Recovery.Gov Project Tracker

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

Moderators: tonybarry, MSimon

KitemanSA
Posts: 6179
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:05 pm
Location: OlyPen WA

Post by KitemanSA »

chrismb wrote:
MSimon wrote:I can let the cat out of the bag now. Procurement difficulties rather than experiment gone bad.
Yeah, since the down turn the unobtanium suppliers have had a tough time! The 'something-from-nothing' machines that they used to share time on with the Financial Markets have all broken!!!
Are you constitutionally unable to accept a communication without snide implication that Polywell is somehow a scam? MSimon says EMC2 had procurement difficulties. You suggest they couldn't find the "unobtanium" they needed. What up with that s#it?
Maybe they couldn't get one of the fancy new probe thingees that the experts said they needed. Maybe they couldn't find anyone to install the fancy probe thingee correctly. Maybe there weren't as many high voltage switcheroos on the shelves as anticipated so they needed to wait till the factory made more. There's a lot of prosaic things that could have impeded construction. But no, you have to imply venality.
Are you just one of those folks that LIKES to be an ass? Is that how you get your jollies?

rcain
Posts: 992
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 2:43 pm
Contact:

Post by rcain »

thank you ladajo, thank you Ivy Matt, thank you recovery.gov and thank you MSimon - at last a REAL (hyperlinked) factoid!!

this is indeed good news.

as is the current focus on 'scaling' i think - it implies they think there is something to hit.

next 2 years or so should be busy with announcements - competition and all. encouraged perhaps. wonder what affect on investment community, chinese, et al.

rcain
Posts: 992
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 2:43 pm
Contact:

Post by rcain »

chrismb wrote:
MSimon wrote:I can let the cat out of the bag now. Procurement difficulties rather than experiment gone bad.
Yeah, since the down turn the unobtanium suppliers have had a tough time! The 'something-from-nothing' machines that they used to share time on with the Financial Markets have all broken!!!
ROFL.

KitemanSA
Posts: 6179
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 3:05 pm
Location: OlyPen WA

Post by KitemanSA »

rcain wrote: next 2 years or so should be busy with announcements - competition and all. encouraged perhaps. wonder what affect on investment community, chinese, et al.
Why should it be "busy with announcements - competition and all"? Until there is a decision to go WB9, all contracting is done. Indeed, the option payment is less than the $6.5M that needs to be announced. We may never know unless the $ is in fact recovery money. But if the Navy decides to fund the option... Heck, they may already have. Ladajo may know. He seems to have connections into the finance system of the Navy.

Just as a reminder, WB-D is EMC2FDC speak for a 100MW demo machine. WB9 is EMC2/Navy funds speak for... whatever is next in line that is currently written as a 100mW machine. This could allow for at least one more intermediate scale machine. WB-D and WB9 are different machines that may or MAY NOT be similar.

chrismb
Posts: 3161
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 6:00 pm

Post by chrismb »

KitemanSA wrote:
chrismb wrote:
MSimon wrote:I can let the cat out of the bag now. Procurement difficulties rather than experiment gone bad.
Yeah, since the down turn the unobtanium suppliers have had a tough time! The 'something-from-nothing' machines that they used to share time on with the Financial Markets have all broken!!!
Are you constitutionally unable to accept a communication without snide implication that Polywell is somehow a scam?
If you mean 'conditionally unable', as in 'come to have expected as much/conditioned over time to anticipate nothing', then that'd be an 'affirmative'.

But I keep saying, no matter how often you guys throw sh*t at me in terms of trying to make out that I'm saying 'it's a scam', I've never said that at all. In much the same way I don't go around accusing Bussard of saying tokamak was a scam.

(If you keep accusing me of saying these things are a scam, then maybe I should just declare anyone with faith in 'polywell' to also be accusing tokamak as 'a scam'?)

rcain
Posts: 992
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 2:43 pm
Contact:

Post by rcain »

KitemanSA wrote:
rcain wrote: next 2 years or so should be busy with announcements - competition and all. encouraged perhaps. wonder what affect on investment community, chinese, et al.
Why should it be "busy with announcements - competition and all"?
misunderstanding - i wasnt expecting more news from emc2/navy, until the end of the period at least - simply meant ''from the competition" really - FoFu, Rossi, possibly - isnt the National Ignition facility meant to be 'igniting' soon also. who know's maybe chrismb will get his inverted cyclotron thingy to do something interesting. - [edit: probably more chance of that than any positive news from ITER in the same period]

in different fields, there's LHC making noises at present and new Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer about to go into orbit.

lots of potentially newsworthy stuff over this same period, plus all thats not even on our radar yet.

just trying to sound optimistic, stem the bordom.

dweigert
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2007 1:09 am

Post by dweigert »

chrismb wrote:
KitemanSA wrote:
chrismb wrote: Yeah, since the down turn the unobtanium suppliers have had a tough time! The 'something-from-nothing' machines that they used to share time on with the Financial Markets have all broken!!!
Are you constitutionally unable to accept a communication without snide implication that Polywell is somehow a scam?
If you mean 'conditionally unable', as in 'come to have expected as much/conditioned over time to anticipate nothing', then that'd be an 'affirmative'.

But I keep saying, no matter how often you guys throw sh*t at me in terms of trying to make out that I'm saying 'it's a scam', I've never said that at all. In much the same way I don't go around accusing Bussard of saying tokamak was a scam.

(If you keep accusing me of saying these things are a scam, then maybe I should just declare anyone with faith in 'polywell' to also be accusing tokamak as 'a scam'?)
It isn't so much the words, as the attitude I think. If something that looks the slightest bit hopeful comes out, you seem to feel that it is your sworn duty to dash all hopes and make everyone as sour and curmudgeonly as yourself. It does get old after a while. To quote a favourite author, "The sum of all human existence is neither black, nor white, but an infinite set of shades of grey." So rather than being snide and snarkey all the time, how about trying for *Allowing* others to be cautiously optimistic? That isn't too much to ask, is it?

Dan

rcain
Posts: 992
Joined: Mon Apr 14, 2008 2:43 pm
Contact:

Post by rcain »

'grey' is even more depressing.

TallDave
Posts: 3140
Joined: Wed Jul 25, 2007 7:12 pm
Contact:

Post by TallDave »

Aero wrote:Obviously I'm missing something, but I'm sure R^7 - R^2 /= R^5.
I wondered about that too, a couple years back, then I realized gain is negative for small machines, so obviously you can't just multiply it by r^5.

It's probably most accurate to say we expect power scales as B^4 * r^3, and we don't really know how losses scale, but we hope they look something like B^.25 * r^2. Gain is power minus loss at whatever values of B and R we plug in. r^5 may sort of describe gain over a certain range.
MSimon wrote:I can let the cat out of the bag now. Procurement difficulties rather than experiment gone bad.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
Betruger wrote:So when can we consider Polywell doesn't behave as Doc Carlson expected according to conventional conjecture? After 8.1 gets the green? IIRC, his and Chrismb's prognostics were for a Polywell to fail at some very fundamental level.
We knew that a long time ago -- Rick stated they were not seeing the ion currents to the walls Art predicted. This was also not seen in most simulations. Art had this strange belief he could just model tiny pieces of the device with an equation here and there and tell whether it would work, which was amusing and sometimes even interesting but never anything like definitive. I wouldn't even trust the simulations all that far; there are probably going to be surprises (and they probably won't be good surprises).
KitemanSA wrote:Just as a reminder, WB-D is EMC2FDC speak for a 100MW demo machine. WB9 is EMC2/Navy funds speak for... whatever is next in line that is currently written as a 100mW machine. This could allow for at least one more intermediate scale machine. WB-D and WB9 are different machines that may or MAY NOT be similar.
Indeed, I remember when some of us here were calling the 100MW machine "WB-8."
ladajo wrote:Well, I guess you will all have to revise your opinions of why and how Rick Nebel is no longer associated with EMC2.

The 1Q/2011 recovery.gov report states:

"As of 1Q/2011, the WB-8 device operates as designed and it is generating positive results. EMC2 is planning to conduct comprehensive experiments on WB-8 in the next 9-12 months based on the current contract funding schedule."

I make of this that they ARE behind schedule, and have NOT received all funding from the Recovery Act, and that we WILL see another report.

I also am failing to supress an uncontrolled expression of glee.
Yes, that sounds about right to me. It's hard to say what "positive results" mean -- that could be "favorable loss scaling confirmed" or neutron counts or just "we're finally getting some data now." We may not know anything more even by implication until WB-8.1/D are approved or denied, but we can hope for an interview I suppose.
n*kBolt*Te = B**2/(2*mu0) and B^.25 loss scaling? Or not so much? Hopefully we'll know soon...

choff
Posts: 2447
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2007 5:02 am
Location: Vancouver, Canada

Post by choff »

RNebel's probably back at Santa Fe doing design work on WBD, note his status still remains on the EMC2 website. As for procurement problems, that could mean they need a one off component custom made and not some exotic material. Mainly they need to rag out the process for as long as possible for the black box project to complete.
CHoff

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Post by Giorgio »

I was expecting more from this report, I am a little disappointed. Anyhow, I guess a little and unclear news is better than a bad news in this period.

rj40
Posts: 288
Joined: Sat Feb 09, 2008 2:31 am
Location: Southern USA

Post by rj40 »

Procurement difficulties? I wonder if it is some lingering after 'ffect of the continuing resolution? I read that gummed up a lot of things money wise.

I am not qualified to have much of an opinion as to whether this will work, but I tend to think it won't. I very much want to be wrong though. I cannot overemphasize how much I want to be wrong.

chrismb
Posts: 3161
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 6:00 pm

Post by chrismb »

dweigert wrote:It isn't so much the words, as the attitude I think. If something that looks the slightest bit hopeful comes out, you seem to feel that it is your sworn duty to dash all hopes and make everyone as sour and curmudgeonly as yourself.
That's not quite my character set. I tend to simply argue the opposite to the prevailing view - on the [what seems to me to be an entirely] logical basis that whatever people hold to be true today is tomorrow's 'old news', so my curmudgeondliness is a reflection of the gun-ho cheer leaders here.

You should anticipate that if there was a bit less over optimism and a bit more realism, you might actually find me defending polywell. I have defended its funding in the past, but it's become increasingly difficult to justify that position, given the intransigence of those who should have released some technical information by now.

How about you tell some of the folks here who are always optimistic that they should be a bit more pessimistic, rather than only tell the pessimists to be optimistic?

One last point - whatever one's 'attitude', it doesn't change a scientific outcome - though you might not know it from the way 'science' is going these days.

mvanwink5
Posts: 2143
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:07 am
Location: N.C. Mountains

Post by mvanwink5 »

"It's hard to say what "positive results" mean -- that could be "favorable loss scaling confirmed" or neutron counts or just "we're finally getting some data now.""

Sounds like management vs union arguing about simple contract wording, with the union claiming overtime pay is owed for being available to come to work in an emergency. Lawyers can even argue the definition of "is." Some won't accept WB-8.1 funding as meaningful either. I can't see the data ever being released and some folks will be upset about this forevermore.

All I can say is that it doesn't take 9-12 months more to know if it works, but that amount of data is worth having for design work. I also can't see why a parallel WB-8.1 wouldn't be worth it. For that matter, why investors would not be building their own D-D machine at this point. Just my thoughts.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

mvanwink5
Posts: 2143
Joined: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:07 am
Location: N.C. Mountains

Post by mvanwink5 »

With positive WB-8 results, I am not sure why EMC2 would not be getting together an electrical utility consortium to design and build a WB-D. Heavens knows solar and wind alternatives stink, and the Japanese earthquake has nearly re-killed the nuclear option, these guys have to be ripe for a cheap fusion option, even if it was D-D.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

Post Reply