Thursday, February 6, 2014
More about LIFE
LIFE was so close to working. This is what Mike Dunne had to say in a recent article (
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_27-1-2014-9-56-31):
"To speed up the timeline to energy generation, Mike and his team have collaborated with engineers from the power industry to create a design for a steam turbine to capture heat from the reaction. This means that once ignition is reached, fewer hurdles will stand in the way of adapting the system to feed into an electrical grid."
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6 comments:
Dunne is a sharp tool, no doubt about it. Not sure if he was just doing what Moses wanted him to do or if he really believes this stuff.
I think it made sense to have some small effort looking at future commercialization possibilities in the event that ignition was achieved, maybe about 1 FTE divided among three people to study the prospects of using solid-state lasers someday, etc.. But what LIFE grew into was ridiculous. Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch. How many FTE's did they have working on LIFE anyway, and exactly where was the money coming from?
I wouldn't be so quick to trash the Z machine. It has produced impressive results when one considers the comparatively puny budget it has.
Was any outside money or client actually funding LIFE?
There was olot of jibber jabber about VCs coming into the NIF game a few years ago. But I don't think any actually sunk money in.
So what is Ed doing now? He was booted out of one job, then another job, and now LIFE is dead too.
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