Talk-Polywell.org

How would this concept be used to generate continuous energy? By attaching "something with inertia" to it. In an ICE, the "thing with inertia" is the moment of inertia of the crankshaft and any flywheel attached to it. In a bicycle it is the inertia of the driver and the bicycle frame. In a wallwar...

Kiteman: Okay, so summing up the gist of your tacking and jibing around the question; You are happy to have SOME level of Plutonium in your children's teeth. but you are unsure/ignorant of what that level should be. Seems like a sensible attitude to me. Neither plutonium nor anything else is infini...

Soylant, what method has N. Korea used. I thought that their first test was a fizzle, possibly because of contaminating plutonium isotopes. Dan Tibbets North Korea used a heavy water moderated IRT-2000 research reactor to get sample amounts of plutonium to play with(not enough for a bomb) and a gra...

As long as you DON'T separate out the Plutonium! Plutonium from spent LWR fuel is pretty useless to any serious, state actor wishing to have nuclear weapons. The isotope you want is Pu-239. It is fissile with a large cross section, it undergoes only 0.02 spontaneous fissions per second per kg and i...

It's actually very misleading to suggest that the power density of an elephant is a mere 5 times higher. That's volumetric power density, rather than gravimetric power density, which is what you're usually interested in.

The gravimetric power density is less than 2 watts per metric tonne.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding something. I thought the "Pebbles" were made of nuclear fuel surrounded with a layer of Silicon Carbide, and the spacing is such (because of the thickness of the Silicon Carbide layer) that the max temperature is limited to well below what Silicon Carbide can withstand...

Yeah, it's "one word per cycle" and that's where 8 bytes comes in; that's a 64 bit processor, the current PC word. That's an unwarranted assumption. Modern processors are super-scalar(can process multiple instructions in parallel if they are independent). Modern processors are pipelined(most instru...

Not even plants like green; that's why they're green, it's the photons they don't want.

I prefer blue energy(blue as in the cerenkov radiation from a nuclear reactor and blue as in hydropower).

It should also be noted that the effect of Keynes' work was not to change the way the government behaved, but to arm the government with excuses and rationalisations for its pre-existing desires. If the market is guided as if by an invisible hand, then surely the correct analogy for the behaviour of...

Of particular amusement is Keynes' forword to the 1936 German version of the General Theory: "The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of pr...

I've seen graphs exactly like this one all the way back since the early 80's, predicting an imminent peak and rapid decline. If you keep predicting that peak oil is imminent every few years, eventually you will be right. I see peak oil as a non-threat unless you happen to live at the very margin; th...

OK, maybe not as apetizing as a good ear of corn... but it's supposed to be better for you... Mike That's not quite true for a few different reasons. Expensive algae is only going to be used in omega-3 supplements and the like; very little consideration is given to taste. What happens when algae be...

LED's consume a lot less than half the power of a fluorescent light. (from package ratings at costco) In terms of lm/watt it's pretty much a toss up between commercially available LEDs and fluorescent lights. It is possible to make white LEDs that put out 150 lm/W but you can't buy them and they're...

Not even plants like green, that's why they reflect it rather than absorb it. Nuclear weapons is why the cold war never became hot and why the India-Pakistan relations have chilled down even though there's a lot of pent up animosity. ICBMs have this funny property no other weapon has. The old farts ...

He is clearly anticipating a simply enormous amount of energy usage then if we can possibly use up all the deuterium by then!!! You're not kidding. I crunched the numbers once, using the assumption that all the deuterium in the worlds oceans are burnt into helium-4(D-D gives tritium or helium-3, bo...