Posted on 07/27/2009 6:46:22 AM PDT by Wonder Warthog
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/fusion_energy.html
Forum software forces me to post this in the “Bloggers” section, but this is NEWS of the first order. Mods are asked to so move the post.
Synopsizing it with a sentence on what the hell it’s actually talking about would probably save a lot of headaches. As it is, it just looks like someone tore a couple pages out of a high energy physics journal and posted them...
Yeah, only science geeks are likely to understand this at first "pop", but the links in comments can get a generally intelligent reader "up to speed".
It is actually quite rude too. It is like speaking Spanish in a group of English speakers when you can also speak English. That’s always been a pet peeve of mine.
>>but the links in comments can get a generally intelligent reader “up to speed”. <<
How about us not so generally intelligent? ;-)
So it’s a flux capacitor?
Nah. It's the gizmo the POWERS the flux capacitor (Mr. Fusion).
This is great news.
The Polywell is the only Nuclear energy device that’s actually working and scalable. Once it’s scaled up to full size, it’s a quick few steps to making cheap and clean electricity.
I understood everything here without even looking at it ....
keep in mind that at 100 milliwatts for a follow on reactor they are starting to get into the power range. If they can get that kind of power with .3 m dia. coils and .8 T fields, then a reactor with 3 m coils and 10 T fields should produce about 2.5 Mega Watts if the scaling laws hold.
“If WB-7 was similar to WB-6 it means an increase from 3 neutrons a shot to 12,000. A real countable number i.e the error bars will be much lower. A count of 3 can actually be considered a count of 3 +/-2. That is a big error bar.”
Paydirt for Polywell, isn’t the same thing as a revolutionary new power generator for the rest of us. I mean, I’m glad the results are good enough to proceed. That said, this is make or break time. If the scaling model is wrong, then this is another cold fusion mess. Good luck to the team.
Well, I’ll give Wonder a “buy” on this one ‘cause of the way-cool factor.
That said, it’s always an obligation of us science types to throw in a layman paragraph and/or define all the acronyms that tend to litter technical documents. I’m in the habit of generally doing so with respect to the latter because we have to do it in all of our reports.
Well, I would say that the fact that the Navy is planning to explore PB11 that the results must have been "really, really good". And no, it won't be "another cold fusion mess", at worst it will be on a par with the Tokamak. Nebel has been VERY careful to do peer review.
>>Nah. It’s the gizmo the POWERS the flux capacitor (Mr. Fusion). <<
Ooooo, you got it!
I guess smart people watch old movies too.
Anyway, thanks for the article and explanation (even more). My nine year old would probably understand what’s going on here (yes, I’m pushing her toward Science) but it’s a bit over my head.
I hope this works. I’m tired of 200.00 electric bills.
Ping of interest
I didn’t have any trouble noodling it out after reading the whole thing and going back over some stuff, but there’s plenty of folks here who’d appreciate the “meat” of this story without having to open a simultaneous window to a search engine and spending an hour looking up stuff like mW, Teslas, etc...
I only nitpick on the subject because it’s the primary reason that people outside of the hard sciences dislike and mistrust scientists. You either get painted the elitist, or on the other hand some bozo in the media takes the core concept and runs off on some crazy tangent with it.
Technical concepts can usually be broken down and reasonably explained to the layperson with a little effort on our part and that effort is usually rewarded with greater respect and a piquing of interest on their part.
Well, it was either post it with minimal comments, or wait 'til the weekend to get the time to assemble such a commentary. I figured getting it out ASAP would be preferable, even if "rough".
I prefer WD-40.
I was joking about understanding it....
I still think it is about toy death rays or possibly lizard people that eat anti-matter
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