Talk-Polywell.org

I agree, wisdom would raise a large difficulty. If humans could live forever, I'd expect the old (or at least, many of the old) to raise up financial empires and the like based on decades of business acumen and accumulated contacts. It would be very difficult for the young to penetrate into that, e...

Wow. I have not visited all the sites yet, so I will ask here. Has the FDA double blind tested any of this and found any of it to be safe and effective? Anyone here notice a life difference after taking any of this stuff? I have been taking resveratrol for a year and an half already. It do help me ...

... it's slightly above unity as we know it. Nothing to get excited about ... A violation of the law of conservation of energy is nothing to get excited about? Depends on the quality/calibration of the experiments. It was done with flow calorimetry if I'm not mistaken. At best good to 1% or so. Typ...

Yeah, I saw that... I am sceptical to day the least. It sure sounds kinda silly and they even say there that it wont make for a practical power source. Still funny what weird stuff people stumble upon by accident. I was doing Astronomy photography when I was a teenager (35 years ago). To save money...

The Brems spectrum from a fusion grade plasma is very broadband [c.f. Glasstone & Loveberg p.33, fig. 2.8] and peaked at rather high photon energies. Photovoltaic cells will not couple well at all. I think that, in keeping with most power balance calculations in other fusion devices, Brems must be ...

You can convert x-rays to electricity a few different ways (thermally, if you have to). I think some have been mentioned in other threads. Contingent on some real numbers for the ion density and neutral density in a Polywell device, I would hazard a guess that all the Brems is very optically thin. ...

A few months one way or the other is no biggie. We will already be well into the next economic cycle by the time we have a go/no go for building power stations. MSimon: you are assuming there will be another economic cycle. Read Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" on why fusion tec...

I don't think we heat the ions with the electrons, we simply are using then to maintain a potential well to trap the ions. The ions are “heated” by simply falling down the potential well. By falling down the ions take energy from the electrons. Either they lower the well depth, thus taking potentia...

A point is made about ions loosing energy to electrons in the center of the polywell. But what about electrons loosing energy to ions around the edges? Since the ions and electrons are circulating between those regions, I'd expect those effects to cancel to some degree. For what I gather, I think t...

when we say 'cold' we mean 'Maxwellian' - right? Rcain, I am just a dumb rocket engineer that did not go to school for the past 30 years. To me, a cold electron is an electron that has little energy (low eV). What I was talking about is to remove the electrons that have a higher temperature (the fa...

Art,
I just realized my link is the same study as the one you provided at the start of this tread. I guess we are reading int differently

Thanks for the reply, Rick. I understand that the loss of up-scattered electrons acts to keep the electrons cold. If you do it right, you also only have to pay for the energy differential, not the whole energy of the electrons being recycled. But I'm afraid I don't see the relevance to my argument....

All right, then the problem is quasineutrality. Say you've got a region of a particular size, like 10 cm , and you've got a particular voltage available, like 500 keV . These two numbers, when you plug then in to Gauss's law, determine the net charge density that you can have. phi = (4 pi epsilon_0...

Very sad indeed. I have met Jim many times. He struck me as a very smart follow with a long term view on things. He was a little ahead of his time with asteroid mining. It is sad that he did not see it happen in his life time, I am sure this will be a major step forward of the humanity evolution, al...

If you do the power balance on the electrons, then you have to add another term to cover the mechanism that is keeping the electrons cold. Yes, this is correct. The electrons get heat transfer from the ions (mostly from the Borons), and get heated in the process. This electron heat need to be remov...