Talk-Polywell.org

What was Bussard thinking? Create the worlds most environmentally friendly abundant energy producing machine in history and then use is to make ethonol from sugar cane? Cut down the rain forests, plant sugar cane, use a Polywell to convert it to ethonol and then BURN IT!

Sorry, he is a very smart man, but this is probably the worst idea I have ever heard for saving the world.

Cheap energy means we can make hydrogen cheaply... and, since the infrastructure for hydrogen distribution looks like it is going to be put in place in similar timeframes to polywells producing abundant electricity, we will run our cars on hydrogen. This is the clean solution.

regards

Well, for various reasons, there's probably always going to be a large market for liquid fuel, and renewable sources are obviously better than fossil.

For that, you need some way to extract the alcohol from the sugar cane (or other biomass), which requires energy. If you had a very cheap and clean way to provide that energy, you could produce renewable liquid fuel much more cheaply.

seedload wrote:What was Bussard thinking? Create the worlds most environmentally friendly abundant energy producing machine in history and then use is to make ethonol from sugar cane? Cut down the rain forests, plant sugar cane, use a Polywell to convert it to ethonol and then BURN IT!

In another thread, Keegan brought up an international research group that had come up with a way to do gas separation much more efficiently using a membrane that simulates the way plants do gas separation. It occurs to me that if you had the energy, you could just do CO2 separation from the atmosphere, reduce it to CO, and then you have the beginning of a Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis cycle. That is, assuming your principle concern was compatibility with the existing fuel delivery system.

There's a lot to be said in favor of that; hydrogen still doesn't have a good delivery system. It's damaging to pipelines, and it doesn't store well. It doesn't exist in nature, and currently would have to be synthesized by steam reformation of natural gas. A Polywell fusion device could certainly give you a lot of hydrogen by electrolysis, but that brings up another point: where would you get all the water you need in the first place? Hydrogen, because of the difficulties of storage, would want to be made at the point of use. That's fine for coastal areas with access to seawater, but what about people inland? Those with poor access to water (in deserts, for instance) are screwed.

It's not clear hydrogen is a great choice for transportation at all.

Retracted

Anything makes more sense than to subsidize Alcohol, then burn massive quantities of Natural Gas to run the distilleries. Fermentation itself is a waste, as evidenced by the large quantities of Carbon Di-Oxide it gives off.
We're better off burning the corn.

I have doubt about Brazilian ethanol too. I wonder what they burn to run the distilleries. Rainforest Charcoal perhaps? The conventional wisdom says that Brazilian Ethanol is a resounding success, but I don't believe it. Imagine a distillery run by burning alcohol, what would the net energy output be? Would it even be positive?

Maybe biomass, if you had hydrogenated biomass, making long hydrocarbon chains... but that would take Nuke power.

scareduck wrote:hydrogen still doesn't have a good delivery system. It's damaging to pipelines, and it doesn't store well. It doesn't exist in nature, and currently would have to be synthesized by steam reformation of natural gas. A Polywell fusion device could certainly give you a lot of hydrogen by electrolysis, but that brings up another point: where would you get all the water you need in the first place? Hydrogen, because of the difficulties of storage, would want to be made at the point of use. That's fine for coastal areas with access to seawater, but what about people inland? Those with poor access to water (in deserts, for instance) are screwed.

It's not clear hydrogen is a great choice for transportation at all.

You create hydrogen at your nearest Polywell plant. You store it safely in a fuel cell of some kind. You distribute the fuel cells. You don't ship hydrogen around. That is the model. Much different than what you are talking about. For example take a look at this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Ammonia. The tech to easily and safely distribute hydrogen is right around the corner - as hopefully is the polywell. We need to stop burning stuff.

Oh, and people who live in deserts should move.

regards[/url]

seedload wrote:You create hydrogen at your nearest Polywell plant. You store it safely in a fuel cell of some kind.

A fuel cell is not a storage mechanism, but an energy conversion mechanism.

Hydrogen wants to bore into steel crystalline lattices, thus weakening them. It also requires very high pressures to store it in its gaseous state, which is a double-whammy because the pressure tends to magnify this problem. There are a number of research programs trying to solve the problem of gaseous hydrogen storage as a result.

One way to store hydrogen that works very well is to put it at the end of long-chain carbon molecules -- for instance, octane, cetane, etc. That is, the common components of gasoline and diesel fuel. These are much more easily transportable than hydrogen gas.

Obviously liquid fuels are not going away anytime soon, even by 2050. Though I think by 2050 Liquid fuels share of transportation will diminish, as Polywell generated electricity will allow electric cars to handle transportation for shorter trips, as well as improved public transportation.

Ethanol from corn has an EROEI of about 1 to 1.3.
Canadian Tar Sands also is about 1 to 1.3
Sugarcane is at about 1 to 6
Oil used to be at 1 to 30, and is down to about 1 to 10.

Some liquid fuels will be needed, and using Polywell to power an existing infrastructure is an already talked about issue here at talk polywell.

Replacing Coal and fission plants is only one option polywell would present to us. So no, Bussard was not nuts, he did see the possibilities, even those in Brazil.

Most of the folks with grandiose propositions for making great changes are totally ignorant of economics and logistics.

Typical thinking process: if we can put a man on the moon why can't everyone buy a moon excursion ticket for a buck ninety-eight ($1.98 for our non-American friends)? And why is it taking so long? Didn't we put a man on the moon?

MSimon wrote:Most of the folks with grandiose propositions for making great changes are totally ignorant of economics and logistics.

For the sake of my own sanity, I will assume you weren't talking about me in the statement above.

Anyway. Back to the topic.

Surely the idea that Polywells will be abundantly available before a hydrogen transport infrastructure technology is abundantly available is a little "grandious". Believing the former is possible while doubting we can do the latter is a bit sketchy to me.

Take this link for example.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 102549.htm

Here are some scientists that have done nothing more than come up with a lab experiment to store hydrogen in a safe compact way... IN THE LAB. Yet they are perfectly willing to make claims like the following...

Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normal pressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. With our technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normal gasoline tank”, says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department of Chemistry at DTU.

Sounds similar to a scientist that has done nothing more than produced a few neutrons in a few fractions of a second that claims to be able to scale it to full production of cheap clean power.

Two different scientific groups with technologies at evidently similar stages of development both making somewhat grandious claims. Now, my believing in the potential of the former is not that crazy if I am to also believe the claims of the latter.

Especially if you consider that the latter scientist had an obvious and very pressing reason to accelerate the timescales he was suggesting. Might it even have been reason enough to exagerate his claims?

The fact is that both technologies are probably much farther off than we would like to hope.

But, back on topic, suggesting that we should use clean power to make unclean fuel is not a good lasting strategy. Hydrogen as fuel and fusion for production are the ultimate synergistic environmental technologies. To suggest anything less is not the right course... IMHO.

regards

I had an idea a while back that involved using space elevators to orbit large solar power stations, with which you could run air refineries to produce gasoline, kerosene, and diesel.

This process is completely sustainable, the net CO2 emissions are zero, and we're getting really good at making sure that CO2 is the only thing that comes out of the tailpipe of a car. If Polywell doesn't work, something like this might be the next best thing.

I do like hydrogen for aviation, though...

Liquid fuels are not going away. They have one important advantage: density.

You get more hydrogen in 1 cc of liquid water than you do in 1 cc of liquid hydrogen.

Which is why liquid fuels are not going away any time soon.

It takes about 50 to 75 years to change a system. So even if we knew the best direction to head today (we have no clue re: specifics - the general direction is well outlined) it would take that long to roll it out on a distributed system.

The electrical grid is a lot more centralized. Power plants go at nodes. You build 1,000 100 MW machines in a year and in 10 years you have changed the electrical supply system. You can't turn autos that fast. About 6% a year. Which means 16 years once all production is of the desired system.

It will take at least 10 years of different offerings to figure out the optimum re:technology vs price and build the logistics base. For one thing we do not yet have sufficient semiconductor production to make all autos hybrids.

Let me add that the CO2 hysteria is bunk.

It didn't cause the warming spell we have had and it will not protect us from the little ice age we currently appear to be headed for.

MSimon, who said those cars need to be Hybrids ? Gee dude sometimes it seems like your brain just freezes in place. Time for a defrag and a restart.

I seriously doubt CPU's for Hybrids will be an issue in 2020 or even 2050.

MSimon wrote:Let me add that the CO2 hysteria is bunk.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Until they show their work -- all of it -- I'm still in the skeptic's camp.

This is also why I have my reservations about Q>=1 for the Polywell.