might be of interest: General Fusion news

Reflections on fusion history, current events, and predictions for the 'fusion powered future.
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richnormand
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might be of interest: General Fusion news

Post by richnormand »

I think that company has been mentioned before on this board. Looks like they are still in business. This video may be of interest:

http://www.gizmag.com/general-fusion-nu ... ype/12420/

but it looks they have a long long road ahead of them....
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Steven Sesselmann
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Re: might be of interest: General Fusion news

Post by Steven Sesselmann »

I wish them luck, and hope they get some funding, if nothing is achieved, at least they will have a lot of fun with those big capacitors.

Steven
http://www.gammaspectacular.com - Gamma Spectrometry Systems
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Sesselmann - Various papers and patents on RG
Tyler Christensen
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Re: might be of interest: General Fusion news

Post by Tyler Christensen »

It seems like the piston cannon approach has been around for quite some time and nothing has ever come of it. I recall seeing a video about the creation of the canons for a similar device years ago
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Richard Hull
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Re: might be of interest: General Fusion news

Post by Richard Hull »

They've already bilked 13.5 millions from 'public and private sources! I see where most of the money went in rent of the warehouse and machine work for the non-functional demo.

More hocum on steroids. They should give it a cool name like "Thor's hammer" or some such. This would garner a few more millions if presented well to the well off, green gullables wanting to do good things.

Will they still be around in 3 years or be at some real job in the work place? Still this seems to be a living for them, for the moment.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
DaveC
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Re: might be of interest: General Fusion news

Post by DaveC »

I wonder if anyone on the project team at General fusion ( or is it Global Fusion??) has doen the math to work the coherency required, to say nothing of the issues of gas/plasma/whatever that's being compressed dissolving or absorbing into the liquid metal. How could anyone state that the density of a large mass of molten metal would be uniform enough that the propagation velocity through it would be identical in all directions at all points throughout the mass so that the compressive wave arrives simultaneously at the inner surface?

Then there's the actual hpothesized "compressive wave", itself. This would be a longitudinal compressive wave. With whatever risetime this penumatic apparatus is thought to be capable, and the propagation velocity of this launched pressure wave into the liquid metal, the actual wavelength is rather small, but one wonders if it is even within "a country mile" of the movement necessary at the center to provide the needed compression.

Further, why would mechanical energies, which utimately have to couple through Van deVaal scale forces ( a few tenths of an eV at most) be thought to provide the necessary push to compress nucleii through the few keV potentials needed to get close enough for a run a fusing.

And then.... why would this process be any more efficient than what we are already capable of doing, with efficiencies in the 0.000000001% range???

Dave Cooper
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