On 09/04/14 14:18, Huge wrote:
On 2014-04-09, Tim Lamb wrote:
In message , Nightjar
writes
If they can make petrol, converting that into other hydrocarbons is
trivial and altering hydrocarbon chain length has already been done for
many decades. All that's needed is cheap energy, which nuclear is
capable of supplying, as long as the FUD and NIMBYism stops.

All that's needed is for the price of nuclear electricity to drop, and
the political will to persuade people to do it.

Can I sell you shares in a company that will be building fusion
reactors in the near future?

No. But I would happily vote for a government that encouraged increased
contributions to international fusion development projects that are
currently unlikely to bear fruit in my lifetime.

+1

Hear, hear.


In principle I would say yes to that, but in practice I fear that its
not quite as easy as that.

To get a new technology up and running there is a period where you know
what you want to do, but you don't know how to do it. And until you have
a methodology that works, refining it and developing it is pointless.

My point being that even if Leonardo da Vinci had unlimited resources he
simply didn't have access at that time to a suitable power plant and the
understanding of that would have wasted years and cost millions and
still not actually arrived at a viable aeroplane.

The problem of fusion is simple: we now how to get it going, but we
don't know how to contain it for more than a few microseconds.


so one group experiments with the torus, which sort of half does for
several microseconds, but stabilising it is vicious, whilst other groups
are looking at say pulse firing, if you like a lot of little H bomb
explosions that would actually in the end generate more power than they
took to start.

I often dream of reciprocatng pistons to compress deuterium and fire it
with laser spark plugs, or a plasma turbine that compresses deuterium
and fires it wit a laser or some such, to make a jet engine..


These are probably totally impractical but the point is that throwing
money at one way of doing it hasn't worked: we need tp literally dream
up another, and a bloke in a garden sipping a cup of tea is as likely to
do that as 1000 scientists and engineers in a research lab.

Once you HAVE a viable methodology, well then yes, DEVELOPING it is
worth spending billions on

And THAT technology is nuclear fission: we know HOW to build reactors
that work. WE want better safer cheaper and cleaner reactors.

So I say spend millions on a few scientist to dream up a way to make
fusion work, but spend the billions on new fission reactor design and
big engineering teams to handle it, because that WILL produce results.




--
Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc-ra-cy) €“ a system of government where the least capable to
lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the
members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are
rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a
diminishing number of producers.