This doesn't light the way to radiation-free energy.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11412

"Although there have been a few proposals for fusion reactors employing plasmas far out of thermodynamic equilibrium (such as migma and inertial-electrostatic confinement), there has never been a broad, systematic study of the entire possible range of such devices. This research fills that gap by deriving fundamental power limitations which apply to virtually any possible type of fusion reactor that uses a grossly nonequilibrium plasma. Two main categories of nonequilibrium plasmas are considered: (1) systems in which the electrons and/or fuel ions possess a significantly non-Maxwellian velocity distribution, and (2) systems in which at least two particle species, such as electrons and ions or two different species of fuel ions, are at radically different mean energies. These types of plasmas would be of particular interest for overcoming bremsstrahlung radiation losses from advanced aneutronic fuels (e.g. ^3He-^3He, p-^{11}B, and p- ^6Li) or for reducing the number of D-D side reactions in D-^3He plasmas. Analytical Fokker-Planck calculations are used to determine accurately the minimum recirculating power that must be extracted from undesirable regions of the plasma's phase space and reinjected into the proper regions of the phase space in order to counteract the effects of collisional scattering events and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. In virtually all cases, this minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power, so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies, reactors employing plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium will not be able to produce net power. Consequently, the advanced aneutronic fuels cannot generate net power in any foreseeable reactor operating either in or out of equilibrium."

You're shooting a beam of protons through a gas of fuel, this is about as far away from thermal equilibrium as you can get. Only a small proportion of protons will actually wind up fusing, the power it takes to generate those protons and shoot them into the fuel (or the power to take the ones that miss fuel ions and recirculate them to give them another pass through the fuel) will dwarf the power you get from the fusion reactions. In other words: big fat hairy deal. Fusion is easy. It's the extracting useful amounts of energy from it that's hard, and this process can't do that.

You're not delusional. JT-60 in Japan sort of reached breakeven, but with one hell of a caveat: JT-60 only uses D-D fuel, but it achieved conditions in the plasma such that if the D-D fuel was replaced with D-T fuel, it would have achieved Q=1.25.

What's delusional is the notion that ICF can ever be a commercial source of fusion power. Even after you squint and wave your hands and say "We reached break-even, if you count only the energy absorbed by the fuel," you need to realize the huge inefficiencies at every step along the chain. Conversion of electricity into laser energy is really inefficient. The IR lasers are frequency-converted into UV beams, a process which is only 50% efficient. And only about 10% of *that* actually goes into compressing the fuel.

And that fuel is frozen D-T contained within a copper-doped beryllium capsule that needs to be spherical to micron tolerances, and the surfaces of that sphere need to be smooth to *nanometer* tolerances. The beryllium must be precisely 150 microns thick, and a 5-micron hole is laser-drilled through it. The capsule in turns rests within an equally-precisely made hohlraum comprised of a gold/uranium alloy. Each one of these precision assemblies costs tens of thousands of dollars to make, assembly of the various parts also must be done to micron tolerances. And out of this, if fusion works perfectly and every bit of the fuel is used, you can expect a maximum possible energy output of 45 megajoules. That's 12.5 kilowatt-hours of energy; if you can manage the miraculous feat of 100% efficiently converting that back into electricity, you could sell that electricity for about $1.25.

For commercial fusion, they'll need to burn 15 of these targets per second, every second, indefinitely. Which means that in addition to needing a fusion gain factor of about *60* (compared to 20 for a tokamak, which will also probably never produce commercial fusion power), they'll need to get the fuel cost down to like 10 cents per target.

Meanwhile, fission just works. Figure out how many LFTRs we could build for the cost of the NIF and weep. ICF is a jobs program for engineers who got scared as hell when the cold-war ended and started pimping their bomb-research machines to environmentalists who don't understand physics or economics.

Sales are not profit. R* didn't make a billion dollars in one day. GTA V sold $1B worth of copies in a day. At best R* will see about 40% of that. Even then, VCs aren't going to just jump at game development. GTA is the exception, not the rule. It cost over $265M and took somewhere in the neighborhood of five years to make GTA V. During development *every* R* studio was involved with it. There were no other games in production. There was no fallback plan, essentially. GTAV was risky every way you look at it. Mitigating that risk was the fact that it was GTA and that R* has a proven record of being able to deliver. While that's great for them it's only great for them. Take an extremely large random collection of game developers, give them $265M and five years to make a game. You won't see $1B in sales on the first day. Chances are depressingly better than average that you won't break even. Except for the large well established studios (studios, not publishers) it's a very risky industry. VCs are generally risk averse.

Yup. those Camrys were the death-knell of Toyota, that's for sure!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjAyazqtQj8&t=2m41s

"If you're going to park a car full of explosives, you can either create a small crater in a car park, or you will go for the airport - so cars that are left outside are checked."

Not quite. What you probably meant to say was that "...cars that are left outside are checked by some minimum-wage monkey whose chief marketable skill is being able to maneuver a car into a parking space."

If bombs in parked cars were an actual concern, they'd be using trained and skilled personnel in order to search them. You think a parking lot attendant is going to check underneath the car, or under the hood, or in the trunk, or in the wheel wells, or behind the dash, or any of the other places in a car where substantial quantities of explosive can be concealed from view?

  No. Of course not. At best he's going to check under the seats and steal your loose change. This should let intelligent people know that there are two possibilities here:

1. Bombs in parked cars at short-term valet-parked lots are not a serious security threat.
2. The TSA is criminally incompetent and that useless titsuck of a government agency should be sequestered with extreme prejudice.

Note: These are not mutually exclusive possibilities.

I qualified, "With breeders and/or sane fuel cycles/reactor designs." The fissionable U235 goes into reactors because we designed the present-day fuel cycle around the military's interest in bomb production. If you designed a fuel cycle around electrical production, there are reactor designs that will either breed U238 into fissile plutonium (all conventional reactors do this to an extent), or which will use 238 as fuel directly (U238 will not sustain a fission chain reaction but it will fission and release energy when bombarded by fast neutrons).

But the underlying point is that whever someone says "There are only [x] years of uranium|oil|coal|lithium reserves left!" that means "at current prices," because that's how "reserves" *are defined.*. With lithium at $y/lb, there are x years of lithium reserves left to mine. But as the price of lithium increases because those reserves start running low, it becomes economical to mine sources of lithium that previously weren't worth mining. So at price $y+1/lb, there are now x+z years of lithium reserves left. Uranium, unlike coal or oil, is so ridiculously energy-dense that it would have to become ridiculously expensive for it not to be worth using to produce energy.

"something that is very limited on this planet."

Bullshit. Uranium is ridiculously abundant. There's more uranium than silver, or tin, or cadmium, or antimony.

"If Fukashima has not occurred, we would be currently looking at a global uranium shortage in the next 5 years as existing major sources (re-purposing from old warheads) dry up and are not replaced with new mines."

Utter and total nonsense. Old warheads are not major sources of uranium, because warheads are fabricated from *plutonium*, not uranium, which is produced in reactors specifically so we can build warheads out of it. There are billions of tons of uranium dissolved in seawater, with another 32000 tons being carried into the oceans by rivers every year. With breeders and/or sane fuel cycles/reactor designs, there's enough uranium to provide our present electrical demands for, literally, millions of years.

And there's three times as much thorium as there is uranium.

"Whenever production of power plants comes back on track, we will once again be facing such a shortage."

Only someone who completely fails to understand what constitutes ore reserves would say such a thing. As uranium prices rise, ore reserves increase, because a higher price for uranium means other sources become economical to exploit. There will only ever be a shortage of uranium *at a given price*, and once that price gets high enough to make extraction from seawater economical, supplies become effectively limitless. And since nuclear fuel is so energy dense, orders of magnitude moreso than chemical fuels, the raw price of ore contributes very little to the cost of electricity coming out of the plant.

Go on, early adopters, pay to prove me wrong.

If your counter argument is "nanny nanny boo boo", then aren't you rather confirming OP's point that this is a game of ideological mud slinging?

They've actually got on top of much of the core stuff in the past few years. Which is why it's astonishing that they went so nuts with "Window" 8.

Remember when Gates BSOD'd Win98 at a presentation? And laughed, because he know that people would still queue up to buy it.

You don't "lay off" in order to recruit "new people". In many jurisdictions, you can't do that legally.

Not that EA has ever cared about silly little things like employment laws.

Incidentally, I work for a 10,000+ employ software company, and to my knowledge and belief, they have never "laid off" anyone, ever.

I'd better tell management that consistent year on year growth - and regularly heading up the best companies to work for lists - is "abnormal" and "unhealthy". They're doing it wrong!

Because when I read "EA" and "slashing workforce" I half expected it to be about "the cubicle stabbings will continue until morale improves."

Good job that's not in the slightest bit radioactive then.

If nuclear adopted the same attitude that coal has always had, then reactor leaks would be result in a shrug and a response of "So what, you can't see it, so it can't hurt you."