A 100 GW D-T Plant

[DeltaV]

Today, nuclear reactors of every type provide a failsafe design approach where the operation of the reactor gracefully shuts down dependent only on the laws of nature (Negative void coefficient) as a primary feature of their operation.

This Polywell electric circuit control approach as you describe it dose not feature such absolutely reliable fail safe control.

So being predisposed by current reactor technology, it is doubtful in my mind that the NRC will license such a reactor design subject to a even the slightest chance of a single point of failure in reactor control.

Ahem. Fusion. Not fission. No chain reactions.

[MSimon]

Axil,

The fail-safes required for nukes (with years of fuel in the reactor) are not required for Polywell with at most a few seconds worth of fuel in the reactor.

Have you ever operated a nuclear reactor?

[Axil]

Axil, are you Vanilla? You're obviously very skilled. . .

But you're wrong. DOD has no reason to classify the Poly. It's too late for that. Instead, they'll protect the trade secrets but the tech is going to go global.

IMHO.

Your post sounds like a hope and a prayer.

For your information and consideration, presented below is a snip from an interview with the public information officer assigned to the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors (DOE-NR) on the subject of space reactors as follows:

Why is it that on the issue of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which presently comes under the aegis of the State Department and a source of complaint that these mechanisms are too restrictive and hobbles U.S. industries' effort for access and export. Wouldn't transfer of space nuclear technology find an easier simpler method of transfer under the direction of the Department of Commerce, the way it had previously served our U.S. commercial space industry?


Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors (DOE-NR): While the U.S. is committed to developing this technology for civilian uses, it could be used by others for military purposes. It is in our national security interest to protect those specific details that would enable a terrorist or an unfriendly nation to use this technology. Protection of this technology under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and other applicable laws and regulations is appropriate.

[ladajo]

Axil,
You are on the wrong bus. This Space Nuclear discussion is about fission and nuclear thermal battries, not Polywell.

[MSimon]

Too late Axil,

We have on this board discussed the proliferation problems and have come up with enough scenarios that any one who wanted to could build a BFR and use it to make any suitable fissile element.

A D-D fusion fission hybrid would do nicely.

And that was within 6 months of the board starting (which was June or July 2007).

And the discussions pop up every year or so. The whole movement is more or less open source.

As to fail safes: About 2,000 sensors, 97 processors, and 6 breakers in series should do the trick.

BTW are you a shill for some fission consortium?

Because I have operated the suckers (Naval nukes). Studied the designs in detail. And I can tell you that other than the neutron flux (large in D-D small in pB11) you are blowing smoke.

And there are open source methods for dealing with the neutron "problem". I'm a Navy guy. I can deal with and deal neutrons.

[GIThruster]

Axil, are you Vanilla? You're obviously very skilled. . .

But you're wrong. DOD has no reason to classify the Poly. It's too late for that. Instead, they'll protect the trade secrets but the tech is going to go global.

IMHO.

Your post sounds like a hope and a prayer.

For your information and consideration, presented below is a snip from an interview with the public information officer assigned to the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors (DOE-NR) on the subject of space reactors as follows:

Why is it that on the issue of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which presently comes under the aegis of the State Department and a source of complaint that these mechanisms are too restrictive and hobbles U.S. industries' effort for access and export. Wouldn't transfer of space nuclear technology find an easier simpler method of transfer under the direction of the Department of Commerce, the way it had previously served our U.S. commercial space industry?


Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors (DOE-NR): While the U.S. is committed to developing this technology for civilian uses, it could be used by others for military purposes. It is in our national security interest to protect those specific details that would enable a terrorist or an unfriendly nation to use this technology. Protection of this technology under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and other applicable laws and regulations is appropriate.

Yes but DOE-NR doesn't get to make the call. If the world finds out that here in the US we've learned to generate almost limitless power for so cheap as to shock, and that this has no direct military consequence, meaning it can't be made into a bomb, then the political pressure to share this with the world will ignite and it is only a matter of time until the right person finds himself in the executive position to give away the tech. RE: Clinton when he sold 50 years of rocket science to the Chinese for $40 million donation to the DNC. There wasn't even a hint of legal consequence when he did this. There won't be any when some sympathetic POTUS hands all this to the rest of the world, either.

Not a prayer at all. That's just the way the world works.

[MSimon]

GIThruster,

FWIW the US is required by treaty to share its fusion results. The wiggle room may be intermediate results and technical details - i.e. only ramistanian carbonated steel will work in the framis valve.

[Axil]

BTW are you a shill for some fission consortium?

So sorry, it’s a matter of personal preference. I like big powerful things. You can get “BIG POWER” out of fission. Boron fusion seems so impotent. Three 2.3 MeV alphas per reaction hardly seems worth the effort. What a joke. It just doesn’t seem up to the job that must be done.


Fusion should provide a backbone power source for the whole country. This 100 GW D-T Plant concept might make a start to fill that need for a backbone nationwide power supply, but only a tentative start.


Small reactors have their roll. They can supply power to some backward African countries that have no electric power grid to speak of. 100 megawatts can power the TVs and lights in a few African villages.

These African bushmen can then connect to the world, pump life giving water from the earth, enjoy a semblance of civilization, and in general rise out of hunter gatherer subsistence.


Paralyzed by a fear of the neutron, under pressure from the green religionists whose greatest ambition is to live off the grid, so too we must live like these African bushmen, to conform to limited power, to abide a declining lifestyle, to avoid heat stroke on those hot sunny western summer afternoons, to dimly light our homes in the evening twilight, to power our irrigation pumps on our parched farms and to sustain our failing businesses.



But for a BIG country that makes steel and aluminum, for a country that must feed the world by manufacturing fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen, for a country that needs to feed power to 200,000,000 electric vehicles, for a country that makes glass and concrete by the megaton for big new cities and wide and spacious roads that span the continent to house and move a burgeoning population, for a country that makes aviation fuel by extracting CO2 from the air to power a huge fleet of aircraft in the tens of thousands that endlessly ply the global skies you need “BIG POWER”.


When fossil fuels peak out, fusion must be there to do absolutely everything that needs to be done and that fusion must be BIG.

[MSimon]

So sorry, it’s a matter of personal preference. I like big powerful things.

Ah. Stalinist/Maoist gigantism. More commonly referred to as ***** envy.

[GIThruster]

So sorry, it’s a matter of personal preference. I like big powerful things. You can get “BIG POWER” out of fission. Boron fusion seems so impotent. Three 2.3 MeV alphas per reaction hardly seems worth the effort. What a joke. It just doesn’t seem up to the job that must be done.

Yes well, consider the cost of Boron compared to fission fuels and suddenly you are getting much more, rather than less. "per reaction" is hardly the measure for success. Pick a useful comparison. How about something like "power/installed and running costs"? If you have the will to do a meaningful comparison, remember that "running costs" include hidden costs like waste management over many centuries--costs we haven't yet begun to pay but a fraction of.

[CaptainBeowulf]

Polywells should be relatively cheap to build, if they work. So you just build a lot of them. They can be turned on and off quickly to match demand from the power grid. So they will provide the backbone that you talk about.

In many respects, it's a good idea to have a lot of polywells spread out all over the place, rather than one huge reactor in every state. It provides you with network redundancy. If a few reactors fail or are taken out by a terrorist strike or something, you don't have a cascading blackout over half the continent...

I actually highly suspect that eventually (by 2050 or 2100) there may be a few working fusion designs... maybe Polywells and FRCs and maybe something bigger. So there will be a spread.

Hydro from water dams, especially in northern Quebec and Labrador, will probably also continue to supply a major chunk of the power in the system. And, I suspect we'll still use natural gas for a long time...

[MSimon]

If you are going to put fusion engines on rockets they must be small. Relatively.

It will be a while before we get toks small enough to fly. In fact it is going to take a while to get your giganto built. First come the experiments. The fuel breeding experiments (Tritium). Then you build a $40 bn power plant. And $40 bn of HVDC eqpt to distribute the power. Good luck raising the money.

OTOH $50 million for Polywell experiments and $200 million for a working reactor? There are at least 50 countries that could do that if the work was spread over 6 years. Roughly $40 million a year.

[D Tibbets]

Power?
Depends on how you figure things. On a molar basis fission produces a lot more power than hydrogen. But, on a weight basis hydrogen rules.
235 grams of Ur235 (one mole) might yield several hundred MeV, but 235 g of hydrogen (235 moles) will yield somewhere in the range of 3-4 GeV. Hydrogen- Boron11 fusion would not be as much, but I suspect it would still be in the ball park compared to Uranium fission.

As far as reactor power. The Polywell is supposed to be efficient enough to produce useful power at ~ 100 MW or less. That is very useful for many purposes. But there is no reason why a Polywell could not be scaled up to produce humongous amounts of power, so long as the heat loadings can be handled and the reactor doesn't collapse under it's own weight (and you don't run out of money building it).
At net power out scaling as ~ r^5 ( assuming B field increases in proportion to radius) a 3 meter reactor might produce 100 MW net gain. A 6 meter reactor would produce ~ 3.2 GW, and a 30 meter reactor would produce ~ 10 Terra watts output. Forget about powering a country from one reactor, how about supplying the world with one reactor. Of course pratical issues make such schemes ridiculous (with one possible exception, and that would require a huge infrastructure expenditure*).

* The exception of course would be a truly humongous reactor that could directly transmit its energy to the entire planet. Any guesses on what it is called?

Dan Tibbets

[GIThruster]

"* The exception of course would be a truly humongous reactor that could directly transmit its energy to the entire planet. Any guesses on what it is called?"

the greatest achievement of the Krell civilization. . .

[D Tibbets]

"* The exception of course would be a truly humongous reactor that could directly transmit its energy to the entire planet. Any guesses on what it is called?"

the greatest achievement of the Krell civilization. . .

The Krel used the energy of the planets core (I think?). This reactor would dwarf even that. It is so powerful, and has such macro instabilities in its magnetic fields (it even puts Tokamaks to shame) that it would have to be placed a great distance from the Earth to be safe.

Dan Tibbets