Image Credit – Brillouin Energy LENR Device

ECAT 1MW Power Plant

Above are two LENR (Cold Fusion) power systems said to be close to going into production. BTE commenter AlainCo makes this point:

“Scientific community will discover LENR in Wall Street Journal.”

Ha, ha – but this may well prove to be true. The 1MW ECAT shown above, for example, is said to be entering production now. In fact 13 units have been shipped. If it only works half as good as claimed, we will have a worldwide energy revolution on our hands. At the bottom of this post is the spec table from the ECAT website. It says the ECAT has a COP of 6. This means it puts out 6 times more thermal energy than the electrical energy put into it. And what does it run on? You put in hydrogen and nickel. What is the waste product? Copper – because the hydrogen and nickel transmutate into copper. All of the nasty air pollution that you get from burning fossil fuels is eliminated. It’s truly amazing LENR is ignored by the mainstream scientific community and mainstream press. But it won’t be for much longer, I think. As I predicted back in January – 2013 will be the year of Cold Fusion.

Here is a calculator that claims the ECAT could create electrical power for $29.3 per MWhr. Imagine if that is true. That is about one third the cost of the lowest cost electrical power generation methods today. For example,  coal is around $100 per MWhr. Like I said, if LENR technologies work we will have an energy revolution on our hands. And the world  will have to figure out what to do with it.

Image credit – Paramount movie Star Trek: Into Darkness

I’ve seen a lot of web traffic coming to the BTE site over the past few days. I think this is in part due to the excitement about the new movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness, that was released yesterday. I look forward to seeing it. (If you’ve seen it, no spoilers please.)

So let’s talk about one theme that has been in Star Trek from the beginning. Specifically, Star Trek carries a certain optimism  about the future, and this characteristic about Star Trek I find appealing. This optimism is talked about in the 1975 book Star Trek Lives! A reviewer wrote of the book:

The “Optimism Effect” is the view of the future which Star Trek provides. It is a “vision of a brighter future of man, and of a world characterized by hope, achievement and understanding.” Star Trek’s presentation of such a future provides an image of success which can encourage someone seeking success for himself.

The Optimism Effect is not only a statement about the future, it is a statement about the nature of reality. In facing difficulties, discovering their nature and sources, and overcoming them, the Star Trek characters show “that the mind can understand reality and be a useful tool of survival.” This philosophical optimism puts Star Trekin contrast with the view, which is prevalent today, that reality is malevolent and incomprehensible.

Closely related to the Optimism Effect is the “Goal Effect.” This is the presentation of the idea “that important goals are worthwhile, worth striving for and – attainable.” Every episode of Star Trek deals with the seeking and attaining of important goals – the saving of a life, a planet, or even a galaxy, the correction of an injustice, the attainment of co-operation between civilizations.

And the reviewer pulls this quote from the book:

“Man is shown as he could and should be, strong, intelligent, beautiful, confident, solving his problems, heroic – thus furnishing us the fuel to become that way, to reach for the stars.”

Thirty eight years later this all still rings true. And I can think of just the spaceship to build to help remind us daily of this optimistic view of the future!

Image credit – AEI, Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem Blog

Not widely known is that in the US there is an oil production boom going on. In states like North Dakota and Texas it is the wild west of the oil boom days again. See the rapid rise in oil production in the graph at the top of this post. And production is still increasing each month.

Unemployment in North Dakota is around 3%. It’s hard to even find housing near the oil fields. The pay is good and there are plenty of jobs. There are plenty of oil field jobs in Texas too.

Since the 1960s we have heard that “peak oil” will soon be upon us. When the peak arrives, some predictions expect a rapid fall off in global oil production and a worldwide  economic catastrophe as a result. Now, it’s true that someday oil production will begin a steady decline. But it’s looking more and more like a rapid fall in production will not happen any time soon, and we will be spared any economic disaster. Things are looking good at least until 2030.

The oil boom – and the natural gas boom that is just as big – are in part happening because new, advanced drilling techniques like fracking have made it economical for businesses to pursue new sources of oil and gas.

Of course in the long term fossil fuels are not desirable for being our major energy source. They pollute the air and also dump a lot of unwanted CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere. But an oil and natural gas production boom to hold off any possibility of peak oil causing sudden drops in the world’s oil supply buys us time for developing alternatives. Alternatives, that is, like LENR or Hot Fusion. (Wind and solar just don’t seem up to the task of replacing fossil fuels.)

For the sections of the Enterprise that house the engines, I’ve called them “engine hulls” on the BTE site. In Star Trek lingo, and for some Earth-based aircraft too, the word nacelle is used instead to describe the part of the ship or airplane that holds an engine while being separate from the fuselage. The nacelles for the Boeing 707 jet are shown above.

Maybe I should have used the term nacelles instead of “engine hulls” on the BTE site. I suppose they mean about the same thing. And maybe I should start using the word nacelle in the future.

One problem I have with the word nacelle is that I can never remember how to pronounce it.

This week marks the one year anniversary of the BuildTheEnterprise website. Break out the champagne!

Below are some highlights of what went on over this past year. Most are known about, but today I reveal some items for the first time.

• The BTE website was launched in early May 2012 and immediately went from obscurity to gaining significant worldwide media attention including in the major news media.
• 31,406 Facebook likes for the BTE site as of today.
• BTE-Dan interviewed in the Washington Times.
• Forum has over 6900 posts (thank you nuclearman and forum staff for facilitating this)
• BTEWiki launched and very many pages added (special thanks to Michel Lamontagne for adding so much good content)
• 190 BTE blog posts published where many hopefully help refine what might make sense for the Gen1 Enterprise technologies. And commenters contributed many thoughts.
• Created a companion BTE Facebook page, twitter account with over 1000 followers, and a Pinterest page. And thanks to the volunteer who created the Google+ page.
• Submitted a White House petition to have NASA do a feasibility study of the Gen1 Enterprise. Received over 7200 signatures and some mainstream media attention.
• Raised awareness that Cold Fusion (LENR) may be close to having production reactors and highlighted the need for the DOE to test them and get involved. Submitted a White House petition. (LENR, if it works, will transform energy technologies on Earth and also provide an ideal nuclear power source for the Enterprise.)
• Raised awareness that two working prototypes of EmDrives exist and it’s claimed that they create thrust without propellant (but they have not been independently tested). Interviewed inventor Roger Shawyer.
• An independent documentary filmmaker in Ireland had a meeting and formally pitched making a documentary on the BTE ideas to the Discovery channel, but he did not get approved.
• I submitted a non-fiction book proposal on the BTE site ideas. A top New York City literary agent was very interested and helped develop the written proposal. But in the end the agent believed a credentialed aerospace expert had to co-write the book, and so he did not submit the proposal to book publishers. He said they would not accept it without a co-writer. (So I have stopped all work on this.)
• Created a complete BTE company website, company name, and company logo. Sorry, keeping this all private until if and when a company is someday launched.

What’s next? Some thoughts -

• Get a dedicated Wikipedia page about the BTE website and BTE core ideas. (I submitted a request for this. Not sure how this can be accelerated.)
• Kickstarter project? Some new ideas: fund hull mechanical stress simulations and Enterprise ship flight dynamics, or independently test the Chinese EmDrive prototype, or build a 500:1 scale gravity wheel prototype, or independently test the LENR ECAT reactor, or build a 2 foot (1500:1 scale) Enterprise prototype and launch it into space, or build a 6 foot (500:1 scale) underwater Enterprise that can be used for testing (assuming underwater can somewhat simulate space). Other ideas?
• I’m thinking about asking some aerospace experts to get involved in the BTE venture but not give their real names. This way they can contribute without worrying about any fall out in their day jobs for working on a project that some consider to be too speculative and too far out there.
• I will launch a new website, which is only loosely related to the BTE venture, in about 1-2 months. It will be about building a high-tech model city on Earth from scratch.
• Start a BTE R&D company? All depends on if  funding is attained. I of course would love to leave my day job to run a BTE company.

One counterpoint to this, and one that I make too, is that many, many experiments now have shown substantial excess heat. And this excess heat alone makes LENR potentially very important. And so mainstream science, the mainstream media, and the US Department of Energy should stop shunning this potential breakthrough.

But some scoff at the excess heat claims because again they say there is no theory to show LENR devices can work within the laws of physics. Therefore LENR is not worthy of serious attention or government research money. One writer recently wrote that he is horrified that NASA might spend money on LENR since there is no good theory to explain it. But should that really be an obstacle at all? Consider what Wikipedia notes about superconducting materials:

“The best available model of high-temperature superconductivity is still somewhat crude. There are currently two main hypotheses – the resonating-valence-bond theory, and spin fluctuation which has the most support in the research community. The second hypothesis proposed that electron pairing in high-temperature superconductors is mediated by short-range spin waves known as paramagnons.”

So superconducting materials are not well understood, yet no one questions that the materials really do achieve superconductivity. People have seen the measured results, and that’s good enough evidence that the materials really work.

I predict that LENR devices will soon reach this same state. Once devices are publicly available, and enough independent testers verify their excess heat (assuming they work), then the fact there is no great theory yet to explain the physics of LENR will become of secondary importance. If the devices work, they work.

Of course having good theories is really important in the long run. The better you understand the physics behind a technology, the more likely you are to gain insights into how to make the technology better.

Coreless Superconducting Electromagnet

Superconducting magnets can be created two different ways. First, some non-magnetic ceramic materials when cold enough  become magnetic due to the Meissner effect and they also exhibit a flux pinning effect that causes these materials to uniquely interact with normal room temperature magnets. This flux pinning is fascinating because the lines of flux lock into fixed locations on the magnets and thus pin the superconducting material in place with respect to the regular magnets. Watch a video of this here. You can levitate things with no feedback control loop needed.

The second way to create a superconducting magnet is to simply wind superconducting wire into a coil, like shown in the image at the top of this post, to create a superconducting electromagnet. When kept cold enough the superconducting wire has zero electrical resistance. This allows a superconducting electromagnet to do this:

“An alternate operating mode, once the magnet has been energized, is to short-circuit the windings with a piece of superconductor. The windings become a closed superconducting loop, the power supply can be turned off, and persistent currents will flow for months, preserving the magnetic field. The advantage of this persistent mode is that stability of the magnetic field is better than is achievable with the best power supplies, and no energy is needed to power the windings.”

The Enterprise may need superconducting electromagnets in many places on the ship. Some examples are:

1) In the VASIMR-like engines to accelerate the plasma propellant for creating thrust.

2) In the magnetic suspension of the gravity wheel.

3) In the maglev circular elevator that moves people to and from the gravity wheel.

There will surely be more places too. For example, if the EmDrive happens to work, it needs superconducting magnets.

It should be noted that the Enterprise may not need any superconducting materials that take advantage of the flux pinning effect that is commonly seen in demonstrations like in the video linked above. While this is an amazing phenomenon, the Enterprise may just need electromagnets that are are simply coils of wire. Electromagnets are more useful because they allow for active control such as for making corrective adjustments to the gravity wheel position as it rotates.

Furthermore, the ferromagnetic cores that are normally used in room temperature electromagnets are not needed in superconducting electromagnets. That is because coils of superconducting wire generate such high magnetic field strengths that the ferromagnetic cores can’t support these fields or enhance them as they do in normal room temperature electromagnets. But that’s okay, and in fact it’s nice because the superconducting electromagnets are simpler and need less material.

Also appealing for the Enterprise is that superconducting electromagnets can have longer lifetimes than room temperature electromagnets. This is because the materials used in them do not have to endure the heating that occurs in room temperature electromagnets due to the electrical current encountering the resistance in the wire used.

Wikipedia notes this about the VASIMR electric propulsion engine:

“Powerful superconducting electromagnets, employed to contain hot plasma, generate tesla-range magnetic fields. They can present problems with other on board devices.”

That’s a good reason to keep the engines as far away from people and equipment as possible. So the long engine hulls of the Enterprise are convenient because the VASIMR-like engines can be placed at the far aft end of them.

Once again, the form of the Really Big E offers a nice functional fit for building the world’s first supership in space.

Also, some the work done by volunteers on the BTEWiki site was lost too. I am still hoping to retrieve this.

I still don’t know what happened to the site and probably never will. But this shows why you always need back ups of your stuff.

As a side note, some people may not know it, but everything on the web is getting backed up somewhere. I’m not talking about your hosting service. I’m talking about places like the Wayback Machine. So you should keep in mind, anything you put on the web may stay around forever.

Update: Here is the last Wayback Machine capture of the BTE site. This is convenient because now I can see what all of the images were on the site as I re-upload them. So these public archives can be useful.