Helion Energy? Did they beat Tri Alpha? Scam?

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

chrismb wrote:
IntLibber wrote:
Torulf2 wrote:Go to "fusion engine" there is an animaion and there is the information.
I went there. Nice animation. Pretty effects. No names listed though. Your site is very thin on details. Really thin. Anemic. I am left wondering who the hell is involved in this project and why they would tolerate a website that kept their identities secret like some mafia scam.
It's probably just embarrasment. I mean, making a claim that '90% collision energy efficiency' - presumably that means 90% of the collision energy results in fusion events - the residence time of an ion at fusible energy must surely be several minutes, yet surely this is a flash-in-a-bottle stuff with almost no residence time for fusible ions, and thus a very low efficiency (not that that's necessarily a problem if the energy outputs are high enough, but it puts a question mark over the maths)?
To error is human... and I'm very human.

D Tibbets
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Post by D Tibbets »

I'll give them the benifit of doubt and guess that they very badly indicated that > 90% of the fusion energy would be in the form of charged particles/ ions, thus allowing direct conversion. This despite the fact that they do not mention advanced low neutron producing fuels, with the possible exception of lithium.
And how is that skinny tube susposed to handle the thermal load, even if it is only 10% ( 10% of 50-200 MW would be 5-20 MW of heat), the rest (?) being squirted out the ends as beams- like the Dense Plasma Focus claimes. If they wish to impress informed reviewers they need to redo the presentation, and perhaps give links to more technical information, or at least suggest it is aviable for potentially serous investers.

Dan Tibbets
To error is human... and I'm very human.

IntLibber
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Post by IntLibber »

TBH, the EMC2 website could use some professionalism and spiffing up. It currently looks like the results of someone kicked off of geocities for lack of creative talent.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

D Tibbets wrote:I'll give them the benifit of doubt and guess that they very badly indicated that > 90% of the fusion energy would be in the form of charged particles/ ions, thus allowing direct conversion. This despite the fact that they do not mention advanced low neutron producing fuels, with the possible exception of lithium.
And how is that skinny tube susposed to handle the thermal load, even if it is only 10% ( 10% of 50-200 MW would be 5-20 MW of heat), the rest (?) being squirted out the ends as beams- like the Dense Plasma Focus claimes. If they wish to impress informed reviewers they need to redo the presentation, and perhaps give links to more technical information, or at least suggest it is aviable for potentially serous investers.

Dan Tibbets
They have a severe electrode erosion problem.

Edit: The "They" being Dense Plasma Focus
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Art Carlson
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Post by Art Carlson »

MSimon wrote:They have a severe electrode erosion problem.
Do you know something we don't know? ("Well, yes, actually quite a bit", he answers.) FRCs generally have external magnets only, no electrodes.

I don't know if we have enough information to know if they really have the wall loading under control. Do remember that they are planning to shoot the plasmoid down a tube during the burn to spread out the load, and I believe they visualize a liquid metal wall, which would be self-healing. (An engineering bitch, I know, but not impossible.)

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

I think I added my edit just as you were posting. I just figured out I was not being clear.
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Axil
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Post by Axil »

Hi all

Dr. J. Slough made a very recent presentation of his Field Reversed Configuration (FRC) at UCLA describing his recent fusion efforts and future plans as follows.

http://www.fusion.ucla.edu/FNST/Renew_P ... 20talk.pdf

He has achieved 10e15 neutrons per pulse. The next stage in his development plan is to ramp up the pulse rate to about 1000 pulses per second. That will get him to a fluence of 10e18 neutrons per second.

If you remember that the neutrons per second rate for the Laser Inertial Fusion Engine, or LIFE system was about 10e20. Ramping up the plus rate on his reactor is a simple engineering effort requiring only money and not a science breakthrough. So John Slough is almost where the LIFE system wants to be in 10 years.

By 2012 his neutrons per pulse will be up to 10e17. At 1000 pps the fluence will be at 10e20 just like LIFE.

His system is SO much simpler. His burn chamber is SO elegant in its simplicity. Both LIFE and ITER will look foolish in 2013 when the big FRC reactor is operational.

Burning thorium with D - T 14 MeV neutrons from fusion will increase the per reaction energy from 14MeV to about 800 MeV per fusion event; That’s not counting the energy from delayed neutron fission.. The energy gain from fission of thorium is H U G E. Way more than infinite Q could ever give.
:D

Axil
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Post by Axil »

The Big Picture:

Quasi-steady Fusion Reactor based on the Pulsed High Density FRC

excerpt:

Neutron source for fissile and fusile fuel breeding


FRC plasmoid fusion, as presented here, has the unique attribute of maintaining critical formation, heating and diverter systems physically far from high neutron fluence and blanket energetics. This key feature greatly mitigates many of the difficult design issues associated with a fusion/fission hybrid system, and is critical to the applications considered here. In addition, the capability of generating a small, intense source of high energy neutrons makes it well suited for use as a nuclear fuel breeder. With projected production costs of over $100M/kg, the need for an alternate source of tritium is obvious. For there to be any growth in fusion energy production, tritium self sufficiency is not enough. Tritium breeding will be essential. Having no need for large structural elements in the cylindrical blanket, parasitic neutron absorption will be minimal. The small source size and the relatively large extended blanket geometry make for near unity blanket coverage so that a TBR significantly greater than one is feasible.

These advantages also apply to fissile fuel breeding, in particular the enabling of an alternate fuel cycle based on thorium. Unlike uranium, thorium is not fissile and can not be used for weapons manufacture. When enabled by an external source of neutrons, thorium can be burned without generating the long-lived high level waste characteristic of the uranium cycle. While all conventional PWR reactors can burn the activated thorium, a symbiotic linking with a molten salt breeder provides for an even more attractive nuclear option. By co-locating a molten salt reactor with FRC QSFRs, a waste mitigating closed nuclear cycle is achieved that is highly proliferation resistant. Only non-fissile material enters the plant in the form of thorium. All fuel for the reactor is produced on-site by the FRC QSFR.

Only a relatively small fusion power source is required (~ 7% of the fission reactor output) as it is leveraged by the much larger energy yield from the fissile fuel enriched thorium reactor. The fissile fuel doubling time can be as short as 5 years, and essentially all the thorium can be consumed in fission reactions, thus extending the energy reserves from thorium to several thousand years, limited only by the lithium reserves required for DT fusion [9]. Waste from the thorium cycle is orders of magnitude smaller than that of a current PWR, and decays to background levels in less than 500 years – only slightly longer than that from fusion neutron activation. By using the FRC QSFR to enable a thorium based energy cycle, nuclear power can finally deliver what the current uranium based fission can not: abundant, safe, and clean energy. Most importantly, it can be done in a timeframe to allow fusion to play a role in the effort to move from a carbon based energy economy.

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

Axil wrote: Dr. J. Slough made a very recent presentation of his Field Reversed Configuration (FRC) ...

He has achieved 10e15 neutrons per pulse.
err... has he?...Slide 11 appears to indicate a 'projected' DT rate (presumably based off of DD experiments) of 5x10E13.

What is Ep(J) - is that meant to be input power? Seems a bit low considering he's talking about having to get a 1MJ capacitor bank. But let's say it is, so that's a 20,000J input for a *projected* 110J output?

Not sure any of that calculation covers the input energy to generate the B field.
Axil wrote: The next stage in his development plan is to ramp up the pulse rate to about 1000 pulses per second. That will get him to a fluence of 10e18 neutrons per second.
It'll still be 1:200 energy out:in

Hey, don't get me wrong, that's great and really good stuff, and at the top of his graph, in years to come, he's hitting a 1:2 ratio, so maybe there'll be more to come. But he doesn't seem to predict that outcome, only that it'll be a 'neutron fluence' source, which seems a level-headed modest claim.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

1E17 n @ 10 Mev/n 1.60217653E-19J/ev = 1E24 ev * 1.6E-19 J/eV = 1.6E5 J.

160 KW seconds or 160,000 J.
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chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

MSimon wrote:1E17 n @ 10 Mev/n 1.60217653E-19J/ev = 1E24 ev * 1.6E-19 J/eV = 1.6E5 J.

160 KW seconds or 160,000 J.
What's your point?

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

chrismb wrote:
MSimon wrote:1E17 n @ 10 Mev/n 1.60217653E-19J/ev = 1E24 ev * 1.6E-19 J/eV = 1.6E5 J.

160 KW seconds or 160,000 J.
What's your point?
Just trying to get a feel for the numbers. Using TP as my blackboard.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

chrismb
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Post by chrismb »

MSimon wrote:
chrismb wrote:
MSimon wrote:1E17 n @ 10 Mev/n 1.60217653E-19J/ev = 1E24 ev * 1.6E-19 J/eV = 1.6E5 J.

160 KW seconds or 160,000 J.
What's your point?
Just trying to get a feel for the numbers. Using TP as my blackboard.
Ah. I see. So the 'return' is quite good on a 1MJ input, though of course it doesn't include the magnetic field (as it changes on the graph, yet without a change in the energy). In the case of JET, for example, they've already got to a state of around 20MJ in for 20MJ of neutrons out, again only for a pulse, but the magnetic field takes 1GJ to create. Imagine if that were needed 1000x per sec!!??

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

chrismb wrote:
MSimon wrote:
chrismb wrote:What's your point?
Just trying to get a feel for the numbers. Using TP as my blackboard.
Ah. I see. So the 'return' is quite good on a 1MJ input, though of course it doesn't include the magnetic field (as it changes on the graph, yet without a change in the energy). In the case of JET, for example, they've already got to a state of around 20MJ in for 20MJ of neutrons out, again only for a pulse, but the magnetic field takes 1GJ to create. Imagine if that were needed 1000x per sec!!??
Yeah. But I cheated. I used the predicted 2012 neutron number. And if I use 14 MeV n the number is around 2.2E5 J. Which isn't going to make a lot of difference.
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Munchausen
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PDF of interest?

Post by Munchausen »


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