[math-fun] revolutionize world energy?
"Lawrenceville plasma physics" is a company that plans to revolutionize energy production with a new fusion reactor, headed by Eric Lerner, author of book "The big bang never happened." http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ They just got funded by... Iran, after USA funding sources all refused. Here's a video of Lerner explaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4w_dzSvVaM Be a big coup for Iran if they succeed, but unfortunately I suspect Lerner's plans will not work. (For example all his plans to directly generate electricity strike me as very dubious...) Still, one has to sort of admire their spunk, perhaps enough of his ideas will work that some progress happens, and I agree with them that neutronless Proton+Boron11 fusion is the only way to go that ever could hope to be economical. (Normal fusion reactions that emit fast neutrons are complete garbage from any economic standpoint since they convert your ultra expensive fusion reactor to radioactive waste... it is totally pointless to develop them. Also, reactors that use tritium are stupid since there is no tritium in the world, and lithium is rare, and a typical outrageous lie told by fusioneers is that lithium-6 could be extracted from seawater at far less than the energy cost you'd get from it, whereas actually those of us who can do high school physics & chemistry can demonstrate it'd probably cost "more" energy, not "way less"...)
While EMC2 seems to be progressing nicely with Bussard's polywell design, funded by the Navy. http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/Pages/RecipientPr... "During 4Q of 2011, EMC2 has modified the electron injectors to increase the plasma heating. The higher plasma density in WB-8 prompted the need for higher heating power. We plan to operate WB-8 in high beta regime with the modified electron injectors during 1Q of 2012." For background, here's Bussard's presentation from 2006. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606 On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 3:21 PM, Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
"Lawrenceville plasma physics" is a company that plans to revolutionize energy production with a new fusion reactor, headed by Eric Lerner, author of book "The big bang never happened."
http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
They just got funded by... Iran, after USA funding sources all refused. Here's a video of Lerner explaining:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4w_dzSvVaM
Be a big coup for Iran if they succeed, but unfortunately I suspect Lerner's plans will not work. (For example all his plans to directly generate electricity strike me as very dubious...)
Still, one has to sort of admire their spunk, perhaps enough of his ideas will work that some progress happens, and I agree with them that neutronless Proton+Boron11 fusion is the only way to go that ever could hope to be economical.
(Normal fusion reactions that emit fast neutrons are complete garbage from any economic standpoint since they convert your ultra expensive fusion reactor to radioactive waste... it is totally pointless to develop them. Also, reactors that use tritium are stupid since there is no tritium in the world, and lithium is rare, and a typical outrageous lie told by fusioneers is that lithium-6 could be extracted from seawater at far less than the energy cost you'd get from it, whereas actually those of us who can do high school physics & chemistry can demonstrate it'd probably cost "more" energy, not "way less"...)
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-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
of course, we can already get energy from fusion! there is a fusion reactor 93 millon miles from the earth. it is already up and running, is maintenance-free, and has a 5 billion year fuel supply. all we have to do is collect its energy using solar collectors, wind turbines, etc. bob --- Warren Smith wrote:
"Lawrenceville plasma physics" is a company that plans to revolutionize energy production with a new fusion reactor, headed by Eric Lerner, author of book "The big bang never happened."
http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
They just got funded by... Iran, after USA funding sources all refused. Here's a video of Lerner explaining:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4w_dzSvVaM
Be a big coup for Iran if they succeed, but unfortunately I suspect Lerner's plans will not work. (For example all his plans to directly generate electricity strike me as very dubious...)
Still, one has to sort of admire their spunk, perhaps enough of his ideas will work that some progress happens, and I agree with them that neutronless Proton+Boron11 fusion is the only way to go that ever could hope to be economical.
(Normal fusion reactions that emit fast neutrons are complete garbage from any economic standpoint since they convert your ultra expensive fusion reactor to radioactive waste... it is totally pointless to develop them. Also, reactors that use tritium are stupid since there is no tritium in the world, and lithium is rare, and a typical outrageous lie told by fusioneers is that lithium-6 could be extracted from seawater at far less than the energy cost you'd get from it, whereas actually those of us who can do high school physics & chemistry can demonstrate it'd probably cost "more" energy, not "way less"...)
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On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 4:38 PM, Robert Baillie <rjbaillie@frii.com> wrote:
of course, we can already get energy from fusion!
there is a fusion reactor 93 millon miles from the earth. it is already up and running, is maintenance-free, and has a 5 billion year fuel supply.
all we have to do is collect its energy using solar collectors, wind turbines, etc.
Yes, "all" we have to do. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
Ah, but plants have already gathered several hundred million years of this fusion energy & stored it for us in a relatively compact form, which is currently at least an order of magnitude more compact (by volume & by weight) than the best batteries. :-) --- The U.S. govt has decided in its infinite wisdom to start charging significant duties on Chinese solar cells, so that they will be noticeably more expensive here in the U.S. :-( --- The good news is that the feature size on silicon chips is now only 3x the sizes needed to build "quantum dots" for the appropriate wavelengths of light for high efficiency solar cells. This means that we will soon no longer have to depend upon weird materials that happen to have the appropriate energy levels; we will be able to manufacture energy levels by changing certain size parameters of these quantum dots. At 04:38 PM 5/25/2012, Robert Baillie wrote:
of course, we can already get energy from fusion!
there is a fusion reactor 93 millon miles from the earth. it is already up and running, is maintenance-free, and has a 5 billion year fuel supply.
all we have to do is collect its energy using solar collectors, wind turbines, etc.
- When I was just a boy, I used to be a plasma physicist working on fusion research. I worked on a tokamak at UT and later on a multiple mirror plasma device at Berkeley. There are many issues to be resolved in this field. Tokamaks resolve one by getting rid of magneto-hydro-dynamic instabilities induced by the cylindrical symmetries of solenoidal devices. The actual extraction of usable energy is another issue that may not have been resolved. (I left this field a long time ago.) But I know that the break even point of a tokamak fusion reactor generating enough (unextracted) energy to sustain the reaction was reached way back in the 1980's at Princeton's TFTR. On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Ah, but plants have already gathered several hundred million years of this fusion energy & stored it for us in a relatively compact form, which is currently at least an order of magnitude more compact (by volume & by weight) than the best batteries. :-)
---
The U.S. govt has decided in its infinite wisdom to start charging significant duties on Chinese solar cells, so that they will be noticeably more expensive here in the U.S. :-(
---
The good news is that the feature size on silicon chips is now only 3x the sizes needed to build "quantum dots" for the appropriate wavelengths of light for high efficiency solar cells. This means that we will soon no longer have to depend upon weird materials that happen to have the appropriate energy levels; we will be able to manufacture energy levels by changing certain size parameters of these quantum dots.
At 04:38 PM 5/25/2012, Robert Baillie wrote:
of course, we can already get energy from fusion!
there is a fusion reactor 93 millon miles from the earth. it is already up and running, is maintenance-free, and has a 5 billion year fuel supply.
all we have to do is collect its energy using solar collectors, wind turbines, etc.
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Interesting, I was in France near Lyon once and at the train station, one woman and 2-3 guys were talking about the job I presume but the conversation was by far of a very high level, they were using words like magneto-hydrodynamic, specialized plates of steel, very high temperatures and plasmas, The train was late and I could not resist to ask the woman what in the hell are they talking about ? , I presented myself as a 'scientific' person and we chatted about their job, they were working at Candarache, the french site where the ITER is : She was convinced that eventualy they would create energy with the device, but I pointed out that , well this is nice but would'nt be simpler to just take the energy where it is : geothermic , wind and such instead of spending billions of euros on a hypothetic project ? Of course my arguments did not convinced her, she probably was making a very good pay at that place, and I think that the problem is there, : Money, not energy. Best regards, Simon plouffe Le 26/05/2012 04:48, Rowan Hamilton a écrit :
- When I was just a boy, I used to be a plasma physicist working on fusion research. I worked on a tokamak at UT and later on a multiple mirror plasma device at Berkeley. There are many issues to be resolved in this field. Tokamaks resolve one by getting rid of magneto-hydro-dynamic instabilities induced by the cylindrical symmetries of solenoidal devices. The actual extraction of usable energy is another issue that may not have been resolved. (I left this field a long time ago.) But I know that the break even point of a tokamak fusion reactor generating enough (unextracted) energy to sustain the reaction was reached way back in the 1980's at Princeton's TFTR.
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Henry Baker<hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Ah, but plants have already gathered several hundred million years of this fusion energy& stored it for us in a relatively compact form, which is currently at least an order of magnitude more compact (by volume& by weight) than the best batteries. :-)
---
The U.S. govt has decided in its infinite wisdom to start charging significant duties on Chinese solar cells, so that they will be noticeably more expensive here in the U.S. :-(
---
The good news is that the feature size on silicon chips is now only 3x the sizes needed to build "quantum dots" for the appropriate wavelengths of light for high efficiency solar cells. This means that we will soon no longer have to depend upon weird materials that happen to have the appropriate energy levels; we will be able to manufacture energy levels by changing certain size parameters of these quantum dots.
At 04:38 PM 5/25/2012, Robert Baillie wrote:
of course, we can already get energy from fusion!
there is a fusion reactor 93 millon miles from the earth. it is already up and running, is maintenance-free, and has a 5 billion year fuel supply. all we have to do is collect its energy using solar collectors, wind turbines, etc.
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For those people who hope that D-T fusion can obsolesce nuclear fission, there is a fatal flaw. While the fusion reaction D + T --> He-4 + n produces a neutron, it takes a neutron to create tritium, Li-6 + n --> He-4 + T. Even if the fusion neutrons are used to breed more tritium, some neutrons will be lost. A neutron source is needed to sustain the fusion cycle, and currently it is the nuclear reactor within which tritium is manufactured from Li-6. Nuclear fission will necessarily accompany D-T fusion. One possibility is to use the fast 14 MeV fusion neutrons to fission natural uranium and thorium, and use the released fission neutrons to breed Pu-239 and U-233 for use in a reactor. I don't feel qualified to judge Mr. Lerner's proposal for B-H fusion. -- Gene
________________________________ From: Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 3:21 PM Subject: [math-fun] revolutionize world energy?
"Lawrenceville plasma physics" is a company that plans to revolutionize energy production with a new fusion reactor, headed by Eric Lerner, author of book "The big bang never happened."
http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/
They just got funded by... Iran, after USA funding sources all refused. Here's a video of Lerner explaining:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4w_dzSvVaM
Be a big coup for Iran if they succeed, but unfortunately I suspect Lerner's plans will not work. (For example all his plans to directly generate electricity strike me as very dubious...)
Still, one has to sort of admire their spunk, perhaps enough of his ideas will work that some progress happens, and I agree with them that neutronless Proton+Boron11 fusion is the only way to go that ever could hope to be economical.
(Normal fusion reactions that emit fast neutrons are complete garbage from any economic standpoint since they convert your ultra expensive fusion reactor to radioactive waste... it is totally pointless to develop them. Also, reactors that use tritium are stupid since there is no tritium in the world, and lithium is rare, and a typical outrageous lie told by fusioneers is that lithium-6 could be extracted from seawater at far less than the energy cost you'd get from it, whereas actually those of us who can do high school physics & chemistry can demonstrate it'd probably cost "more" energy, not "way less"...)
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participants (7)
-
Eugene Salamin -
Henry Baker -
Mike Stay -
Robert Baillie -
Rowan Hamilton -
Simon Plouffe -
Warren Smith