Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Reflections on fusion history, current events, and predictions for the 'fusion powered future.
Post Reply
Adrian Hindes
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2015 7:28 am
Real name: Adrian Hindes

Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Adrian Hindes »

So Tri-Alpha just launched their website, finally stepping out of the shadows. http://trialphaenergy.com/

Looks like they're after a bit more media coverage seeing as they did that Time interview posted on the forums just recently.

This is the video of their reactor on the website too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN7v81yWY0Q

If you ask my naive self, I'd say it looks damn promising. Out of all startups and research groups, they're the only ones going after p-B fusion too. Their design is pretty novel too; a step away from tokamaks and stellarators.
User avatar
Paul_Schatzkin
Site Admin
Posts: 993
Joined: Thu Jun 14, 2001 12:49 pm
Real name: aka The Perfesser
Contact:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

If you ask my naive self, I'd say it looks damn promising.
I see your "naivete" and raise you a few chips of my own:

Adrian, what part of this contraption looks "promising" to you?

What I see is a cleverly contrived animation and lots of buoyant, promising ... rhetoric.

Sure, it looks "promising" when it's a essentially a hundred-million-dollar cartoon.

And I agree, the emphasis on the P+B11 fuel cycle is a highly desirable destination. Can we tell from anything they're reporting now that they are actually developing their process around that fuel cycle, or is that also speculative?

From the vantage point of my own naive self, I see this and arrive at the opposite conclusion. It's more Rube Goldberg technology. And a really nice cartoon.

But it's nice to see what a nice, clean facility $140 million of Paul Allen's money can buy...

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
User avatar
Bob Reite
Posts: 576
Joined: Sun Aug 25, 2013 9:03 pm
Real name: Bob Reite
Location: Wilkes Barre/Scranton area

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Bob Reite »

The Polywell researches as well as Focus Fusion are seeking to use proton-Boron fusion.
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
User avatar
Richard Hull
Moderator
Posts: 14991
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:44 am
Real name: Richard Hull

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Richard Hull »

Why not go for the more difficult fusion instead of the easy one? Probably no tritium license needed. Why not go to D-D? Yeah the win would be nice with p-B11, but thats a tough row to hoe. I guess all these folks think they have got it in the bag. I can't understand why they don't shoot for Xe-Xe fusion or Cl-O fusion....If they have fusion in the bag. Ain't fusion great, or what?

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
Adrian Hindes
Posts: 16
Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2015 7:28 am
Real name: Adrian Hindes

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Adrian Hindes »

Paul_Schatzkin wrote:
If you ask my naive self, I'd say it looks damn promising.
I see your "naivete" and raise you a few chips of my own:

Adrian, what part of this contraption looks "promising" to you?

What I see is a cleverly contrived animation and lots of buoyant, promising ... rhetoric.

Sure, it looks "promising" when it's a essentially a hundred-million-dollar cartoon.

And I agree, the emphasis on the P+B11 fuel cycle is a highly desirable destination. Can we tell from anything they're reporting now that they are actually developing their process around that fuel cycle, or is that also speculative?

From the vantage point of my own naive self, I see this and arrive at the opposite conclusion. It's more Rube Goldberg technology. And a really nice cartoon.

But it's nice to see what a nice, clean facility $140 million of Paul Allen's money can buy...

--PS
Apologies for the optimism. The way I see it, Tri-Alpha are trying something innovative, and on a small budget (relatively to virtually all other fusion projects at the moment), they've managed to put together a prototype in record time. Burton Richter and Ronald Davidson (past director of PSFC and PPPL) are on their panel of advisors, so there must be something to the theory. That's promising enough for me.

Calling it a "hundred-million dollar cartoon" is short selling it, I think. It's ambitious compared to other fusion devices, especially with the p-B goal. I'd reasonably speculate that they would use direct energy conversion, seeing as that's virtually a no-brainer.

Of course from what little I understand, I'd much prefer seeing $140 million of investors money go to IEC development, but I don't think it's wise to put all our eggs in the one electrostatic basket.
Dan Tibbets
Posts: 578
Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2008 1:29 am
Real name:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Dan Tibbets »

I'm impressed. Weather they have the answer, or are on the right path is not what impresses me. I do not have the expertise to judge. But, I am impressed that they seem to have the infrastructure and resources online to pursue the research to useful conclusions. Compare this to the small scale efforts by EMC2 and LLP which are barely above keep open levels, and intermittent at that.

I hope that they do not become entrenched like the Tokamak quagmire.

My impression is that perhaps the most promising features of these small machines, is that if they work, then great, and if they do not work, the smaller scale of the machines allow for more rapid and much cheaper pursuit of an answer than , again, the Tokamak dinosaur.

Who knows, the answer may be some cross breed of these several approaches. Lockheed Martin is already going down this path.

Dan Tibbets
prestonbarrows
Posts: 211
Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 1:27 am
Real name:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by prestonbarrows »

Paul_Schatzkin wrote:What I see is a cleverly contrived animation and lots of buoyant, promising ... rhetoric.
There are a lot of valid reservations you could have about Tri-Alpha, but judging their technical merit by their elevator pitch youtube clip is silly. What they released is just something that lets the average Joe have an inkling of what their system does in 30 seconds and get people excited about their company. It is a quick sugary bite that can get shared on social media and get people talking, just like we are doing now.

The most interesting thing is that their latest press releases actually show legitimate hardware. Up until now, they have tended towards vapor-ware information if any at all. If any of that shiny hardware ever works is of course another issue.

As a private company, the technical information they have released is sparse, but the fundamental concepts have been worked on by many universities and national labs over the decades. A few of the main topics to look into if you are interested are Field Reversed Configurations, Neutral Beam Injection, and helicity injection.
Richard Hull wrote:Why not go for the more difficult fusion instead of the easy one? Probably no tritium license needed. Why not go to D-D? Yeah the win would be nice with p-B11, but thats a tough row to hoe. I guess all these folks think they have got it in the bag. I can't understand why they don't shoot for Xe-Xe fusion or Cl-O fusion....If they have fusion in the bag. Ain't fusion great, or what?

Richard Hull
On the more practical side, neutrons are a beast to deal with at reactor levels. The immediate complications of radiation hazards while the device is active is almost the least of your worries. Basically everything activates, leading you to add extra engineering hoops to avoid certain common materials and also introducing long cool-down cycles each time maintenance is needed. Of course, even p-b11 has radiation to deal with but it is on a very different scale.

As you mentioned, tritium handling facilities are astronomically expensive and bring in an entirely new level of regulation and redtape. Even if you go DD in the short term, the implicit assumption is that you are going DT in the future and all those issues hang over every engineering, science, and business decision in the mean time.

They are doubling down and sidestepping all of that. Call it bold or stupid, this is a pretty radical difference from the traditional fusion world where DD equivalent-net-gain is the norm. As an outsider, it is difficult to judge the wisdom of this decision without seeing their internal results over the last years. Only time will tell if it pays off for them, but they seem to be doing well for themselves at the moment, if only as a company.

Being a radical trendsetter hiding an ace up their sleeve while being just slightly holier-than-thou is part of their MO as a business. Going straight for clean p-B11 while leaving DD to the rabble of lesser groups is a sexier story for investors, especially when you can point to numbers and previous experiments that make it look at least somewhat feasible. Cynical as it may be, Tri-alpha is a private business and not a public science institute, so that is a legitimate factor. As with almost all R&D companies in their early stages, their product is a story told to investors of a technology developed in the future; the trick is actually creating and selling that technology before people stop buying the story.
Frank Sanns
Site Admin
Posts: 2119
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2002 2:26 pm
Real name: Frank Sanns

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Frank Sanns »

This is a glorified neon bulb. Having plasma is easy. So you inject a plasma into a chamber and keep it alive with tangential beams. Put enough tangential beams in and it can stay lit.

The question becomes, where is the collisional energy or the temperature for any kind of fusion at all? A 10v plasma will not fuse to any significant extent with the best of fuels. There is nothing about that chamber that suggest the kind of energy inputs necessary for a single fusion event let alone a self sustaining one.

Snake oil comes from private companies for funding. That building was huge and everything spotless. Looks more like a museum than a research facility. Somebody is getting big private money from a non scientific investor.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
prestonbarrows
Posts: 211
Joined: Sun Jun 24, 2012 1:27 am
Real name:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by prestonbarrows »

Frank Sanns wrote: So you inject a plasma into a chamber and keep it alive with tangential beams...where is the collisional energy or the temperature for any kind of fusion at all? A 10v plasma will not fuse to any significant extent with the best of fuels.
The fact that you are 'keeping it alive' in a steady state shows that you are putting power into the plasma which is equal to the power leaving the plasma through losses. If you then turn up the input knob so that you are putting in more power than you are loosing, the plasma heats up.

I won't pretend to be an expert on Tri-Alpha's particular setup, but neutral beam injection is a well established method of heating a confined plasma for tokamaks, stellerators, and other FRC machines. It has been demonstrated in NSTX at Princeton, KSTAR in Korea, LHD, and JT-60U in Japan, among many others. It is also planned as a key component for the future W7X and ITER reactors. The general idea is launching a multiple equivalent-amps of neutral particles with MeV's of energy into the core. Since the incoming particles are neutral, they can pass through the confining fields. Interactions with the plasma then ionize these fast neutrals creating fast ions in the process which are now confined. Energy is also transferred through elastic collisions with particles already in the core; this effect can be used to impart 'spin' into the plasma which can help to stabilize it. NBI can dump power on the order of megawatts into the plasma. The process is analogous to heating up milk using the steam wand on a cappuccino machine and causing it to spin around the cup in the process.

Some of the main issues with NBI are efficient deposition of power into the core before the particles fly back out the opposite side and avoiding the creation of instabilities.

The other popular method of CW(non-pulsed) heating is launching in microwaves and coupling them to various electron or ion resonances within the confining magnetic field.

Here are some a few pages giving a basic overview:
https://www.iter.org/mach/heating
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_beam_injection
Or for a bit more depth:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22neut ... letype:pdf



Time will tell how successful their approach turns out, but Tri-Alpha are not complete charlatans.
JoeBallantyne
Posts: 327
Joined: Tue Jul 20, 2010 4:08 pm
Real name: Joe Ballantyne
Location: Redmond, WA

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by JoeBallantyne »

It is noteworthy that there is no visible shielding pretty much anywhere around Tri Alpha's "reactor". But it makes sense when you realize that their 10 Million degree Celsius temperature is equivalent to a pathetic 861Volts in a fusor. Assuming that the ions in a fusor are accelerated across the full potential drop between the anode and cathode, and using the 11604 K/eV equivalence. Some of the ions in a fusor of course will not fall across the full potential difference, but it makes you realize how powerful fusors are compared to some of these very expensive machines that people are spending many tens of millions of dollars building.

Doug Coulter's 50kV fusor is hitting temperatures in the neighborhood of 580 million degrees kelvin. Which of course is why he has to worry a lot more about both x-ray shielding and neutron shielding. At less than 1kV, Tri Alpha doesn't have to worry about neutrons at all, even if they were using D-D as their feed gas. They simply aren't even close to the temperatures required for fusion. By their own admission they are a factor of 300 away from where they need to be for PB11 fusion. I suspect they will spend very many tens of millions more attempting to get there.

Fusors today easily generate plasma that is 35 to 60 times hotter than Tri Alpha's plasma. And they cost a lot less too.

Joe.
User avatar
Paul_Schatzkin
Site Admin
Posts: 993
Joined: Thu Jun 14, 2001 12:49 pm
Real name: aka The Perfesser
Contact:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Thanks for that post, Joe. That's pretty much how I see it, too.

Fusion can't get "funding" unless it's some large-scale, gazillion dollar undertaking.

I think that's exactly the opposite of what fusion "wants" to be, or, at least, should be. Which is why I find the fusor so appealing and all these other Rube Goldberg giants so... ridiculous.

That said, I have to confess I get a little confused with some of the nomenclature and metrics.
their 10 Million degree Celsius temperature is equivalent to a pathetic 861Volts in a fusor. Assuming that the ions in a fusor are accelerated across the full potential drop between the anode and cathode, and using the 11604 K/eV equivalence....Doug Coulter's 50kV fusor is hitting temperatures in the neighborhood of 580 million degrees kelvin.
I get lost between the temperature measurements and the K/eV equivalence. I'm not asking you to explain (not here, anyway), just trying to convey how confusing it gets for somebody not intrinsically well versed in the language and the acronyms.

And Richard Hull keeps insisting that the fusor is not "thermonuclear," at which point I have to wonder what that words even means. If 580MºK is not thermonuclear... then what is??

At least we know we're not dealing with "cold" fusion. Jeez, every time I talk to somebody (who knows even less than I do) about "fusion" and they say "you mean 'cold fusion'?" I wanna slap 'em upside the head...

But I get this much:
They simply aren't even close to the temperatures required for fusion.
... and just have to wonder, "so why all the excitement." At which point I might take a bit of umbrage at the dismissal of my crack about the "100 million dollar cartoon." If they're that far from producing actual fusion – let alone their stated intent of p+B11 fusion - then what ARE they doing besides building really shiny laboratory?

I mean, Paul Allen has supposedly sunk $100 MILLION into this thing... and fusors can't get a couple of million here and there? WTF??
Fusors today easily generate plasma that is 35 to 60 times hotter than Tri Alpha's plasma. And they cost a lot less too.
And yet, the fusor "gets no respect" in institutional scientific circles (except maybe at UofW, and a few other places that think of it strictly as a neutron generator), and there's no shortage of people right here on this site who insist that the fusor will never, ever be an actual, practical energy source.

The key phrase above is "...And they cost a lot less too." There is a mentality surrounding fusion that it is a giant problem that requires costly solutions.

Maybe it's must because I don't know any better that I can continue to believe... "...maybe not..."

--PS

(and don't even start me on the Wendelstat Stellarator... a million man-hours to construct? For all I know is may produce a bajillion joules of energy. But it's gonna be a mofo to make into a power plant... )

Update 151110: I'm doing some (long overdue) homework here, and I get now why we don't refer to the fusor as "thermonuclear." Now I will try to cope with the semantic inconsistencies of the nomenclature.
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
User avatar
Richard Hull
Moderator
Posts: 14991
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:44 am
Real name: Richard Hull

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Richard Hull »

All who would know what temperature in degrees and kelvins mean as related to fusion hype must read and understand this old FAQ post by me. Temperature is thermodynamics

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=10424

Who ever assembled the Fusion theory forum left out a FAQ location for that forum which is where the above would find a proper home. I was forced to place it in the construction forum FAQ bin. Needless to say, I was pissed, but I can't add FAQ bins to major forums.

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
Frank Sanns
Site Admin
Posts: 2119
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2002 2:26 pm
Real name: Frank Sanns

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Frank Sanns »

Richard Hull wrote:All who would know what temperature in degrees and kelvins mean as related to fusion hype must read and understand this old FAQ post by me. Temperature is thermodynamics

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=9223&p=62526#p62526

Who ever assembled the Fusion theory forum left out a FAQ location for that forum which is where the above would find a proper home. I was forced to place it in the construction forum FAQ bin. Needless to say, I was pissed, but I can't add FAQ bins to major forums.

Richard Hull
Richard,

Your moderator control panel will allow you do the same things to FAQs as it does for everybody else's posts. You can move, copy, lock, delete, and make sticky along with a few others. Whenever you want to move a FAQ just go to the thread and select move. It will give you the choice of the forum location that you want to move or copy to. Once there, make it a sticky and it will remain at the top of the list.

I copied the FAQ that you pointed to in your link over to the correct forum but left the original so you link was not bad. All along, you just needed to click your red slippers together and all was good. ;-)
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
User avatar
Richard Hull
Moderator
Posts: 14991
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:44 am
Real name: Richard Hull

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Richard Hull »

I appreciate the effort and knew how to do that. I was taking issue that there is no real FAQ area in the theory forum.
Amateurs are directed to the special FAQ areas in each forum. They have a special commanding place designed to teach. FAQs piling up in head end of the actual discussion forums will be a bit imbalanced. I realize it is just too late to alter the nature of a forum to add the separate FAQ area seen in other forums.

I have also edited my above post to send folks to the new location in the Theory forum. Thanks again frank.

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
User avatar
Paul_Schatzkin
Site Admin
Posts: 993
Joined: Thu Jun 14, 2001 12:49 pm
Real name: aka The Perfesser
Contact:

RE: Theory FAQ section

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

I thought Richard was saying that when we reconfigured the site, we neglected to create a "FAQ" section for the "Theory" section, i.e. something that would appear at the top of this page:

viewforum.php?f=14

...much as the FAQ section appears at the top of the Construction and Operation section:

viewforum.php?f=6

I was going to see if such a FAQ section could be created in the Theory section. Wouldn't Richard's post (linked above) be better in such a section? Shouldn't there BE such a section? Seems like it'd be easy enough to create (once I/we figure out how...)

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
Frank Sanns
Site Admin
Posts: 2119
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2002 2:26 pm
Real name: Frank Sanns

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Frank Sanns »

Just created a FAQ section. Will populate it and streamline things too.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
User avatar
Richard Hull
Moderator
Posts: 14991
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:44 am
Real name: Richard Hull

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Richard Hull »

Great works guys!

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
Dan Tibbets
Posts: 578
Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2008 1:29 am
Real name:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Dan Tibbets »

Perhaps exposing my ignorance again, but method and efficiency of heating is certainly important, but the dominate consideration is confinement. If particle and KE confinement is not adequate, even a tremendously efficient heating mechanism is useless. I've not been impressed with the temperatures they have been reporting, but I suspect this is low on their priorities list. Establishing adequate confinement against reasonable/ expected (?) input costs is the key. My impression is that they are advertising their confinement gains. Of course scaling these with other scaling considerations like injection capacity and efficiency make for an intricate dance that historically has proven to be fraught with unknowns.

EMC2 with the Polywell have accomplished similar results. They have demonstrated the principles of adequate confinement, and now need to implement input methods that are adequate. The Polywell is a Fusor and has demonstrated deep potential wells, as has other fusors . The problem with fusors has always been one of confinement , not temperature. The input issues may change catastrophically once confinement is achieved. This is a challenge for the Polywell, FRC, or any other approach. The necessary goals are often competing against each other.

Neutral beam injection, microwave heating are two heating mechanisms available. For fusor like machines, and others(?), electrostatic acceleration within the confined space is a third.

Now, if we only had a confinement method that did not interact so much with the dance of charged particles and magnetic fields. Does anyone have a pocket gravity generator?

Dan Tibbets
Frank Sanns
Site Admin
Posts: 2119
Joined: Fri Jun 14, 2002 2:26 pm
Real name: Frank Sanns

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Frank Sanns »

Dan,

Temperature loss due to radiative cooling scales to the fourth power. It takes huge energy inputs to get those last Kelvins for fusion to go at any appreciable rate. What seems to be 90% of the way there is really only 3% of the way there.

Confinement of a plasma at low temperatures is not so difficult. Doing it at fusion temperatures is something else entirely.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
User avatar
Werner Engel
Posts: 145
Joined: Sun Aug 18, 2013 11:51 am
Real name: Werner Engel
Location: Vienna, Austria
Contact:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Werner Engel »

A few days ago I attended a lecture of a former Nobel Prize winner – Carlo Rubbia. He was also a former director at CERN and a famous particle physicist. His story was about the next energy source of mankind.
To make it short he wants us to use methane-clathrates by separating CH4 to Carbon and Hydrogen. Hydrogen should be burnt as normal fuel where the Carbon should be used to "fuel" our oil based chemical industry.
The interesting statement followed after the lecture during Q&A:
From the audience: “Mr. Rubbia, what do you think about nuclear fusion?”
Mr. Rubbia – short version: “DT Fusion produces nuclear material – therefor there should be no further development like ITER. But B11/p+ fusion is aneutronic and therefore we should go for this reaction”.
He did not mention anything regarding cross section versus mass energy or maximum heat load on the plasma heat exchangers nor any other engineering issues we might expect.

But B11/p+ as the only future of fusion!!!!
Attachments
IMG_2030.JPG
IMG_2028.JPG
IMG_2018.JPG
User avatar
Richard Hull
Moderator
Posts: 14991
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2001 9:44 am
Real name: Richard Hull

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Richard Hull »

Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one. Some opinions bear more consideration than others due to the source. Still, a good mind that has studied the fusion issues and also knows not only the physics, but the engineering and funding end of things has a much clearer view of what is involved.

As noted earlier, if you can't win with D-T fusion, the easiest known to man, then you will never have even the slightest chance at P-B11 fusion. Why start that quest? An analogy would be: Why try and build an automobile when you haven't figured out how to do a wheel, yet. Even the meanest intellgence can gather this point to the fore in their brain.

Paul asked about thermo-nuclear definition much earlier. A thermo nuclear reaction is one that creates more energy than is used to create it and can be either self-sustaining or not. It always involes a heated plasma of fusion fuel.

The fusor fails as it is a non-net energy producer. Some of the dubious claims made for JET and other multi-million dollar efforts in thermal plasma systems related to their having produced more energy out than in, for a matter of secs to milliseconds also fails the definition. The H bomb is a superlative example of a good, solid thermo-nuclear reaction that is non-self sustaining.

The only self-sustaining thermo-nuclear reaction in the universe is found is stars. The only workable, over unity, thermonuclear reaction found on earth is the H bomb.

All other fusion reactors are not thermo-nuclear, but instead are fusion devices that take a bit more energy input than they give in output. The fusor is a Billion to one net loss fusion device and the very best multi-million dollar systems are most likely a 1.5 to 1 net loss or even worse if 100% of all things needed to make them go is considered. The rotteness of our efforts at thermo-nuclear fusion is a matter of scale only. If you only have $800 to spend on a cobbled up fusor you are at the bottom of the scale. However hundreds of millions to billions of the money scale perfectly. $800 is to one billionth return as 1billion dollars is to one tenth or better return. The 1/10th or better return is doing the same as the fusor in fusion, It just costs a lot more and still fails in the area of thermo-nuclear fusion.

Yes, true, the fusor makes no attempt at containment, but for all the multi-million dollar containment efforts....Still zip! Both systems do net loss fusion.

Yes, true, you only fuse well at collisional effective temperatures in the 100's of millions of kelvins (degree) range, beit in a fusor or a tokamak, but you aren't getting "net usable or positive destructive thermo-nuclear energy out of either device.

Defintion (net postive destructive energy)....An H bomb that is used to destroy an enemy becomes a net positive outcome of direct use of massive over-unity, thermo-nuclear energy for the nation using it...... wait for it...........(thermo-nuclear retaliation can be a bitch)....Still, both sides are well served, energy-wise, by the use of their H-bombs agaisnt their foes.
Result....
Energy in: a few millions of dollars per bomb.....
Energy out: Tens of trillions of dollars in damage to the other guy........What a bargain!

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
User avatar
Werner Engel
Posts: 145
Joined: Sun Aug 18, 2013 11:51 am
Real name: Werner Engel
Location: Vienna, Austria
Contact:

Re: Tri-Alpha Energy just launched its website

Post by Werner Engel »

Does anyone have a personal contact to Mr. Michl Binderbauer (president and CTO of Tri-Alpha)? I tried to get in contact with him (as he is also Austrian) - but did not get any feedback.
Post Reply

Return to “Fusion --- Past, Present, and Future”