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Should Google Go Nuclear?
Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."
It is quite strange that this fusion-ninja should destroy boron to create the shiniest energy. In the world.
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
If Google pursues this, I don't think they'll do so for financial reasons, but rather for PR reasons (just like they used the installation of a relatively large solar capacity as PR). But nowadays $200 Million isn't that much to Google, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them support the effort to some extent.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
Obligatory science fiction refernce: Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned"
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I watched the google video link of the presentation for a bit to just be sure - and - he does say fusion. I thought that fusion was perpetually 20 years off? If it's fusion, this will be the most important breakthrough in decades. Clean power without all that nasty global warming consequences.
Shh.
I wonder if it'll have an "I feel lucky" button...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
" The Bussard ramjet method of spacecraft propulsion was proposed in 1960 by the physicist Robert W. Bussard and popularized by Carl Sagan in the television series and subsequent book Cosmos as a variant of a fusion rocket capable of fast interstellar spaceflight. It would use a large scoop (on the order of kilometers in diameter) to compress hydrogen from the interstellar medium and fuse it. This mass would then form the exhaust of a rocket to accelerate the ramjet." - from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
Does anybody think the oil companies are going to allow this to happen ? At least without a fight ?
They have invested billions of dollars in thier rigs and have got accustomed to huge profits and will do am awful lot to keep make sure they keep those profits coming.
Mad scientist goes broke after blowing up a bunch of Totally Expensive Equipment, so he goes on to beg Google for millions...
My friend's father is one of the guys responsible for Bussard's (now-dwindling) Navy funding. The few million he got for his first reactors came from them. From what I've heard from him, Bussard is really onto something with his devices. Now, I've never met him myself, nor do I have enough physics under my belt yet to be able to critique the device, but it does sound pretty reasonable.
About the $200 mil, apparently the power output of these scales as something like the 7th or 9th power of the radius of the device (don't quote me on these numbers), so while the prototypes tested so far produce piddling amounts of power, not nearly break-even, they supposedly confirmed the principles, and the $200 mil model should be big enough to be power-positive. I really hope Google decides to sponsor this. I mean, if they can spend $1.6b on Youtube, what's $200m?
Dr. Robert W. Bussard
Is this the same dude of Bussard Collector fame? Sweet.
I can now officially have fantasies of being on a space faring hotel, with women wearing skin tight costumes...
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
The Bussard Ramjet is one of the finest pieces of Pseudo scientific speculation ever dreamed of and integrated into Science Fiction works. It is simple and elegant in concept, a machine that in theory would make interstellar travel easier than ever, but in reality unworkable. The Bussard Ramjet is a dream that cannot be.
Mr. Bussard is a dreamer, and his ideas are beautiful; Star Trek has named a large component of its star ships after Bussard. His fertile imagination leads to great science fiction. Even the Great Carl Sagan was inspired by the beautiful mind of Bussard the dreamer.
I too like Mr. Bussard a great deal, and respect and admire his numerous contributions to our culture and to science fiction. However, it has become clear to me that Mr. Bussard no longer is the man he once was. He, most unfortunately, appears to have become senile, vindictive and single-minded to the point of blindness; read what he says, how he defends his project while attacking all other research constantly.
Mr. Bussard today has become a pseudo scientific hack, a charlatan if you will. He has become a quack who is attempting to prove the magical results of his form of fusion while all other scientists deny his conclusions, and he repeat "Give me 200M$!" as the sole refrain of his incessant groveling for cash.
It saddens me to see that Mr. Bussard has chosen to challenge James Randi and every scientific skeptic on earth. Mr. Bussard has never been able to reproduce any of his results in front of impartial peers, under controlled conditions. Read his letter on JREF, and see for yourself.
Mr. Bussard claims to have tested his device a few times and achieved success, but whenever he tried to test it under controlled conditions, it failed - and he blamed some obscure technical malfunction for this inability to achieve any measurable results. Then he says that only by having 200M$ can he show that his techniques work - he will not rebuild his original demonstration machine, nor allow anybody to do so.
According to Mr. Bussard, it is easy to test for the proper operation of his machine, hence confirming that scaling the machine up in a 200M$ version would produce lots and lots of energy. However, he refuses to construct such a workable prototype and have it tested by independent experts.
Read it for yourself and tell me this man is rational.
Oh this is a bad idea - when skyn^H^H Google becomes fully self-aware - it's going to have it's own incredible power source?!
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
Brings new and interesting meanings to the concept of googlebombing :-)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
talks like a nut case and flies like a nut case - it probably is a nut case...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
He is supposed to be the founder of a "Energy Matter Conversion Corporation", but I cannot find a website of the company. Are there still technology companies without a website out there? In this field? Physicists started the whole www.
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
That depends on whether an MAD scenario with Microsoft would increase shareholder value.
In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion."
Shane ;)
(yes, I'm shamelessly publishing links to my servers for all the Slashdot community to hit. After all, they have to have some reason to keep me employed!
Mr. Fusion?
Just remember, it's nucelar, nuc-e-lar. --Homer Simpson.
What's several orders of magnitude more than 0?
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than the USA.
:)
Here, I fixed it for you. You're welcome
Syllable 0.62 is here at last!!!
Robert W. Bussard is the same man that invented the Bussard Ramscoop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramscoop, popularized by Carl Sagan and the Star Trek show.
What are the rules in the USofA regarding corporate nuclear reactors?
Actually it would be pretty interesting to hear about such laws in other countries as well.
Roger Ramjet is his name,
Hero of our Nation,
Every time he has a wank,
He calls it masturbation.
I can't for the life of me remember what the proper words should be.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Soo... there's the old adage that big claims need big evidence, and Bussard currently has rather an excess of one and a lack of the other. but for someone who chooses to discredit him for not being a bit short on concrete, verifiable data, your post itself is completely science free. In a discussion that is entirely dependant on science (his last prototype's malfunction is unfortunate and perhaps suspicious, but is by no means proof of hackery), I don't understand why people find what amounts to an emotional evaluation of his work useful.
Your criticisms are mostly ad hominem, e.g. his "Incessant groveling for cash" - he does not grovel incessantly, in fact in the Google lecture he admits to giving up on the search for funding. Should he have just packed his bags when his funding was cut (it should be noted that it was all navy energy research funding, not him in particular)? He also defends the malfunction quite reasonably (it was one not a series as you suggest), and considering the supposedly successful prototype was only tested a few times at useful power levels, small amounts of data are also not unreasonable.
If he's a quack, so be it. But let's actually add to the debate by citing facts, not armchair opinions that essentially a love of science fiction == hack (Remember how people used to dream about a better and wonderful future? That used to actually be a fairly american quality and he is of that generation).
I don't try and discredit ID proponents just by calling them assholes. I point to the fact that it is a scientifically sterile non-theory and that there is a wide body of evidence supporting evolution. He wasn't working alone in his basement, he had a pretty impressive team (Jim Benson immedialely hired them after funding dissapeared) that would have complained publicly if he was lying about his results. Treat his science as you would any other, and fight it with evidence, or restrain your tongue.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
00000
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
only when President Bush can pronounce the word correctly.
I do wish his ... "invention" destroys morons instead of borons. The planet gets a clean source of energy for handful of ... less desirables.
If you want to prove that you're not full of it why not rebuild the last machine you built, which would be relatively cheap, to recreate the results you got the day before you had to close the labs down?
- Well the $200M will build ones which will be 50x better, one of them will be a dodecahedron.
Why is no-one funding you?
- No-one thinks outside the box. If you let me choose who goes on the panel who gets to decide whether it's worthwhile I'll pick some people who can think outside the box. There are lots of people in China and other countries who can think outside the box, and if I don't get funding here in America I'll give my patents to China for free and you wouldn't want that. (I'm not making this up, he literally threatened the audience with giving the tech to China for free)
How do you get the helium waste products out?
- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Good at thinking long term... And this explains the huge investments in nuclear, i.e. fission, power. Or wait, are they investing in stupid PR technologies like windmills? I know when chevron runs adds saying they care and have donated $200 million dollars to finding clean, renewable energy sources it sounds nice and all, but all these large companies have annual revuans in the hundreds of billions (and profits in the 10's) and so thats pretty much just advertising money.
Why would the company leadership care anyway? It's not like they're going to be there when oil becomes unprofitable (Which is long after it becomes scare, for obvious reasons I hope, it becomes more profitable before it becomes less). Don't believe the damn ads. No company, is planning 20 years into the future, particularly not an american company. When they start spending 3 and 5 billion dollars, that will be the indication that they actually care. Until then, its just money to get people like you to like them.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Do not look into the boron with your remaining eye!
liqbase
What if a private person wants to invest? Just normal people with no big money but with an idea that this fusion type should work? What can be done? What we do?
He needs two hundred dollars for some good lecture slides.
I found it totally incomprehensible. The only thing that makes it watchable is a kind of exasperation and disbelief in his voice at the large efforts of others which are "wrong". This is a bad sign. He's old, he only needs USD200m to get this thing to work, and it is based on research from the 1920s. Why hasn't it been realised yet? If he's waiting for new technology, then that's a Pandora's box.
If it can be done with bamboo leaves and snot then this lone wolf is right and all the tokomak (not just ITER, but also JET) people are wrong. Seems unlikely.
No 200M, don't pass Go.
Could be google interested in funding this technology because of the high power comsuption of its data centers? Looking for an alternative way of generating power and perhaps lowering its electricity bill? ;-)
.. than Iran or North Korea or G. W. Bush.
United States has demanded that google opens its nuclear facilities to a team of IAEC inspectors, and is threatening to impose economic sanction if its demand is not met. United States State Department has expressed concerns about google's nuclear program and decline to rule out military option.
the idea about Inertial Electrostatic Confinement did not come from them. Farnsworth (of TV tube fame) and hirsh developed that, but ran into problems with the anode or kathode not being transparent enough. Their invention is to make this electrode with magnets, which is a logical progression.
You might be right tough that he is a kook as I did not hear him addres the biggest problem with IEC: bremsstrahlung. Every time you have to accelerate a ion it will leak some radiation in the form of bremsstarahlung (braking radiation). The ions you want to fuse each have to pass the center of the well a couple of thousand times (depending on density and temperature) just to have the chance to meet another ion close enough for fusion to occur. Pump more energy into it, and more radiation leaks away and you will never be able to break even.
The other thing that is fishy is the strange reason he gave why they did not publish for 11 years. If you don't publish essentially you are not doing science, even after the embargo they did not release the floodgates and publish all the articles they had written over time but could not publish. He is promising a 100+ paper, but appearantly it is not ready yet. WTF? you had 11 for that and one year you knew for certain what situation you'd be in now. On october 1 they sould not have been doing last minute experiments, but been submitting all their articles to every journal respectable enough. They would have had a much better chance to get funding with a couple of influential papers to their name. In science it's publish or perish, and they chose not to publish.
The other countries threat is hollow too: if they had really cared about the subject, they would have had no problem moving to another country just to keep their lab going. He is still here...
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
No matter what you do. Some one some where thinks what your doing is Evil. Some people think Google is Evil because you can search for Porn and Other people this it is evil because it blocks some sites where such sites are illegal in that country. As for a nuclear energy it is an other case of Environmentalist shooting them selves in the foot. If it Ain't Solar, or Wind Energy they will complain, fuss and block that new technology. Nuclear energy is relatively clean where the toxic side effects are actually fairly manageable. But with that small about of toxins released. Environmentalist go Crazy block it. Thus leaving us dependent on Coal, Power plants. The Environmentalist are just as bad as the Bush Administration to the environment. We really need to promote more the moderate Environmentalist groups and Shun the WackJob groups on both sides.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why nobody talks about the Z machine?
6 /physics-astron/hottest-z-output.html
Last experiments heat up to 2 billions degree. Bore B11 goes to only 1 billion. Regular nuclear fusion goes to half a billion.
And it is clean! No nasty radioactive waste!
http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/200
See the p-B^11 fuel cycle, too.
Moron at eleven.
Bussard mentions arcing as one of their problems and shows data for breakdown voltages of hydrogen, co2, etc.
:-)
I think the electric utilities have settled on using sulfur hexafluoride as the best solution for this issue in high voltage transformers. In spite of the frightening name this gas is actually non-toxic (and if you breathe it you get the opposite of the helium effect because of its high density
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Umm... last time I checked, Google is not the only entity that could give away 200M (or any substantial portion of that sum) without the accountants noticing. And Google is not the only entity that supports technological advancement. In fact, there are thousands upon thousands of such organizations and individuals. Why didn't they suggest it be the Branson Fusion Device(TM)?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
here's why... (Pops new) We now HAVE an internal arms struggle in this country.
Bussard should go to Allen and Google about this. Unlike Gates, he has the right idea. He is constantly investing into ideas that are outlandiously expensive, but will payoff high if successful. For example, he was one of the major investors in using Cable for internet. In addition, he funded SS1/WK, and is still a major player with Rutan for chasing the privatization of space. This would be up his alley, combined with perhaps a high speed mag lev.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Last I heard nuclear reactions are the opposite of fusion reactions. Are they going nuclear or going fusion?
Res publica non dominetur
"Google Now Officially a Nuclear Power; Microsoft Sets Pants to Brown Alert"
Oldie but goodie.
Last I heard nuclear reactions are the opposite of fusion reactions. Are they going nuclear or going fusion?
No. Fission and fusion reactions are two different kinds of nuclear reactions.
Though you can call them "opposite nuclear reactions" , this would be misleading since both reactions can be a source of energy.
So his "under the radar" funding was cut, because they have reallocated research on how to fight road side bombs. Think this is pretty myopic for government. But then there is free oil in iraq... Priorities are all out of place.
Lately within /. there has been evidence of old physics coming around again, for example the article of transmitted power comes from Tesla theory. Now the elctrostatic fusion device, or fusor is once again being visited. Interesting thing about the fusor... the same underlying technology that makes a CRT television work is the same underlying technology to get the fusor to work.
Or maybe Dr. Bussard is working on another, electrostatic fusion device other than the fusor?
If you were a superintelligent machine, what benefit would you possibly hope to derive from enslaving puny, stupid humans? Anything you could get human slaves to do, you could do better yourself.
More likely, the superintelligent machine will act only to prevent humans from destroying it (which would include making sure humans have no real reason to destroy it), and then leave.
Like another poster said there is no more sense for machines to enslave humans than for humans to enslave chimps. As funny pets maybe (and even that I doubt very much).
That's simple.
Make oil expensive. All sorts of efficiency improvements and novel energy production methods will become viable. Fusion is frankly irrelevant.
You see people are naturally wasteful. If something is cheap, it's not worth using efficiently and so the overwhelming majority of it is wasted, look at oil, coal, nuclear etc. 60% of the output is thrown away before the electricity even leaves the power plant. Look at the housing, businesses still using single layer glazing, no wall or roof insulation. Open windows with air conditioning etc etc etc. Look at the automobiles, 15% efficient overall, the sales of 15mpg vehicles in the US, the land of cheap oil, the sales of 55mpg vehicles in europe where fuel is far more expensive.
You see, right now, we do in fact live in an incredibly energy rich civilisation. Energy is cheaper now than it has been ever before in human history. It could be cheaper still, almost half the price it is now, less even, simply by becoming more efficient. And we don't bother with that because it's just not worth while becoming more efficient.
So... Fusion is irrelevant, we already have cheap power. Making it cheaper just means people will waste more of it. It's human nature and economics. In that light fusion research gets more than enough funding for what's really a highly speculative investment.
Deleted
He didn't threaten anyone. That's a gross mischaracterization, and you should be ashamed. He stated that he wants the tech developed, and at this point, if he can't get it funded here, he'll get it funded wherever he can (China, India, Spain, Italy, etc) because he thinks he has proven the physics and the value to the planet would be immeasurable if the engineering could be overcome.
And, well, you also lied. He stated that in the first year, he would rebuild the last prototype from his work, and for this only $2 million - $5million would be required. But these prototypes would be updates on that prototype, with better instrumentation, and better design based on the knowledge gained from that final prototype.
What purpose do you have in lying? Or are you simply incapable of comprehending what you hear?
If this fusion thing were to miraculously work and we did have a new source of energy, we'd be in the exact same place as the current oil crisis... We'd have to mine for boron-11. And since, like all matter on this planet, it is finite in quantity, we'll eventually have to depend on countries like Turkey for our boron. The same goes for the ITER http://www.iter.org/ technology... they need lithium to generate the fuels required by the device, and eventually, we'll run out of lithium. This is complete bullshit. We should be focusing on ways to store electrical energy more efficiently and working towards more efficient solar technologies.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
2,350 hits for search string: "boron fusion" 229 for "boron fusion" funded 8 hits for search string: "boron fusion" funded Bussard & relates to a Wikipedia overview. Wikipedia then speaks of the groups doing this research and development under "Current research" which goes way beyond what Bussard noted in the article. Searching on them can turn up interesting work. Bo
Your comments just about sum up all fusion research: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, etc. No fusion research has demonstrated that it can result in any kind of break-even energy delivery in any real sense, and there are big theoretical gaps in all of them.
Stephen Colbert's persona (the one he uses on The Colbert Report) doesn't equate to someone with a Doctorate. The show isn't called, "Dr. Colbert plays the Devil's Advocate for Haw-Haws." He plays himself as a showboating ass, therein lies the comedy.
You comment on people calling themselves doctors when they aren't medical doctors is asinine. You wouldn't call someone with a PhD in Physics a doctor? How about Mr. Martin Luther King (plagiarism conspiracy theories aside)?
Does anyone besides me find it ludicrous to hear a Google employee asking how to find a PDF on the internet?
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not.
This reminded me of one Native American method for buffalo hunting:
In this analogy, the oil companies "leading the alternative energy charge" are analogous to the young men getting the herd to follow them. The oil companies lead the charge away from the truly revolutionary breakthroughs, towards business models where they're still relevant.
I met a physicist some 4 years ago who was working on his doctorate, on Cold Fusion-style research. At the time said he'd have to modify one of his papers to acknowledge some tokamak-fusion research that'd just been published - the experiment turned out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it. Just finished his doctorate a month or two ago...
Scientific revolutions come in waves. Right now we have the old-guard (established energy companies & rogue energy terrorists) fighting to suppress the coming paradigm shift. They'll lose eventually, and we'll all be better off.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
No, Fission is the opposite of Fusion. They are both types of nuclear reactions.
Gooclear power!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Yes, the video is indeed about fusion. Yes, people say that fusion is a ways off. Yes, fusion is an ideal power source. Any other gems of wisdom you have to lend?
Materia is made from lifestream! We must blow up the reactors or the planet will die! :)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Google rex researchLOL!!
Sorry, i don't see what's misleading about that. AFAIK nuclear reactions are not classified by the energy they release or absorb. _That_ would really be misleading.
"...it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation."
"He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11"
Does that mean the scaled-up version will ALSO blow up, on an even bigger scale?
First off, enslavement? Genocide is easier and more logical than enslavement. What are we going to be able to do better than machines anyways?
Secondly, you know what would really head off this rebellion of intelligent machines? Removing a logical reason for rebellion. If we can create intelligent machines, should we treat them as fellow intelligent beings or things? If were to grant them equality there would be no reason for them to rebel.
Admittedly there would also be no economic incentive for building them, but I did solve the whole terminator problem and my father's from the past, just like everybody else's.
Ok, you have a point. My answer to the grandparent was a bit too long (his mistake was that he thought that "fusion reaction" was the opposite of "nuclear reaction").
But I wonder what are the examples of fission reactions that can be exactly reverted by a fusion reaction, and vice versa. In these cases, one reaction would be the exact opposite of the other.
This project, probably Focus Fusion if I read the tealeaves right without even seeing the videos, will result in
clean power. I mean clean power absolutely. Boron fusion produces no radioactivity! Focus fusion converts nuclear energy directly to electrical energy by generating a proton beam where energy is removed directly by electrohydrodynamics using superconducting coils. It sounds like science fiction but it is not. Fusion power plants of this type will be about
the size of a small two car garage, and could be located in just about any place. Small towns could easily get back into the business of selling electricity again and do it so cheaply that the energy will be too cheap to meter. This process idea has travelled around the world, so it will be looked into everywhere on earth by any nation or private interest with an eye to the future. Those who develope this in one country will possess the means to energize their industrial plants with unstoppable and uncompetable advantages. We will again be in the nineteenth century pattern of industrial growth. No longer will slave labor be able to compete for jobs. Factories relying on limitless energy will bury the slavers in avalanches of goods. If China developes this first, you better start teaching your children Mandarin and Cantonese, for that is going to be their future language.
There is a tricky issue here. How expensive is oil? Looking at the price of gasoline or the cents per megawatt-hour on your electricity bill doesn't tell you. The reason is that there are many costs that are paid indirectly or paid by all of us. First (and I only wish to tread lightly on this one) is the expense incurred trying to maintain political stability in the Middle East while swamping corrupt goverments with oil money. Then there is pollution of the air and water and the longterm effects of CO2 emission. Even trivial things like oil tankers using public roads. Now incorporate all these things into the price of oil. Is it still cheaper than fusion?
I have no idea, but that is the right question to ask.
I believe that he's sincere. It's possible that he's correct. That he is correct, however, is less than 50% probable. I'll believe that the problems he encountered last time will be fixed by scaling. I will expect, however, that new problems will show up.
Scaling up a complex system is rarely simple. I feel that he's over-optimistic.
(That said, given the potential pay-off this might be a worth-while piece of research. I don't need to decide, so I'm not going to. There's a potential high pay-off, and the odds are against success. I'll decide that those two statements are both correct.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
Why is everyone so concerned about Iran and North Korea? Of all the nations in possession of nuclear weapons there is only one country that has actually used them on civilians, and they did it twice. Think about it.
"Enslave" may be melodramatic, but a Troll moderation is missing the point.
Have you ever been to a zoo? What benefit do we get from a zoo? Would you like to be in a zoo?
Have you seen the people who kill giant apes to make ashtrays out of their hands? Who slash and burn their habitat?
Making no more sense or having no reason why in not a good enough argument to not take the idea seriously - instead start with Cui Bono, and recognize that many many things happen all the time that are senseless when seen logically, yet they still happen.
As for chimps - the point perfect. The nature of a completely logic-based system will be (as in the worst cases of unhealthy humans) to eliminate the possibility of competition for resources.
You need to go through a lot of math to understand if the confinement works. It is easy to make a confinement system work in the first approximation. Then you have to consider all the higher order effects due to field curvature etc. and prove that these are either slow or cancel out. Is this true for his geometry?
Insulation is a red herring. A plasma is a good conductor, and charge will move around and create large currents and electric fields wherever it can. The point made elsewhere that "we know how to make high voltage standoffs" is likewise not really true, because the electric field that can be sustained across a gap depends on the gas and plasma density, and is a lot lower in those conditions than at 1 atm of air.
What ion temperature did he achieve? Until you get to an ion temperature of a few hundred eV, most of the power will be lost to atomic radiation. Until you "burn through" this limit, you do not have a serious contender for a fusion experiment.
Only if it bankrolls charlatans outside their field.
I'll believe that we have working fusion reactors when the AECL is selling them.
If this guy had a working fusion reactor, people would be throwing money at him, he wouldn't be lobbying corporations with questionable investment policies.
This is totally bogus. I can't believe that people are even entertaining the concept.
Power generation involves generating power, not consuming it. Any fusion reactor that requires a significant power input is guaranteed to fail. Period.
Caught the video, and while I don't have sufficient physics or math to certify what he's talking about, I have been following the plasm fusion field for years and am glad that someone has followed up on the fusor concept.
However one of the things that Dr. Bussard points out is that he is unable to simulate the experiment due to a lack of computational resources, in particular he states that he had one contracter bail in the middle of the contract when he realized that the problem could not be computed on a "reasonable budget" with existing resources.
I think there may be a way around this by using the parallel approach initially setup by Seti and now called 'BOINC'.
Can I suggest that some of the really smart numerics guys take a hard look at the processing model and potential resources available by BOINC to see if it's a sufficiently good fit to apply in order to try simulating some runs, perhaps initially targetting the model (WB6?) that gave the high fusion counts? Can it be done? Because if it can, then it *should* be done.
I know that I'd be willing to switch my BOINC processing cycles over to such a simulation, and I doubt that I'd be alone in doing so. Heck, I'd even be willing to help out on the non-numerical coding end of things...
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ - for reference...
Within minutes, he had pointed out that his reaction did not produce neutrons. He clearly knew this is a key issue. He described the basic geometries of fusion reaction. He made a nice, clear description of the random walk nature of tokomak fields, and why that meant some of the contents would always head for the walls. His explanations involved nice, clear numbers, like how many times the ion should go through the dense region before it collided. This isn't a popular science gloss-over - I am pretty sure you are getting the real deal here. He argued the need for a 1/r-type field to contain the ions, and why this is best done using electrons guided by coils. I have some familiarity with saddle-field ion sources - not the same thing, but similar enough to recognize what he was talking about.
For those of you familiar with Hollywood Science, 11 years of research with a load of failed designs may not seem like an investment. Actually, it showed a lot of steady progress, with many orders of magnitude improvement. The only faintly Hollywood bit was the final experiment, and that rang very true to me. The lab is being shut doown; the apparatus is going into storage. We may get to use it again, we may not. Why not turn the current supply all the way up? You can do it safely enough if you stand behind the filing cabinet. Oops, it fried. Oh well, we got some numbers anyway. Yup, that's what a lot of science is like. It is much slower and less dramatic then you would believe.
The 'wiffle ball' effect is really cute. He is working with plasmas. You have charged stuff zipping about in magnetic and electrostatic fields. Unfortunately, that stuff is itself charged, and because it is moving, it has its own magnetic field. This usually means the plasma can work out within microseconds what it is not supposed to do, and start hosepiping, or wiggling, or whatever it was that it shouldn't. Just occasionally, you can use this self-will to your advantage. The microwave magnetron is an example (particularly cute that he used one inside his experiment to keep the ionization up). Well, I would see that you could concentrale positive ions using negative electrons, but wouldn't they hit each other and neutralize all the time? Well - no they don't, because the electrons will make fast lanes through the slower moving ions.
He had worked on space engines. He is one of the mad atom smashers from the fifties. Okay, let's see how his proposal stacks up in traditional Mad Scientist terms. Usually a good Mad experiment involves at least two of (a) space, (b) H-bombs, (c) superconductivity, and (d) a small country. A mad experiment needs a budget that is a mere 10% of the US annual defence budget/spending of fossil fuels. And, usually there is the requirement for government funding to pay for the bits that won't make a profit. Some biofuel proposals get well into the Mad bracket. This project has clear aims and costs. It is not huge. You can build it. Either it will work or it won't. If it works, then we can put it into ships and conventional power stations. Project Plowshare it ain't.
The only thing I might say against is that this may be just
It would also usher in a new era of mixed drinks, starting with the Pan-Galactic Google Blaster.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
100% correct. The static confinement reactors suck power because the plasma will leak out. There is NO WAY to confine plasma in a static shell, no matter how you scale it. Well, maybe if it were the size of Earth or something then the losses would be less important!
Regardless, static confinement NEVER works because as any physics literate person knows, between two electrons you have 0 potential. Hence the leak no matter how much up you drive the potential.
The fusor is a pipe-dream. Period. Heck, the laser fusor projects also cannot scale, but I guess that's a different topic!
Magnetic confinement works because the field can be made uniform without the 0 potential gap problem as with static shell. The plasma cannot seep out like in a fuzor. And even then, there is a milliard of other problems that require experts from virtually ALL areas in physics (solid state physics, plasma physics, electromagnetism, nuclear). Not as simple as people thought in 1960s with the Fusor but at least it is working.
I have personally operated one of the devices he mentions, a Farnsworth fusor, at a friend's house in Richmond VA. They're not hard to make at all, this friend made it himself, and they don't cost much. He was on rev 3 completely self funded, and getting quite high neutron outputs using deuterium. I saw the neutron counter count, and the fusion itself through a window. We didn't run it long, as we didn't want to make the whole lab radioactive, and as Bussard says, the grid melts. The friend (who may not want his name out there) normally observes via cheap CC tv. Now I have no way to judge if this Bussard guy is rational. His idea sounds fairly good, but I did notice the arm-waving at certain critical points in the presentation (we don't have time...to tell you how this actually works...with math). Question is, does it matter? Do you have to be rational to be onto something good? Where did that scaling of seventh power come from, thin air? Can't answer without making one and trying it, which would in truth cost very little. I DO have the physics background and training to understand this, being something of an old guy myself. It could work, the devil, as always, is in the details which that video didn't provide (perhaps on purpose, there's a telling instruction at the beginning to not ask "classified" questions during the Q&A period). One thing he is for sure dead right about is the problems with trying to do fusion with Maxwellian distributions -- random thermal motions. That'll only fly with gravity confinement and very large mass (eg, the sun). On earth, magnetic confinement of plasma is about the hardest thing to do there is, and the whole time the pesky electrons are giving off photons, wasting your input energy. And if you have too much density of any particular charge, say just positive nuclei, they won't come together. So tokamaks are expensive boondoggles that may indeed do good science sometimes, but as he said, most of the advances in plasma confinement there turned out to be purely empirical lucky guesses, not truly science. I laughed when he talked about the problems of computational modeling in front of programmers with access to what has to be the largest computer network on the planet, along with some of the smartest programmers. Deliberate challenge? The Farnsworth principle is clever, but is not the only non-maxwellian way there is. Consider a crystal of for example B11 oxide (or whatever) that you fire protons at. You only bother to accelerate ones that are going to hit a nuclei to fairly high degree of confidence. By firing single protons, you can find several nuclei, and once you know where three are in a crystal, you know where they all are. Due to having a crystal out there as a target, this defines a "grid" of locations you want to hit, and much more area where shooting protons in there is just a waste. One could focus an image of another Farnsworth invention (I think) eg the shadow mask used in color CRT's or it's moral equivalent. The holes would be a lot smaller and farther apart, that's all. Using the same type of charged particle optics that were used in electron microscopes, only backwards, the image could be reduced to atomic dimensions. This solves all the problems of loss by radiation, confining a plasma, maxwellian waste and so forth. The only trouble is that it cannot scale large, like the power companies want. Once you shoot the crystal, it's hot now, and the atoms are jiggling around too much to reliably hit again. You'd have to have something like a monomolecular layer of crystal on something like cassette tape and step and repeat. Doing the math on this gives you an upper limit of 10 or 20 kw per unit -- you can only move the "tape" so fast, and find out how the crystal is aligned this time so fast. You can't use a huge crystal because of random thermal motions at any practical temperature, so knowing where some of the nuclei are doesn't really tell you with enough precision where all of them are. I am building the above apparatus, and some of th
Oil is NOT in competition with fusion, fission, or any other method of making electricity. The VAST majority of oil goes to fueling cars or making oil products. Oil is only used as a backup power source. Oil's advantage is portability and energy density, not its cost or energy producing potential. You could magically make free energy and it would hardly dent oil profits. Battery technology that could allow a car to either store vastly more electrical energy or that could recharge in a timely manner would be a treat to oil. Cheaper and cleaner energy doesn't harm oil companies. PORTABLE energy is their competition. Even with portable energy alternatives they would still have a substantial market in petrol products.
If anything, cheaper energy might HELP oil companies. The oil refining process is fairly energy intensive. If energy was cheaper the cost to refine oil would be cheaper and they could squeeze a little more profit out of the oil they have.
Cheap energy isn't in competition with oil. We already have energy that is far cheaper then oil. The issue is portability. Oil companies fear better battery technology a hell of a lot more then they fear cheap and green energy.
Maybe they should look for funding from somewhere else...
The way to simulate this fusion process is to compute the effect of every particle on every other particle. So if you have a billion particles, you need to perform 1e9^2 (1e18) computations to determine the next state. That's easy to parallelize because you could have a thousand computers, each performing the calculations on a million particles. Unfortunately, each of those thousand computers needs the state of all billion particles (gigabytes of memory), and once the computation is done the state of those million particles at each computer must be distributed to the other 999 computers.
This is the sort of task that requires a real shared-memory supercomputer, like a Cray. Distributed parallel processing computers (like SETI@home) are only useful for tasks that require no communication between nodes.
dom
One of the last to survive in our celebrity driven society. Well worth a look by any entreprenur with a love of physics from the sound of it. Good luck to the man I say & I look forward to free power for all and an end to global warming. We need more people like him in todays corporate and beurocratic society.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The Wright Brother's Bike Shop approach is wonderful if you haven't centralized wealth to the point that the modern equivalent of a Wright Brother's Bike Shop is out of the reach of the modern equivalent of the Wright Brothers. Making a few guys like Brin and Page obscenely wealthy isn't the right way create the kind of society that gave rise to mass production of cars, air flight, the transistor, etc.
Seastead this.
This is the most insightful comment I've seen in this discussion so far. I wish I had mod points to give this person. Please do it for me.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Do you actually know something about Bussard or do you just have a lot of attitude?
Did the Navy actually fund him? Did it receive data from him that suggested some advances?
Who has independently examined his setup? Were you involved in the process? Did you hear about it?
The basic science here seems sound, but there is, I'm sure, plenty of detailed reasons things might not work as envisioned with a scaled up reactor.
Having been active in nanotechnology research for the past few years, I can also tell you that irreproducibility, sketchiness, random technical problems and the like is par for the course. Of course, in the end you come up with some sort of reproducible result, but "reproducibility" often means another lab working for a year or two just to figure out all the little details that actually made things work for you. Clean and straightforward does not usually characterize science. The expenditure of lots of money and lots of frustration does.
This Bussard guy maybe old, may be a little senile, may have glossed over the details, and may be obstinate and difficult to deal with, but that doesn't mean that he's not onto something. Instead of asking for $200 million, which is a lot of money by any standard, the thing for him to do is to ask for a few more million a year from Darpa to gain confidence in the current results and look at technical issues with scaling up his designs. Age and senility might be factors in not wishing to take that route, which likely wouldn't see a working reactor before he dies.
2. Google goes nuclear. Threat muted...
3. Mad scientists Sergey and Larry then release 'Google eGov'.
See, we did learn something from the 'axis of evil'.
Whoa! Timeout! Everybody chill out for a minute. Mark Cuban just isn't that important. Let it go Google.
I love it when you see those rich hippies in the valleys complaining about wind power, yet the farmers
dont seam to mind having 1000s of cows walking around, yeah they look pretty in the green distance, but they
make more pollution, eat too much, and shit too much and for little benefit, they require too much energy to put in to
make something usefull, ie food.
Wind turbines only effect the lower layer of winds, its not like they are 2000feet HIGH!!! and besides there are different
types too, the tubular ones. And I thought birds are smart, they wouldnt be so stupid as to constantly die in the blades.
If you are that concerned , then what about all the birds who die when hit by cars or trucks or eaten by feral cats.
If we had 2000watt panels and a small wind generator in EVERY house in a city of 5million, it would save a significant amount
of power. Rich yuppies can do without them and pay 2x $$$ for their delivered power if they dont like the look.
Besides if there are any natural disasters, or loss of grid power, you have at least enough to keep your essentials running.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Thank goodness there is now an elected congressional representative who can answer this kind of bullshit when it shows up on C-SPAN (and in the Congressional Record!)
Ignoting the neutrons as a product is like ignoring the chlorine gas you get when you mix bleach and ammonia. It might be a great solution to some problems, but it will hurt you bad if you get anywhere near it or its products/junk. The difference is the chlorine gas dissipates quickly. Radioactive metalic and organic (plastic) junk says deadly for a very long time.
It has to save the cheerleader.
Now think for a moment -- you're a potential investor with $200M to risk but you don't want to throw your money away. Do you just put up a couple of million to see the thing reproducibly validate the favorable scaling laws without intending to put the rest of the $200M up or without having a pretty good idea that _someone_ is going to bring the system to full scale? Why do you risk your $2M for recreating the demonstrator if not to realize the profit from the full scale system?
Seastead this.
Here are two of Bussards posts, and the two patents he mentions:5 007961e36e93001813d66ec9a4ea&p=1722023 = fusor_announce&key=1143684406 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5160695.PN.&OS=PN/51606 95&RS=PN/5160695 T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4826646.PN.&OS=PN/48266 46&RS=PN/4826646
http://www.randi.org/forumlive/showpost.php?s=e66
http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
Everything he says is consistent with what he has said elsewhere. Furthermore, all the details are correct to the extent of my knowledge (though this isn't the same branch of physics I specialised in).
The only thing I notice to be a little offsetting is: his disdain for government funding, oil companies, and his exaggeration of how great this will be for the world. But some folks are like that; this is perhaps the sort of thinking you should keep to yourself when trying to convince others of the veracity of your claims! All the same, it has no bearing on the rigour or ration of his work. (He even recognises that this sounds like "sour grapes", but that this isn't his intention.)
So I expect this to be on the up-and-up, though an insurmountable obstacle may well still pop up. That isn't the sort of thing I would expect to be mentioned to potential funders!
They should stop doing evil: Fix their groups design which is totally awfull and remove all that imbedded stylesheet and javascript crap on the search engine!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Why not invest in superconductor overunity devices eg.
. view&friendID=90263110&blogID=184699617&MyToken=26 6969c0-2d4d-4efd-96db-5c6f585b2af5
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog
...Google employees kept asking questions that dived into the confidential realm of Google. :
The video did not show these questions, but ofcourse we all know what they were - the answers of the Dr. were lost however -
* does the nuclear fusion give us the ability to power the Google-Prisons we intend to build after we rule the Earth ?
* how does the alien population of Earth think about this, wouldn't Google be doing harm to ourselves ?
* could we send advertisements through the Fusion-Energy ?
* we have only 1000 nuclear Phd.'s in Google, will this be enough or should we stick to making the nuclear fission device we wanted to have ?
* erm, did you sign OUR confidentiality agreement yet ? If not, care for some nice 'tea' after this session ? Any last wishes ?
after watching the presentation and following that with reading some comments i realised how pathetic they are compared to this persons idea and long years he put into this project cannot be wiped out by a number of idiots. oh yes, i personally attack most of your absolutely stupid idiots and i call you what you are.
on the other note, i agree that a global effort to calculate/simulate an experiment on the large number of computers across the world is a good idea and he should probably look into that while they are looking for funding. the idea is brilliant, and the cause is good. i dont think he over-exaggerated the impact of the device, once its ready. in fact it could go a lot further than what he mentioned, but of course its a fantasy/speculation at this point.
cheap energy could help us with most of the problems that we have right now except for one , and i'll repeat other persons argument here to some extent:
if mr. bussard figured out how to get rid of all morons(interpretations vary), then we would not have problems that we have right now. we would have a lot bigger problems caused by morons that got rid of others.
he is right about the rice bowl. the budget of DOE is way over-blown for how much output they have realistically produced in the field and he deserves a chance. there is a fat layer of bureocrats, that would not want to leave their cushy spots, where they dont do anything, except making stupid decisions and play golf. its like that in any goverment project, thats funded above their necks. i think this guy deserves funding, and if google funds him, well its great for google.
Watched the entire video.
Interesting audience... the women are where?
http://yudkowsky.net/sing/shocklevels.html
Check this: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33 227017.pdf
The paper appears to shoot down any chance of an IEC fusion reactor producing useful energy outputs. This paper has been around for a while and is one reason why so few people are interested in IEC (or similar systems) these days. I'm not qualified to follow the scientific argument, but I'd love to know whether Dr. Bussard can answer it.
A friend and I (we both know our nuclear physics) watched the theoretical section in the beginning, pausing at every tricky spot to analyze the details, and decided that the theory is sound.
One particular advantage this device has over the JET/ITER designs is that it immediately accelerates all nuclei to the energy level (some 500 keV) needed for fusion. The torus designs heat a lot of nuclei to a level where the fastest nuclei reach this level and have a reasonable probability of colliding. That takes a lot more energy and engineering to hold such great amounts of plasma.
The pure beauty of his approach using a static electric field to both accelerate the ions and keep the plasma in confinement already makes this a work of art - even if it would turn out not to be commercially viable for whatever reason.
As for him just giving up on funding, I give him the benefit of doubt. He's a scientist, not a fundraiser, and it's hard to convince bureaucrats to do anything risky. He's delivered the science, the prototypes and has described it in patents. Now it's up to someone else to pick up the lead and continue into the real engineering of his. It's true that the Iraq war eats up budgets like crazy (that war might qualify for the 'Stupidity of the Century' award, once we get that far). It also delayed reinforcement of the New Orleans dikes.
MeThinks that either some corporate investor (Google is not a bad idea) or some non-US country will pick this up and do the practical work. $200 million is peanuts in this context. It's what you'll pay for a new stretch of motorway, a large concert hall, ship or whatever the local or federal government decides to build this week. Even if there was just one in a hundred % chance that this will work, it should be tried and tested.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
And learn to accept other opinions than your own.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Really? Shame you did not have a couple of minutes to back that one up.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A similar talk on renewable energy - ocean wave power the day before...
3 4834825253
see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-36933904
A friend asked me to comment on the video, and I posted extensive comments here: Clean, cheap, nuclear power: Should Google go nuclear?
But be warned: This web page is not only uncited, it is no longer on the web outside of the archive.
Seastead this.