The pebble bed reactor (PBR) is an advanced nuclear reactor type. A number of prototypes have been built, and it is currently under active development in South Africa as the PBMR design, and in China whose HTR-10 is the only prototype currently operating.
This technology claims a dramatically higher level of safety and has achieved higher thermal efficiencies than traditional Nuclear Power Plants. Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly. This eliminates the complex steam management system from the design and increases the thermal efficiency (ratio of electrical output to thermal output) from 32-35% to 40-50%. Also, the gases do not dissolve contaminants or absorb neutrons as water does, so the core has less in the way of radioactive fluids and is more economical than a light water reactor.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight.
This type of bacterium, approximately four micrometers in length, has survived for millions of years on chemical food sources that derive from the radioactive decay of minerals in the surrounding rock, making it one of the few creatures known that does not depend on sunlight for nourishment.
These will survive any surface conditions, until the heat penetrates two miles deep.
Every time a new technology comes along, the education establishment embraces it as a silver bullet that will deliver knowledge while keeping the students' interest.
When movies came along students sat through all sorts of educational movies as a way educating them and engaging them.
Students were subjected to film strips.
I was a professor when TV came along. The university had a new building devoted to TV lectures. I had to film a few lectures. They were terrible! All except the most telegenic faculty had the same experience. Very soon the building devolved to a lecture hall with an unused TV system.
Computers were hailed as a magic solution. We see where that is going.
Education consists of an engaging teacher and engaged students. Without those, all the newest gadgets are useless. With them the gadgets are superfluous.
There is still a limitation on speed. As the train approaches earth orbital velocity (abut 7.75 km/sec ), the centripedal force approaches the force of gravity (excuse my sloppy language), the passengers become weightless, and some will get "space-sick" ans start barfing all over the place.
There is so much energy available that the whole world's energy consumption could be supplied with very minimal effect on the oceans. Quote below is from here
Indeed, the Earth has an enormous natural solar collector - the tropical oceans. "On an average day, 60 million square kilometers (23 million square miles) of tropical seas absorb an amount of solar radiation equal in heat content to about 250 billion barrels of oil." [1] Energy "equivalent to at least 4000 times the amount presently consumed by humans." [2] If we can tap into this renewable source, considering thermodynamics and entropy, approximately 1% of it could provide the entire current worldwide demand for energy. More than enough energy is available, we only need a way to get it - in a practical, cost-effective, ecologically safe and sustainable way.
Twenty years ago I visited Paul M. Koloc in his garage in College Park Md., watching his Plasmak machine produce ball lightning. He is still working on and improving it.
Eukaryotes are organisms with complex cells containing nucleii -- roughly everything except bacteria and viruses. That is both yeast and elephants are eukaryotes. See the Wikipedia definition.
Some of them, such as humans, do sleep. Perhaps the writer meant mammals or vertebrates.
2500 rem a year is about 6.8 rem/day.
While occupational regulations are complex and depend on what type of radiation, they are the equivalent of 5 rem/year. See as an example.
This means the occupants could not spend too much time in the Van Allen Belt.
Truespel is designed to help non-english speakers pronounce written English. It is not a simplified spelling system but a pronunciation aid.
You can check it out at www.truespel.com . If you click the "Converter" button you can convert any web page or text from English spelling to Truespel or back. Full disclosure, I wrote the two-way converter which can be adapted to simplified spelling systems.
There is a set of four books describing the system written by Tom Zurinskas, creator the system. They are available on the website
Take a look at what is happening in the NBA. More and more players are coming abroad. Even in an all-American sport such as basketball, our home-grown players are falling into a culture that elevates self-glorification and hot-dogging over teamwork and hard work.
The density of interstellar space is about one atom per cubic centimeter.
If the spaceship were going near the speed of light (3 x 10^10 cm/sec), it would be hit by 3 x 10^10 relativistic particles per cm^2/sec. This is about the equivalent of one Curie per cm^2, which would kill a human and cripple any electronics on board
A very heavy magnet could deflect the protons, but the neutral atoms would be unaffected by the magnetic field.
All interstate commerce should be subject to a 5% sales tax collected by the federal government. At the end of the year the feds would distribute the collected taxes to the states in proportion to their own sales tax collection from in-state purchases. That is if state X's collected sales taxs were 3% of the sum of all the 50 state's collections, it would get 3% of the federal collected taxes.
All of us, including me, love to evade sales tax, but we all want the roads, schools and police services that it pays for.
Even if this worked, it would almost certaily lead to another example of William H. McNeill's "Conservation of Catastrophy" thesis. McNeil's principle sates that when you build a system to prevent small catastrophies, you end up with infrequent large one.
Examples are: Supressing local forest fires leads to buildup of debris on the forest floor which feed huge uncontrolable fires.
Region wide electrical grids prevent frequent small local blackouts, but contain instabilites which lead to region wide blackouts.
Flood control on rivers leave no room for the waters to rise and exacerbate large floods.
If we did supress hurricanes, all that excess atmospheric energy would have to do something. What is anyone's guess.
Paul has not seen neutrons because he is working in air. Ball lightning is stable. This has been witnessed for over two millenia. Ball Lightning
He does not have any defitive results, but considering that he is self-financed and his probably has spent less than monthly toilet paper budget of a national lab, this is no surprise.
I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)
Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.
Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.
Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.
Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion, but now is resurrected. I assume that they found some technical advances, or just "cooked the books" space-station style to justify it.
The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a 10 years ago in response to this.
Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.
Last decade the Trisops machine was moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.
Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).
The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.
I have a spooky side effect from my implanted mechanical mitral valve. Whenever it is quiet I hear a steady click-click as my heart beats, one click for each beat. People with good hearing can hear it a short distance away. This really startled my 16 year old nephew who heard it as we were working a computer together. I'm sure he has spread the story among his friends.
I find the clicking sound reassuring, it is a sign that everything is working well.
While valve and my pacemaker (which gives no sign of its presence) is comforting for me, I hear that others are disturbed as they make them feel not whole and reminds them of thier mortality.
A psychotherapist friend of mine tells me that he has a patient being driven crazy by the clicks. I feel sorry for the patient, as there is no way to avoid them.
Using biomass (plants) for fuel has a lot to say for it. It is a renewable resource which does not contribute to global warming. Anyone with a lawn can produce some.
Unfortunately, when you do the numbers, we do not have enough land to replace more that a few percent of our fossil fuel consuption with biomass.
An
article in Physics Today discusses this. They only talk about fertile agricultural land, but even if you were to use marginal land, the argument stays the same.
While we speak of an energy problem in the singular, there are really two problems. The first is transportation fuel. Right now, oil is our only transportation fuel. All the proposed alternatives such as biofuel, or hydrogen either require a technical breakthrough (i.e. storing sufficient quantities of hydrogen in a vehicle) or are not available in sufficient quantity . Nuclear energy will not help here.
The second problem is stationary energy, that is electricity and natural gas. We have enough coal to generate electricity for many decades. In most cases, electricity can be substituted for natural gas The only constraint on coal is global warming. Nuclear can help here. I will not get into the debate of safety etc.
The analogy of a weight on a stretched membrane is easy to visualize, but depends on a force outside the "fabric" of space - ordinary gravity.
A better analogy on how curved space can seem like a force is to look at two ships, both some distance apart at the equator heading north. For the sake of this argument, assume the Earth is totally cloud covered, and those on the surface are not aware of anything off of the surface.
The captains will see that their initial motion is parallel. They are both going in a straight line, along a longitude line, heading for the North Pole. On the surface of a sphere, as on any curved ( or uncurved) space, a straight line is defined as the shortest distance between two points. As the two ships head north, the captains will notice that they are getting closer to each other; finally colliding at the Pole.
After scratching their heads to figure out what happened, the will conclude that there was some force drawing the two ships together. From "outside" we can see that the collision was caused by the curvature of their space, but those whose motion, and vision is confined to the surface of a sphere, will give this force a name. Perhaps "gravity."
Let me correct you. They do not keep all the materials from the copyright office. Some they forward to other appropriate places, such as the National Library of Medicine.
Their collections policy statement states that they only keep material specific to their very broad mission statement. This means that they will not keep a copy of a laundry list they received throught the copyright office.
The ion temperatures were measured as 6 kev from Doppler broadening and D-D neutron production. The electron temperatures stayed at 50 ev. The configuration lasted 100 microseconds. One of the problem ( and one of the excuses for discontiuing the funding) was that the electron-ion equilibration time for this is 2 microseconds.
We did not have the funds for a Thompson scattering laser, so we measured the density of 10^16 to 10^17 by differential Stark broadening between differenent ion levels of Ne.
We did no D-T work. The compression was done by adiabatic compression, by suddenly increasing the guide linear magnetic guide field. using a capacitor bank discharge.
The experiment, including the capacitory bank occupied less than 1000 square feet of an old World War II temporary wooden shack. The actual apparatus was about 2 meters long, and the plasma itself was confined inside a 4" pyrex pipe.
I do not have a copy of the paper, just a preprint. I am sure you can find a copy in any major university library
Thirty years ago, I worked at the University of Miami on Dan Wells' project, Trisops. We produced stable plasma rings with a force-free ( velocity and magnetic fields are parallel ) doughnut shaped configuration. They are sort of the magnetohydrodynamic equivalent of a smoke ring - which is a stable vortex structure. If you poke your finger through the hole of a smke ring, and then move it sideways across the ring, the ring will heal itself because of its stability.
After producing two rings at the opposite end of a vacuum tube, they were guided by a magnetic field until they collided. At collision they repelled each other, and then were compressed. The rings heated up and stayed stable for 30 microseconds under compression ( which by plasma standards is a long time). The funding was cut off in 1978 because the concept was too far from the mainstream.
In 1999 John Brandenburg received a grant from NASA to move the experiment from Miami to Lanham MD (near NASA Goddard). He moved it and reassembled it, but never received an money to operate it. It stands gathering dust.
Right now, Paul Koloc is doing something similar in his garage, producing ball lightning ( a stable plasma structure that has been documented since Roman times). His project, Plasmak, has received some sbir funding. For more details on the Plasmak, look here.
From reading the white paper, I do not think the Trisops plasma is the same configuration as in the levitated dipole experiment. I do not have a clear idea of the structure of the Plasmak.
I list the Trisops papers below for anyone who wants to follow up.
Daniel R. Wells, Paul Edward Ziajka, and Jack L. Tunstall. Hydrodynamic confinement of thermonuclear plasmas TRISOPS VIII (plasma liner confinement). Fusion Tech., 9:83, 1986.
Winston H. Bostick and Daniel R. Wells. Azimuthal magnetic field in the conical theta pinch. Phys. Fluids, 6(9):1325, 1963.
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
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Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
The most famous engineer in the US is Dilbert.
A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight.
Subterrainian MicrobesThese will survive any surface conditions, until the heat penetrates two miles deep.
Every time a new technology comes along, the education establishment embraces it as a silver bullet that will deliver knowledge while keeping the students' interest.
When movies came along students sat through all sorts of educational movies as a way educating them and engaging them.
Students were subjected to film strips.
I was a professor when TV came along. The university had a new building devoted to TV lectures. I had to film a few lectures. They were terrible! All except the most telegenic faculty had the same experience. Very soon the building devolved to a lecture hall with an unused TV system.
Computers were hailed as a magic solution. We see where that is going.
Education consists of an engaging teacher and engaged students. Without those, all the newest gadgets are useless. With them the gadgets are superfluous.
This has been proposed often. See http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/5e610b4511b84 010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html.
There is still a limitation on speed. As the train approaches earth orbital velocity (abut 7.75 km/sec ), the centripedal force approaches the force of gravity (excuse my sloppy language), the passengers become weightless, and some will get "space-sick" ans start barfing all over the place.
There is so much energy available that the whole world's energy consumption could be supplied with very minimal effect on the oceans. Quote below is from here
Check it out at here .
Eukaryotes are organisms with complex cells containing nucleii -- roughly everything except bacteria and viruses. That is both yeast and elephants are eukaryotes. See the Wikipedia definition.
Some of them, such as humans, do sleep. Perhaps the writer meant mammals or vertebrates.
2500 rem a year is about 6.8 rem/day. While occupational regulations are complex and depend on what type of radiation, they are the equivalent of 5 rem/year. See as an example. This means the occupants could not spend too much time in the Van Allen Belt.
E) Geothermal
This is a combination of energy left over from the formation of of the Earth and heat from the natural radioactivity inside the Earth.
You can check it out at www.truespel.com . If you click the "Converter" button you can convert any web page or text from English spelling to Truespel or back. Full disclosure, I wrote the two-way converter which can be adapted to simplified spelling systems.
There is a set of four books describing the system written by Tom Zurinskas, creator the system. They are available on the website
Take a look at what is happening in the NBA. More and more players are coming abroad. Even in an all-American sport such as basketball, our home-grown players are falling into a culture that elevates self-glorification and hot-dogging over teamwork and hard work.
The density of interstellar space is about one atom per cubic centimeter. If the spaceship were going near the speed of light (3 x 10^10 cm/sec), it would be hit by 3 x 10^10 relativistic particles per cm^2/sec. This is about the equivalent of one Curie per cm^2, which would kill a human and cripple any electronics on board
A very heavy magnet could deflect the protons, but the neutral atoms would be unaffected by the magnetic field.
All interstate commerce should be subject to a 5% sales tax collected by the federal government. At the end of the year the feds would distribute the collected taxes to the states in proportion to their own sales tax collection from in-state purchases. That is if state X's collected sales taxs were 3% of the sum of all the 50 state's collections, it would get 3% of the federal collected taxes.
All of us, including me, love to evade sales tax, but we all want the roads, schools and police services that it pays for.
Even if this worked, it would almost certaily lead to another example of William H. McNeill's "Conservation of Catastrophy" thesis. McNeil's principle sates that when you build a system to prevent small catastrophies, you end up with infrequent large one.
Examples are:
Supressing local forest fires leads to buildup of debris on the forest floor which feed huge uncontrolable fires.
Region wide electrical grids prevent frequent small local blackouts, but contain instabilites which lead to region wide blackouts.
Flood control on rivers leave no room for the waters to rise and exacerbate large floods.
If we did supress hurricanes, all that excess atmospheric energy would have to do something. What is anyone's guess.
Watching the emperor penguins care for their offspring, to the point of risking their lives, makes "March of the Penguins" the ultimate chick flick.
Paul has not seen neutrons because he is working in air. Ball lightning is stable. This has been witnessed for over two millenia. Ball Lightning
He does not have any defitive results, but considering that he is self-financed and his probably has spent less than monthly toilet paper budget of a national lab, this is no surprise.
His approach should be supported at a low level.
I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)
Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.
Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.
Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.
Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion, but now is resurrected. I assume that they found some technical advances, or just "cooked the books" space-station style to justify it.
The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a 10 years ago in response to this.
Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.
Last decade the Trisops machine was moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.
Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).
The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.
This is a update of an earlier post Don't sell your Exxon Stock
I have a spooky side effect from my implanted mechanical mitral valve. Whenever it is quiet I hear a steady click-click as my heart beats, one click for each beat. People with good hearing can hear it a short distance away. This really startled my 16 year old nephew who heard it as we were working a computer together. I'm sure he has spread the story among his friends.
I find the clicking sound reassuring, it is a sign that everything is working well.
While valve and my pacemaker (which gives no sign of its presence) is comforting for me, I hear that others are disturbed as they make them feel not whole and reminds them of thier mortality.
A psychotherapist friend of mine tells me that he has a patient being driven crazy by the clicks. I feel sorry for the patient, as there is no way to avoid them.
Unfortunately, when you do the numbers, we do not have enough land to replace more that a few percent of our fossil fuel consuption with biomass.
An article in Physics Today discusses this. They only talk about fertile agricultural land, but even if you were to use marginal land, the argument stays the same.
The second problem is stationary energy, that is electricity and natural gas. We have enough coal to generate electricity for many decades. In most cases, electricity can be substituted for natural gas The only constraint on coal is global warming. Nuclear can help here. I will not get into the debate of safety etc.
A better analogy on how curved space can seem like a force is to look at two ships, both some distance apart at the equator heading north. For the sake of this argument, assume the Earth is totally cloud covered, and those on the surface are not aware of anything off of the surface.
The captains will see that their initial motion is parallel. They are both going in a straight line, along a longitude line, heading for the North Pole. On the surface of a sphere, as on any curved ( or uncurved) space, a straight line is defined as the shortest distance between two points. As the two ships head north, the captains will notice that they are getting closer to each other; finally colliding at the Pole.
After scratching their heads to figure out what happened, the will conclude that there was some force drawing the two ships together. From "outside" we can see that the collision was caused by the curvature of their space, but those whose motion, and vision is confined to the surface of a sphere, will give this force a name. Perhaps "gravity."
Their collections policy statement states that they only keep material specific to their very broad mission statement. This means that they will not keep a copy of a laundry list they received throught the copyright office.
We did not have the funds for a Thompson scattering laser, so we measured the density of 10^16 to 10^17 by differential Stark broadening between differenent ion levels of Ne.
We did no D-T work. The compression was done by adiabatic compression, by suddenly increasing the guide linear magnetic guide field. using a capacitor bank discharge.
The experiment, including the capacitory bank occupied less than 1000 square feet of an old World War II temporary wooden shack. The actual apparatus was about 2 meters long, and the plasma itself was confined inside a 4" pyrex pipe. I do not have a copy of the paper, just a preprint. I am sure you can find a copy in any major university library
After producing two rings at the opposite end of a vacuum tube, they were guided by a magnetic field until they collided. At collision they repelled each other, and then were compressed. The rings heated up and stayed stable for 30 microseconds under compression ( which by plasma standards is a long time). The funding was cut off in 1978 because the concept was too far from the mainstream.
In 1999 John Brandenburg received a grant from NASA to move the experiment from Miami to Lanham MD (near NASA Goddard). He moved it and reassembled it, but never received an money to operate it. It stands gathering dust.
Right now, Paul Koloc is doing something similar in his garage, producing ball lightning ( a stable plasma structure that has been documented since Roman times). His project, Plasmak, has received some sbir funding. For more details on the Plasmak, look here.
From reading the white paper, I do not think the Trisops plasma is the same configuration as in the levitated dipole experiment. I do not have a clear idea of the structure of the Plasmak.
I list the Trisops papers below for anyone who wants to follow up.
Daniel R. Wells, Paul Edward Ziajka, and Jack L. Tunstall. Hydrodynamic confinement of thermonuclear plasmas TRISOPS VIII (plasma liner confinement). Fusion Tech., 9:83, 1986.
Winston H. Bostick and Daniel R. Wells. Azimuthal magnetic field in the conical theta pinch. Phys. Fluids, 6(9):1325, 1963.
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.