Posted on 01/03/2009 7:24:49 AM PST by SunkenCiv
Two desktop-printer engineers quit their jobs to search for the ultimate source of endless energy: nuclear fusion. Could this highly improbable enterprise actually succeed? The source of endless energy for all humankind resides just off Government Street in Burnaby, British Columbia, up the little spit of blacktop on Bonneville Place and across the parking lot from Shade-O-Matic blind manufacturers and wholesalers. The future is there, in that mostly empty office with the vomit-green walls -- and inside the brain of Michel Laberge, 47, bearded and French-Canadian. According to a diagram, printed on a single sheet of white paper and affixed with tape to a dusty slab of office drywall, his vision looks like a medieval torture device: a metal ball surrounded on all sides by metal rods and bisected by two long cylinders. It's big but not immense -- maybe 10 times as tall as the little robot man in the lower right corner of the page who's there to indicate scale. What Laberge has set out to build in this office park, using $2 million in private funding and a skeletal workforce, is a nuclear-fusion power plant... he will also tell you that his twist on a method known as magnetized target fusion, or MTF -- to wildly oversimplify, a process in which plasma (ionized gas) trapped by a magnetic field is rapidly compressed to create fusion -- will, in fact, work because it is relatively cheap and scalable. Give his team six to 10 years and a few hundred million dollars, he says, and his company, General Fusion, will give you a nuclear-fusion power plant.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
The Bum Rap on Biofuels
American Thinker | 5-13-08 | Herbert Meyer
Posted on 05/14/2008 3:59:06 AM PDT by Renfield
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2015711/posts
Campaign to vilify ethanol revealed
ethanol producer Magazine | May 16, 2008 | By Kris Bevill
Posted on 05/17/2008 9:22:13 AM PDT by Kevin J waldroup
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2017389/posts
No way, I’m still waiting for that 28 million you owe me.
Yourself.
This won’t happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.
This won’t happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.
This won’t happen in the US anytime soon even if it is practical. First it is “nuclear” so the environmentalist and anti-nuke crowd will oppose it on principle. Second US energy policy will be focused solely on boondoggle biofuels, worthless windmills and proven failure solar technologies.
McElroy Provides Enhanced HDPE Pipe Fusion
And there is this:
Damn,...I haven’t seen that image in quite awhile...LOL!
Better to spend time, energy and money developing something that uses the power of the sun directly, cheaply, and efficiently.
What do these people think they will build that will contain the fusion reaction? It will have to be a plant much bigger than current nuclear plants. Also, nuclear plants have controls to regulate the reaction. Just what do these people expect to use to regulate the fusion reaction? On the earth, a fusion reaction is actually an explosion. How do they plan to control the explosion?
That’s it! I got rid of my car, purchased one of those and life has never been the same. It’s nice to chat with the thousands of others as we make our way to work. Speilberg was right. Of course he is still driving his BMW.:)
...nuclear plants have controls to regulate the reaction. Just what do these people expect to use to regulate the fusion reaction? On the earth, a fusion reaction is actually an explosion.Nope. That's like saying, "on Earth, a fission reaction is actually an explosion" because an uncontrolled chain reaction produced a big pile of ash where Hiroshima had been. A fission plant generates electricity by using the regulated nuclear pile to generate heat to run the turbines. In conventional generation, the turbines are turned by steam generated from coal, natural gas, other fuels, as well as falling water, wind, and (occasionally) geothermal sources.
How do they plan to control the explosion?The reaction will be small, and the electrical generation will be similar to fission plants (steam to turn turbines). There are a handful of different ideas for how to contain the reaction, which will turn out a lot of heat even in a short period of time. The tokamak is the method being attempted in the multinational ITER project (based in Europe), and has been in continuous research for over thirty years. Inertial containment has been worked on for a similar length of time here in the US, and the method of ignition has been giant laser arrays. This topic links to a story about another method, and there's a link to another recent topic about electrostatic confinement.
A hole drilled into the earth to the point of enough pressure to compress the plasma. This is repeated time after time by a electrical pump forcing the Plasma container down after each fusion reaction. Traveling about 1500 feet each reaction.The steam is sent up a connecting pipe to power a turbine.
Backyard model starting at 15 million. :-)
FReepers can be counted on to come through! ;’)
ROFL!
Are you series? You never got the check? Sorry sir, I'm gonna look into it..........I'll get back with you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
