New Type Of Gravity Power Plant Could Be Landmark Use Of Fusion

[trevorjohnson32]

I have a patent that involves creating electricity from explosives and gravity. I was just wondering if anyone has heard of any other ideas to create electricity from explosives. There are three basic concepts. The first basic concept is to blast a cannonball up into the air catch it where gravity pauses it then use the weight of the cannonball to pull down on an elevator type generator until the ball is back to where you shot it from at which point you can re load the cannon and start the process all over again. So you re using explosives as the fuel in the system.

The second method is instead of using a cannonball as the weight you can fill the cannon with water and blast the water weight into the air which I ve experimented with using fireworks as the explosive and a soup can in the ground as the cannon and I observed that an explosion set off inside a water cannon squeezes the water inside against the walls of the cannon causing the water to shoot straight up pretty high into the air . Now one of the advantages of using a water cannon is you can build it several hundred feet wide and deep enabling one to use a much larger explosive say a fission or fusion explosive to clear the water out.

And yet another method in the patent involves pre cutting the earth in a way that you can detonate an underground explosive and pop the piece of pre cut material right out of the ground ,a generator could then be operated lowering the weight or other weight back into the ground. I ve also proven this works using fireworks and it works really well comparing the weight to the crater i made with a fireworks surface blast. This method could make use of hundreds of millions even billions of killowatts from a single fusion explosive. This method also has limited amount of fallout because the single piece of precut material absorbs most of the blast energy related to fallout. this would be important if using a fission primary fusion explosive to remove the piece of earth.

so anyone can look up the full patent by google searching trevor hawthorne and patentscope

[billvon]

 

I have a patent that involves creating electricity from explosives and gravity.

Well, no, you don't.  You have an application.  If they grant the patent, then you will have a patent.

 

 

This method could make use of hundreds of millions even billions of killowatts from a single fusion explosive.

I don't think so.  We don't have any technology that can extract "billions of kilowatts" from falling debris.  Even the largest hydroelectric turbines in the world, working with a medium much easier to work with than falling radioactive debris, can only generate a few tens of gigawatts (= tens of millions of kilowatts.)

[trevorjohnson32]

I never said i wanted to catch falling debris. I would create a cavity using the pre-cutting method, the weight removed would be one giant block and it wouldn't travel very far from the crater. You could then operate a generator lowering that weight or other weight back down into the cavity. By pre cutting the earth above an underground explosion you increase the efficiency of cratering to possibly 5%. This method is the safest. The amount of water weight you could move in a water cannon is huge. It's a lot of cannonballs. The water weight blasted out of the cannon can be caught by a large loop structure built next to the cannon opening.

[billvon]

I never said i wanted to catch falling debris. I would create a cavity using the pre-cutting method, the weight removed would be one giant block

Wait.  You propose to set off a subterranean nuclear bomb - and you expect the material above it will come out as one giant block?  That's just plain nuts.  Look at any underground nuclear test - it vaporizes the material nearest the bomb, pulverizes the material at a greater distance and just blasts the material even further from the explosion away.

 

 

The water weight blasted out of the cannon can be caught by a large loop structure built next to the cannon opening.

Like I said, the largest hydro generator on the planet could not generate the powers you list.  And even if you could somehow blast all that water into the air, and get it to land in a higher elevation reservoir, and run it through a hydro facility the size of the Three Gorges Dam, you would very quickly deplete it - and have to set off a new bomb.  And where are you going to get all that water, and what are you going to do with the now-radioactive water you have created?

[trevorjohnson32]

I could lower the water back down into a water cannon as quickly as I like. I could do it over ten years. There's no constraints on how fast or slow you gain the energy back from weight displacement. As for the giant block of earth removed, that's what the pre-cutting method does. It is an inventive step in cratering and increases the efficiency of weight displacement. I know it's not on any video because no one has ever tried it before I thought of it. When you pre-cut a giant block of earth or whatever shape above an underground explosive, the blast energy converts to weight displacement and 'pops' the piece of material right out of the ground. It's really quite amazing. You can then operate a generator lowering weight back into the cavity created and get an estimated 5% efficiency of the kw power of the explosive converted to electricity.

[pgrmdave]

I have a patent that involves creating electricity from explosives and gravity.

Is this the application? http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013172884A4?cl=en Kind of neat that you have a patent application, do you plan on building it or licensing the use of it? Or do you expect to be able to sell it to power generating entities?

[trevorjohnson32]

I imagine someone else making a business out of it in the future but I don't have the means to. I would like to see it done just to make the first use out of fusion fuel. To date no one has done that.

[billvon]

When you pre-cut a giant block of earth or whatever shape above an underground explosive, the blast energy converts to weight displacement and 'pops' the piece of material right out of the ground. It's really quite amazing.

 

I think perhaps extrapolating what fireworks do to a small chunk of dirt to what a nuclear weapon does to a piece of the earth is not a valid extrapolation.  Try getting even 1000 cubic meters of dirt to stay in a cube shape even without an explosion, for example.

[CraigD]

I was just wondering if anyone has heard of any other ideas to create electricity from explosives.

This idea is very common, and widely implemented.

 

For example, I have a portable device that uses a fuel air explosive – gasoline vapor and air – to generate electricity. It’s just an ordinary gasoline engine-powered generator, available at many stores.

 

The first basic concept is to blast a cannonball up into the air catch it where gravity pauses it then use the weight of the cannonball to pull down on an elevator type generator until the ball is back to where you shot it from at which point you can re load the cannon and start the process all over again.

While this would work, it would be less efficient and require more machinery that if you replaced the cannonball in the cannon with a piston, attaching it via a crankshaft to a flywheel attached to an electric generator.

 

... This method could make use of hundreds of millions even billions of killowatts from a single fusion explosive.

I think you’re misusing units here, Trevor. Although we user words like “power plant” to describe devices that convert fuel into electricity, the yield of a single unit of fuel (in your example “a single fusion explosion”, meaning a single fusion bomb, in a more common example, something like a liter of diesel fuel) should have units of energy such a Joules, kilowatt hours, or tons TNT equivalent, not units of power such as watts or kilowatts.

 

A fundamental problem with using fusion bombs as fuel for electrical power plants is that while fusion bombs have very high power, they don’t produce as much energy as one might guess. For example, the warhead of a typical sub-based missile has about 500 kilotons energy, equivalent to about 644 railway cars carrying 100 tons of coal. This is about 2.5% of the coal consumed daily in the US. If the US used its entire nuclear arsenal (about 5000 warheads) to generate all the electricity is uses, it would run out in about 50 days.

 

Fusion bombs are very expensive to make, and even countries like the US and Russia can’t make many of them a year. So while they’re very compact compared to ordinary fuels, fusion bombs aren’t a very economical fuel source for electrical power generation.

[trevorjohnson32]

yeah but it works with an efficiency of 2-40%. Show me just one other example of a fusion fueled power generating system with those types of efficiency's. You can't. You know why? cause there are none! Edward Teller couldn't think of one. His idea was to collect heat from explosions with circulating a type of salt inside a closed steel container. wikipedia's idea is to use abandoned mines filled with water to try to collect heat. No one has ever thought to convert blast energy into kinetic energy stored in the weight into electricity before.This system will still be used for thousands, even millions of years from now in combination with lasers. And at raw material cost I seriously doubt the energy required to do refining and cutting and the cost of the materials would add up to be more then the energy you create from using the described method.

[billvon]

yeah but it works with an efficiency of 2-40%. Show me just one other example of a fusion fueled power generating system with those types of efficiency's. You can't.

 

I can.  The solar panels on my roof.  18% efficient, and no nuclear bombs, fallout or million-ton cranes required.

[trevorjohnson32]

Hey yeah solar wind and dams are great. We should build more of them. I m not really talking about replacing all energy sources and systems with my idea, not thinking 100% of our annual energy usage be from weight displacement. Just suggesting that at raw material costs it could be a profitable business for a couple uses.

[CraigD]

yeah but it works with an efficiency of 2-40%.

How did you calculate the efficiency of you system, and why is the range so great, from a low 2% to a respectable (give that the best conventional coal and gas generators are about 37% efficient) 40%?

 

In addition or instead of answering this question, please give the specifications of your system. What are the mass of its projectiles? To what height are they to be raised?

 

I don’t think your system, even if it could be built, would be more efficient of a cycling heat-engine driven generator.

 

You system is essentially a device uses the high pressure gas and/or plasma of an explosion to lift a mass (this technology, the gun, is common and very mature), then uses the height and weight of that mass to power an electric generator (another common, mature technology). Ignoring for the moment the source of energy (fusion bombs) for it, we can pretty easily estimate its efficiency by looking empirically calculating the efficiency of a gun and an electric generator.

 

I’ve never read or heard a discussion of the efficiency of guns, so looked up and calculate it here

One of the largest guns existant, the US 16"/50 mark 7 battleship gun (16"/50 caliber means a barrel 16 inches in bore, 800 inches long), uses 300 kg of gunpowder to accelerate projectiles with masses from 860 to 1225 kg to speeds around 800 m/s. The energy density of gunpowder is about 3 MJ/kg, so the energy of 300 kg of it is about 9 x 10⁸ J. The gun’s efficiency,

[math]\frac{m v^2}{E}[/math]

then, is from 32 to 40%. Interestingly, this calculation gives about the same result for guns as small as .22 caliber, and everthing I checked in between.

 

Not important to the efficiency calculation, but interesting to do in passing, some quick and rough calculations suggest to me that a 16" gun could throw its projectile to an altitude of about 30,000 m.

 

Rotary electric generators can be very (98% or so) efficient, so as long as your system doesn’t need a complicated mechanical transmission to convert the linear downward motion of the descending weight to a rotary one, or if a linear generator is used, the generator won’t much reduce the system’s efficiency

 

So, in the end, we have a 30 to 40% efficient system, about the same as a typical steam-powered electric power plant.

 

Show me just one other example of a fusion fueled power generating system with those types of efficiency's. You can't. You know why? cause there are none! Edward Teller couldn't think of one. His idea was to collect heat from explosions with circulating a type of salt inside a closed steel container. wikipedia's idea is to use abandoned mines filled with water to try to collect heat.

Saying Teller had an idea for generating electricity using atomic bombs implies he could think of such a thing.

 

Do you have a link or reference to Teller or “Wikipedia”’s designs (Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a source or original ideas) :QuestionM

 

I’d be surprised if any good engineer has ever suggested using fusion bombs as an energy source (other than, of course, in a nuclear weapon), because not only, as I previously mentioned, are fusion bombs very expensive and difficult to make, but unless you’re the government of a the few nations that have nuclear weapons, having them is intensely illegal, and for good reason – a fusion bomb that can be used in a giant gun can as easily be used as a weapon capable of killing millions of people with a single explosion.

 

And at raw material cost I seriously doubt the energy required to do refining and cutting and the cost of the materials would add up to be more then the energy you create from using the described method.

How much it actually costs to make a fusion bomb is a difficult question, largely because for many years, nobody has. Because there are many more fusion bombs than post-cold war militaries need, new ones are not being manufactured, but rather old ones refurbished.

 

According to this Union of Concerned Scientists article, it costs about US$2,000,000 to refurbish a 100 kt W76 fusion warhead, the most common one in the US nuclear arsenal. At present prices of about $40./ton, coal of equivalent energy (12,880 tons) costs about $515,000. So refurbishing fusion bombs cost about 4 times as much as buying the equivalent energy as coal. This Washington Post story suggest that it would cost about 4 times as much to build new fusion bombs

 

So to be cost competitive with coal, you need to be able to build a fusion bomb for about 1/16 the current cost.

 

How would you do this, Trevor?

 

Keep in mind that, although fundamentally fusion bombs are fueled by common and inexpensive hydrogen, in practice, the only successful fusion bombs require a roughtly 50/50 mixture of the rare ²H isotope and the ³H isotope, which is manufactured in fission power plants. Because the only explosive that has successfully produced the pressure necessary for fusion is a fission bomb, they require enriched uranium and plutonium.

 

This is the Teller-Ulam configuration, first successfully detonated in 1952. Despite much research into designs for pure fusion bombs – ones that didn’t require a fission bomb – one has not yet been made, and credible accounts are that high-intensity research into making one has been abandoned.

 

A successful pure fusion bomb is a holy grail of many technological paths, from civil power generation to spaceflight. It appears to be a very hard problem, having stymied generations of the world’s best and brightest engineers and scientists.

[trevorjohnson32]

That's a tough question Craig and thanks for not dismissing the idea. Like you said no one has ever produced a fusion explosive for commercial purposes before. I realize the government, charging what they do, could make the whole system obsolete. I said it before and I ll say it again that it would really rely on whether more energy goes into the refining process and the cost of raw materials then the energy converted by the system.

 

I came up with the efficiency's researching the efficiency of a cannon, like you said its 30-40%. The efficiency of a water cannon and that of the pre cutting method were determined by comparing the weight removed to the weight of a surface blast from the same size explosive. A surface blast is .4% efficient to cratering and an underground blast is .1%.

 

 

In addition or instead of answering this question, please give the specifications of your system. What are the mass of its projectiles? To what height are they to be raised?
 

 

Well it takes .045 watts to lift one cubic foot of rock up one foot. From these calculations using some of the most powerful explosives that have been before, I could see moving a 4000 ft cubic piece of rock at 125 lbs per cubic foot so that it would be displaced onto the surface of the earth. A piece of rock that size may create a crater with 5.76 billion kilowatt capacity, that is if you filled it back in with rock, if you filled it in with some other material you would get a different amount of energy from re filling the crater. A piece of rock that size may require a 100 billion kilowatt explosive which would be a high percentage of fusion. The efficiency of the weight displacement to blast energy, an estimated 5% here, could be further increased by lowering the weight of the block of rock removed from the top down. That or the cavity could be re-filled more efficiently from a nearby water source like the ocean which would be close to at the same level as the surface of the earth. It's interesting to note you could first fill it with water then fill it with rock and operate a turbine both times.

 

The water cannon would be most expensive method to create. One would want to be safe building a water cannon not allow toxic gasses loose. The size of a water cannon that uses a high percentage fusion explosive may be upwards of 2,000 ft wide and ten times the width in depth with a depth of water in the cannon of about 4,000 ft.

[pgrmdave]

The water cannon would be most expensive method to create. One would want to be safe building a water cannon not allow toxic gasses loose. The size of a water cannon that uses a high percentage fusion explosive may be upwards of 2,000 ft wide and ten times the width in depth with a depth of water in the cannon of about 4,000 ft.

This is getting more expensive by the sentence. You want to construct something that's a third of a mile square and three quarters of a mile deep?  That's a volume of 16 trillion cubic feet, nearly 34 times the size of the next largest building by volume (Boeing Everett Factory). I'm not dismissing your ideas out of hand, I'm looking at what you're saying and suggesting that while it's certainly possible, the economics don't seem to work out. If I'm an investor with a few million/billion/trillion to put somewhere, this is unlikely to be in my top 100.

[trevorjohnson32]

No the water cannon isn't my focus as a business because like you said it would cost a lot to build assuming you couldn't carve the shape out of the earth and blast the piece out. The depth of the cavity is actually ten times the width so in the example it would be 20,000 ft deep. The depth of water in the cavity is only 4,000 ft to give the weight a chance to gather more kinetic energy from the blast energy. The water cannon could pose a potential threat to the enviroment if whoever builds it doesn't take the time to enclose the system and just clears the water out of the cannon back onto the earth.  You should get the energy from creating the cavity back after about ten to hundred uses. I still hold on the water cannon idea as an idea to go with fusion lasers better then the cannonball method because you can use such a more powerful explosive but now really with use of fission primary explosives because the loop structure that would have to be built at the top would be enormous! Now one could use a water cannon as small as 50 ft wide and 500 ft in depth with a water depth in the cannon of about 100 ft. In this system one could expect to remove about half of the water with an explosive. A system to these dimensions could still make use of a fission explosive. This has the advantage over traditional nuclear power plants which use about 5% of the available energy in the fuel before moving it to a spent fuel pool. By using uranium in the weight displacement methods you use 25-40% of the available energy  in the fuel, which means you need considerably less of it mined. A system of these dimensions I have an easier time imagining being enclosed which is so important to the water cannon system.

 

The pre cutting method in contrast is the 'cleanest' proposal that I have using high percentage fusion. Ten uses could create billions of dollars in energy.

[trevorjohnson32]

, it costs about US$2,000,000 to refurbish a 100 kt W76 fusion warhead, 

I bet the refurbishing is a can of pledge and a rag.