Why I've been so quiet of late...

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Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Sep 21, 2015 9:05 pm

At least here, and at least about fusor stuff. It's because we made a ginormous breakthrough, actually. We are at approximately 100 billion neutrons/second with under 100w input. I had been using this site and making it all open source to give me "first to invent" status, recorded and time-stamped by an uninterested 3rd party - I have to patent this to give it away(!). But recent changes in patent laws, and events here have made me have to shut up till the patent is filed and perhaps granted.
First to invent no longer is the law - it's now first to file. That means someone else can steal it, patent it, monopolize it - admit they did - and still own it legally and rip off the world. This is not acceptable.

I'm really sorry about that - it's not under my control as is. But I do plan to actually give this away, with whatever details required to dupe my results and have already revealed the details such as they are to a few I trust in case I get hit by a meteor or something. (Pretty much anyone here could ask me and I'd tell them - it's jaw droppingly elegant and all standard model too...just not obvious till you've seen it - it's going to be fun to tell about!).

Thus all this crap I've been putting up on youtube (I'm DCFusor there) about building a new building and so on - so I can control and tune this from a safe distance. That's the real motivation - I like being alive, and that level of output - and scaling down has stopped being effective - I can't be in the room with for even a few seconds (as I found out the very hard way, and it took awhile to recover from). Since erecting meters-thick concrete shielding in the building the fusor is in isn't practical, and requires remoting it all anyway, I'm simply moving across my campus to a safe distance and letting the air and inverse square (and in some cases, better than that) law do that for me. Yes, it's taking way too long, I'm chomping at the bit - what are the chances I hit the right "tuning" on the first go? E^-(some_big_number), right? So I'm busy as heck building remote data aq and remote tuning right now. Just so you guys know - this project is far from dead, rather the opposite. There have been some interesting revelations along the way, which I'm chomping at the bit to share - but I can't just now for the reasons I stated above.

No, "big energy" isn't after me in a negative way, in fact, they've been in touch to try and buy in (news does travel, so why not let you guys in on it too?) - despite their propaganda, they know there are problems and want a chair for when the music stops. But each wants an exclusive, which of course is anathema to where I'm coming from, so no joy there so far. I believe we'll get there soon enough...not my worry just now. I'm sure a consortium can be assembled. Obviously, I'm not going to make fusion reactors for the world, there are other guys who make boilers, turbines, generators, and all the rest far better than I ever will, and they don't care how the heat is made, and they'll make money no matter what - we have no arguments whatever.

A couple hundred mW out for <100W in I think puts me at the Q record for all approaches for all time, though, and that feels pretty good (once I got over the rad sickness). And it's not a pulse thing, it's continuous and will run all day, all year. Normally, I'm pretty much of a cowboy and don't care about spurious "safety" fears, but that was a real eye opener...not to mention the amount of puking I had to dispose of. No more of that, now we go "by the book" on rad safety, which takes what it takes. Just so y'all know...I'm not dead, no one seems to want that (especially including me) and I've not given up or run into a wall - we're in what my partner calls a "good bad place" right now - good that we are doing so well, bad that we can't scale it down to the point of working in the same room with it safely. So, I have to spend all this time on otherwise boring infrastructure in order to continue. I expect some pretty cool announcements in a few months. This junk takes way too much time and effort, but we gotta do what we gotta do....
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Jake Gray » Wed Sep 23, 2015 1:08 pm

Funny, I was just thinking of writing an "Are you still alive?" post. Thanks for letting us know you haven't blown yourself up. Yet.
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Sep 23, 2015 3:03 pm

I'm quite alive, complete with aches and pains from building and so on. Since it's (mostly) not directly related to the board here, I've been posting about that on the youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/DCFusor
Though actually I've been so busy doing that and supervising help that even that is lacking as to my activities. And those of some true friends that deserve mention - no way I can pull all this off on my own, and help has come out of the woodwork...some of it competent.

One might further consider that my "lan of things" initiative, which is bringing anachronistic tech to the truly oldest profession (survival - I'm a homesteader and off-grid) as a dry run for the fusor remote stuff - after all, it's a thing (actually a few) on my LAN. But unlike water valves and such - a failure there can be really expensive, so why not make the mistakes on things like weather stations, water supply and so on? It's all part of the plan...

The lan of things has some interesting advantages over the hyped IoT stuff as well. Not only do I retain privacy - but also total control. I'm not sending data to a hub to be resold to market junk to me (targeted advertising is horrible for an inventor who wants to see new/unexpected stuff as stimulus) - but I don't have to sweat them getting hacked...From collecting my own data - even after sanitizing it some - it's simply amazing what a few temperature sensors and a barometer can tell you - every door and window opening, some of the walking around, when I took a dump, whether I washed well after...and "c'mon thieves, he's not home now" type stuff. No way any sane person puts that up on the internet. Do you really want remote control of your house heat? How long before people start houses on fire with that? (extreme, but you get the idea...there's so much wrong with the concept I pale at listing it all)

Further, since moving some things over from manual (but never forgetting those star trek episodes where lack of a manual override became an issue in the plot) - I've found I've over-provisioned a few things, and where I was scrimping before out of being conservative, I now have luxury levels of power and potable water. It could be worse(!)....and there's more to come. I've simply been a bit more busy doing stuff than posting - some of this is at a complexity level where it's not good for little bite sized posts - you have to see the whole system working together to "get it". Believe me, there will be plenty of posting once I can show the whole thing together, but as of now, its more like "nothing works until it all works", more or less - yes, I have debug-level stuff going and helping me day to day, but not like the vision for what it's really going to be.

For fusor remote we are talking about 5-6 microprocessors driven by a local PC for command, but sending their data to another PC (wirelessly isolated and in another building) for data collection. And separate wireless links for video and so on.
It's a pretty complex system, but one that shares the load among various machines so none get behind, and with no single point of failure if one goes down, we just lose its data - not the world.
All backed up by hardwired, buried, telco grade cable for master power and some of the more important safety controls. It's just taking longer than I wish - but having to do it at all means good news, we're really taking names at fusion now.
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Jake Gray » Wed Sep 23, 2015 5:58 pm

Looking forward to reading about it. I'm surprised that wireless is going to work for you. I would have thought noise off the fusor or power supply would have made wifi a dicey situation, but I suppose at 2.4 Ghz wifi isn't in the same range as the fusor noise.

I used to make control systems in sawmills and used some similar strategies just to not have to walk to the other end of the plant to check up on machines. Fun puzzles!
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Doug Coulter » Wed Sep 23, 2015 7:40 pm

Wireless (we have both 2.4 and 5 gig) works well for some stuff (and I use good directional antennas at short ranges, so it's a booming signal), and has the advantage of not transmitting lightning bolts that destroy whole LANs. Some other stuff, not so much, and we recognize that some gear is at risk or "sacrificial" because getting the data is so important. Wireless of course works great for starting essentially autonomous things before, and stopping after, a run - like a pi shooting video, which it's recording internally as well as previewing. If I lose the preview, it's not good, but not a disaster, for example. If I lost my whole lan, it would kind of mess my budget up...along with a lot of work to get everything installed on new gear again.

A lot of this (the early years) was working on how *not* to have fast-risetime things like arcs in the insulators with the stray capacity (high Q) and mere billion watt pulses...but wireless just re-transmits for those, usually. So, you might lose time-sync, which is one of the many issues with doing data aq well...but there are workarounds for most of those.
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Doug Coulter » Thu Nov 05, 2015 7:02 pm

Coming together step by step, inch by inch...
FusorMaster.JPG
The new control room.


The quad monitor setup is probably going over the other two in the corner, so I can use all of this at a time. And everyone knows, you've got to have a rip-your-face-off stereo and a killer computer setup to have a real control room, right?
Whiteboard optional...
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby APynckel » Mon Nov 09, 2015 7:25 am

Good to see your stuff coming together, Doug. Was looking for updates on the new "bunker" and how you were going about shielding yourself with the new setup.

P.S I hear old sailboat keels are great sources for raw Pb. :D
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Nov 09, 2015 9:15 am

Thanks. I'm getting there, it's just other things in life also take time. We're not short of lead here - probably nearly 1k lbs already in use. But there are limits to its use. Not only will the shop floor only hold so much (even with extra piers and jacks) but it has virtually no effect on neutrons or "neutron capture gammas", as the mass absorption coefficient drops orders of magnitude at high energies - it might as well be paper at say 2MeV.
Looks like distance (in my case) is a better answer. Should I need to erect a concrete wall...the industry standard for fission (similar batch of issues) - I can now do it outdoors where it will fit. We will be checking with scintillators, neutron detectors and so on at the op position - hopefully they won't blank, anyway. In real use (assuming we get there) the water in a boiler could be all the shielding required...but we're at research level now.

I'm giving considerable thought to this setup, even when I'm not actively working on it. I need a 100% reliable way to shut it off, and know it worked, for example. For that, yes, there is an interlock for the main power provided by the supply, but Spellman says "don't trust this" in an abundance of caution (legal guys?). But they are right - no single point of failure should exist. Therefore, I also buried some telco grade mulit-pair armored cable for things like hardwired AC power shutoff relays with the coil current coming from the op position rather than over there - any failure fails with them open - for just one thing. We've had computers crash, and frankly don't care if the reason was EMI or radiation flux - we know that while very useful for data acquisition, you don't trust your life to them.

So I won't - one exposure at that level was plenty, I don't want any more of that.
Interestingly, I've noticed that the "crashability" of computers goes more or less like this - Intel NUC, Raspberry pi, Arduino, with the bigger ones (running out of ram, not rom) being the most susceptible. There are other factors, to be sure - the big guys have more and longer wiring, which makes for more of an antenna to pick up EMI, and it's hard to test for shielding and ground loop issues. Since we want data, we'd just shut down a run in the event of a crash anyway, but we won't be depending on some computer to actually do the shutdown. For that, more like a couple relays in series with the power, coils in series too - and power from the remote position - so if any relay fails closed, any wire shorts or fails open - we're still good.

I couldn't easily get my hands back on the mass absorption curve for lead, but it's similar to iron in shape other than the location of the K line glitch (higher energy in lead). Neutrons? Cross section negligible, it's like bouncing BB's off bowling balls, they just find their way on through. Note that for double the energy, you don't need double the thickness - you need far more (orders of magnitude) for the same shielding. And the worst case is right around 2 MeV - which is neutron decay gamma or capture in hydrogen energy. Even boron makes a 571 KeV gamma...this is a hard game to win.
Attenuation_Coefficient_Iron.png
Note log scaling here. This isn't easy.


Right now, I'm working on automating the gas control, and ion source control, using a Teensy 3.2, which looks like the right machine for the job, and fits into my "LAN of things" system nicely. We will be using a couple of raspi's with the HD cameras to stream video back to the op position, as well as our normal data aq (counters, voltages, currents, and so on).

Edit:
Seems there's always a little more work to do. Here's lead vs gamma energy. Lots of orders magnitude difference between hospital (or our power supply voltage) and the real hot stuff created by neutron capture or decay.
Pb-gamma.gif
We have plenty for 50kv, but...
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby APynckel » Mon Nov 09, 2015 2:51 pm

Sounds like you need to find some stuff with a very high fast neutron capture cross section ;) (good luck, lol)

With that information in the fast neutron attentuation of Pb, I agree that distance + concrete is going to be your best bet. Scary to think about when they actually get "hot" fusion to work on a production scale, where are they going to put the reactors to keep the flux down.... Underground? Under the ocean? How hot are the neutrons going to be at that scale?

:geek:
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Re: Why I've been so quiet of late...

Postby Doug Coulter » Mon Nov 09, 2015 5:03 pm

Actually, that was just for gammas. Lead absorbs neutrons "none at all" or close enough...it's like firing a shotgun through a grid of baseballs 1/3 mile between them. Should a neutron actually find a lead nucleus, it'll just bounce off and keep going (in some other direction) having lost 1/206th (roughly speaking) of it's kinetic energy.

So, for any high energy gammas - or neutrons of any speed, lead may as well be paper.
While there are things with high neutron cross sections for both scattering and capture - capture generally means generating a high energy gamma in response. This shielding stuff is HARD to get right. And we only have ~ 2.5 megavolt neutrons with DD fusion. While in theory, a 2.5 MV neutron is more harmful than a same-energy gamma, I kinda would avoid either one.

Distance is for sure your friend (like altitude for an aviator). We get better than inverse square law here - due to neutrons being slowed and captured in air/water vapor, and compton scattering with gammas. We'll measure how much - calculating it is a pain and we after all, do have the gear to just measure and eliminate any oops in calculating.

One thought we've had is to simply put a bunch of moderator (HDPE or water) near the fusor and slow down all the neutrons, so they are either captured or decay "over there" - at a distance.
This approach would have been idiotic in the same room with it...but makes more sense at a distance. We could add boron to the moderator and get "mere" 570 KV gammas as well...a little better.
I'm looking into other things, of course, but the online databases don't make the searching easy for what we want here.

ITER has 16 megavolt ones with DT - enough to actually knock iron atoms out of a lattice, turning it to dust at some point, and lets not get in to what it'll do to their magnets.
I have no clue why they didn't realize this upfront - all those supposedly smart PhD's looking for tenure didn't see what they didn't want to see, I guess - so when they figured out they couldn't get there with DD, they said, well, we get 100 times the cross section (and ~4x power per) with DT - and ran with that, not thinking about the materials issues. I believe they more or less shut down while they think of how to solve that one - and it's a real bear. They'd also need to breed the tritium, for which there are various schemes, some of which may work. Dunno, we're going down a different road here. But I'd also observe that in a DT mix, not all the hits are going to be D on T - you'll have half as many each DD and TT...so that 100x is imaginary at best.
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