Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote: > The "no nuclear waste" claim is also blatantly false. > > It does seem improbably. But are you sure? Do you know what reaction it is? Where does it say that?
> On closer inspection it turns out that Hawker's “energy gain” would not be > the continuous gain of an operating power system nor even a net reactor > gain nor even a one-time net energy gain which accounts for all losses. > Closer inspection of what? What document describes this? I don't see why continuous gain is needed to estimate efficiency. If it takes X Joules to accelerate the sample with the railgun, and you get 10 X Joules from the reaction, that would be a large gain. Suppose it only happens once a minute with the experimental unit. That has no bearing on the claim. Once an hour would be fine. As long as the machine does not quickly self-destruct. As long as it seems likely that closely spaced reactions are possible, I see no need to continuous reactions. The reactions in an internal combustion engine are not continuous. If this machine needed something conceptually similar to a multi-cylinder engine with periodic explosions in each cylinder, that might work. Arthur C. Clarke once described an imaginary small laser inertial confinement reactor that operated every few seconds, with cracking sound as a new target was imploded. The heat came continuously. That sounds plausible. It is like throwing a shovelful of coal into a fire.
