Talk-Polywell.org

1. I must like to bang my head against the wall of the super religous types...the greens amongst others. 2. I like the idea of their Tweets having comments like mine there to remind them what mental defects they are. If you say it is petty I won't argue. I guess I just utterly despise people who ar...

Solar and Wind are unreliable, but also cheaper. This is just plain false. W&S MUST be buffered for grid use. Buffered W&S is about the most expensive power there is. I don't get it. If this is false, why are the big energy companies still investing in installing more W&S ? Nuclear is reliable, but...

First thing. What is levelized cost? Basically, it's is an attempt to calculate the cost per MWh of electricity produced by a power plant during its whole operational life. It is calculated by dividing the estimated lifelong production, by the sum of all the costs of financing, construction, fuelin...

Trenta did indeed have a D-T campaign but Helion has not published the results yet. I am not sure whether they ever will (for competitive reasons). Thank you Skipjack, very interesting. I just rechecked their website to confirm that my memory was accurate, and yes, that data point is still not ther...

P.S.: Why do you say that "The CO2 output for the NG is reduced by the use of W&S but the leakage remains no matter how high the CapFac is for the W&S.". Given that most leakage is from the production sites (again, Google) shouldn't that leakage vary depending of the capacity factor of the backed r...

For the record, my favorite option would be "everything", with a medium term goal of [mostly] renewables backed by nuclear (and a good pinch of all else kept in standby, at least for a while). As for “all of the above”, if you have reliable nuclear, why in the world would you want to screw up your ...

Thinking it twice, GWP per kilogram, or per mole, seem a bit unwieldy. GWP/kWh of electricity produced would make comparisons easier. Let's see, in GWP/kg the numbers are: Coal : 1 (by definition) NG.. : 120 according to that paper I mentioned. If we approximate coal as pure carbon, and NG as pure C...

1) Stability of the FRC during the fusion stage: Starting with a 10^22 - 10^23 m(-3) ion density, 20-30 keV ion temp, D-3He FRC. If 1% undergo fusion, that will create 10^20 - 10^21 high speed charged particles, directionally isotropic at birth (I think). Will that perturbe the FRC structure? Unles...

These days I've been reading the few last months of /r/fusion threads on reddit. A number of the arguments presented there, regarding Helion's reactors, are interesting. Some suggest there may still be a few hidden obstacles ahead. The famous "known unknowns, and unknown unknowns". I wonder about tw...

When you include the entire power system, buffered windand solar are actually WORSE than coal on a greenhouse drive standpoint. This is because buffering W&S typical requires NatGas turbines, and the NG systems leak by 2% to 6% of total gas extracted. That means that the drive is between .02 X 88 (...

Helion's David Kirtley is in the schedule for the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, for a short intervention at 09:30 on next November 3: https://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DPP23/Session/YO08.7 From the abstract, it seems he is not going to talk about anything new (so, no Pola...

New video about First Light on Youtube. This one is by Dr. Ben Miles:

Inside The UKs Breakthrough Fusion Reactor - First Light Fusion

It includes a few minutes of engineering porn (regarding rail guns, high power switches, vacuum vessels, and more).

Nice.

Thanks, I've visited their technology section a few times in the last months but, even after the recent face lift, the "Technical Resources" it still too short, it lacks many important links (for instance, any exchange with the USNRC regarding radiological protection or Tritium processing, or the pp...

And here we go again. The uninformed making all kind of claims about how they KNOW that Helion is going to fail / it is just another scam to fleece investors, or asking just once more about this or that specific detail of the machine. If I were Helion, I'd add to my website a "research" section (lik...

It is 1994 and the Internet again (or 1765 and steam engines, or 1906 and electronics, or 1980 and personal computers, etc., etc.). When Internet was about to change everyone's world, the overwhelming majority were completely oblivious to it. Now it is controlled nuclear fusion. Again, we are on the...