Terry Blanton wrote: > http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23102/ > > Sidebar: > > Power pistons: General Fusion's reactor is a metal sphere with 220 > pneumatic pistons designed to ram its surface simultaneously. The > ramming creates an acoustic wave that travels through a lead-lithium > liquid and eventually accelerates toward the center into a shock wave. > The shock wave compresses a plasma target, called a spheromak, to > trigger a fusion burst. The thermal energy is extracted with a heat > exchanger and used to create steam for electricity generation. To > produce power, the process would be repeated every second.
This reminds me of something... Does anybody else here remember RCA's entry in the competition for the first successful video disk? One random site which talks about it: http://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html It was similar to the technology of LP records, but it used a much higher spin rate and a very high bandwidth pickup. In other words, it used a mechanical device to do something which was "obviously" outside the realm of what you can do with mechanical devices... AFAIK the RCA device worked, but I recall it had issues which interfered with acceptance: Its playing time was much shorter than the Phillips disks, it's not clear what the longevity of the disks would have been, and it was a rather dubious concept on aesthetic grounds. I don't know how much the last influenced record company executives but I'm sure the first issue bothered them quite a bit. > > <more> > > I want one in my 1976 Chevy Vega! You want to swap out your V6 for a V220? Probably need to beef up the suspension a bit. > > Terry >
