Talk-Polywell.org

That's why I said 50 eV for the binding energy - you'd have to break at least 12 bonds at once. The odds of that are really small, but I don't know real numbers. If you figure elastic plus inelastic scattering cross section from nuclei then the combined transfer to lattice from an alpha is a very cr...

Never stop asking questions! Everybody learns something new.

Nothing is transparent to electrons. The cross section for alpha impact is probably really small, but if you've got 100 MW worth of alphas, you are going to have to deal with the impacts. If the structure is only 12 atoms, then the binding energy is on the order of 50 eV. A 2 MeV alpha has no troubl...

Congratulations! I know my brother would be really jealous - he's been writing sci-fi and not getting published for years.

But let's work on making it real instead of fiction!

Carbon nanotubes have interesting properties. They have high heat conduction along the axis and low conduction perpendicular to it. So they won't radiate much, but you should be able to suck the heat out of them rapidly towards some support structure. You also have to connect them to some kind of po...

A radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) can be used instead of nuclear fuel with neutrons. Once the heat gets below boiling of water, then yes, it's probably too low to use as fuel. After that it can be used as tracers. Lots of industrial and medical applications require the ability to find ou...

I think the most important idea to get across with nukes is that there is no such thing as "waste". "One man's trash is another man's treasure" has been the mantra of business merchants for 100's of years. Radioactivity can be put to work in a lot of places, and the long lived stuff is usually calle...

You remembered correctly. Look up "pellet fusion" and "laser fusion" to get more details.

A few years ago I helped Verified Voting with programs to help track voting problems. They are still at it and have a lot more sophistication these days. I'm sure they can still use donations as well as monitors to help with the reporting.

The experiment is done at (within 10^-8 degrees) absolute zero, so most of their equipment is probably slow. The "missing mass" just left the region faster than their detectors reacted, that's all. It would be really cool if it tunneled through space, it's a quantum wave block after all. But I bet t...

OK, I've never heard of a "bose supernova" before, so I did a google search and found this from NIST . Some how a connection has been made between the lowest energy possible of absolute zero and the highest energy possible in the LHC! Both sets of physics are very interesting, but neither will chang...

MSimon wrote:
And no doubt Biden is a capitalist since he is in it just for himself.

I didn't watch it, but my kids did. They were quite amused especially since they are taking world history in high school now. They came down and excitedly told me that Palin was a communist because she wants everyone to "work for the greater good". I'm really glad I didn't watch it!

Weird. At least on this forum nobody is afraid to actually type in the math. Somebody needs to write LaTex to BBcode so we get mathicons instead of emoticons. Arguing about what the math means is more fun anyway.

That's pretty good for a bunch of physicists!