Please welcome "The Polywell Guy"

[bananas]

He replied to an old thread so it wasn't kicked: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=52184

I don't know anything about him, but he seems nice enough.

[hunter]

1. Cheap fusion would be among the worst things that ever happened to earth.

Imagine industrial populations growing and spreading without limit.

Humans would consume what's left of the natural world, turning everything into more humans and more garbage.

If I discovered how to make an H-bomb out of ordinary hardware store materials I wouldn't tell anyone. If I built a working fusion power plant, Tony Stark style, I still wouldn't tell anyone.



Our species is a three year old playing with matches and we've lit the house on fire.

Global warming and overpopulation are symptoms of our civilization's immaturity, not problems that can be "solved" with increasingly powerful technologies.

We have all the tools we need today to stabilize our population at sustainable levels, and provide a good standard of living for everyone.

If we want to stop using fossil fuels now, the solution is simple: Stop using fossil fuels!

The difficult part is not finding a "replacement" source of energy, the difficult part is creating a society where we don't need more energy.

I can easily imagine a society where most people have never smelled gasoline, never driven a car, never seen a high voltage power line, yet still live in comfortable leisurely sustainable ways with good shelter, good food, appropriate medical care, and easy access to worldwide communication and transportation networks.

This can be accomplished with existing technologies. From there, who knows where we might go? But in our current society cheap fusion would simply add fuel to the house fire. We'd build more cars, mine more materials (how about those fusion powered tar sand refineries, eh?), and generally make a bigger mess of things than we already have.

[bananas]

2. That's completely backwards - the demographic transition is happening. nt

[hunter]

3. Really?

They've stopped mining coal and tar sands, stopped fracking for oil and gas, they've stopped expanding the highway system, and people have stopped buying cars and airline tickets?

I don't think so.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. How much of what you’re talking about is due to constrained resources

e.g. if there weren’t constrained supplies of oil, would we be going after “unconventional sources” such as “tar sands” and shale oil?

Would unlimited energy mean that people would destructively use every bit that they could, and in a purely destructive fashion?

I don’t think so.

[hunter]

5. We haven't stopped expanding since we started burning coal.

The track record of humanity isn't very good.

Let's say you have a fusion power plant generating inexpensive hydrogen. Wonderful, we can use that to turn coal into inexpensive gasoline for our cars, other transportation fuels for shipping and airline travel, methane, ethane, and propane for our gas appliances, industry production, and plastics. Prices go down, consumption goes up.

Suddenly we have no incentive to change anything in our society, and all that coal sitting in the ground still eventually ends up as carbon dioxide or plastic garbage.

Well then, you might say, we could replace coal fired plants with fusion plants, and outlaw the use of coal. Maybe that's better, but you still get all sorts of development -- huge desalinization plants turning coastal deserts "green," other sorts of fuel production (we will not give up our airlines), and critical shortages of other resources requiring more destructive forms of mining.

Imagine huge machines like this powered by fusion, digging up phosphates, rare earth metals, iron and aluminum ore:

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. “Suddenly we have no incentive to change anything in our society…”

…other than climate change you mean.

I don’t think people will use a clean energy source to allow them to use more of a dirty energy source.

[hunter]

7. I'm not so optimistic.

Imagine, we could close our offshore oil platforms, stop importing oil, and turn coal into $2.00 a gallon gasoline.

Next thing you know everyone is driving giant urban assault vehicles again.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_XT

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Why on earth would we do that?

There are so many other ways to create liquid fuels, given sufficient energy.

http://energy.sandia.gov/?page_id=776

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Sunshine to Petrol[/font]

[font size=3]Sandia’s Sunshine to Petrol (S2P) team seeks to address the critical national and global issues of growing energy consumption amid increased vulnerability and price volatility of petroleum supplies and climate change risks. The transportation and industrial sectors in the United States are deeply dependent on petroleum, a dominant energy source for these sectors and a driver of greenhouse gas emissions. An alternative energy carrier coupled to a sustainable energy source that can be used within existing infrastructure, distribution, and traditional petroleum-based combustion systems is necessary to assure national security, enhance U.S. economic competitiveness, demonstrate leadership in mitigating the risks of climate change, and promote a smooth transition to an energy-secure and diversified transportation mix.

The Sandia S2P team seeks to address this challenge by developing a sustainable liquid fuels solution that can replace petroleum-based fuels on a large enough scale to significantly and positively affect the energy future of the United States and the world. The solution, S2P, is based on a novel continuous flow, recuperating thermochemical heat engine powered by concentrated solar irradiation. The engine converts either carbon dioxide or water to two products, oxygen and carbon monoxide or hydrogen, respectively, and spatially separates the products. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen are universal energy-rich building blocks for producing synthetic fuels that can be equivalent to today’s petroleum-derived liquid fuels, the “gold standard” transportation energy carrier.

To realize this concept, Sandia’s S2P team is addressing and solving complex chemical, materials science, and engineering problems for the prototype thermochemical heat engines and crucial enabling metal-oxide working materials. They must also demonstrate techno-economics of a full system (sunlight to liquid hydrocarbon fuels) are viable in a competitive market place. The team has proven the concept in the laboratory in batch mode, virtually using detailed reactor models, and in continuous mode on-sun in the lab’s hand-built precision prototype reactor currently undergoing tests at the solar furnace at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility . The team has made skillful use of analytical modeling to complement experiments and has demonstrated the potential for a foundational solution to the ‘triumvirate challenge’ of energy security, economic growth, and environmental effects.

Sandia’s interdisciplinary S2P research team leverages the lab’s extensive experience in concentrating solar power, reactors and reactive structures, systems, materials, and thermodynamics and in several universities. The team is guided by a diverse and experienced external advisory board that provides feedback on research directions in periodic reviews that ensure progress.

…[/font][/font]

[hunter]

10. Why would we do that? Because most of the infrastructure already exists, but mostly because we can.

Swap out natural gas derived hydrogen and heat for fusion derived hydrogen and heat. Done. We don't have to build an entirely new production or transportation infrastructure from scratch.

Business goes on as usual -- airline routes are not replaced by high speed rail, gasoline powered cars are not replaced by electric cars and public transportation, farms using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are not converted to organic farms. Everything stays the same, giant corporations are not disrupted. Fusion simply replaces natural gas, makes renewable energy systems obsolete, and industrial age humans continue to consume the earth.

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. I know it's hard, but assume, just for the moment, that people have some sense

Or, are you the only sensible human on the planet?

[FogerRox]

12. A Polywell would generate not hydrogen but electricity

[hunter]

14. Same thing at higher temps...

... the "holy grail" being boron fusion reactions converted directly to electricity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

A surprising amount of electricity is used in modern petro-chemical refining.

[FogerRox]

16. Proton Boron 11 fusuion creates alphas and helium.

[GliderGuider]

8. I agree wholeheartedly. Humanity is not genetically equipped to handle unlimited amounts of energy.

My perspective on that aspect of the question is here:

Paradise Lost

The main difficulty I have with all the technical, political, economic and social reform proposals I've seen is that they run counter to some very deep-seated aspects of human behavior and decision-making. Mainly, they assume that human intelligence and analytical ability control our behavior, and from what I've seen, that’s simply not true. In fact it’s untrue to such an extent that I don’t even think it’s a “human” issue per se.

I have come to think that most of our collective choices and actions are shaped by physical forces so deep that they can’t even be called “genetic”. I haven’t written anything definitive about this yet, but the conclusion I have come to in the last six months is that a physical principle called the "Maximum Entropy Production Principle”, which is closely related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, actually underlies the structure of life itself. Its operation has shaped the energy-seeking, replicative behavior of everything from bacteria to humans. All our intelligence does is makes its operation more effective.

This principle is behind the appearance of life in the first place, has guided the development of genetic replication and natural selection, and has embedded itself in our behavior at the very deepest level. Like all life, our mandate is simple: survive and reproduce so as to form a metastable dissipative structure. All of human behavior and history has been oriented towards executing this mandate as effectively as possible. This “survive and reproduce” program springs from a universal law of physics, much like gravity. As a result it even precedes genetics as a driver of human behavior. And lest there be any lingering doubt about the connection to our current predicament, the survival imperative is what causes all living organisms to exhibit energy-seeking behavior. Humans just do this better than any other organism in the history of the planet because of our intelligence.

In this context, the evolutionary fitness role of human intelligence is to act as a limit-removal mechanism, to circumvent any obstacles in the way of making make our growth in terms of energy use and reproduction more effective. It’s why we are blind to the need for limits both as individuals (in general) and collectively as cultures. We acknowledge limits only when they are so close as to present an immediate existential threat, as they were and are in hunter-gatherer societies. As a result we tend to make hard changes only in response to a crisis, not in advance of it. Basically, the goal of life is to live rather than die, and to do this it must grow rather than shrink. This imperative governs everything we think and do.

My current reading in the field of evolutionary psychology indicates that EP findings completely support this position.

[joshcryer]

17. Super cheap energy would be a boon to the planet.

1) Energy is directly tied to standard of living, lots of cheap energy equals a higher standard of living, generally.

2) Higher living standard means people stop making babies.

3) Higher energy means you can reduce your ground footprint. Everyone lives in cities. Food grown in vertical skyscrapers. Waste is able to be recycled in the city, etc (waste pollution is done because recycling is energy intensive).

[FogerRox]

13. Self promotion type.

I dont think much of him, and hes certainly not part pf the old school guys at talk-polywell.com crowd. He isnt all that knowledgeable or very technical.

[bananas]

15. Thanks for that evaluation.

I didn't really have time to look at his site.

[The Polywell Guy]

18. Thanks for the warm welcome

Greetings,

Often when I join a forum, nobody cares. This one is bursting with traffic. I don't know about human implications. But, I will say this: researchers can build great tools - but it is on us to use these tools with heart and intelligence.

I work on the physics and on explaining it. I have been posting on Talk-Polywell for many years. I decided to re-use a description of the Polywell I used on CosmoQuest. Enjoy!


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The Polywell heats ions to fusion conditions using an electric field. You need about a 10,000 volt field to do it. To get that field you need to hold a plasma with 10^12 extra electrons. You can contain it, using magnetic fields - the same way magnetic mirrors held in plasmas. (Google MFTF) But, there are plenty of problems that need solving. Here are just 3:

1. Controlling ion injection, focus, and acceleration. Nevins (LLNL, 1995) wrote a whole article theoretically arguing you cannot hold the ion focus. The ions are pushed around by the electric and magnetic forces inside the cloud. Getting them to consolidate in a central point is going to be very hard to do.

2. The ions and electrons energy falling into a bell curve. Rider (MIT, 1994, 1995) did his thesis arguing that once the machine falls into thermodynamic equilibrium, the radiation losses outpace the fusion rate. His work was theoretical, made assumptions and is based off the respected work: "The Physics of fully ionized gases". It is certainly good work, but it is not data. There is such a thing as non-thermal plasma, where the electrons and ions are at two different temperatures - but the stability of this system inside the polywell is hard to believe. If two temperatures were possible, the temperatures could be optimized. Radiation scales as temperature^4. So, cold electrons lower radiation losses while hot ions raise fusion rates. Still unknowns here.

3. Holding the (-) voltage. Naturally, the (+) and (-) like to mix together. This makes it hard to concentrate the charge overtime. This means you lose the nice negative well you need to accelerate the ions to fusion conditions. Could you just dump excess electrons in to keep the well? How long can you contain these electrons? (they leak over time). These are all open questions.

We do not know if these problems will kill this idea or not. There are so many ways that the machine can be built or operated. It may be an optimization problem - where there is a "sweet spot" where we get more fusion and less of competing physical mechanisms (plasma instabilities, radiation losses, conduction losses, ect..). It may be a Throw-Lots-Of-Money-At-It Problem - whereby you can get net power, but you need to add so many bells and whistles that the machine is no longer economical. Or it could be a dead idea.

====
How it works:

The machine itself is 6 rings in a box. The rings are electromagnetics. Each has a north and south pole. The same poles face into the center - AKA six north poles facing inward. In the center, there is a null point which will scatter the particles. These rings are inside a wire cage. The cage is biased (-) to the rings. So, there are two fields inside the machine. A magnetic field in the center and a electric field surrounding it. This is inside a vacuum chamber. At the start, the fields are on and the vacuum is made.

First, electrons are released. Because of the cage field, they experience a Lorentz force and fly to the rings. At some point, the magnetic part of the Lorentz force is greater than the electric part - the electrons are "caught" by the ring field. They start corkscrewing along the magnetic field lines. They pass through the null point in the center. They pass straight through. This straight motion, scatters them, and is one way for the electrons to leak out. The electrons head to the corners or sides. They start to corkscrew tighter and tighter as the move into denser fields. When they hit a dense field in the corner they are reflected. This is a magnetic mirror effect. The rings are imposing a magnetic field pressure on the plasma in the center. The plasma cloud also has a pressure of its own. These pressures can balance one another (the same way they do in Tokomaks). This is call Beta=1 conditions.

When billions of electrons are trapped they form a cloud in the center. This cloud MAY look like a 14 point "star". Each point would be pointed at a corner or the sides of the box of rings. Now about 1.2 to 1.5E12 extra electrons are packed inside the rings. This makes a 10,000 volt drop at about 8" from the center. At this point deuterium gas is puffed in. They used a glass tube to this, and they puffed in at a pressure of ~0.04 Pascal's. The D2 gas is uncharged. This means it can cross to the rings without being effected by the electric and magnetic fields. When it reaches the edge of the electron cloud, it exchanges energy with the electrons. If this heats the ion up past 16 eV, it ionizes the gas. The Gas spilts apart into two ions and two electrons. The ions feel the 10,000 volt drop in front of them. They fall down the drop. They heat up. They are gaining kinetic energy. The electric field is doing work on the ions, heating them to fusion conditions. If they hit in the center at 10KeV they can fuse.


====
Now as they fall there are many other things that can happen. These are competing physics mechanisms. They can collide with each other and not fuse. They can gain so much energy, they fly out the other side of the well. They can not find other. They can be slowed by the (+) and (-) interactions with the electron cloud. Many problems! So, we need allot more work to flush out this idea - and it may be a dud in the end.

====
There is a new YouTube film - "The Polywell 101" which walks the viewer through most of this. Check it out here:

[The Polywell Guy]

19. Video Covering All Fusion Research in 5 Min

Hey Guys,

Guess nobody read my technical post. If you want to see a rousing video in support of fusion, you guys should watch this:

(I made this as well)

[The Polywell Guy]

20. Polywell Guy Here - Sorry I have not been around!

Hello Everyone,


I am a real person. I do not post on DU often. But, as far as online communities go, yours seems to be very accepting. I hope you are also skeptical and inquisitive.


The Polywell has not worked or failed - yet. We do not know. We have to try and see. It may fail. There have been several events surrounding the polywell, since August. Here is a quick list:

- In July, "NBC Rock Center" with Brian Williams, interviewed Taylor Wilson about his homemade fusion reactor. His fusor is similar to a polywell.

- In July, the first Polywell PhD Thesis was published

- On October first, the Physics of Plasmas journal published a new polywell paper. This work simulated electron motion inside the machine.

- On October 8th, the 14th annual IEC conference wrapped up in Japan. Several polywell presentations were made available.

- On October 22nd, a Polywell start up in Washington state did its first investor call. I have reviewed/explained some of their work, in detail, on the polywell blog.

- On November 1rst, MIT Colab featured the polywell in it's: "solutions to the climate crisis" conference. Though, people who attended, were not as enthusiastic as you may have expected.

- On November 12th, the University of Wisconsin presented its' first Polywell work at the 2013 American Physical Society conference. A young grad student named Jeff, presented some limited simulation work. Hopefully we get a paper out of this.

- On December 27th, The first IEC textbook was published by springier, from the University of Illinois.

===
There are also a few new Polywell/fusor groups. The first is the Northwest nuclear consortium. Carl Greinger, a manager at Microsoft, built a fusor in his home in Washington state. 18 high school physics students - Learn & Do Real Nuclear Fusion - on a weekly basis. The group has won several science fairs, and has 4 instructors. The other is Radiant Matter Research - a pair of dutch college students have built a fusor and are on path to building a polywell in the Netherlands. These are small machines with low power but the pair has been at it for a couple of years. Finally, a new amateur (John Dudmesh) has started a project in Brighton, England. He only just started though - very early stages. Lastly, I have two new posts up, check them out:

http://thepolywellblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-serious-need-for-data.html

http://thepolywellblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/we-have-to-try.html