Speaking of wasting money …

Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light? If you have a personal favorite theory, that is in someway related to the Electric Universe, this is where it can be posted.
BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sun Jul 17, 2022 12:14 am

Fools and their money …

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-Gene ... oding.html
Investment In Nuclear Fusion Is Exploding

… snip …

Nuclear fusion has enjoyed a huge bump-up in global investment over the past 12 months, raising hopes of a breakthrough in clean energy technology. 

New industry figures reveal more has been poured into the sector over the past year than the previous ten combined, as first reported in The Telegraph. 
 
Fusion attracted $2.8bn [£2.5bn] over the past year, compared to around $2bn over the previous decade.

The Fusion Industry Association said more than 93 percent of companies that responded to its survey believe that fusion power will be feeding electricity into power grids by the 2030s
My oh my ... aren't they optimists.

Cargo
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by Cargo » Sun Jul 17, 2022 4:03 am

Imagine if it said
Even previous conspiracy theorists are changing their views on the situation
Clearly, a true waste of words to support the old order.
interstellar filaments conducted electricity having currents as high as 10 thousand billion amperes
"You know not what. .. Perhaps you no longer trust your feelings,." Michael Clarage
"Charge separation prevents the collapse of stars." Wal Thornhill

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Aug 03, 2022 12:56 am

https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/sust ... 1-08-2022/
The Culham Science Centre, which has been home to the UK’s fusion research for more than 40 years, aims to design and build a working commercial fusion reactor by 2040. Supported by £220m of government funding, the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) research programme is key to this process.

… snip …

The fusion plans are separate from the large-scale ITER fusion reactor in France, of which the UK is a partner. The aim is to build small power stations of about 100MW or more with the current STEP designs. Methven says STEP should be expecting to publish invitations to tender for the engineering and construction partner roles by the end of this year, and go through the selection and onboarding process by March 2024.

Fourteen more potential sites

The current shortlisted sites are Ardeer in Ayrshire, Goole in Humberside, Moorside in Cumbria, Severn Edge in Gloucestershire and West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Methven notes that 15 sites were long-listed originally, so if the facility is successful, “we have the option for up to 14 more”.
So, they’re planning 15 sites each probably costing on the order of $2 billion (according to their own estimates) … assuming everything goes as expected (and when has it ever)? If each produces about 100 MW (if everything goes as expected), then that's $30 billion to produce about 1.5 GW from the 15 sites.

Now then, what does it cost to produce 1.5 GWe by other means? The latest data (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/generatorcosts/) indicates natural gas fired power plants cost about $1078 per kw installed. Since a giga watt is a million kw, that’s $1.1 billion per GWe, so a 1.5 GW natural gas power plant would cost just $1.6 billion dollars. And 1.5 GW of petroleum liquid power plants would cost about $1.7 billion dollars. Coal fired power plants (except in China where the environment doesn't matter) now cost about $3500 per kw, making 1.5 GW of coal power plants cost about $5 billion. Even 1 GW nuclear plants still only cost about $5-8 billion to build. So on a per kw electric cost basis, these fusion plants they are starting to build are going to cost 4 to 17 times what the other types of power sources that are available cost to build. No wonder everyone involved in them is fine with going along with this LIE … “The world really shifted itself when it came to COVID-19. Climate change is an existentially much bigger problem than COVID and it needs big solutions to solve it.” There’s money to be made ... off our backs. :x

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Aug 03, 2022 6:24 pm

Regarding the cost of fusion produced electricity …

https://akihabaranews.com/fusion-energy ... -solution/
Kyoto Fusioneering, a startup which was born out of Kyoto University, announced that it will have a testing facility for fusion power plant equipment by 2024. It aims to have a fusion power plant up and running within the next five years. The firm has already raised over ¥1.3 billion (US$10 million) towards its goals.

If all goes according to plan, Kyoto Fusioneering’s power plant will have the ability to actually generate power. However, its energy production is expected to be quite modest–the company believes it will be several dozen kilowatts, or about the energy needed to light up a single incandescent light bulb.
Let’s see. Suppose it’s 50 kw that they produce from their *power plant*. That’s $200,000 per kw. LOL! Who is kidding who? The only people who are going to benefit from this are a bunch of physicists and the folks who build the equipment.

Meanwhile a UK effort (First Light Fusion - FLF) just announced they are seeking 400 million pounds (about 500 million dollars) for the next stage of their “research”. They claim that within a few years they too will produce more energy than they put in. They use the term “energy gain”, however, so I suspect they’re pulling the same stunt that ITER pulled in that they aren’t actually going to produce electricity. And their reactor, like ITER's, will probably consume far more electrical power than it produces by fusion. My opinion is that fusion projects like this are the equivalent of Dark Matter projects. Both ensure the LUCRATIVE employment of physicists for years and years to come. THAT is the real goal.

Furthermore, FLF’s vision of success is building a power plant in 2030s that produces 150 MWe for around 1 billion dollars. That would be $15 billion per 1.5 GW … or about 3 times the cost of coal fired power plants almost 10 times the cost of natural gas and petroleum fueled power plants. So what they are promising is electricity costing 3 to 10 times what it currently costs … starting just 10 years from now. In short, they promise to crash the world’s economy … all in the name of Zero Carbon, which is their stated motivation for pursuing this project. These people are not only greedy but foolish.

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Aug 03, 2022 6:27 pm

There’s one other fusion project I’d like to mention. In 2021 a company called Helion (https://www.helionenergy.com/fusion-energy/) secured $2.2 billion to commercialize fusion energy. They broke ground on a facility in Everett Washington where they planned to build a “7th generation fusion prototype called Polaris”. They expected construction to be complete in 2022 but now it’s not expected to be finished till 2023. But they claim that by 2024 they will demonstration net electricity production and that by 2030 commercial reactors could be ready.

Now I’m a little skeptical simply because back in 2014, the CEO of Helion told the Wall Street Journal that “we hope to reach that goal (net energy gain) in the next three years” and “profitable fusion energy in 2019”. In 2015 they claimed they’d demonstrate net energy gain by 2017 and promised a 50 MWe pilot plant by 2019. In 2016 they were still promising net energy gain with “a couple years” but now commercial power was “6 years” away. In 2018, “breakeven energy generation was 3 years away”. Their goal posts keep moving, like all these efforts. So why should we believe them now?

So many of these efforts are nothing but promises, promises, promises and apparently there are plenty of suckers who will believe these promises. Indeed, such scams are now the bread and butter of many physicists … be it in the fusion arena or the dark matter arena. And with the help of the bogus Climate Change scam, there is money to made.

BUT, I will admit this about the Helion venture. At least their approach to generating electricity is innovative and more in line with some of the notions of EU. They call their device a “linear fusion reactor”. It doesn’t try to maintain a stable fusion reaction like a tokamak or stellarator. And it doesn’t remove the heat from the plasma with a heat exchanger and turbines to convert steam to electricity. Instead, pulsed magnetic fields accelerate plasma into a burn chamber where the plasma fuses. The plasma expands, then magnetic coils in the walls of the reactor generate electricity from this moving plasma. The process is then repeated over and over and over, much like a diesel engine operates. They claim that as much as 95% of the energy released from the plasmas might be converted to electricity this way, rather than the 40% a typical heat exchanger/turbine approach achieves. And they claim they can build much smaller reactors … on the order of 50 MW … than the other approaches claim is economically feasible. Guess we’ll have to wait and see if this one pans out. At least we don’t have to wait 20-30 years to get to the demo stage like ITER promises.

BeAChooser
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Here’s a great article on how the fusion scam works …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Mon Aug 08, 2022 11:03 pm

Well worth a read ...

https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/08 ... ntentions/
MIT’s Road to Nuclear Fusion Is Paved With Good Intentions

By Steven B. Krivit


Aug. 8, 2022
What it shows is that the MIT/Commonwealth Fusion Systems SPARC project is likely a scam. They've gotten massive funding recently from a number of big investors (including Bill Gates, Google and George Soros) based on intentionally misleading statements that led them to believing MIT/CFS is building something they aren't actually building ... "the world’s first commercially relevant net energy fusion machine.” And because these investors had their own agenda that they couldn't see past (they wish to control the future power supply of the public) they were easily taken for a ride.

Cargo
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by Cargo » Tue Aug 09, 2022 4:24 am

Reference for my blank quote above. jic bac fia eol
BeAChooser wrote: Sat Jul 09, 2022 1:07 am
Can Fusion Solve the Climate Change Problem?
Re: Speaking of wasting money …
interstellar filaments conducted electricity having currents as high as 10 thousand billion amperes
"You know not what. .. Perhaps you no longer trust your feelings,." Michael Clarage
"Charge separation prevents the collapse of stars." Wal Thornhill

BeAChooser
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Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2015 2:24 am

Newsweek gets it wrong …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sun Aug 14, 2022 5:36 am

https://www.newsweek.com/nuclear-fusion ... ia-1733238
Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Confirmed: California Team Achieved Ignition

A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL's) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the Sun and other stars: heavy hydrogen atoms collide with enough force that they fuse together to form a helium atom, releasing large amounts of energy as a by-product. Once the hydrogen plasma "ignites", the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, with the fusions themselves producing enough power to maintain the temperature without external heating.
Hmmmm. First of all, that article make it sound like no other fusion effort in the world has managed to fuse deuterium and tritium. But that’s not true. In fact, back in 2014 even LLNL was reporting that they had generated through fusion reactions more energy than what was deposited into the fuel. Of course, what Newsweek was trying to report is LLNL’s progress in achieving ignition.

Here's what Newsweek says LLNL achieved a year ago: “In this latest milestone at the LLNL, researchers recorded an energy yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) during only a few nanoseconds.” That’s true. In fact, LLNL reported (https://annual.llnl.gov/fy-2021/thresho ... ition-2021 ) in 2021 that the “fusion yield was 25 times more than the record set in 2018.” The LLNL article noted that “ignition occurs when the fusion energy produced exceeds the amount of laser energy delivered to the target chamber. The measure fusion yield was about 70 percent of that goal.

So Newsweek is wrong to claim that ignition was achieve. Maybe Newsweek’s *science* reporter didn’t actually read the reports that LLNL produced because nearly every other news outlet did and reported that LLNL was on the “threshold” of ignition. Maybe Newsweek’s science guy doesn’t understand the mean of threshold? In any case, they are still a long way from building an economically viable commercial fusion power plant by this means. Remember that as far as a commercial fusion power plant breaking even, there are large energy loses to produce the electricity delivered to the NIF. Now once a power plant is in operation, presumably it will supply it own power. But there are also loses converting that electricity to laser beams. In fact, this CNBC article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/17/lawrenc ... usion.html) quotes Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for LLNL’s inertial-confinement fusion program, saying “The bottom line is that very little energy ever makes it into the fusion fuel as compared to the electricity we used to charge the laser.” Plus there will be large energy losses when converting the heat that the fusion produces back into electricity. In short, they are a long way from building an economically viable commercial fusion power plant.

In fact, this article in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- ... 240a1c0e0d ) noted that repeated attempts to replicate the August 8 experiment produced at most only 50% as much output energy. It states “for many, the failure to reproduce last August’s experiment underscores researchers’ inability to understand, engineer and predict experiments at these energies with precision.” As a result, some researchers have suggested that it’s time to rethink the National Ignition Facility’s design. “I think they should call it a success and stop,” says Stephen Bodner, a physicist who formerly headed the laser-fusion programme at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. “Bodner says the NIF is a technological dead end, and that it is time to prepare for a next-generation laser that could open the door to fusion energy.” In other words, give us more money. Lots of it. And clearly things aren’t quite as rosy as Newsweek and a few other media outlet’s portrayed. Oh … and by the way, the NIF opened in 2009 with a promise to achieve ignition in 2012. Here it is a decade after that deadline and they still haven’t met that goal. The Nature article also confirms that the August 8th shot “didn’t meet the NAS definition of ignition.” So Newsweek article title is wrong … nothing more than hype.

One final point. The real reason LLNL pursues this is for weapons development. That’s their charter. And the Nature article says that “Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for Livermore’s inertial-confinement fusion programme, has advocated pressing forwards with the existing experimental design to probe this energy regime, rather than stepping back to regroup. … snip … For his part, Hurricane … snip … maintains that the device is now operating in a crucial fusion regime that will be useful for understanding and predicting the reliability of nuclear weapons.” So let’s not be deceived by a Newsweek article touting the promise of no carbon, fusion power plants that are just around the corner thank’s to LLNL’s “breakthrough”. Just saying …

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:48 pm

Read this …

https://henryscharbroiler.com/surprisin ... ee-energy/

Does it make any sense to any of you?

Do you ever get the feeling that fusion *scientists* are akin to witch doctors …

… just poking sticks at what they don’t understand to see what happens?

jackokie
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by jackokie » Sat Aug 20, 2022 4:54 pm

Re: Helion Fusion. It looks like they are taking the same approach as SpaceX, iterating through increasingly capable designs that apply lessons learned from the last test article. Their optimistic forecasts are also reminiscent of Elon's. ;) Their design does seem to be among the most promising - much better than the Tokomat. I haven't heard anything about Lockheed's project lately, but I'm guessing it's turning out to be a lot harder than they thought.

I wonder what would result if Helion and Eric Lerner's LPP Fusion hooked up.
Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sat Aug 20, 2022 5:09 pm

jackokie wrote: Sat Aug 20, 2022 4:54 pm I wonder what would result if Helion and Eric Lerner's LPP Fusion hooked up.
They are fundamentally different approaches to producing fusion, but they might be able to learn something useful from each other.

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Aug 24, 2022 12:35 am

Today there's news regarding a 12 billion dollar program being sold on a LIE.

Here’s the lie …

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/step ... -to-fusion
“It’s clear we must make significant changes to address the effects of climate change, and STEP’s delivery partners will play a crucial role in our quest to making fusion a reality.”
And here’s the 12 billion …

https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/sust ... 3-08-2022/
Construction partner sought for £10bn nuclear build
This is what happens when socialists control *science* and your pocketbook. A rush to stupidity.

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Aug 24, 2022 1:49 am

Well … I suppose the $10 billion pounds the UK is investing in their STEP program might be a better investment than this $10 billion dollars *investment* has been: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-roo ... mmunities/ . Just saying …

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Aug 24, 2022 4:28 pm

I noticed this article by “Doctor Y” on the American Council on Science and Health’s website: https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/08/24/fu ... tion-16509 “Fusion Power – Finally At Ignition!” It says “A recent article in The Science Times reports an announcement from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the publication of three papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature describing experiments over the last year that NIF claims meet the criteria for having briefly achieved “ignition” in hydrogen fusion. It links to this announcement by LLNL: https://www.llnl.gov/news/three-peer-re ... ity-record . Funny thing, though. That doesn’t claim that they “briefly achieved ‘ignition’”. In fact, the very first paragraph states the 1.3 megajoule shot puts them “at the threshold of fusion gain and achieving scientific ignition.

Then there’s this article at the sciencealert website: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists ... plicate-it “Scientists Achieved Self-Sustaining Nuclear Fusion… But Now They Can't Replicate It”. It states that “Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility in California have spent over a decade perfecting their technique and have now confirmed that the landmark experiment conducted on 8 August 2021 did, in fact, produce the first-ever successful ignition of a nuclear fusion reaction.” That article links to this: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/1 ... 129.075001 “Lawson Criterion for Ignition Exceeded in an Inertial Fusion Experiment”

The problem is that back in 1997, when the $1.1 billion dollar (which turned out to be about $3.5 billion) NIF was first proposed, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) formed a committee to review the proposal that defined ignition as an experiment that generates more energy than it consumes. Here, from the Executive Summary of their review of the proposed NIF (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/5730/chapter/2 ): “ The definition of ‘ignition’ adopted here is fusion energy output greater than laser energy incident on the target assembly”. In Chapter 1 of that report, under the heading “Definition of Ignition”, it said “A plot of fusion yield as a function of other relevant drive parameters … snip … leads to the operative definition of ignition adopted by the committee: gain greater than unity.”

But as already pointed out in the earlier articles I posted on this, that didn't happen. Even Doctor Y admitted that it didn't in his article. So it sounds to me like the NIF organization is now trying to redefine what was agreed to be the definition of ignition in order to get the NIF approved in the first place. And that smacks of desperation. Just saying ...

BeAChooser
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Re: Speaking of wasting money …

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sat Aug 27, 2022 10:52 pm

Just published …

https://ungo.com.tr/en/2022/08/the-higgs-boson/
The Higgs boson: Everything about the God Particle
Yeah … everything except what good is it?

Seriously, folks, was this discovery really worth spending $4+ billion on?

What good … what technology … what changes in our life … have come from it?

As the article points out “The Higgs boson’s discovery was a significant achievement in physics. However, significant advances in particle physics have not been made since”, and the article doesn’t describe one thing that would change any of our lives in a measurable way. Yet the mainstream wants to throw even more money at particle physicists now. A lot more.

They want to build a Future Circular Collider (FSC) (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/1 ... 2056-w.pdf and https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00173-2) that is 4 times the diameter of the LHC and which might cost … hold on to your sombreros … more than $20 billion dollars at current exchange rates … and with no guarantees it will find anything of value. And a large part of the justification for building such a device is that it would broaden the exploration for different Dark Matter candidates.

And such early cost estimates are notoriously off. The LHC which ended up costing twice what it was initially estimated to cost. The now discontinued SSC started out with $3.1 billion estimate which had been revised to $8.6 billion by the time it was canceled. So I'd hazard that the FCC could end up costing $50 billion dollars! And for WHAT? Another digit in the mass of the Higgs boson? Another negative DM result?

As Jared Kaplan, a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University, recently said (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019 ... er-physics ) “The humanitarian case is very weak, and it was weak for the LHC as well.” “The reason for pessimism about practical applications is that we understand nature really, really well in some respects." Colliders are "getting further removed from relevance to technologies on a human scale.” As that article says, “The particles we discover in colliders like these exist only under extremely rare conditions, require extraordinary effort to produce, and are incredibly unstable, existing for only fractions of a second. E ven if one of them had incredibly useful properties, ... snip ... it’s hard to imagine how we’d get to industrial applications. … snip … So whatever we discover with the Future Circular Collider, it’s very unlikely to be a new energy source or to produce new products or techniques.”

So isn’t it about time we stop feeding the beast of modern particle physics? It would end up being more wasted money.

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