takes a 1g thrust about 4.5 years to get a mass up to c/2 speed. But if every particle of that mass could be accelerated at once, one could get to c/2 (or even closer to c) in an instant, and for the same overall expenditure of energy. And live, which would be the neat part!
Click to expand...

You're talking about Inertial Dampers? :D
 
definte sex wee:D
may just have more chance of working if its a military project US navy like nuke reactors that work
 
Minor update - the contract has been awarded for the next phase of research
 
I find it fascinating too. But due to my lack of understanding/knowledge on the subject :)() my only contribution to this thread will have to be to compare this:

180px-Polywell_WB-6_complete.jpg


to this:

o_rly.jpg


i apologise for the moronic level of my post.
 
Also, jim, I know no-one else has picked up on your metamaterials comment, but i hadn't heard of them, so i wikied it and it doesn't seem like metamaterials have anything to do with energy creation. How does that work?
 
Crispy said:
Minor update - the contract has been awarded for the next phase of research
Click to expand...


Cool. I periodically check that Poly talk forum in hope of breakthroughs. Not that I know what the number stuff means. Seem to remember reading a quote, perhaps by the late Bussard himself. That it was primarily engineering issues currently preventing this device forephilling the dream. Not to say those engineering problems aren't massively complex. But one day...
*dreams*
 
well, it's 'engineering issues' preventing tokamak fusion from fulfilling the dream, so let's not get too excited :)
 
How did I miss this thread?

I started checking out Bussard a couple of years ago - as it happened, in the months just before he died and the story was spiked :(

His own website disappeared when he died. (There's not nearly as much now at www.emc2fusion.org as there was then.)

Trouble was, it had all the signs of free-energy-fruitloop. Leave aside the appalling HTML 0.3 layout, nearly sinking to Time Cube standard. Leave aside the video of him just looking the very part of the fruitloop. Really.

The site had:
  1. Purposefully obfuscated descriptions of methods and results to deter idea-theft and avoid applying for patents
  2. Some howling non-sequiturs in what he did reveal, IIRC
  3. Appeals to write him a cheque for $200M - just that one last push to make it work

Due to 1 it was very difficult to evaluate his claims. Eventually, I'll look at other people's contributions...

On the upside, it included the wonderful image caption "Fusion and Control of Election Losses". :)
 
And now there are scientists actually working on it, and producing data, it's all hush hushed by the navy. (partly because they don't want to step on the department of energy's toes)
 
Who cares if NIF works or not when you have a 500 trillion watt laser firing in to one of these...

Moses5.jpg


Serious engineering porn. :cool:
 
Now some scientists are warning it is at least 100 years away I am more hopeful.

A bit like politicians categorically denying stuff.
 
kyser_soze said:
Any big science that calls things wiffleballs deserves to work, IMHO.
Click to expand...

To be fair particle physics often strays into whimsy and occasionaly the outright student-zany with some of its names. IIRC Quarks are a misreading of quarts (of beer) from a poem. And the names of them things like strange, up, down, charm and so on...... and topping that lot would be the gluon. Cause it glues particles together.

But plumbing the all time depths was George Gamow and his infamous "Alpha Beta Gamow" prank....
 
I vaguely remember that there was a recent recategorisation of loads of gene names, cos they had stuff like the Sonic the Hedgehog and whatnot...
 
Santino said:
Now some scientists are warning it is at least 100 years away I am more hopeful.

A bit like politicians categorically denying stuff.
Click to expand...
That's the okamak approach. Has always been 25 years away.

This approach looks to be more like 5-10.
 
Crispy said:
More good news - contract awarded to the EMC2 lab for the next version of the machine, and modifications thereof. The language of the contract implies that the previous testing went well. They're even planning to test p-B11 reactions (the holy grail of fusion reactions)

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/06/boys-at-talk-polywell-have-struck.html
Click to expand...
Even better news, EMC2 have secured an extra $8m in funding to 2011 (they previously had $2m for the same period). This comes out of the federal govt's Recovery Act budget.

http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2009/09/polywell-gets-dough.html

In two years we should know for sure if this is a viable concept for power generation. I'm very excited.
 
Get into the distribution/substation side of things. The size of the individual units in a polywell powerstation makes them ideal for distributed or remote installation, which is common to wind power.
 
ITER, DEMO and PROTO

Well, I spent today at UKAEA at a workshop on ITER.

Quick conclusions:

  • This is one hell of a complex way to do it

In more detail: JET generated .75x input power. Other tokomak research makes ITER confident they will generate 10x input power, which means 500MW or so. ITER is a proof-of-concept of (a) big tokomak and (b) being able to build and maintain big tokomak, given that it would need 125 years after switchoff before someone could go into the torus.

ITER is first plasma in 2018, which looks like an aggressive schedule (!) given the insane number of things they are doing from scratch. After ITER, the plan is to build DEMO which is a proof-of-concept of power generation from the tokomak, then PROTO which is a prototype power plant. So that's 40-50 years in all.

Meanwhile, just down the road at Harwell, they're doing the next-stage laser ignited fusion plant. This seems more sane, somehow, even though it's still "you can't go in there", if only because they seem to be easier to build...

As to Polywell - have I mentioned Kelly Johnson yet in this thread? "Starve before doing business with the US navy"....
 
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