Peak Oil Optimist

Purdue Panel Finds Misconduct By Taleyarkhan

2008-07-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Purdue committee, which includes representatives from other schools, said that in a follow-up paper published in 2006 in Physical Review Letters, Taleyarkhan falsely claimed that his 2002 work had been independently confirmed.
The panel also found that in a pair of 2005 papers, Taleyarkhan added another person as an author even though that researcher did not substantially contribute.
...
"From small beginnings there developed a tangled web of wishful thinking, scientific misjudgment, institutional lapses and human failings," the committee wrote. "Each strand could have been resolved separately, but knitting them together produced a crisis."

Lockheed Mumbles Something About EEStor

2008-01-22T17:59:00.000-08:00

Lockheed Martin supposedly has signed an agreement with EEStor to deliver products, though the former company won't admit to having seen even so much as a prototype. Delivery is supposed to be at the end of the year. More: the article says that the ZENN car company is expecting production modules by mid-year. We'll see.

R.A. Nebel On Plasma Calculations

2008-01-17T22:45:00.000-08:00

R.A. Nebel writes in the comments section of the MSNBC thread:

In general, some types of plasma theories work pretty well and others not so well. Plasma theories work pretty well for calculating equilibria and global stability. Transport calculations and kinetic calculations are considerably more suspect. The thing that raises the red flags about the collisionality calculations is that when you look at the Chacon work he sees a big difference between square potential wells (as assumed by Nevins) and parabolic potential wells. I would not have expected that result, and that tells me that none of these results are truly "generic". I think this issue has to be resolved experimentally. That's not to imply that these calculations have no value. What they do tell you is that collisions on the boundary are beneficial (they remove angular momentum) while collisions in the core can be a problem. This, of course, was known by Bussard and Krall a long time ago. It's also possible to affect these collision rates by techniques like gas puffing into the boundary (i.e. introducing neutrals).
Also, I would like to thank M Simon, TallDave and their fellow bloggers for their continued interest in this technology. We appreciate that a great deal, but as you might imagine we have been a little too busy to communicate very much with the on-line people.

It makes you wonder just how much could be accomplished with computers, or how little.

First Plasma In Los Alamos

2008-01-10T23:23:00.000-08:00

It's really hard what to know what to say about this (MSNBC). I hope for the best. It's not nearly enough. It may never be. I keep my fingers crossed.

Update 1/11: Corrected the title to reflect reality (s/Fusion/Plasma/).

A Useful BS Detector Kit

2008-01-04T10:26:00.000-08:00

In the absence of useful and/or hopeful news, I stumbled onto a thread a few days ago at talk-polywell.org in which the topic of discussion was alleged ultraconductors, discovered and named by one Dr. Leonid Grigorov, Ph.D., Dc.S, formerly of the Polymer Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. This led to the discovery that the company in the U.S. hyperbolically claiming to be on the verge of commercializing this remarkable discovery is also one and the same as Magnetic Power, Inc., another of the zero-point energy loons. One of the useful things I did find, however, was a post in the Skeptics Society Forum detailing a useful BS detector kit, proffered by someone who claimed to work for venture capital. As a service to my reader(s?), I reproduce it forthwith:

I spent a lot of years in and around the venture capital industry. We developed our own baloney detection kits, tuned to use business plans and web sites to protect us from garbage businesses.

Here are some questions, cribbed from that kit:
1) Give me an authentic provenance to the idea. Show me the small steps others have made leading up to it.
2) Does it already have legitimate VC funding? (Military money is notoriously dumb, so it doesn't count.)
3) To whom does the principal give his or her time? (I would be much happier to see the AAAS than the American Antigravity folks: see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/americana ... message/64.)
4) Show me a credible reference client with a real application.
5) If you can't show me a reference client, show me a working prototype. If it's on the verge of being commercialized, it must be working somewhere ... in a house, in a car, in a flashlight, in an iPod. Show me! You have to know I will bring a plague of experts to bear on this prototype, so it had better be GOOD.
6) What is the history of ideas of the principals? What else are they involved in? (Zero Point Energy and energy from magnets are very, very bad signs. http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?nam ... e&sid=1357)
7) Look at the language. Is the development always "on the verge" of being ready? Is the "establishment" always "wrong", and the principal always right? Do they make the "Chinese market" logical fallacy? (Read "Art of the Start" ... not enough space here.) Watch out for firms that miss "whopper deadlines" (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000045.html) by a mile.
8) Show me peer-reviewed papers and presentations at mainstream scientific conferences by the principals. Better yet, show me serious scientists who respond to these papers. Papers by other people on collateral topics don't count. A paper on ZPE is not the same as a paper outlining an industrial process to capture it.
9) Give me reproducibility. I won't look at a company with "secret processes"; if you can't show me how someone else can do it, I won't even get up from my desk.
10) Give me competitors. If one person can do it, so can someone else. If one person is working on it now, you can bet two or three others are, too. You are defined by the quality of your cometitors, so the competitors had better look good to the baloney kit. If you compete with Boeing (even in a minor way), I am impressed. If you compete with Johann Bessler, I am much less impressed.

R-Squared's Top Energy Stories

2007-12-24T16:16:00.000-08:00

Of course, my favorite on the list is number 10:

10. US Navy funds Bussard Fusion

I think you have to include the US Navy funding Bussard Fusion in there:

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=3139619&C=navwar

Bussard died a couple months ago. I had really given up on fusion, but his work actually appears to have a reasonable change to work. Hopefully with more funding his team will be able to make it work.

Yes, Dr. Bussard's work will be carried on. First step is to construct WB-7 and replicate the results achieved with WB-6. Hopefully by the end of April 2008. If that works, then on to WB-8, and then an actual power generating plant.

Number 25 is also pretty interesting:

25. Cooper Pairs in insulators

http://www.aip.org/pnu/2007/split/849-1.html

One of the AIP's top stories of the year, this discovery may well help us reach a better understanding of superconductivity and insulators both. Superconductivity is of course a holy grail in energy research, and while this discovery doesn't directly lead to a room temp superconductor, it does add to the fundamental knowledge of material in the solid state.

Read the whole thing. It's good stuff.

Interesting Bussard Obit In The New Mexican

2007-12-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

From the comments in a prior post, Power And Control points to an obituary of Robert Bussard in The New Mexican.

March to May. It's no overstatement to say, as M. Simon does, that "Civilization depends on it."

First Product Rolls Off Nanosolar Manufacturing Line

2007-12-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

News.com has the news of Nanosolar producing their first product ever, which would be a big piece of news right there. (Also at the Nanosolar Blog.) They claim $0.99/watt, which would be an unheard of price for solar. I've had my doubts about the company for a long time considering the hoopla, but if they're actually starting to deliver, well, hooray.

Congress Garrotes ITER

2007-12-19T08:16:00.001-08:00

Zero dollar budget. Sometimes, you just don't know what to say. (Via IEC Fusion Technology.)

BASF Patent For Barium Titanate Ultracapacitor

2007-12-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

I wish I could recall where I saw this, but it sure is interesting. In addition to EEStor, BASF has filed for a patent on a barium titanate ultracapacitor design, number 7,023,687 filed on April 4, 2006. It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these competing designs ever make it to market. The more I read of EEStor (or, perhaps more accurately, the less I read, for they're notoriously quiet and quietly slipping behind schedule), the less inclined I am to believe they'll ever deliver a working product.

Update 12/17: A lot of interesting and heated discussion at Clean Break about this, including an anonymous commenter who claims that energy stored is proportional to ½cV for non-linear dielectrics (which barium titanate supposedly is) rather than ½cV² for linear dielectrics. One sign — and I agree — we should look for is an actual lab measurement of the properties they believe they can meet. Supposedly this is done in WIPO patent WO/2006/026136. Judging by the tone and arguments raised, it appears the same Anonymous (who may have been a former Maxwell Corp. employee) has been busy recently on Boing Boing as well.

Tad Patzek Joins The Doomers

2007-12-11T13:43:00.000-08:00

Here (PDF):

I argue that with the current set of objective constraints a continuous stable solution to human life cannot exist in the near-future, unless we all rapidly implement much more limited ways of using the Earth’s resources, while reducing the global populations of cars, trucks, livestock and, eventually, also humans.

You first, Tad.

Another IEC Fusion Company: Fusion Power Generation

2007-12-11T13:16:00.000-08:00

A couple of Columbia grads are having a go at IEC fusion under the name Fusion Power Generation, and they're looking for funding. (Aren't we all?) Alex Klein used to work at EMC2; the meat of his approach can be found on their Q & A page:

9. What is different about our approach?
- By adding a particular type of magnetic field to a traditional spherical IEC machine, using a shaped electromagnet which doubles as the accelerating cathode, we are able to dramatically lower the losses of energetic ions that limit the efficiency of traditional designs.
- The magnetic field confines electrons to the reaction region at the center of the machine; electrons enter via secondary emission from the electromagnet itself. The electrons bulk-neutralize the positive charge of the ions, and allow the ions to converge to very high densities at the center: the density can be increased by a factor of 10,000 or more over conventional IEC devices.
- The magnetic field also creates space charge lenses at the openings of the electromagnet so-called magnetic mirrors, which in turn serve to continually refocus beams of ions as they pass in and out of the core. The focusing action can be made to exactly counteract the effect of Coulomb collisions between particles, and ions can re-circulate on stable orbits thousands of times through the device without colliding with a material structure, preventing the loss of energy that limits the efficiency of conventional machines. In this way the density will be greatly increased while the input power to the device will be reduced over conventional IEC machines.
- Both effects will help solve the problems that have limited previous IEC experiments' performance.
- With higher densities, electrons and ions can arrange themselves in alternating layers of positive and negative charge, forming "virtual electrodes" that can result in yet higher densities of ions at the center of the machine, and a trapped ion population that never intersects any material structure. Evidence for this effect has previously been observed in operating IEC machine.
- The addition of a small radio frequency modulation of the cathode voltage will drive trapped ions to converge simultaneously at megahertz rates in the very center of the machine at high energies, provided a harmonic electric potential can be maintained inside the cathode, an effect called POPS (Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere) that has been documented in previous IEC experiments.
- Pulsed operation will potentially raise the fusion rate still further.
- We have plans to extract ions which have developed non-ideal orbits at low energy, thus substantially increasing the energy confinement time and further raising efficiency.

Good luck, guys. (Hat tip: jumartinez at talk-polywell.org.)

Followup: Global Resource Corp.

2007-11-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

With respect to an earlier story about Global Resource Corp., a company that claimed to have a means to convert plastic to crude oil: here's a post from a broker who seems to have lost his appetite for that company. Reading GRC's most recent 10-K should give you pause to consider; the chain of companies runs from EmailMortgage.com to Advance Medical Technologies Inc. to Carbon Recovery Corporation to the current configuration; and all of these have interlocking boards with no outsiders on them. Eww.

An "Earthquake" At The IEA

2007-10-31T20:39:00.000-07:00

I don't like writing about oil much, but this amounts to the IEA hitting the panic button. Years too late, but ...

LONDON: The rapidly growing appetite for fossil fuels in China and India is likely to help keep oil prices high for the foreseeable future - threatening a global economic slowdown, a top energy expert said Wednesday.
The unusually stark warning by Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, about the impact of Asia's emerging giants comes as the agency prepares to issue its influential annual report next week, which will focus on China and India.
In preparing the report, Birol said he had experienced "an earthquake" in his thinking.
"China plus India are going to dominate growth in the oil markets," Birol said during an interview at an oil industry conference. During the past 18 months, he noted, more than two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand came from China and India alone.
Demand for oil in China, he added, would eventually equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia.
Partly as a result, he added, the annual report would predict that oil prices, now at about $93 a barrel, could remain at levels much higher than thought possible in the past. This, he said, heightened the risk of a serious global economic slowdown.
"We may see very high prices that will come to a level where the wheels may fall off," Birol said. "I definitely believe that if prices stay at these levels, there will be a slowdown of the global economy."

Navy Funds EMC2 Efforts

2007-10-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Via Power And Control, the Navy is funding EMC2 Corp. to find out whether Bussard's claims about the WB-6 unit were correct, to the tune of $2M. The Defense News article's physics are a bit off, though:

Bussard received nearly $2 million under a U.S. Navy contract in August to continue work on an inertial electrostatic confinement reactor he had developed. The reactor uses magnetic fields to confine electrons, whose negative charge causes protons and Boron 11 atoms to fuse. The fusion sets off a chain of reactions that produces electricity.

The electrons actually get in the way of the process (see brehmsstrahlung radiation).

New (To Me) Blog: Energy From Thorium

2007-10-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

Now on the sidebar.

What To Do With Those Neutrons? Part 2, Neutron Effects

2007-10-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Interesting citation here indicating that "[f]ew previous studies have shown measurable effects on the mechanical properties of HY-80 steel if irradiation levels are below 1x10¹⁷n/cm²." Nevertheless, it it would be useful to see what kind of radioactive changes the neutrons might induce in said steel. Using the wise-uranium.org calculator, for fast neutrons bombarding 1 kg stainless for a year, we get the following (slightly reformatted):

Neutron flux = 647.0e9  per cm2s
Irradiation = 1 a;  Delay = 0 h 
 
    Original      Reaction      Activation       Half-
    Nuclide                     & Decay (~>)     Life
                                Products

710.0 g Iron:
          Fe-54    (n,3n) ->           Fe-52    (8.275 h)
                                    ~> Mn-52m   (21.40 m)
                                    ~> Mn-52    (5.592 d)
          Fe-54    (n,p)  ->           Mn-54    (312.7 d)
          Fe-54    (n,t)  ->           Mn-52    (5.592 d)
          Fe-54    (n,A)  ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Fe-56    (n,2n) ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Fe-56    (n,p)  ->           Mn-56    (2.578 h)
          Fe-56    (n,t)  ->           Mn-54    (312.7 d)
          Fe-57    (n,3n) ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Fe-57    (n,p)  ->           Mn-57    (1.470 m)
          Fe-58    (n,t)  ->           Mn-56    (2.578 h)

190.0 g Chromium:
          Cr-50    (n,2n) ->           Cr-49    (42.09 m)
                                    ~> V-49     (330.0 d)
          Cr-50    (n,t)  ->           V-48     (15.97 d)
          Cr-52    (n,2n) ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Cr-52    (n,p)  ->           V-52     (3.750 m)
          Cr-53    (n,3n) ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Cr-54    (n,t)  ->           V-52     (3.750 m)
          Cr-54    (n,A)  ->           Ti-51    (5.750 m)

100.0 g Nickel:
          Ni-58    (n,2n) ->           Ni-57    (1.503 d)
                                    ~> Co-57    (270.9 d)
 
          Ni-58    (n,3n) ->           Ni-56    (6.099 d)
                                    ~> Co-56    (78.77 d)
          Ni-58    (n,p)  ->           Co-58    (70.81 d)
          Ni-58    (n,t)  ->           Co-56    (78.77 d)
          Ni-58    (n,A)  ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Ni-60    (n,2n) ->           Ni-59    (75.00e3 a)
          Ni-60    (n,p)  ->           Co-60    (5.271 a)
          Ni-60    (n,t)  ->           Co-58    (70.81 d)
          Ni-61    (n,3n) ->           Ni-59    (75.00e3 a)
          Ni-61    (n,p)  ->           Co-61    (1.650 h)
          Ni-62    (n,t)  ->           Co-60    (5.271 a)
          Ni-62    (n,A)  ->           Fe-59    (44.64 d)
          Ni-64    (n,2n) ->           Ni-63    (100.1 a)

There's a fair number of short-lived isotopes there, which usually means you'll end up with a mess of radioactivity. I'm still working on calculating all the decay products.

A very cranky, opinionated look at this was on talk-polywell, but I missed it earlier.

Update 10/18: Back to our 1 GW reference case, this means radiated power from fast neutrons (just the ¹¹B + α reaction) ends up as

7.3x10¹⁷ neutrons/s * 2.7x10⁶ MeV/neutron * 1.602x10^-19 J/eV = 316 kW

M. Simon suggested that a 500 MW Polywell device would throw off 5 kW of neutrons. I'm not sure how he derives that figure, but I'll ask.

Robert Bussard Passes

2007-10-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

Via Slashdot. Also at New Energy And Fuel and Power And Control. I'm speechless.

What To Do With Those Neutrons?

2007-10-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

One problem bugging me about so-called aneutronic fusion is the large numbers of neutrons it actually would produce in practice. To illustrate this, let's go back to an earlier post I wrote about a hypothetical 1GW commercial fusion reactor. Remembering that 1 GW = 1 GJ/s

1 GJ/s / (8.6x10⁶ eV/reaction * 1.602x10^-19 J/eV) = 7.3x10²⁰ reactions/s

Per Wikipedia, 0.1% of all fusion reactions would end up creating a neutron anyway from the ¹¹B + α side reaction. (Update 10/17: This ends up being a 2.7 MeV neutron, well over the threshold of a fast neutron, at 1 MeV.) This means that 7.3x10¹⁷ neutrons/s will be generated from the most widely discussed "aneutronic" fuel out there! That's a simply enormous number. Contrast this with reported background radiation at 2,420m above sea level of 65±3 neutrons/cm²*h. (I'm still trying to come up with a neutron flux figure for a commercial fission reactor.) But assuming a completed ICF device is something like 3m (rounding up a bit) in approximate diameter, and that neutrons are sprayed uniformly (this may not be a good assumption), that means you now have to deal with

4*π*(3m)²*1x10⁴cm²/m²*7.3x10¹⁷n/s = 6.46x10¹¹ n/cm²*s

In a fission reactor, you can use regular water to moderate those neutrons. But what do you do with a fusion reactor?

Coming soon in part 2: how this will affect the parts of the fusor itself thanks to this neutron activation calculator.

Update 10/15: A much better nuclide decay calculator at BNL.gov. "Nuclear Wallet Cards Search" seems almost designed to be impenetrable to Google.

New Sidebar Links, And The Determinism Of Pessimism

2007-10-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

Three new sidebar links (and some culling of older ones, which I didn't document): IEC Fusion Technology, itself an offshoot of Power And Control, which I linked to about a month ago; and Talk-Polywell, which mostly is a bunch of guys praying Robert Bussard is right and Todd Rider is wrong.

On this subject, FuturePundit recently ran a piece about the former chairman of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, admitting peak oil production will occur within the next 20 years. What was interesting was the ensuing comments section, and in particular, Paul Dietz' comments about Bussard's reactor:

It cannot prevent electron-ion interactions. Let me run you through the argument to illustrate the two horns of the dilemma.
Polywell has a putative central interaction region where the ions are energetic and are to undergo nuclear reactions. This interaction region CANNOT exclude electrons. If it did (assuming it even could), the space charge of the ions would limit the ion density to a low value, preventing anywhere close to practical (let alone the promised 100 MW!) power levels.
So, there are electrons in this region. There are two possibilities: the electrons have energies approaching those of the ions ('hot' electrons) or the electrons are significantly less energetic ('cold' electrons).
In the first case, bremsstrahlung power exceeds fusion power.
In the second case, the rate of energy transfer from the ions to the electrons greatly exceeds fusion power. This power would have to be recovered and reinjected with extremely high efficiency. Rider's thesis, IIRC, showed that if the electron temperature were half that of the ions, the recirculating power would exceed the fusion power by a couple of orders of magnitude.
These two cases overlap; in the intermediate energy case both occur.

Re-reading Todd Rider's doctoral thesis "Fundamental limitations on fusion systems not in equilibrium" (note to self: link off the Polywell Wikipedia page — the damn thing keeps moving), it seems a complex net of impossibilities. Want to use a magnetic trap to keep electrons away from the ions? Then you induce synchrotron radiation. And then there's the thermalization problem, which, as far as I can understand it, means the ions will need so much energy to keep them inside the device that, unless you're very very efficient about getting them back in, you'll lose them to the outside of the box before they have a chance to fuse.

Rider, of course, seems to have gone on to become a biomedical researcher, a choice maybe not surprising considering the hopelessness invested in his doctoral dissertation. Maybe he's right, but I do have to ask a hopefully useful question: what was the role of his thesis advisor was in drawing those conclusions? Overseeing Rider's project was Lawrence Lidsky, a long-time MIT fusion researcher who wrote a seminal 1983 paper entitled, "The Trouble With Fusion". Despairing of ever surmounting the engineering challenges, he gave up on fusion altogether, and one wonders just how much that colored Rider's research and paper.

Contradicting Rider: "Maxwell Don't Live Here" claims to have a bunch of answers to why IEC fusion could actually work, bolstered by some recent research at MIT.

EEStor's Ultracapacitor That Isn't (Just Yet?)

2007-09-13T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'll start with this January, 2007 piece at MIT's Technology Review that breathlessly announced EEStor's ultracapacitor; there was recently an AP piece about U.S. Patent 7,033,406, which claimed to cover the thing. The big advance claimed is a huge increase in permittivity even in cold weather and at high voltages, something others in the field say has not been done with years of research invested. Now it looks like they're delaying product shipment until 2008. Hm...

Salt Water As Fuel?

2007-09-11T15:24:00.001-07:00

Oncology researcher John Kanzius pointed a microwave at salt water and got a whole mess of hydrogen:

Mr. Kanzius' discovery was an accident.
He developed the RF generator as a novel cancer treatment. His research in targeting cancer cells with metallic nanoparticles then destroying them with radio-frequency is proceeding at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Manuscripts updating the cancer research are in preparation for publication in coming months, Mr. Kanzius said.
While Mr. Kanzius was demonstrating how his generator heated nanoparticles, someone noted condensation inside the test tube and suggested he try using his equipment to desalinate water.
So, Mr. Kanzius said, he put sea water in a test tube, then trained his machine on it, producing an unexpected spark. In time he and laboratory owners struck a match and ignited the water, which continued burning as long as it remained in the radio-frequency field.
During several trials, heat from burning hydrogen grew hot enough to melt the test tube, he said. Dr. Roy's tests on the machine last week provided further evidence that the process is releasing and burning hydrogen from the water. Tests on different water solutions and concentrations produced various temperatures and flame colors.

Almost certainly this is an energetic dead end; you don't get something for nothing in this universe, and what I suspect they'll find is that energy in from the microwave source equals energy out in H₂ and O₂ gas.

More On Thorium Fission Reactors

2007-09-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

New Energy And Fuel (that's two links in two days!) has an interesting article that links to a piece at Accelerating Future discussing a potential energy source with some promise, thorium fission reactors. Thorium's benefits as an energy source over uranium are manifold: it's more plentiful and thus should be expected to be cheap when mined in quantity, and absent a source of neutrons, won't go supercritical on its own. Of course, that's also a significant drawback, as the real problem with thorium is that its decay chain doesn't produce neutrons, and so the reaction has to be constantly pumped. Nevertheless, an interesting idea.

Bussard Gets Another Round Of Funding?

2007-09-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what to make of this thread at talk-polywell.org citing an August 23 post at Power And Control indicating that Robert Bussard's inertial containment Polywell fusion device has been funded; that post itself points to a lengthier New Energy And Fuel post with more details. I'm hopeful but Bussard has himself confessed to misleading people before for the purpose of getting more money for other projects he feels promising. Nevertheless, since this is his pony (and there's talk he's in failing health), it's pretty certain he's going to ride this one. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Pointing And Laughing Time: Electron Power Systems

2007-09-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

Not for real. Check out also the creation timestamp on the page (05/05/2003 07:49:52 AM) versus the current date at the top of the page, generated thanks to your local clock on your client. Sneaky. At least they're cheap scamsters: they only want $2 million for their seed money...