Here's a pretty good primer on why all the interest in mining He3 from the moon, including shots of what appears to be a grid-based IEC type device:
The continuation of this film can also be found here at YouTube Thanks for forum member Zixinus for the links.
Venture Capital in Silicon Valley is contemplating nuclear fusion:
Link: RED HERRING | Startup Chases Nuclear Fusion.
Even with all the hullabaloo about clean energy, few scenarios are as pie-in-the-sky as nuclear fusion power. The sun and stars are powered by fusion reactions, and scientists have been working for more than half a century in hopes of harnessing the phenomenon to develop a clean and abundant source of energy here on Earth.
Enter Tri Alpha Energy. The Foothill Ranch, California-based startup last month raised $40 million in venture capital to do just that, seemingly upending all Silicon Valley logic. “Our primary application is to build an alternative energy platform for power generation,” says Dale Prouty, CEO of Tri Alpha, which is so publicity-shy it doesn’t have a web site. “But we’re a long way from knowing if this is going to work or not.”
I hope they're doing their homework before they start spending that $40-Million, or they're gonna wind up like Jimmy Olsen, burning their cash just to contact Superman...
Ya gotta love it when somebody writes their first article fusion, and assures us that the future just barely exceeds our grasp....
Link: Engineer Live!.
Power generation: nuclear fusion closer
The holy grail for researchers in power generation is nuclear fusion. It promises the clean power of conventional fission with the safety of non-nuclear technology.
One kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuel. There are no chain reactions, no production of radioactive actinides and the radiotoxicity of fusion waste materials decays rapidly.
But there are still two major hurdles to overcome. One is containing the tremendous heat given off by fusion, 100 million degrees centigrade; the other is generating sufficient power for the fusion process.
Yup, just figure out how to bottle the star and the rest is easy....
From CBS 60 Minutes - April 8, 2007:
With power demands rising and concerns over global warming
increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing
large amounts of carbon free energy. One of the few available options
is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go and may now
be coming again.
For the first time in decades, new nuclear plants are being built,
and not just in Iran and North Korea. With zero green house gas
emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some
environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power.
And as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, one of the first the places they are looking is to France, where it has been a resounding success and the attitude is "Vive Les Nukes."
(CBS/AP) Quote "Wind and solar are you know, temporary sources of energy. It works when you have wind, it works when you have sun. No sun, no wind, no energy. You don't want watch TV only when you have wind." -- Anne Lauvergeon
Brace yourselves for an onslaught of newbies... WIRED magazine has just issued this article at wired.com that covers the full range of fusion experiments in the world today, and prominently features the work that our members here at fusor.net are conducting:
There is, however, a problem: Fusion doesn't work. In hopes of changing that, international consortia have plunged billions into research, with the latest project, ITER, tagged at $13.3 billion. Even so, scientists expect it will take ITER decades to consistently produce more energy than its consumes.
Faced with such immense price tags, it's easy to be startled by the work of people like Thiago Olson, Frank Sanns and Raymond Jimenez. These men all share one thing in common: they've all built fusors -- simple, fully-functional fusion reactors -- using readily available parts, and shared their experiments online.)
They call themselves fusioneers.
"Fusion has always intrigued me, but did not seem like the kind of thing you could do in your basement," said Sanns. "It is quite involved but quite elegant, and ... the fusion is spectacular."
I don't know if it's been mathematically proven yet, but I still suspect that even our low-yield fusors are generating far more fusion-per-dollar than those billion dollar boondoggles...
Please direct your discussion of this article to this section in the fusor forums
Link: Fusion Experiments Show Nuclear Power's Softer Side -.
This doesn't really have anything to do with fusion, but most of the visitors and regulars here, in addition to being Philo-files, are also well aware of the contributions that Nikola Tesla has made to electrical science. And this doesn't really have anything to do with Tesla, either, except that his name is being used as the marque for a new, 100% rechargeable electric car called the Tesla Roadster
One of the editors PC Magazine has had a chance to examine one of the prototypes and reports his findings here:
Due on the market this fall, at a price of $92,000, the Tesla is powered by the same lithium-ion battery cells that drive the average laptop or smartphone, and you can charge it from an ordinary wall socket. There's even a grate under the rear fender where the car expels hot air, just like the typical desktop PC.
Several prototypes are already assembled, and last night, I was invited down to the company's Silicon Valley offices for a spin down the freeway. No, I didn't get to drive. Each prototype was built at a cost of over a million dollars, and only the lucky few covered by the company insurance policy are permitted behind the wheel. But I did get the rush of sitting in the passenger seat of this Lotus-like two-door convertible. And what a rush it is!
On second thought, maybe there is a fusion connection to this story. I mean, if we're going to have a world of non-polluting electric cars, the electricity is going to have to come from somewhere, and unless we find some source other than coal or gas fired generators (and fission reactors), there will be no net-gain in reduced emissions if the cars are the only things running on electricity. So the sooner somebody comes up with practical fusion generation, the sooner cars like the Tesla Roadster will make any kind of real environmental sense.
Link: Tesla Roadster: Test Driving Your Electric Dream Car - News and Analysis by PC Magazine.
Link: DefenseNews.com - Fighting for Fusion - 03/05/07 17:52.
Discuss this article in the forumsHe completed low-power tests in September and October and began high-power testing of the reactor in November. After four tests Nov. 9 and 10, an electromagnetic coil short-circuited as electricity surged through it, “vaporizing” part of his reactor, Bussard said, and bringing his tests to an end. “The following Monday, we started to tear the lab down. Nobody had time to reduce the data that was stored on the computer. It wasn’t until early December that we reduced the data and looked at it and realized what we had done,” he said. Bussard said he and his small team of scientists had proven that nuclear fusion can be harnessed as a usable source of cheap, clean energy.
...
and this time from across the pond.
Physics Web, the online journal of the Institute of Physics in the UK, has run a very nice article about the Fusor and people in the UK and Ireland who are building them. Comparing the Fusor to the humongous ITER now being built in France, author Edwin Cartlidge writes,
the device that sits on a bench in the corner of a quiet laboratory at Cambridge University. Like the reactors built by professional scientists, this machine can be used to create fusion reactions – tens of thousands of deuterium–deuterium reactions per second. But this device, known as a “fusor”, cost about £3000 and was put together by two secondary-school students in the garage of one of their parents’ houses in Torquay.
Download the entire article in .pdf format from the link in this post in the forums
This article in Today's Science section of the New York Times might be the most prominent, mainstream mention of the Farnsworth Fusor that I have seen in the more than 30 years since I first learned of the device myself on a hillside in Santa Cruz, California. Money quotes:
Other researchers already have working desktop fusion devices, including ones that are descendants of the Farnsworth Fusor invented four decades ago by Philo T. Farnsworth, the television pioneer.
Robert W. Bussard, an independent scientist, advocates a return to the Farnsworth Fusor, otherwise known as inertial confinement fusion. Farnsworth and Robert L. Hirsch, who later ran the Office of Fusion Energy for the Atomic Energy Commission, developed a fusor consisting of two electrically charged concentric spherical grids. They accelerated charged atoms, or ions, to the center.
“It’s like the electron guns in your TV tube,” Dr. Bussard said.
Well, yes, I suppose... if you still have electron guns in your TV tube. Mine has a mega-mirrored micro chip and a spinning color wheel. Don't anybody tell John Logie Baird...
Link: starbulletin.com | News | /2007/02/18/.
SAN FRANCISCO » In this city famous for the Gold Rush, a University of Hawaii researcher joined a former Apollo astronaut yesterday in touting the mining of a resource on the moon that holds the promise of cheap, clean abundant energy on Earth.
The resource is helium-3, a rare isotope on Earth that is plentiful on the lunar surface due to billions of years of exposure to the solar wind.
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