2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

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

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mvanwink5
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by mvanwink5 »

It looks like GF has made a public move to the front.
Today, the pistons work well, and the plasma is hot enough and dense enough. Within the last month, the gas donut has started lasting long enough for the system to work, so now the company is turning its focus to compression and timing, according to Michael Delage, VP of strategy and corporate development.
So, the remaining issue is to solve the RM stability problem as mentioned by crowberry,
The Richtmeyer-Meshkov instability can be a problem too, see the FPA presentation on page 6 and the following two papers.
If there is too much lead contamination in the plasma then it will cool off. There are several things that GF can adjust to keep the problems under control like the acoustic pulse amplitude, duration, the angular velocity of the PbLi-fluid, possible injection of Li-nearest the center of the reactor to avoid Pb-contamination. Also the temperature and density of the plasma before the acoustic compression are important parameters. To have an idea of the good parameter set realistic simulations are needed. Currently the GF simulations are simplified and are missing important aspects of the acoustic vortex compression.
And as substantiated by GF, repeating from Michael Delage's statement above,
so now the company is turning its focus to compression and timing,
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

CharlesKramer
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by CharlesKramer »

mvanwink5 wrote:There are many dark horse fusion projects that have had delays that seem to have conspired to push their "effective net" dates into 2014
Civilization and prosperity may be a function of energy per capita -- aka "White's law."

Fusion -- no matter how cheap the electricity it creates -- may not overcome all resource constraints, but ought to keep industrial civilization from collapse -- *if* it succeeds, and soon.

But the race is on...

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... -recession
"Despite new discoveries and increasing reliance on unconventional oil and gas, 37 countries are already post-peak, and global oil production is declining at about 4.1% per year"

Does any other news really matter?

- CBK
================================
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/charleskramer

mvanwink5
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by mvanwink5 »

CBK,
Your logic is just hand waving and such hand waving has no true predictive power. So far GF is not that far behind their research plans as GF reached their plasma injector test objectives a month ago, along with their understanding how to compress the plasma spheromak stably. Naysayers believed it would be years later than it ended up being, if could be done at all. Further, the issue of RM instability was known up front, and GF said there is a risk the RM issue may be a show stopper. So, at this point with other issues resolved and with the needed insight of the details of how the spheromak plasma has to be compressed, GF is now working on solving their "first wall" problem of liquid lead surface RM instability with plasma details they could only have gotten by doing the prior work. Simply saying that the RM stability problem hasn't been solved tells us nothing about timing of the solution appearance or if an eventual solution is possible.

If hand waving really had the power to give answers then such effortless "research" would have been used, papers would been published, and money saved. But real world experience is that there is no substitute for real experimental knowledge combined with real theory. Indeed, that is the whole problem that the naysayers have, all they are doing is blowing smoke and claiming Cassandra's divination with no real insight, just hand waving.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

choff
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by choff »

Remember that peak oil collapse theory relies on the effect of rising energy prices on a fractional reserve debt based monetary system. Nations can greatly put off the day of reckoning by converting to a credit/equity based high reserve monetary system.
CHoff

happyjack27
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by happyjack27 »

CharlesKramer wrote: Civilization and prosperity may be a function of energy per capita -- aka "White's law."
That doesn't work. Except for the weasel word "may be". Yes, it "may be", but it's not.

civilization and prosperity is much more closely tied to how energy is aggregated and distributed. likewise for wealth.

to show this, one can imagine two extreme scenarios:

1.) all energy goes to a single person, everyone else gets no energy. in this scenario the energy per capita could be extremely high, or extremely low. it doesn't much matter, because the total productivity from that energy will be capped by the person's ability to make use of it. and that ability is capped by the limits of a single person's brain power, as well as by how fast they can move their fingers, feet, etc. this is obviously a very low prosperity situation. it can be argued that that was already given from the outset, since almost everyone has no energy.

2.) randomly distributed energy. the production efficiency is not as bad as scenario 1, since the wasted energy is not the total energy minus the capacity of one person, but there is still a lot of energy wasted, and still a lot of things that could use more energy. and while energy a priori is necessarily distributed more fairly than the first scenario (since the first scenario is the most unfair distribution.), it still leaves a lot of people out of "prosperity" and a lot of people who's prosperity isn't really effected any more by energy level because they already have more than their capacity.

so you see even in very high energy or very low energy per capita, you could get drastically different prosperity levels. having said that, while yes, prosperity is "a function of..." it is so in the sense that energy per capita is one variable in a much larger equation with many other variables, and the final result of the equation is rather weakly correlated with energy per capita. and it is in fact, not correlated at all with wealth per capita, since that is simply a matter of the amount of currency in circulation; a more predictive economic indicator is the ability of individuals to exchange goods and services for absolute benefit.

in either case it is not so much a matter of total quantities in the aggregate, but relative proportions in the parts.

CharlesKramer
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by CharlesKramer »

happyjack27 wrote:
CharlesKramer wrote: Civilization and prosperity may be a function of energy per capita -- aka "White's law."
That doesn't work. Except for the weasel word "may be". Yes, it "may be", but it's not.
My point was much more modest than perhaps it appeared.

Simply: fossil fuels are in decline.

This threatens industrial civilization - unless a source of clean and cheap energy is found, civilization as we know it will change radically or collapse, and possibly soon (decades, not centuries).

Against that fear fusion may be the only hope.

This is the last forum where I would expect that promise to be controversial.
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Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/charleskramer

Skipjack
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by Skipjack »

I am with Charles on this. You can not have unlimited economic growth without access to unlimited energy. Much of the recent recession and slow economic growth has been caused by the (still) high oil prices. The current US oil boom is only a result of the high oil prices that make exploiting those reserves economic. If oil prices were lower, no one would bother.
So we wont get out of the economic problems if we don't find a solution to the energy crisis. Paradoxically, governments around the world rather give the money to banks than to energy research. Politicians are treacherous idiots.

happyjack27
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by happyjack27 »

yeah, i do agree with that. esp. after flipping the logic: as is often the case, not a implies not b is much more solid than a implies b. (esp. when the null hypothesis is not b, as opposed to b)

mvanwink5
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by mvanwink5 »

Skipjack, that last point is something we all agree on. On the other points, I prefer to think in terms of the positive contribution that lower cost, bountiful energy makes to humankind's destiny, as viewed looking at the stars. The rest of what I was going to say was a rant, so I did everyone a favor and deleted it. :D
Best regards,

PS My hopes for a Trifecta this year is slip sliding towards 2015, but I haven't thrown the betting stub away just yet... GF may figure out a solution to their first wall problem (first wall issue was originally off my radar), which if GF can solve it with the 1 meter test reactor and 14 pistons, the larger 3 meter reactor with 200 pistons should be easier (I think). And, further, EMC2 may have a pony in the garage after all. On the third dark horse, if GF can figure out how to stably compress the spheromak plasma, surely Tri-Alpha has figured it out, or is close behind.

I keep thinking about the rest of the solar system and even the stars instead of scrapping over earth dirt.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

mvanwink5
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by mvanwink5 »

Good thing I kept my betting stub, it looks like GF is thinking 300 pistons will do the job as they seem to be thinking of starting the full size prototype build this year. My guess is the long lead item is the 3 meter diameter sphere. Target would be three years to put the prototype in service. The point is that the modeling has to show it will work before the full size prototype is financed.

Now, I am waiting to hear what the heck is going on with Polywell funding. The way these FPDS.gov reports go, there is a major lag time between a report change and the little squeak we get on .gov, and the project completion is now 4-30-14... Zzzzzzz... Look, those guys don't work for food. Surely we will hear something with their garage door soon, or some resumes will hit Linkedin. They will have built a space ship powered by a Polywell before we see anything on FPDS.gov :D
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

crowberry
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by crowberry »

The race towards break even has become even more interesting now that JET is attempting to break their record from 1997 by running in 2017 with DT.

LPP has as their target achieving break even with pB11, but in order to do that they will have to achieve a triple product value larger than the limit for DT break even. If they can do that, then it will be a big milestone even if they will not use the DT fuel. Would that still be counted as a trifecta goal if they surpass the JT-60 DT equivalent Q value of 1.25?

Skipjack
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by Skipjack »

crowberry wrote:The race towards break even has become even more interesting now that JET is attempting to break their record from 1997 by running in 2017 with DT.

LPP has as their target achieving break even with pB11, but in order to do that they will have to achieve a triple product value larger than the limit for DT break even. If they can do that, then it will be a big milestone even if they will not use the DT fuel. Would that still be counted as a trifecta goal if they surpass the JT-60 DT equivalent Q value of 1.25?
I still have hope for some of the other players. MSNW recently built a new prototype for their Helion fusion engine, Tri Alpha also has a new prototype up and running (I just saw it mentioned in a paper I read the other day).

crowberry
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by crowberry »

Skipjack wrote: I still have hope for some of the other players. MSNW recently built a new prototype for their Helion fusion engine, Tri Alpha also has a new prototype up and running (I just saw it mentioned in a paper I read the other day).
Sure, it is nice with so many contenders in the race. It would be even better if all of them would be enough funded. Due you have references to the new experiments by Helion Energy and Tri Alpha Energy?

Skipjack
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by Skipjack »

crowberry wrote:
Skipjack wrote: I still have hope for some of the other players. MSNW recently built a new prototype for their Helion fusion engine, Tri Alpha also has a new prototype up and running (I just saw it mentioned in a paper I read the other day).
Sure, it is nice with so many contenders in the race. It would be even better if all of them would be enough funded. Due you have references to the new experiments by Helion Energy and Tri Alpha Energy?
http://helionenergy.com/?p=440
The 4th in Helion’s series of groundbreaking prototypes is now operational.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.js ... %3D6635499
The Flux-Coil-Generated, Field-Reversed Configuration Experiment (FCX) at Tri Alpha Energy
Previous test article was the "C2 device" from what I understand. So this one seems to be new. I also heard something about a C3 device. So I am not 100% sure whether the above is part of the C3, or whether they changed names, or whether this is a new device following the C3.

mvanwink5
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Re: 2014 Dark Horse Trifecta Year?

Post by mvanwink5 »

Next Big Future has an article reviewing the different fusion efforts, (but missed Sorlox)
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/summar ... .html#more
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.

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