500,000X the energy density of capacitors, 12-25% of the cost of LiIon batteries.

Could reduce the weight, cost, and size of FoFus dramatically.

http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/how-easily-can-a-power-plant-be-hacked-very-1023/

The author suggests that due to climate change, legislative actions that compromise the profitability of the fossil fuel sector are inevitable, one way or another. He notes that “If you look specifically at the UK, five of the top 10 companies in the FTSE 100 are almost exclusively high-carbon and together account for a staggering 25% of the index’s entire market capitalisation.” and then speculates “When markets wake up to the real value of high-carbon assets, the chaos wrought and value lost could be devastating.”

A large number of institutional investors, including pension funds, are carrying large amounts of stock in companies like BP and Exxon. There are also some retail banks which have large amounts of corporate assets, especially in these supposedly safe blue-chip companies - we’re still a long way off any kind of Glass-Steagall law, on both sides of the pond. Would fusion trigger a re-evaluation of high carbon assets, leading to a banking collapse that would dwarf the previous one (indeed, possibly be beyond the reach of authorities to bail out)?

I thought I’d throw this out here for discussion.

This would appear to require proof of each aneutronic fusion concept (Focus Fusion, PolyWell, and FRC, possibly ball lightning) in the form of slightly over unity operation, which in turn is going to require visionary funding sources with a relatively high tolerance of risk by today’s corporate standards.

Thus we need to emphasize the multiple bottom lines involved in “cloning” the LPP lab as a million dollar annual investment in building and operating a cutting-edge fusion research lab which can be leveraged to inspire even elementary school students to master science, math, physics, CAD/ engineering, CNC manufacturing, etc. Encouraging local students of all ages to submit thought and real experiments will increase the leverage. Iow, we don’t require over-unity operation in order to begin improving the world on a local basis, community by community, across the planet.

While the target number of clone labs is set and being met, each aneutronic reactor configuration will require it’s own NRC type certification. The lab network provides the numerical data from operations far quicker than can be obtained from a single prototype. The roaring local and global buzzes surrounding these labs will help gain the popular and political support required. Thus we have a chicken-and-egg closed loop regarding these goals and how to manage them.

The infrastructure is also going to require distribution and service networks, which can be developed in the form of agreements concurrently with the lab network growth.

About fusion;
Dave S. is correct to state that materials able to withstand fusion are not going to happen.  This, IMO, rules out what I call the “meso-fusion” (human-scale) regime.  Stellar mega-fusion and micro-fusion remain.  Until we become a Type II civilization, able to harness the full output of our star, mega-fusion is not accessible (as a direct tool; I’m not talking about converting radiant energy to electricity).  But micro-fusion, now ....

There is a firm, LPP, Inc., which is working with a process called Focus Fusion. Containment is magnetic, within a sub-microscopic “plasmoid” generated by kinking a magnetic filament in plasma just so.  It is completing its preliminary D-D calibration runs and tweaks now, and will be moving into the final proton-Boron11 regime within a couple of months.  This is a waste-free, non-neutron-emitting fusion.  It claims to have solved (in theory and simulation) the X-ray cooling problem by tuning the High Magnetic Field Effect some had predicted so that electron heating is minimized.

It won’t be free, but the planned “product” is a 5MW generator installed in about the housing size of a home garage, with capital per-watt costs and output pricing at source per kwh both around 1/20 of current best N.A. retail, or maybe 1/50 of European prices.  It is easily adapted to distributed generation, and could end up bypassing most of the current grid, if necessary. 

Timeline around 3-5 years to come up with a proven licensable design, to be made openly available at reasonable prices to all manufacturers wanting to produce and distribute it, world-wide.

The growth in demand and use he is predicting is staggering; given availability of FF, I suspect he may even be low by another factor of 2 or so!

Most jobs will be in supply and training chains and their supply and training chains. Here’s a rough bill of materials required to assemble 20 million FF generators per year:

* 240 million high energy, high voltage, high speed pulsed power supply capacitors. These are the big blue boxes in the picture. These are bulky, heavy, expensive, and cantankerous to work with. The industry has plenty of room for expansion, especially for companies who can progressively minimize one or more of these problems.
* 240 million HE/HV/HS capacitor switches. This sleepy little niche is getting away with reliability and price/performance problems that only the R&D world will put up with due to the current lack of competition.
* 20 million PLC-based ignition systems and firmware. Look for controller firmware to be the opportunity, since so many companies already make PLCs for demanding mass production applications.
* 160 million stamped steel HV delivery plates. Again, look for established tool and die shops to own this niche.
* 20 million water jacket tanks and frames. This is a relatively low-precision part that can be manufactured by local fabricators and/or installers.

Ample Opportunity Will Also Spring Up Supplying:

* 20 million base plates. This part is a precision machined part built mainly using automated laser sintering and machine tools, which will soon become immense markets in their own right. The real winners in this niche will be the tool builders who can make these machines do ever more for ever less money and energy. The metals listed for these parts are currently preferred, but not absolutely required. Look for differing architectures to specify differing metals.
* 20 million beryllium/copper anodes. This part can be built using laser sintering and/or traditional lost foam casting and machining, depending on the anode geometry. Expect geometries to become ever more complex, like apartment building rooflines over the last 30 years, as DPF numeric modeling software tools become more refined and memory prices fall.
* 320 million beryllium/copper cathodes. See anode, but expect more price pressures due to much larger volume. There is an option for the cathode to be one continuous ring, however. This will allow cathode vendors to specialize by which company’s architecture they wish to align with.
* 20 million stainless steel vacuum chambers about the size of a 5 gallon bucket. Pretty much the same as the electrodes, except using thick walled stainless steel.
* 20 million vacuum pumps. Again, this is currently a sleepy little specialty market whose price/performance ratios are about to be turned on their ear.
* 20 million turbo-molecular pumps. These glorified vacuum pumps remove the last few traces of atmosphere, hence contamination, before the fuel gas is injected. These manufacturers are also in for a brawl.
* 20 million stainless steel inductive converter tubes. An extension of the vacuum chamber, these may or may not be integrated into the body design.
* 20 million copper tubing coils with cooling and electrical connectors for the inductive recovery subsystem. This part is essentially a wave guide. Expect the cost of wave guides to fall and the market for their tool makers to explode.
* 20 million heat exchangers and associated plumbing. Come and get it! This is one of the key areas for the ongoing size, weight, and price reductions that will define the more mature DPF marketplace.
* Countless fasteners and sensors, etc.
* 3.6 billion photovoltiac converters for generator applications. The X-ray to electricity converter is much simpler in theory than engineering or production. It’s known as the onion due to it’s thousands of thin foil and insulator layers. It’s expected to be made on leading edge and next-generation chip making machinery, so once again, this is a tool maker’s paradise. Cooling around 2MW of electrical power in a package this small and complex, along with the X-ray physics requirements, are going to keep the onion makers in challenges and profits until the DPF is replaced by an even better technology. Hard to believe, but that’s the way innovation has played out down the millennia.
* 20 million cap bank controllers may or may not be integrated into the PLC controller package. Each capacitor is charged and monitored individually, but generally fired in unison. Since this type of capacitor is currently a very finicky and quirky device that needs a lot of pampering, any firmware/hardware that can improve cap bank reliability and delivered charge repeatability is going to clean up.
* 20 million output power conditioning modules. These translate the very high voltage, high current pulses of only a few tens of billionths of seconds into commercially useful voltages, frequencies, and currents. Clever design may be able to justify the cost of the entire DPF generator module by eliminating the transmission transformer(s), especially in larger arrays.
* 20 million transmission transformers for commercial power applications. As noted above, this will have to integrate the power conditioning module in order to earn it’s spot on the team.

Expect “Because that’s the way its always been done” to become financially suicidal in the 21st century business environment, if it isn’t already.
* Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Also mentioned above, the tool makers for a number of industries will also need designers, engineers, technicians, assemblers, installers, service teams, and so on.
* All of these people need to be trained, and many will need to be certified. Tech schools will flourish.

But this morning it dawned on me that with only 10 licenses, as well as the speculative nature at this point, I should be aiming mainly at the people already making vacuum pumps, stainless steel plumbing, and all of the various parts that comprise an operational system, including financing a huge expansion of several industries in order to mass-produce FFs Detroit style (by the millions).

So my question is if anything other than the baseplate and electrodes are covered by the patent? The patent’s claims add up almost as if you have a patent for the DPF, lol.

Just wondering if the energy becomes plentiful and cheap and
all the resources in the world will become affordable,
what will the governments come after next? Land?

The interactive site is at http://www.nextgenerationnuclearplant.com/facility/index.shtml . Even though this is an INL site, the project has its own URL and site with slick interactive graphics.  They’ve covered all of our energy, environmental, and economic bases, except they use nuclear fission rather than nuclear fusion to do it. We should look this good and read so well.

https://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1269&mode=2&featurestory=DA_329615 is the INL page showing the co-generative turbine.

I’ve spent the last few days going through the 2009 budget, House Committees, Senate Committees, Cabinet officers, and the President’s own scientific advisors, and I’m getting mixed signals- the budget says its looking for innovative energy solutions and provides for anticipation and deployment funding of these projects, while the DOE site plainly explains that they aren’t in any hurry to make electricity using fusion reactions. Maybe the red herring designed to test how determined a DPF approach is to find its demo/grid integration funding.