Inside California's Star Power Fusion Facility

This process of laser focusing to fuse Deuterium+tricium in a nuclear reaction is not new. It has been with us for more than 40 years now. What has changed to make it more feasible than what it was before? It is the same original tric of heating and imploding the pelet to create fusion.

Unless there is some new development to create the fusion with less energy hungry lasers ...??? or a different method that will self entertain the chain reaction BUT with a possibility to control it ...?? then we must try and figure out a more economical and safe way of creating fusion.

I've often wondered what would be the result if you made the container out of BeCu(has strength and conductivity), filled the container with heavy water and screwed it tight. The container has to be a pressure vessel capable of say 10,000psi or more. Then stick it underground in a steel tank filled with water and connect one end to a tower with a heavy copper conductor and the other to a heavy ground conductor. This installation could be somewhere around Orlando, Florida. then wait for one of the many electrical storms to develop. If fusion resulted steam could result and could then be used to drive a turbine. The tricky part would be rearming the "fusion boiler" with a new container.

According to Doc Brown a couple million jigga-watts of free electricity might just do the trick.

Every year they push back the date for "ignition". The consumption of power for this project is of course, enormous, so it stands to reason they keep promoting the end goal of cheap clean energy to green their public image. 500 trillion watts? To create a self-sustaining, hydrogen eating energy source? With no mechanism in place to capture or utilize the energy from their "miniature star" if they do achieve "ignition", it's pretty obvious no one at the NIF is really taking the prospect of power generation seriously, and no one else should either.

W will learn a lot from this very expensive attempt to harness nuclear fusion, but it may never send an amp to the grid. They are a long way from having a way to sustain any power gain for hours on end.

Rossi's E-CAT has already done that. He has demonstrated fusion of Nickel-to-Copper on October 6th. It ran for 3.5 hours with NO input energy, and continued to heat water for the entire time. Here is a report:

"One of the clearest pieces of analysis of the event that I have found comes from Jed Rothwell who posts on the vortex-l mailing list. Of this data, Rothwell comments:

Nothing happens until 13:22 when the steam begins to flow through the heat exchanger.At 15:13 output is a little higher than input, even though there is a great deal of heat unaccounted for, especially the water from the condensed steam, which they poured down the drain.At 15:50 the power is cut off. If there had been no source of anomalous heat, the power would have fallen off rapidly and monotonically, at the same rate it did after 19:55. It would have approached the zero line by 17:25. Actually, it would have approached zero before that, based on Newton's law of cooling. In other words, it would have been stone cold after 3 hours. During that time, 1.8 tons of water went through the cooling loop. It is inconceivable that an object of this size with no power input could have remained at the same high temperature the whole time. Yet Lewan reports that the surface of the reactor was still hot, and boiling could still be heard inside it.As you see, the temperature did not fall. It went up at 16:26. The cooling water flow rate was unchanged, so only a source of heat could have caused this.You can ignore the thermocouple data, and look only at the fact that it continued to boil for more than 3 hours after the power was turned off, and the reactor surface remained hot. That alone is rock solid proof.

There had not been too much in the way of public comment from those who attended the event, but Focus magazine reports that the attendees seemed to be impressed by what they saw, and ended the day with a round of applause which Andrea Rossi said was one of the greatest moments of his life.

The debate will no doubt continue - not everyone is convinced at this point, but taken at face value, to me it appears clear that Andrea Rossi's energy catalyzer is not powered by chemical processes; Andrea Rossi seems to have discovered a means of creating a new form of nuclear reaction."

A follow up demo of a 1 Megawatt version using 52 E-CATs is scheduled for this Friday, October 28. I for one am hoping for success.

You are right Woodward. I also hope for success.

Great achievements are not made without enormous sacrifice in the technological world. I don't grudge the energy used for the LHC either.

The fact is, none of these high tech feats would be possible without the huge human population and economy existing in the world today. None of the political or economic attitudes that we take about today's culture can negate the fact, we are capable of extraordinary knowledge now because we can (our governments, our human race) expend that kind of investment.