Slightly off topic, still...

Joat42 wrote: {snip}...but in this case there isn't any money to make, just a loss of reputation if it turns out that it's hype.

dreamrider wrote:

Joat42 wrote: {snip}...but in this case there isn't any money to make, just a loss of reputation if it turns out that it's hype.

You're kidding, right?

dr

Joat42 wrote:

dreamrider wrote:Lockheed (whose reputation, as a historically important and successful aerospace company I highly respect) has also done stuff like sell the State of Texas a total bill of goods on how improved and efficient the Texas Employment Commission would be if it were closed down and totally outsourced to Lockheed. Unemployment in Texas has been up relative to past similar economic periods every year since.

Premature hype is an inherent fault of American corporate culture. Most (~80%) high-level corporate executives come out of marketing and sales backgrounds, not engineering.

dreamrider

If there is a buck to make a lot of companies will fudge the truth as you say, but in this case there isn't any money to make, just a loss of reputation if it turns out that it's hype.

SWM wrote:Joat, nobody is saying that it is deliberate blue-sky hype. What we are saying is that early announcements of technology--including from Lockheed and other reputable companies--often turn out to have been overly optimistic due to unforeseen problems.

[edit]In any case, Lockheed wouldn't get any loss of reputation from this. They have announced a new design for a fusion generator. Even if it doesn't work as well as expected, it is an important feat. There is no downside to making this announcement.[/edit]

Joat42 wrote:

SWM wrote:Joat, nobody is saying that it is deliberate blue-sky hype. What we are saying is that early announcements of technology--including from Lockheed and other reputable companies--often turn out to have been overly optimistic due to unforeseen problems.

[edit]In any case, Lockheed wouldn't get any loss of reputation from this. They have announced a new design for a fusion generator. Even if it doesn't work as well as expected, it is an important feat. There is no downside to making this announcement.[/edit]

It seems to me that it was indicated by dreamriders posts that he was of the opinion that the announcement was of the premature hype type so they could make a buck.

Jonathan_S wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Since I've got an aversion to watching videos (I'm behind a very slow line - videos tend to lose their punch when I get two or three second views in every 10 or 15 seconds), I got most of what I know from a couple of the other articles. What they seem to be claiming is that they've solved the problem that has plagued tokamak research for the last several decades: instability of the magnetic field confining the plasma. If that is in fact true, and their system will generate enough negative feedback to keep the plasma away from the physical walls of the device, then they have the possibility of some interesting developments. One of the articles said that they were aiming for 10 seconds of sustained plasma as a proof that their concept worked.

I have the impression that they regard the next steps as "just engineering." I'm not so sanguine, but then they're a lot smarter than I am.

The Nuclear_Fusion article at Wikipedia, as well as one of the linked articles, gives a pretty decent background on how the actual reactions work.

I did see a skeptical article (which of course I can't find at the moment) that thought that Lockheed's design seemed to require the superconducting magnet rings to be too close to the fusion chamber - that they couldn't have enough shielding there to keep neutron bombardment from the fusion from knocking them out of superconducting mode.

I've no idea if that's a concern, and really hope Lockheed (or somebody) makes some real progress on economical fusion power.

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I did see a skeptical article (which of course I can't find at the moment) that thought that Lockheed's design seemed to require the superconducting magnet rings to be too close to the fusion chamber - that they couldn't have enough shielding there to keep neutron bombardment from the fusion from knocking them out of superconducting mode.

I've no idea if that's a concern, and really hope Lockheed (or somebody) makes some real progress on economical fusion power.

That was in the comments on one of the sites posted by one of the physicists from U Washington's Fusion team. In short, Lockheed didn't have enough physical distance to blunt 13.4 MeV particles from interacting with the magnets themselves, and if they have a different way to manage this, it was not explained.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Theemile wrote:That was in the comments on one of the sites posted by one of the physicists from U Washington's Fusion team. In short, Lockheed didn't have enough physical distance to blunt 13.4 MeV particles from interacting with the magnets themselves, and if they have a different way to manage this, it was not explained.

Thanks for digging that up - better to have the actual source that my potentially garbled recollection.

SWM wrote:You probably want to check out the discussion we already had on that last week--http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6343