The claim is that by introducing boronated water into the exhaust they get pB fusion which then added so much additional energy they got 50% more thrust.

Not in a million billion years.

All fusion fuels have a curve that describes their reaction rate at any given temperature. If the fuel is too cool, it will not have enough energy for the ions to overcome their mutual repulsion. If it is too high, the ions will move past each other faster than the reaction takes place. The result is a poisson-like graph of temperature to reaction rate.

For pB, that curve is unusually "peaky" compared to D-T or other fuels. To get it to work, you need to have the ions collide at one of two very specific energies, and if you are even slightly off the peak the rate falls drastically. In contrast, D-T's peak is much more spread out, requires 10 times less energy, the reaction rate is 100 times faster at that peak, and the reactions release twice as much energy.

For pB, the first peak corresponds to a temperature of 10 billion K. Their engine does not run at 10 billion K. Moreover, the p and B are in a thermalized mixture at what for fusion reactors would be considered high densities, meaning the population of ions on those two peaks is a number so low it cannot be represented on a calculator. They have to meet each other at those energies, despite being in the middle of all those off-peak ions *and a bunch of oxygen and who knows what else*. The rate of pB reactions in this fuel would be like the rate of D-T reactions taking place in the air in the room you're in right now.

Moreover, to get an appreciable amount of energy from fusion, the energy from the reactions has to be recycled back to the fuel to heat it and cause the ions around it to reach the required energy levels. For that to work, you need to have that energy be deposited into the fuel faster than energy is being lost to the environment. At fusion temperatures, a primary loss channel is x-rays from bremsstrahlung. The rate of x-ray production is a combination of temperature and atomic mass.

Net energy from pB fusion is generally considered hard-to-impossible because of that last bit. To get pB reactions to work at all, you need to have very high energies, which means you're producing more x-rays that are cooling it at a very rapid rate. Moreover, the presence of the B means the net atomic mass is some 5 times that of D-D, further increasing the losses.

So in the end, pB fusion is rapidly radiating energy away at rates that are much higher than the fusion events. There is a *very* small area where the curves meet where net energy is produced, and it's a *very* small amount of net energy, and it has to be *right* on the energy peak.

And they're claiming to get net energy from this reaction by mixing it in a water plasma, Z=17.

Yeah, right.

> Advertising, the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue

You don't think Motorola has Madison Avenue advertising? Or Microsoft? Or LG? Or Sony? Or Nokia? Or Blackberry?

They all have advertizing, that's not the reason.

> changes to the cargo including an additional 3,000kg of fuel

Images of the actual logs are available in a 2015 article in The Sun:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/26256957/mh370-extra-fuel-oxygen-pilot-plan/

The first of the images shows this "additional 3,000kg of fuel". This is labelled "comp fuel". This is short for "company fuel" which is added to compensate for per-aircraft differences in fuel burn. Some planes burn more fuel, some burn less, and those that burn more add fuel on a separate line for clarity, instead of adjusting the trip fuel. That way you can calculate the fuel needed to reach your destination using the standard numbers for that model of aircraft, and then just add a bit of slush as a separate, clearly labelled line.

This is entirely routine and suggests nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, if they were planning to ditch in the ocean far short of their destination, why would they ask for *more* fuel?

As a pilot and air investigator, the author of these claims should be very much aware of this.

> It's a strange coincidence that the last engineering task that was done before it headed
> off to oblivion was topping up crew oxygen which is only for the cockpit, not for the cabin crew

Oxygen is lost naturally and has to be topped up time to time. The second image in the Sun article states "crew oxygen system replenished", which appears to be entirely ordinary. They topped it off to the nominal 1800 psi. I see no indication that the crew asked for this, and certainly, nothing to suggest this is "extra". The Sun adds that it was added "only to the cockpit", as if that were interesting, but of course, that's only because this system *only exists in the cockpit*. The cabin systems are either overhead oxygen candles or portable tanks for the cabin crew.

So this sounds like yet more balonium from someone who likes being in the newspapers.

I used to live in the country north of Toronto. Bussed to school. We had 3 to 5 snow days a year, when it would drift up to our waist.

Hasn't been a snow day in maybe 15 years now. Today, there is no snow whatsoever on the ground. Hasn't been for weeks. I have never seen anything remotely like this in my 1/2 century in the area. Normally we still have a little bit of dirty corn snow in the ditches and such well into April. It's all gone. Every flake. Since January.

Seems like they're fixing the wrong problem.

> What has happened to our engineering capabilities?

Attempts to build fusion reactors pre-date both fission and the moon shot. To be exact, the first attempt to make a fusion reactor was in 1938.

So it's not because we've lost engineering capability or can-do attitude. The same people were working on both (literally).

Fusion is just stupidly hard.

> that's only if you could process the entirety of the world's water supply

And do so more rapidly than the half life is destroying what you collected.

> The US does not have better "designs" than CANDU.

Of course they do. Even AECL does (did).

> CANDU reactors run on natural uranium. There is nothing imaginable better than that.

Running on natural uranium is one of those things that sounds great until you understand the first thing about reactors, and especially their economics.

In the 1950s, enrichment was wildly expensive and quite limited. At that time, running on natural uranium seemed like a good idea. You simply dig up the yellowcake, smelt it, presto! Of course, making that work is non-trivial, as you need more physical material to get to the same total U235 in the core, and you have to use some other form of moderator than normal water, and all sorts of other little adjustments here and there.

So ultimately you're trading off using normal water to use "normal' uranium. This produces a larger reactor design that is larger and more expensive to build, along with the need for heavy water (or graphite, as in the UK's AGR fleet which no one ever mentions) so the whole thing costs more. But we'll *totally* make up for that in reduced fuel costs and better capacity factor!

And then the cost of enrichment crashed in the early 1980s. And that was it for CANDU. All further sales evaporated. For good reason.

They picked the wrong design horse.

> CANDU reactors in Canada, and that's only a few kilograms per year

And that will dwindle as the reactors go out of service and are replaced with non-CANDU designs.

> To my knowledge, this has not yet been demonstrated, though work has been ongoing.

They were supposed to build a test system to demonstrate this... in 1984. That's because they predicted it would take about 20 years to develop the technology to commercial levels, and they expected tokamaks to reach the same level of development around 2000.

So even if we had a working cycle tomorrow, we have no way to fuel it and won't for... well, some time at least.

> Helion projects breakeven in 2024.

They have been predicting breakeven and commercial reactors any day now pretty much every year since they formed.

In 2014, they said that they would have commercial reactors in 2019.
In 2015, they said they would have net energy gain in 24 months and a pilot commercial plant in 2019.
In 2016, they said energy gain "in a few years" and commercial power in six years.
In 2018 they said breakeven in less than three years.

All of those have come and gone, without any of these milestones being even remotely met. Their best performance to date is about that of tokamak designs from the 1970s.

>SPARC should be in operation in 2025.

In contrast to Helion, where there are serious questions about the physics of the entire system, SPARC is at least built on well-understood physics and has a definite possibility of hitting breakeven when they turn it on.

Unfortunately, SPARC is subject to all of the well-known problems with the tokamak design. Well almost all, them may (yet to be demonstrated) have a demountable core. But all of the issues about tritium breeding, cooling, power extraction, fueling and overall maintenance remain unsolved. Further, the cost of the system is astronomical, and it is not clear whether the production quantities will result in the necessary cost reductions to make the system competitive with fission, let alone any of the modern systems that are killing fission in the marketplace.

>I don't understand where you got the 2 year timeline?

Out of thin air, apparently.

I've lived most of my half-century in and around the Toronto area, I've lived maybe a year in other places (lived, not visited).

Today is +10C outside. There is no snow. There has not been snow on the ground for several weeks. And I mean NONE, not even the grimy bits of corn snow in the ditches. There had been some snow, but so far this year I have shovelled once, and it was relatively light. A second snowfall I simply let melt off because it was so thin.

I mention this because I have never seen anything *remotely* like this. The current state is normally what we would get in April. It's been like this since shortly after new years. We went to the Algonquin Park area to go tobogganing over the new year's break, but there was not enough snow there either.

It's not just the snow... up the street from me, flowers are blooming. Now admittedly, they are snowdrops, but snowdrops normally bud in late March here, not the first week of February (and the last week of January). Meanwhile, the cardinals are building a nest in our back yard.

We're completely boned.

> What we did is compare 55 elements from the periodic table in coal ash

Apparently a single example from the US, not the far east. Data presented with no error bars.

> But there's a trade-off between consumer protection and the profit motive that drives investment and innovation

The WSJ said the quiet part out loud.

"Intel Delays $20 Billion Ohio Project, Citing Slow Chip Market"

So I seem to recall a worldwide shortage of chips. One that was slowing down all sorts of manufacturing, notably cars.

But the real problem is not *enough* market.

Gotcha.

> I haven't used mine in years.

I got a USB CD/DVD/BD reader just in case when I updated my Mac to one without a drive.

I believe I have used it once in 11 years.

Apollo 12 put down beside Surveyor 3 at only slightly larger distance in 1969, and that's because they wanted to land on the higher ground.

File this one under "big deal".