Lockheed says makes breakthrough on fusion energy project

More digging...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

Yields this paragraph:

/quote
In February 2013, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works announced a new compact fusion machine, the high beta fusion reactor, which may be related to the biconic cusp and the polywell, and working at β = 1.[24]
/end-quote

Which begat this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_be...or#cite_note-5

Which begat McGuire's PhD thesis in the references:
http://ssl.mit.edu/publications/thes...uireThomas.pdf

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 1:53:50 PM UTC-4, David Spain wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

Which ultimately leads me back to Rider....
Quote from above link:

/quote
Criticism

In his thesis[36] and his 1995 publication,[33] MIT doctoral student Todd Rider had calculated that X-ray radiation losses with this fuel will exceed fusion power production by at least 20%. Rider modeled the system using the following assumptions:

The plasma was quasineutral. Therefore positives and negatives were equally mixed together.[33]
The fuel was evenly mixed throughout the volume.[33]
The plasma was isotropic, meaning that its behavior was the same in any given direction.[33]
The plasma had a uniform energy and temperature throughout the cloud.[33]
The plasma was an unstructured Gaussian sphere, with a strongly converged dense central core. The core represented a small (~1%) part of the total volume.[33] In a later 1995 paper, William Nevins at LANL argued against this assumption. He argued that the particles would build up angular momentum, causing the dense core to degrade.[37] The loss of density inside the core would reduce fusion rates.
The potential well was broad and flat.[33]

Based on these assumptions, Rider used general equations[38] to estimate the rates of different physical effects. These included, but were not limited to, the loss of ions to up-scattering, the ion thermalization rate, the energy loss due to X-ray radiation and the fusion rate.[33] His conclusions were that the device suffered from "fundamental flaws".[33]

By contrast, Bussard has argued[23] that the plasma inside the polywell has different structure, temperature distribution and well profile. These characteristics have not been fully measured and are central to the device's feasibility. Based on this his calculations indicate that the bremsstrahlung losses would be much smaller.[39][40] According to Bussard the high speed and therefore low cross section for Coulomb collisions of the ions in the core makes thermalizing collisions very unlikely, while the low speed at the rim means that thermalization there has almost no impact on ion velocity in the core.[41][42] Bussard calculated that a polywell reactor with a radius of 1.5 meters would produce net power fusing deuterium.[43]

Other studies also disproved some of assumptions made by Rider and Nevins, arguing the real fusion rate and the associated recirculating power (needed to overcome the thermalizing effect and sustain the non-Maxwellian ion profile) could be estimated only with a self-consistent collisional treatment of the ion distribution function, lacking in Rider's work.[44]
/end-quote

So who will be right? Beta of one eh?

Dave

"David Spain" wrote in message
...

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 8:52:10 AM UTC-4, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"Sylvia Else" wrote in message ...


Did you intend to post a link, but forgot?

Yes. Sorry.

http://aviationweek.com/technology/s...eactor-details

Bah, another pay-walled article. Sorry Greg, not helpful... I'll Google
around when I get a chance...

Dave


Not sure what you're talking about. I was able to read the entire article
there.

Still can.

So I guess the question is, what did YOU do to **** off Avweek :-)


--
Greg D. Moore http://greenmountainsoftware.wordpress.com/
CEO QuiCR: Quick, Crowdsourced Responses. http://www.quicr.net

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 2:29:34 PM UTC-4, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
So I guess the question is, what did YOU do to **** off Avweek :-)

Apparently nothing. Maybe the hit ratio was high enough they decided there was positive ad revenue to be had? Dunno, but it's working for me now too...

Go figure...

Dave

In article ,
says...

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 8:52:10 AM UTC-4, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:
"Sylvia Else" wrote in message ...


Did you intend to post a link, but forgot?

Yes. Sorry.

http://aviationweek.com/technology/s...eactor-details

Bah, another pay-walled article. Sorry Greg, not helpful... I'll Google around when I get a chance...

Odd, I can get to the article without hitting a pay wall, and I quit
paying for Aviation Week when it was only in print.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

In article ,
says...

Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
ess says...

On 16/10/2014 2:43 PM, Greg (Strider) Moore wrote:


A bit more detailed article on this.

Did you intend to post a link, but forgot?

Here is a link:

Skunk Works Reveals Compact Fusion Reactor Details
Lockheed Martin aims to develop compact reactor prototype in
five years, production unit in 10
Oct 15, 2014 Guy Norris | Aviation Week & Space Technology
http://tinyurl.com/n9dbofr

As usual, Aviation Week includes more technical details than the
"mainstream media".

And it seems they give rather different dimensions than the Reuters
article. Almost looksl ike a meters versus feet thing (I'm assuming
that tinyurl URL is to the article I think it is, I have a slightly
irrational unwillingness to follow tinyurl-esque links).

rick jones

Understandable, but if I don't make the links "tiny" other readers here
complain that their newsreader won't directly link to the URL due to
line breaks, so I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't. Still, you could
always cut and paste the title of the article into Google and find the
link on the Aviation Week site.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

On Thursday, October 16, 2014 12:06:54 PM UTC-4, David Spain wrote:
Looks like a spherical-tokamak derivative of some kind. Did the AvWeek article describe the Beta for this reactor?

Thought I had updated my comments on this but apparently not here. Lockheed documentation claims this is more closely related to an IEC (Inertial Electrostatic Confinement) fusion type reactor. McGuire's PhD thesis is also along these lines (IEC type fusion).

Dave

http://www.ieer.org/wp/wp-content/up...clearQuest.pdf

Jetter Cycle fusion starts with a neutron falling into a Lithium-6 nucleus to produce a Triton and a Helium-4 nucleus, along with 4.2 MeV of energy. That tritium nucleus has enough energy to fuse immediately with any Deuterium nuclei, forming another Helium-4 nucleus, along with 17.6 MeV, returning the neutron again. Now a lot of the energy is in the neutron, but if you mix in Tungsten with this material, you get a (n,2n) reaction;

https://inis.iaea.org/search/search...._q=RN:27046410

This was the basis of Project Sherwood following the successful detonation of the US' first 'dry' hydrogen bomb in 1952. The success of Sherwood, which involved building a fusion 'pile' consisting of tubes of Beryllium packed with a mixture of Lithium-6 Deuteride (a white powder with 0.82 g/cc density) and tungsten powder surrounding a wire of Cf-252 as a neutron source at the centre. The Beryllium pipe is thick, and cylindrical cavities are milled around it. Rods made of beryllium on one side and boron on the other, are placed in these cavities and rotated to control the power level of the reactor as described here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoiVej1rccs#t=810s

This system produces only heat and alpha particles, and has a controlled neutron flux during operation.

The Earth produces 600,000 tonnes of Lithium per year. Of this total 45,000 tonnes is Lithium-6. This is enough lithium, when combined with 15,000 tonnes of Deuterium, will produce 28x the energy currently produced by humanity. This is sufficient to raise our living standard from $83 trillion per year today to $2.4 quadrillion per year! Or, from $11,800 per person today to $330,000! All while eliminating CO2 emissions.

With a 7% rate of economic growth this transition will take 49.4 years from today. Over this same period, with population growth of 1.14% per year population will rise to 12.47 billions. This is about half the carrying capacity using this new technology;

https://www.scribd.com/doc/106112900/Resources

https://www.scribd.com/doc/77588930/Brand-New-World

Since rocks contain 20 ppm Lithium, and 1.5 ppm Lithium-6 and deuterium, each cubic meter of rock containing 2.8 tonnes of rock and that contains 3.3 grams of nuclear fuels. Yet, despite the low quantity, sufficient 895.7 gigajoules. About the equivalent of 32 tonnes of coal, or 147 barrels of crude oil! The cool part about this is that 2.8 tonnes of rock can be vaporized with 112 gigajoules into a hot plasma! So, only 12% of the energy in the rock is needed to vaporize the rock, and extract at the atomic level, ALL the raw materials from the rock, and use 3D print technology to assemble ANYTHING from the rock - while extracting enough fuel to meet any need.

In this way, rocks become the feedstock for anything!

WIth self-replicating machine systems, and robot swarms, we don't need to wait 50 years, and we're not limited to 28x today's industrial level. We can have anything we like TODAY!

This reduces population growth since wealth above a certain level reduces population growth.

http://www.swarmrobot.org/

In article ,
says...
WIth self-replicating machine systems, and robot swarms, we don't need to wait 50 years, and we're not limited to 28x today's industrial level. We can have anything we like TODAY!


No, we can't have "anything we like TODAY!" because you're a nutter who
doesn't understand that your imagination is running away with you. That
is, unless someone, somewhere, has actually figured out how to make a
completely self replicating machine. But I'm guessing you don't have a
cite for that, do you?

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

David Spain is guilty of
as of
10/16/2014 9:48:36 AM
On Thursday, October 16, 2014 12:27:32 PM UTC-4, Rick Jones wrote:
Jeff Findley wrote:

http://tinyurl.com/n9dbofr



As usual, Aviation Week includes more technical details than the
"mainstream media".

And it seems they give rather different dimensions than the Reuters
article. Almost looksl ike a meters versus feet thing

The picture of a test chamber with people around suggests that they are
currently at about 6 *foot* by 4 *foot*, a cylinder with conical caps.

(I'm assuming
that tinyurl URL is to the article I think it is, I have a slightly
irrational unwillingness to follow tinyurl-esque links).

Me too. And I thought I'd tried that URL earlier today and it hit a pay-wall.
Oh well, working now....

If it doesn't come with preview in the URL, you can go to tinyurl.com
and turn on preview mode.

Or edit the URL
as in http://preview.tinyurl.com/n9dbofr

Paranoia can be a tool, not just a handicap.


/dps

--
Ieri, oggi, domani