Watts: Book Review of “Super Fuel”

Posted on wattsupwiththat

This is a book review by a guest on watts' blog.

quote:

Like all warmers, his grip on reality is a bit weak. One example of this is on page 55 where he states “the container ship Altona, bound for China and carrying a load of 770,000 tons of uranium concentrate.” The biggest ship on the planet carries some 500,000 tonnes and the world yellowcake market is about 80,000 tonnes per annum. Perhaps he meant 770,000 lbs instead of tons, but nobody else in the editing and publishing chain picked up the mistake either

Comment:

I may have my own review shortly.  As of the moment, I'm looking at other stuff that has been written about this book.  Unfortunately, this review is kind of the same thing I've been ranting about for awhile on this blog.  It is bashing the opposition instead of looking for a way to come to common ground.

Sure, there's a lot to argue about when it comes to global warming.  But the whole point of the discussion about thorium is that, when developed, it will make the whole argument moot.  So, why bother arguing?

It seems that both sides of the ideological divide are taking positions that are self-defeating.  You can't power an industrial society with renewables, insisting upon it will only bring ruin.  On the other hand, you can't insist on always doing things the same old way.   Otherwise, we'd all be driving Model T's, or even still be on horseback.  There's room for improvement and this is an improvement.  So, stop letting the ideology make people stupid.  Use your head, not your heart.

I cited the above quote because of the tendency to focus on some small point of error, as contrasted with treating the entire book as a serious attempt to explicate something complex, but very important.  Therefore this review is disappointingly petty in that regard. But not all of the review is negative.

As for the video cited, it has a few errors. But don't let that dominate your perception of it. It has some valuable points and those points were there.

Here's the video by a San Diego TV station KUSI:



Update:

Here's another review:

Book Review: Super Fuel: Thorium-Green Energy Source For The Future by Richard Martin


A review of the review is that it isn't too bad.

EGO OUT: SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DEFKALION’S LENR TECHNOLO...

EGO OUT: SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DEFKALION’S LENR TECHNOLO...: Prologue: My readers know that I am completely and irreversibly dedicated to LENR. I want LENR to be understood and to be used as a signific...

Comment:

Defkalion may be worth watching more closely.

BECNF theory seemed pretty interesting for a time.  I was wondering though, if a quasi-particle assumes a BEC state, do the particles comprising the quasi-particle also assume a BEC state?  I checked back through the pdf file in Rossi's blog for an answer.  It is very technical stuff, and so I didn't get very far with answering that question.  The best I could tell was that it did.  Collectively the particles making up a quasi-particle may act like a boson, but individually they are still fermions.  How that allows the coulomb barrier to be overcome is not clear at all.

Towards a reusable rocket system with a fast turnaround, part 5

Speculation alert

This should be the last of the series, as I have probably gone far enough with this idea.

Incidentally, the idea does not seem so bad. The basic idea was that all attempts at Single Stage to Orbit are too ambitious. In the end, there'll be too much mass being carried to orbit, so the procedure of staging is actually pretty sound.

The problem to overcome is to make the two stages re-usable. The use of higher ISP engines should give enough margin to do that. For example, the Shuttle External Tank achieved near orbital velocity from the ground until main engine cutoff. The Shuttle itself weighed in at over 250k pounds loaded. The external tank fully loaded with fuel along with the shuttle put the launch weight ( not including external boosters) at nearly 2 million pounds. The Shuttle, therefore, was too heavy.

On the other hand, the Shuttle's would-be replacement, the VentureStar, was also a pretty heavy bird. It appears to have suffered the same malady as the Shuttle, too much ambition. The VentureStar was to be a single stage to orbit vehicle. But it could only deliver a little more mass than a Dragon Capsule even though its launch weight was as much as the Shuttle and fueled External Tank together on the launch pad.

In trying to get to some solution to this problem with equipment already produced or had been produced in the recent past, this is probably something that's totally impractical. Yet a configuration with 2 shuttle main engines in the first stage and 1 main engine in the second stage yields some interesting numbers.

For instance, the mass to thrust ratio is about the same with both stages and with the shuttle at liftoff. There's plenty enough thrust to get off the ground, but acceleration may be so ferocious that it may need to be throttled down the entire time it is firing. I don't know if the engine is capable of this. It can be throttled down, that much I do know.

The mass is about the same for both stages.  This is a bit odd and it may be a problem.  I can't answer that question myself.

There's plenty of wiggle room on the second stage.  I showed two possibilities-- a dragon capsule and a dream chaser.  In either case, the second stage has enough leeway to add stuff to make it back from orbit for re-usability.  The Dragon and Dreamchaser are already re-usable.  If, by any chance, this actually could work, you'd have plenty of extra mass available for some add-ons. For instance--- extra fuel, wings, landing gear, and so forth.

Therefore, as the results show that it may be feasible, but the Shuttle main engines weren't built for this type of service, and so this is probably not a solution after all.  But the overall idea was to show that re-usability is not some pipe dream.

Well, here it is

Errata: Final velocity: 17644 mph.  Lifting mass is more than 100k in the rectangular box.  It actually came out to 48k kg in the bottom box.  Note how much mass available at the bottom.  It can go back to the first stage or stay on the second stage.  The layout of this spreadsheet leaves something to be desired.    

Update:

This is getting pretty obsessive. I just did some more work on this thing. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Using the same performance obtained from the Shuttle flights and mapping it onto the two engines in the first stage and the single engine in the second stage, the numbers work out beautifully. So, a little over 8 minutes and you're in orbit.

In addition, I fiddled around with the propellant numbers and so forth. It is now staged out at about mach 7 or so. Two and a half minutes after launch, the first stage shuts off, and the second stage takes over for almost 6 minutes.

To top it all off, I started calculating volumes and so forth in order to get the dimensions of the stack. Maybe a 150 foot stack would do the trick.

Don't bet the farm on all this, though.

Update: 7/29/2012


Sorry, I know I said that I was done with this, but wait just one more little update.  The shuttle's main engines and external tank was all you needed to get to orbit with a small payload.  I worked out the numbers, so it's true.  As mentioned, the main engines fired from launch until 98% orbital velocity anyway.  The reason you needed solid rocket boosters was to lift the shuttle itself into orbit as well.  Take about that 250,000 lbs and replace it with a payload comparable to a Dragon capsule, and you'll get to orbit with room to spare.

To repeat, in order to have a chance at re-usability, you must break up the launch vehicle into stages.  The mostly empty fuel tanks and rocket motors are too much mass to lift together.  By splitting it up, you have enough wiggle room to make the rockets re-usable.

For instance, consider the JDAM bombs, which are launched from planes flying at 30,000 feet or more.  They can glide to their targets for 20 miles or so.  If you make a glider out the the first stage, it can come back that way.  The amount of fuel needed to decelerate- and re-accelerate towards the launch site- isn't as much as you would think.  That's because it isn't carrying all that much weight anymore since the payload and second stage is off towards orbit.

The second stage may be a challenge.  But consider that the shuttle came back as a glider, so if you can arrange that with the second stage, it could be done.

Now for the main point of all this.  It seems that the Shuttle program, with its stated goal of re-usability was a very limited success.  However, it failed if the mission was to make low-cost and frequent access to space possible.  It failed because it was too ambitious.  If the goal was to get people to orbit, or a small payload, then it would have been successful.  But it was asked to get a payload, plus astronauts, plus all of the other re-usability and low-cost access type of goals, and all that was just too much to ask.

This is what the system produced.  The system was to blame.  It failed and it failed the nation.  That's the whole point.

Update: ( Jan 7, 2016  Several years later ):

Musk has landed his first stage rocket on a pad near where it launched.  As of this writing, it probably has undergone a lot of testing and looks good.  By and large, Musk has achieved his goal.

So, who am I to criticize?  The next thing he wants to do is to send 100 people at a time to Mars.

Time for more speculation about how he will do that.

Towards a reusable rocket system with a fast turnaround, part 4

Here's where the speculation alerts are getting closer to the ending point.  The reason is that now is the time to look at more real world attempts to get a re-usable vehicle with a fast turnaround time and could get passengers and cargo to low earth orbit.

That would be the X-33 system that was canceled in 2001.  The final product of that development would have been the VentureStar system proposed by Lockheed Martin.  It would have been the next step up from the X-33 system that was under development.  The failure point was in the composite fuel tanks.  According to the Wikipedia entry, that problem has been solved since it was canceled.

Anyway, in previous posts, there were a few details that got overlooked.  One detail was the loss of ISP at sea level.  In order to overcome that, a special rocket nozzle, called the aerospike, is necessary to get that back.  The X-33 would have had such a nozzle.

Another detail that was overlooked was the greater thrust needed at launch.  This means more engines and more mass, unfortunately.  Ultimately, this will limit how big of a machine that you can get to orbit.  Secondly, perhaps one should drop the idea of a single stage to orbit altogether.  The reason is that the VentureStar was going to be too darned big for the amount of work that it could do.   By going back to the Elon Musk model of staged re-usable rockets, a lot of that mass can be saved, and the rockets can become more modest in size.

Now, here's the proposition.  What if you could modify the existing X-33 concept to deliver a second stage with payload to a delta-v of about Mach 5 to Mach 7, and about 100, 000 feet-- then return to launch site?

The X-33 could be modified to save mass as it was designed for re-entry with an all metal fuselage.  Since this wasn't going to go orbital, this can be replaced with a lighter configuration.  If the tank problem has been solved, this will also help with mass.  Otherwise, you can use the type of tank that the Shuttle used.  The savings in mass for the fuselage can go for the tank, if necessary.

Let's look at what we've got with propulsion:

The RS-2200 Linear Aerospike Engine^[3] was derived from the XRS-2200. The RS-2200 was to power the VentureStar single-stage-to-orbit vehicle. In the latest design, seven RS-2200s producing 542,000 pounds of thrust each would boost the VentureStar into low earth orbit.

The X-33 was to use only two of these engines.  The above specification is greater than what is listed for the X-33, as can be seen.  So, what if we cut it down to just one engine?  Having two will give you the same configuration as the X-33, though.  But you would be overpowered, I would think.

With a million pounds of thrust, you could lift a half million pounds with some spare capacity.  If you were to cut that down to 1 engine only, you would have no spare capacity, and an engine loss would mean a crash.  Let's stick to two engines for this discussion.

Here's a few calcs from a spreadsheet.  Have to run, got a busy day ahead.  This is only a rough draft as I am out of time.

The spreadsheet above has an error: There's more mass fraction available to launch, about 9k kg to be exact.  This is therefore considered to be a more conservative estimate than what it appears to be

Update:

Hate to say this, but there are some more errors in this post. Back to speculation mode after all.

The ISP of the X-33 engines are not as high as I thought when I made the spreadsheet calculations above. Those are out the window now. The ISP is not as good as I thought, so can this idea still fly?

I mean, is it still worth it? Perhaps I can look at that next.

Update:

Next in Series, Part 5

Towards a reusable rocket system with a fast turnaround, part 3

Speculation alert

A small, but important detail was left out in the previous discussion. The Falcon 9's ISP leaves a lot of room for improvement. The will occur once SpaceX goes with an all LH2/LOX rocket in both stages.

Let's look at the first stage of the Falcon 9:

255 ISP on First Stage, 345 for second stage

Now compare this with the main engines of the Shuttle.  You have a considerable discrepancy in performance there.  This will make a big difference when calculating masses in the rocket equation.

I am guesstimating upwards of 350000 pounds of wet mass can be shaved off the Falcon 9 by using liquid hydrogen instead of RP-1.   The mass savings could be applied in making the Falcon 9 fully re-usable.

Based upon this, I think SpaceX's odds of success at being 100%.   They will succeed.




Update:

Next in Series, Part 4

Obama’s Ratings Dive

Dick Morris

Rather the cause of his decreased likeability is his negative campaigning, both in person and on the air. He is now no longer the sunny, optimistic, friendly person he portrayed himself as being in 2008. Instead, a nasty, surly, angry image has taken over.

If Romney goes positive soon, the outcome of this election could become a foregone conclusion.

David LeBlanc - Molten Salt Reactor Designs, Options & Outlook @ TEAC4

Published on Jul 20, 2012 by gordonmcdowell

A ton of information here.

He has a few cautions about being too enthusiastic, and letting it get out of hand.  On the other hand, there's even more reasons to be enthused- don't let that discourage you.

Just keeping it real is the idea.  Come for the Thorium, and Stay for the Reactor.