201–210 of 375 posts
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I followed the ecat ( http://ecatnews.com/ ) story for a year or so until my BS alarm started getting really loud - but just the prospect of it was so exhilarating, it was hard to resist the enthusiasm overflow... Now this sounds way more serious than Andrea Rossi's saga. But I did get a lot tougher on my wait and see stand.
I'm still waiting on a Steorn Orbo replication...
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How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst? Time sell any oil company stocks, mutual fund holding?
> How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst? Neutrons are interesting in that they dump all their energy into a very small region. Instead of losing energy continually and gradually, they travel a ways and then dump all their energy into one spot. This makes them potentially very useful for things like cancer treatment (you can select neutrons to ensure they deliver most of the…
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That's an excellent point! Perhaps they intend the truck to be sitting at the bottom of a fast moving river. But what gets me is that they are burying the lead. No fusion reactor of any size has reached sustainability...so why is the story here talking about size at all? Small size would be a very nice added bonus; fusion reactors that don't consume more energy than they produce are earth-changing.
Small size means you can build it easily. It's not a huge undertaking like ITER.
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> How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst? Neutrons are interesting in that they dump all their energy into a very small region. Instead of losing energy continually and gradually, they travel a ways and then dump all their energy into one spot. This makes them potentially very useful for things like cancer treatment (you can select neutrons to ensure they deliver most of the…
> I suspect this effect means that, for reactors, the wear and tear is more localized, but of a larger amplitude. Not exactly. The initial collisions do indeed cause localised damage cascades, but the overall effect of a large neutron flux is embrittlement of the material. This is a problem already in fission reactor vessels, but the neutron fluxes are a whole order of magnitude larger in fusion reactors, and it's a…
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No, the standard joke is "thirty years away." Or at least it was. Strangely enough the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.
Plotting a "Year vs Years away" graph would then give us a good estimation on when we can expect to meet that expectation.
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
It's always a safe bet that the top Hacker News comment will always be "won't work, it's too hard." It's like sitting around for a year trying to sell a project at my current employer, with everybody and their lead telling you "that'll never work," then you implement in a weekend and those same people start nitpicking what you've come up with. (What happened to it'll never work? "Well, your CSS isn't great.") Honestl…
It is however another great example that there is money going into lots of different fusion ideas. And that can only be a good thing as far as I am concerned.
[1] http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor-...
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The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 has 1200 hp and therefore probably produces around 2.5 MW waste heat at full power. A factor of 40 is still quite a difference but it does not sound like an unsolvable problem.
That's peak power, though. Basically no street car is designed to be able to produce peak power for more than a minute or two at a time, and probably very few can do it for more than a few seconds. I'm pretty sure that car doesn't have the cooling capacity to cool itself at full power like this plant would have to.
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
