Carbon-free fusion power could be ‘on the grid in 15 years’

No no no! that is NOT how it works, every year it is "just" 15 years away!

 

People smug about lack of progress fascinate me. I imagine they spend long nights reading tomes on constipation and parliamentory procedural tricks.

But ill jump in. There has been a progress this year from a lot of private concerns, but as most of the leaders now are private and not public concerns like ITER, they're not divulging much until they have something to say.

I would suspect right now its a race to the finish line between TAE, Helion, and General, in terms of breakeven. Breakeven isn't the same as converting joules into power on the grid, but it may cause these saints of obstruction a few moments of awkward loosidty.

 

I've always had an interest in vortices. I have seen some tornadoes with as few as two suction vortices, in a double helix shape.

Well--a thunderstorm is an updraft--and so is a smoker. Maybe DNA is an after-image of aquatic vorticity...this from 1986 footage of a MN tornado:


This tornado had only one super-intense vortex right at ground level for a bit. The funnel not even a yard across. Very focused. This due to a process called vortex breakdown:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JAS3965.1

Now, with tokamaks, you have a torus. But I think there are some spiral designs. If you can use both magnetic fields and vortex breakdown--you might get better confinement.

I also wonder about combining other processes. Lasers/Z-pinch hitting the area of breakdown--maybe even a palladium target--use everything combined, but in a constant way.

 

interestingly TAE's first commercial product will not be fusion power but treatment for cancer.

https://taelifesciences.com/about-bnct/

Their using their knowledge of neutron beams to create a device that targets cancer cells based on absorption of Boron10. Pretty interesting and eliminates them.

 

They're talking about harvesting Helium 3 on the Moon. Apparently, they've found a way to make the trip worthwhile. The only problem is that they still can't get energy from the fusion of Helium 3 with Deuterium!! The reactor absorbs more energy than it produces, which kinda defeats the purpose of the whole thing. They say that they'll be ready to send the Moon harvesting robots in a decade or so... but it could take them much longer to make the reactor work.

 

I had this idea for a device where you pump blood into a chamber and electron beams penetrate the chamber targeting cancer cells and nuking them.

 

Your proposal doesn't do anything to treat the bone marrow, where the cancerous white cells are produced nor does it prevent metastasis via other pathways. How do you propose to detect which white cells are cancerous? That is the hard part.

 

Good points...... Hey it was just an idea. Well I suppose you could pump bone marrow into a similar device and target the cells there too.

 

I still want to know how you are detecting the mutated cells.

Current advanced research on advanced therapies uses molecular-scale targetting based on factors such as expression of anomalous proteins or even direct examination of DNA sequences for mutated segments.

Ultrasonic-guided microbead delivery of chemotherapy to tumour cells is also being trialed. That does, at least, avoid hitting all cells in the body with chemo drugs, even if it's not as advanced.

Another problem is that cancer cells evolve resistance through random variations. They are tricky buggers to pin down. The current thinking is to force resistant mutation down one pathway before applying another treatment to which the cells are extremely unlikely to be able to evolve a countermeasure.

 

Ok just spitballing ideas here but there would be a database of what possible anomalies would look like or be like and an AI would help target the beams based on that database.

 

The anomalies (proteins expressed due to mutations in the DNA) are most likely only going to be detectable at a molecular level. Let's assume the anomolous protein is expressed in the cell membrane.

What analytical techniques are appropriate in that case? Which ones are least likely to cause cell damage on their own part? How long does it take to examine each of the billions of white blood cells? There are between 4,000 and 10,000 WBCs per microlitre of blood so between about 20 billion and 50 billion WBCs in the human body. That's a lot of cells to process, even in parallel.

Why use electron beams in preference to proton beams?

What are the probabilities of incorrect diagnosis (false negatives and positives)?

How are you dealing with the resection margin? You can't assume that you've extracted all the cancerous cells from the marrow. Surrounding blood vessels and bone might harbour some. Some bone marrow is not readily accessible. I assume you can detect the primary cancer site by looking for a "hot" area (high uptake of fluorodeoxyglucose, FDG) in a PET scan.

ETA: If the subject of advanced cancer therapies interests you, I'd suggest starting a new, dedicated thread. Otherwise, we're derailing this thread with irrelevancies.

 

To tell the truth I hadn't really thought out every single detail. I just create ideas on the fly.

 

Esse est percipi. Anyway, let's not clog up this thread.

 

LPP chief scientist Eric Lerner is going to be presenting proposals at the Fusion Energy Symposium today in Trenton, NJ. They've been working on new beryllium electrodes since February (LPP has the record right now for highest temperatures for plasma in confinement) to help them on to their next phase, so there maybe be some interesting news from this underdog in the race, so to speak.

 

Nanobots are the future for the treatment of Cancer. They can kill cancer cells one by one. The nanobots are so small that they could work at an incredible speed (almost no inertia), cancer could be eliminated in a matter of hours. The question is how do they spot the cancerous cells. Well, I've read the cancer cells are metabolically disconnected from our bodies and that means for example that they don't handle fasts very well. After a few days fast the cancer cell would appear much weaker than the normal cells. The bots would then be instructed to kill the cells that appear weaker than average, but that's only an example, I am sure doctors know of other ways to make the distinction between them.

 

Maybe as Asbo was saying, there can be a thread about cancer treatments.

 

You know what I think that's a fantastic idea. Can someone start it?

 

I'll do just that.

Wait--we already have one:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/a-cure-for-cancer.101430/

 

In yet another side business, I see Helionenergy.com has revamped their site to show production of He3 as a product, though obviously they're not selling in in bulk. That's a pretty big deal. It means their current machine has been fusing enough He3 that they must feel they are going to be able to sell it in quantity (and it has a lot of uses), and also means they're making some significant progress.

He3 sales alone might be able to continue to fund them to their goal.

 

I hope that pans out I wonder if the old Profac concept--but circling Saturn-- might be better than lunar harvesting.

I wonder if this might be useful for fusion
www.spacedaily.com/reports/Accurate_probing_of_magnetism_with_light_999.html
www.spacedaily.com/reports/Scientists_offer_designer_big_atoms_on_demand_999.html