Talk-Polywell.org

Nonsense. There's the issue of fuel availability (FAR more boron and deuterium in the world than fissible uranium-235), which you keep glossing over. Your comment got me curious about what the real abundance of Boron, Thorium, and Uranium is . Boron is actually fairly scarce. In fact there is less ...

A Thorium MSR is NOT a simple breeder. In order to make it function at all you need to remove the Protactinium until it decays into U233. Otherwise it is a poison and ruins the neutron economy. With an external neutron source, the complexity of the rapid fuel recycling gives way to the safety of an...

What do you mean? When is the last time you vacationed in the Eastern Idaho Desert? Must have been some time very recently... INL is a government nuclear laboratory and research facility. They do fuel reprocessing research. I meant that as a matter of policy the US does not reprocess any of the spe...

I'm comparing it to already known reactor technology such as a fluoride molten salt reactor running on a thorium fuel cycle. These already have a sufficient neutron economy to breed more fuel than they use. What would be the economic advantage of adding all the fusion complexity to the system when i...

Then it will make sense.

A Fusion/Fission hybrid does not.

The point of a fusion/fission hybrid is that you can enhance the neutron economy of the reactor. Wouldn't it be nice to return I129 back into the pot? A well designed fusion/fission hybrid can be very cleaning in terms of waste, and actually produce a lot of useful isotopes beside. Sure it would be...

Uh huh, and where do you get the neutrons from? From the fission of the U233 in the reactor core. There are sufficient excess neutrons to breed the fuel needed to run the reactor. It's a breeder reactor. Depends on the fusion reactor, doesn't it? No, the fission reactor is going to be cheaper than ...

It would be much simpler and cheaper to just breed the thorium into U233 in the reactor you are burning the U233 in. No need to bother with a fusion reactor. Yes you can breed fissile material in a fusion reactor, but it doesn't make any economic sense to do so. There are simpler cheaper ways of doi...

There is no point to a fusion/fission hybrid process. The only advantages of Fusion over Fission power generation are that it avoids the problems (mostly) of radioactive waste disposal and nuclear weapons proliferation. Soon as you start radiating fertile isotopes with the neutron flux you've negate...

A production car is not going to spend the money required to get the weight reductions and motor performance Tesla did. And that number might represent out of the door designed number. i.e. not counting 30% reserve for battery life, reserve for battery aging, reserve for production tolerances etc. ...

MSimon suggested a rough working figure of 1 Wh/kg mi, which would mean that a car the size of a Smart ForTwo (curb weight 730kg) with one driver and stuff (figure 70kg) would need 80kWh for a range of 100mi. This is much too conservative an estimate. The Tesla and Volt get about 0.13 Wh/kg mi 4-5 ...