On Tue, 21 Oct 2014 22:59:05 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman Gave us:
goddamned line length idiot!
But hey, let's gear up and go to Mars! (before the Chinese do)
Pop me over to the Moon with one to power everything, and I'll be a space guinea pig for science, and they can see how long an old man can live in such a place.
No. Fifty years away translates to "impossible" and fusion power plants is one of those elusive technologies that has always been 50 years away. A bit like that nuclear electricity "Too cheap to meter"...
If it is ten years away then lets see their lab prototype now. It will take about that long to engineer a robust power generating version from something that already works on a pilot plant scale. I don't care what size it is - lets see one working and then they can miniaturise it.
Superconducting magnets and high temperature plasmas in close proximity make for unforgiving failure modes as CERN will readily testify.
Skunk works have some real street credibility at delivering hitech bleeding edge projects like the U2 and SR71 unlike the LENR eCrap team.
It would be an amazing coup if they have been able to do it.
I will believe it when I see it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Anyone can pump out a press release.
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Indeed it would be an amazing coup, as would be the success of the University of Washington's effort:
"The (UW) researchers have successfully tested the prototype?s ability to sustain a plasma efficiently", whatever that means; Lockheed Martin only claims to have confined a "magnetized ion gas", so we seem to be looking mostly at efforts to solicit for continued funding.
These projects are at least better than the 'inertial confinement' nuclear fusion weapon model verification testing, which somehow gets away with pretending to be energy research. (But somehow no one cares that it only met 1% of it's phony fusion energy goals.)
There will always be some neutrons from side reactions but the fusion core reactions that go the most easily are fairly clean - you will get a serious gamma ray flux though which somehow needs to be thermalised down to a temperature that can generate high pressure steam.
I don't think there is much call for a MW class gamma ray generator.
Ha, I've got you beat! I have a piece of old rackmount hardware that uses magnetically biased gas discharge tubes for noise generation (6D4 triodes, actually -- a pair, I think to invert one and mix them to minimize autocorrelations). Supposedly good for a few 100kHz BW and 3-4 sigma.
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