Wilmot McCutchen

Hg removal from flue gas by sorption on sponge coke will not be feasible at the huge scale required. Lab scale chemistry can't possibly scale up to handle the huge volumes of hot and dirty flue gas emitted by a utility boiler. Better would be separation of Hg along with fly ash in a scalable kinematic separator based on the open von Karman geometry. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1001605814600196 Hg molecules have a higher momentum than N2 and H2O, although at thermal equilibrium all molecules in flue gas have the same kinetic energy, so Hg can't follow the convergent flow path of the low molecular weight fractions, N2 and H2O, through the vortex cores to axial extraction. So Hg vapor gets spun out to collection in a shrouding tank, along with fly ash and CO2.

The underground injection of CO2 is currently the aim of global warming policy-makers. But in our panicked desperation, let's not make things even worse by cracking the bedrock and salting the groundwater. “We have faults that are accumulating stress over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, even in Iowa,” says Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback. “So when you inject water or gas or any fluid it can set some of them off. ... Stanford’s Zoback says the standard calculations that have convinced some that immense volumes of CO2 can be buried safely in the pore space of deep formations reflect “science that could be done by a fourth grader. They are leaving out one important fact,” he says. “Those pores are already filled with saline water. Where are you going to put that?”” https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pumping-carbon-dioxide-deep-underground-may-trigger-earthquakes

Accepting poverty (conservation) is not a solution to water scarcity on this scale. New technology needs to be developed, but there is no interest or funding because policymakers have been persuaded to believe scrimping on our water usage will be enough.

There is an excess of tritium in the Fukushima wastewater, and superheavy water could be centrifugally separated. The availability of deuterium and tritium for fusion should not be a major obstacle to development of sustained net usable energy generation. Magnetic confinement fusion appears to be making progress away from tokamaks. Hot fusion still has a pulse. From Strange's link: "Spheromaks were in vogue in the 1970s when Jarboe began working on them at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but back then they couldn't confine a hot plasma for longer than the blink of an eye. The car-sized experiment that Jarboe has working today is the first spheromak to confine high-pressure plasma. "It could go on indefinitely if we had the cooling and power supply," he says."

You're right, slow neutrons are not mentioned in that article, but in another. NASA says that slow neutrons can be produced by nickel with lots of hydrogen in the lattice. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/149090-nasas-cold-fusion-tech-could-put-a-nuclear-reactor-in-every-home-car-and-plane

Each kWh of electricity consumes 1.8 liters of water evaporated into the atmosphere for heat rejection at thermal power plants. That's poor water efficiency. But air cooling can't dissipate more than 1 W/cm2 even with blowers. For nuclear and coal plants sited in dry areas, poor water efficiency -- on the part of the biggest water hog of all, power generation -- has led to a needless confrontation. It's not necessary to chose water or electricity. Both could be improved by harvesting the power of wet steam more completely by expanding it in the radial counterflow open von Karman geometry between counter-rotating coaxial spiral-bladed radial turbines having axial extraction of low enthalpy saturated vapor into the condenser. By pushing on the blades and causing the disks to counter-rotate, the wet turbine exhaust steam loses enthalpy doing useful work, making more electricity and reducing the need for heat rejection to a scale that air cooling might handle. For even more power harvesting from waste heat, a bottoming organic Rankine cycle. The solutions are out there, but no money is being spent to improve water effiiciency.

The Rossi reactor, which generates slow neutrons in the transmutation of hydrogen-loaded nickel into copper under THz radiation, has produced 1.5 MWh of energy over 32 days. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline

David Sedlak's new book, Water 4.0, tells the history of water and waste treatment. Water 1.0 was the Roman system of aqueducts to supply dense populations and flush away their waste. Water 2.0 was disinfection of drinking water, and 3.0 was treatment of sewage. Emerging technologies, such as desalination, and concerns, such as disinfection byproducts and endocrine disruptors in wastewater effluent, are succinctly presented in this lucid little book. It's a great service to have compiled this vital knowledge, which is hard to find. The author is the Malozemoff Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley.

What would be the right name for this -- unmixing ... antidiffusion? Momentum is diffused from the slowly rotating cylinder for five revolutions, and then the direction is reversed until the viscous fluid snaps back to its original state of three inclusions at approximately the same depth in the corn syrup. Viscosity is energy storage.

The Fukushima disaster should be an occasion for collaborative problem solving. The issue is what is to be done with the RO concentrate (which is polluted by cesium)? The leak flowrate from the concentrate tanks is not large (1 gallon per second), so solution scalability should not be a problem. Tedious reiteration of unsubstantiated talking points seeking to scare people away from nuclear generation is not helpful, nor is the coal-is-worse retort. What is the real magnitude of the danger posed by the leak? What is the state of the art of nuclear wastewater treatment, and how could it be improved?

The flow rate of the leak is only 300 m3/day, which is a gallon a second. The Japanese government is prepared to spend half a billion dollars to solve that. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-government-pledges-nearly-500-million-as-tepco-deals-with-water-crisis/2013/09/03/581876c6-147c-11e3-880b-7503237cc69d_story.html?wprss=rss_asia-pacific

Very brief radio bursts have been detected from 11 billion light years. Could these be the axial jets of black holes or collapsars? The burst may be because Earth is very briefly transiting the beam. Other possibilities? http://phys.org/news/2013-07-cosmic-radio-cataclysmic.html

Collapsar axial jets transport matter away from the black hole. Not everything falls in. The axial jets can result in gamma ray bursts perceived on Earth from sources billions of light years away. This 2012 astrophysics paper by Milosavljevic et al. is entitled "Supernovae powered by collapsar accretion in gamma ray burst sources." http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/744/2/103/fulltext/

Hydrogen embrittlement of metal tanks used to store hydrogen is another unsolved problem. As Mr. Monkeybat points out, hydrogen is hard to contain. If it leaks, it could ignite. If the metal in the containment gets brittle, it could crack (viz. the SF Bay Bridge bolts) with catastrophic failure. Joe Romm's book "The Hype about Hydrogen" is recommended reading to get a sense of the issues.

The News forum was probably deemed the wrong classification of your interesting work so the administrator removed it to a more appropriate forum. Nevertheless, I've found you and I would like to find out more about the clay process you speak of. I would also like to find out more about the power generation idea, although it seems at first glance that the amount of work from the heat flux would be too small to harvest. The particular problem I'd like to hear your thoughts on is the sludge ponds of Alberta, the legacy of oil sands extraction. Mature fine tailings make them the consistency of yogurt. The electrostatic house-of-cards edge-to-face arrangement of clay platelets prevents them from settling. Up until now the profit from cleaning up the sludge ponds was not appreciated. Thickened tailings may be rich ore.

Spin disappeared in the observed event. Could it be that the observation was end-on into a vortex collapsing, where angular momentum converts to linear momentum?

Jon Gertner's 2012 book is a readable history of some interesting personalities and their stimulating work environment. A unique institution funded by a regulated monopoly, Bell Labs worked on radar and other vital projects for the WWII war effort. The war might have gone badly had there not been this technical talent pool already assembled. The transistor, information theory, and other inventions conceived and developed at Bell Labs made the wired world we know today.

A practical example may be useful: a tennis ball struck by a racquet has a certain dwell time during which the force is being applied but the ball is not moving, but deforming in contact with the racquet.

Pyrolysis in a retort. I hope the final decision on spending the money was made after considering the EPA rules relating to solid waste incineration. Just burning the solid waste won't do any more, at least in the US. http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/129/ssi/ssipg.html

Consider the tornado. A strong axial jet -- linear momentum capable of doing work -- when the tornado touches down and streamlines converge on the axis of symmetry as swirl collapses. Angular momentum converting to linear momentum is the opposite of the dissipative conception of turbulence. So what would you call that? Convergence or collapse seems a better word, as it connotes the optimal energy flux as streamlines converge. "Symmetry breaking".doesn't say enough, in my opinion, and I would suppose most non-experts would agree with me that symmetry is what to create. Why break what you should make? Why is "turbulence only considered from the dissipative perspective. Why not the opposite, for waste heat power generation? Overcoming viscous diffusion by an input of organizing energy to collapse turbulence. Shtern and Hussain, http://www2.egr.uh.edu/~ifdt/archivalpapers/arfm/ShternHussain1999.pdf "Collapse, Symmetry Breaking, and Hysteresis of Swirling Flows" (1999): "...there are examples in everyday life of swirl development without any obvious forcing, e.g. the whirlpool in a bath sink. Whether the bathtub vortex occurs due to symmetry breaking or external forcing has been widely discussed but not resolved." .

I just finished A.Zee's Fearful Symmetry per your recommendation, for which, many thanks. Wonderful read. He doesn't say much about symmetry breaking, The heuristic value of symmetry considerations is memorably illustrated in the evolution of particle physics. Sethna says: "To them [condensed matter physicists], the fundamental question is not discovering the underlying quantum mechanical laws, but in understanding and explaining the new laws that emerge when many particles interact." "Usually, the material has lowest energy when the order parameter field is uniform, when the symmetry is broken in the same way throughout space. In practise, though, the material often doesn't break symmetry uniformly. Most pieces of iron don't appear magnetic, simply because the local magnetization points in different directions at different places. The magnetization is already there at the atomic level: to make a magnet, you pound the different domains until they line up." "When the symmetry is broken in the same way throughout space" -- that sounds like symmetry breaking is the appearance of a path of least resistance to energy flux out of the material. Order, not disorder. Zee also discusses magnetic elements aligning:."pretty soon, the zillions of arrows all end up pointing in the same direction. The rotational symmetry inherent in the underlying physics has been broken spontaneously." He mentions the case where symmetry breaking is forced "by hand." So both Zee and Sethna agree that symmetry breaking is order from disorder. So symmetry is the disorder ...?

NaOH is being used for air capture of CO2: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/business/pilot-plant-in-the-works-for-carbon-dioxide-cleansing.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130106&_r=0 The difference in molecular weight between CO2 and methane (16 vs. 44 g/mol) would make centrifugal separation possible, as in this apparatus: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7901485.pdf

Symmetry breaking means order emerging from a state where everything is the same in all directions. That seems to be the opposite of what most would consider symmetry. Something symmetrical is not a blur, in the common understanding. Turbulence, for example, is considered perfectly symmetrical because there is no order anywhere, and the appearance of a vortex (which is axisymmetric) is called symmetry breaking. This opposition of pedantic rigor to common understanding may be what is standing in the way of progress in extracting power from turbulence. Since the steam age, only a fraction (set by the Carnot efficiency) of the energy is considered usable for power generation. Maybe the Carnot limit is like the sound barrier.. Maybe the wasted energy ("entropy") in turbine exhaust steam can be a power source, with some intelligent design based on a clear understanding of order parameter fields. See, e.g. this device for waste heat power harvesting from turbine exhaust steam: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7987677.pdf For a tutorial on symmetry breaking and topology by James P. Sethna. see http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/sethna/OrderParameters/Intro.html

Theta pinch, resulting from ions rotating in a vortex, squeezes the ions into the vortex axis, by Lorentz force. The moving ions (a current) create a solenoidal magnetic field through which the ions rotate. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinch_%28plasma_physics%29

The conventional dissipative view is that momentum diffuses from large scale perturbations into tiny eddies, and these eddies diffuse into "viscosity." Hysteresis might be a better term, since it connotes internal energy and is less likely to be confused with behavior of non-Newtonian fluids. Dynamic viscosity is too vague and suffers from the same defect. For collapse, symmetry breaking, and hysteresis in swirling flows, see http://www2.egr.uh.edu/~ifdt/archivalpapers/arfm/ShternHussain1999.pdf. The idea is that organized motion becomes disorganized, and vice versa. Linear momentum becomes angular momentum in the dissipative scenario, and by collapse, angular momentum becomes linear momentum, as in a tornado. The water is in a container, said to be "full." The container is disposed in a pressure chamber and I presume the container has flexible walls because rigid walls would shield the water from the air in the pressure chamber. So there is some interaction between the air in the pressure chamber and the water in the container, via the flexible walls, which will have their own damping effect. But let's assume that the material of the walls has no damping effect and that the waves in the container from the perturbation are directly affected by the air in the pressure chamber. We might do away with the flexible walls by reframing this problem as a bubble in a tank. Could boosting water pressure after perturbing the bubble flatten the bubble surface quicker by providing more energy for undoing dissipation? In the bubble case, it seems that it might. In the inverted case with the infinitely flexible walls and air around the water instead of water around the air, what is the difference? More energy in the material (higher enthalpy) would at least offer the potential for the organizing energy to appear.