Subterrene

Pronounced like submarine, and fairly obvious when you think about it, just not the type of thing you figure anyone gets around to building anytime after you stopped reading comic books or science fiction. Truth, however, is very often stranger than fiction.

ABSTRACT A tunneling machine for producing large tunnels in rock by progressive detachment of the tunnel core by thermal melting a boundary kerf into the tunnel face and simultaneously forming an initial tunnel wall support by deflecting the molten materials against the tunnel walls to provide, when solidified, a continuous liner; and fragmenting the tunnel core circumscribed by the kerf by thermal stress fracturing and in which the heat required for such operations is supplied by a compact nuclear reactor.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART The utilization of the basic concept of melting earth materials to dig a hole or small tunnel is taught in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,357,505 issued 15 to Armstrong et al. in 1967, disclosed an electrically heated rock drill. U.S. Pat. No. 3,396,806 issued August 1968 to Benson disclosed a unitized machine for thermal earth drilling utilizing a nuclear reactor for supplying the melting energy requirements. This patent 20 also suggests that the hole could be melted to a larger diameter than required for the finished hole so that melt material would provide the hole casing. U.S. Pat. No. 3,693,731 issued Sept. 1972 to Armstrong et al. also discloses a nuclear reactor pow- 25 ered earth boring machine and melt material is used as structural hole lining material. However, this patent, like others that disclose machines for drilling tunnels by melting the earth, is a solid front machine which creates an amount of melt equal to the tunnel cross sec- 30 tion. 3-* tion of such large tunnels requires large heat flow rates and creates excessive costs of the heat generating and supply system. The most economical method is for the machine to thermally melt just enough material to detach the core, and to provide adequate tunnel lining The machine of the present invention is particularly adapted to excavate large tunnels, that is, having a cross-sectional measurement in the range of 2 to 12 metres and larger. The melting of the entire cross sec- 40 material. The core materials can be mechanically fractured for disposal. However, in hard rock the disintegration of the core material is best done by heated thermal stress fracturing penetrators.

Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes

UK Guardian Observer | Exactly eight months ago, I opined that the commercial release of compact nuclear reactor technology would signal the onset of very serious engagement by TPTB with the energy crisis. While I was of the opinion that this highly privileged technology would see deployment in the areas of fossil fuel search and extraction, as it turns out, it's going to go directly into baseload power generation.

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'

Though this could be a question of pure economics, I think it means that the global energy crisis is even more acute than I have previously suspected.

The Road Not Taken....,

Prophecies and warnings regarding fossil fuel depletion. Extracted from the Wikipedia entry on Admiral Hyman Rickover - the visionary "inventor" of compact nuclear reactor technology and the man who handpicked Lt. James Earl Carter to join his superb nuclear naval fleet.

As early as 1957, Admiral Rickover began urging the development of alternate energy consumption paths to that of fossil fuels as their eventual depletion became evident, noting:

"A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life...Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java - the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads - anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded....High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant."

Carter was the only president who attempted to take on the single greatest threat to our survival, and to this day, he remains maligned and ignored despite being a visionary many, many years ahead of his time. Not so far ahead as his mentor Admiral Rickover, who was noted for his intolerance of oxygen thievery;

Moreover, he had "little tolerance for mediocrity, none for stupidity." "If a man is dumb," said a Chicago friend, "Rickover thinks he ought to be dead." Even while a Captain, Rickover did not conceal his opinions, and many of the officers he regarded as dumb eventually rose in rank to be admirals and were assigned to the Pentagon.

Too bad these visionaries weren't able to wake up the masses in their time.

With or Without Compact Fusion - Mankind IS ALREADY WILL GET Permanently Off-World

energy.gov | NNSA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) joined forces to address a unique challenge: developing a power source able to support deep space travel and outlast existing fuel sources. NNSA came through with the technical expertise required to achieve this goal.

“The relationship between NNSA and NASA is a ‘win-win’ partnership,” said Patrick Cahalane, NNSA’s Principal Deputy Associate Administrator for Safety, Infrastructure and Operations. “NASA gets a prototype demonstration for a kilowatt-range fission power source, and NNSA gets a benchmark-quality experiment that provides new nuclear data in support of our Nuclear Criticality Safety Program.”

The experiment, nicknamed KRUSTY (Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY), was part of NASA’s larger Kilopower project. KRUSTY was designed to test a prototype fission reactor coupled to a Stirling engine. Stirling technology is efficient, doesn’t require significant maintenance, and does not degrade in performance over time.

Scientists from NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Nevada National Security Site partnered with NASA to develop and test the KRUSTY design at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC).

Researchers designed and performed initial testing of the KRUSTY reactor design using a surrogate, or non-fissile, reactor core and resistive heating elements. Experts from NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex manufactured the uranium reactor core, which was delivered to the NCERC in the fall of 2017. 

Soft Disclosure? Limited Hangout? Age of Star Trek Discovery?

thedrive |  The War Zone has been reporting on a set of bizarre patents assigned to the U.S. Navy that describe radical new technologies that could absolutely revolutionize the aerospace field, and frankly, the very way we live our lives. These include high-energy electromagnetic fields used to create force fields and outlandish new methods of aerospace propulsion and vehicle design that basically read as UFO-like technology. You can learn all about these patents, their viability, and the issues surrounding them in these exclusive features of ours. Now, the same mysterious Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division engineer behind those patents has produced another patent—one for a compact fusion reactor that could pump out absolutely incredible amounts of power in a small space—maybe even in a craft. 

Energy dominance has become a cornerstone of American military policy as laboratories seek to develop the ‘Holy Grail’ of power generation: nuclear fusion. These attempts at developing stable fusion reactors utilize incredibly powerful magnetic fields in order to contain the nuclear reactions occurring inside. Creating a stable fusion reaction is difficult enough, but some laboratories are going even further by attempting to create compact reactors small enough to fit inside shipping containers or even possibly vehicles.

While Lockheed Martin’s CFR designs have garnered quite a bit of media attention and internet buzz in recent years, it appears one of the Skunk Works' major clients is also hard at work in this field. The U.S. Navy has filed a potentially revolutionary patent application for a radical new compact fusion reactor that claims to improve upon the shortcomings of the Skunk Works CFR, and judging from the identity of the reactor’s inventor, it's sure to raise eyebrows in the scientific community.

This latest design is the brainchild of the elusive Salvatore Cezar Pais, the inventor of the Navy’s bizarre and controversial room temperature superconductors, high energy electromagnetic field generators, and sci-fi-sounding propulsion technologies that The War Zone has previously reported on. The patent for Pais’ “Plasma Compression Fusion Device” was applied for on March 22, 2018, and was just published on September 26, 2019. 

why isn't d-bag stephen pomp raining on lockheed martin's astounding claims of having fusion in the bag?

lockheed | FUSION VS. FISSION

More than 50 years ago, nuclear power through fission was the excitement of its day. People tried using it to power almost everything, even planes. In the end, operational hurdles prevented fission from widespread use.

While fission continues to power our nuclear reactors today, fusion offers a cleaner, safer source of energy.

Fission occurs when one atom is split into two smaller fragments, creating an explosion of sorts and resulting in the release of heat energy. 

Fusion is the process by which a gas is heated up and separated into its ions and electrons. When the ions get hot enough, they can overcome their mutual repulsion and collide, fusing together. When this happens, they release a lot of energy – about one million times more powerful than a chemical reaction and 3-4 times more powerful than a fission reaction.

Energy created through fusion is 3-4 times more powerful than the energy released by fission. 

HOW COMPACT FUSION WORKS 
Nuclear fusion is the process by which the sun works. Our concept will mimic that process within a compact magnetic container and release energy in a controlled fashion to produce power we can use. A reactor small enough to fit on a truck could provide enough power for a small city of up to 100,000 people Building on more than 60 years of fusion research, the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works approach to compact fusion is a high beta concept. This concept uses a high fraction of the magnetic field pressure, or all of its potential, so we can make our devices 10 times smaller than previous concepts. That means we can replace a device that must be housed in a large building with one that can fit on the back of a truck.

Salvatore Cezar Pais and His Weird-Assed Navy Patents

popularmechanics |  The elusive engineer behind several highly unusual patents, filed on behalf of the U.S. Navy, has broken his silence and finally spoken to the media. Salvatore Cezar Pais responded to emails sent by The War Zone, but his answers bring us no closer to how the technology behind the patents, which involve fusion power and other exotic tech, came about.

Dr. Pais, formerly an aerospace engineer with Naval Air Systems Command/ Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division and now at the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, recently achieved notoriety with the publication of patents involving compact fusion reactor energy—truly wild stuff that stretches the limits of science—and a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.”

The two technologies combined could theoretically create a “UFO”-like craft similar to the one seen by U.S. Navy pilots in 2004 and 2014-15. Although highly unusual, Naval Air Systems’ Chief Technology Officer James Sheehy assured the U.S. Patent Technology Office (USPTO) that the technology behind them was indeed real, and that some aspects were already undergoing testing.

Pais recently published a paper in EEE Transactions on Plasma Science titled, “The Plasma Compression Fusion Device—Enabling Nuclear Fusion Ignition.” The device is essentially a fusion reactor, the holy grail of energy research. Fusion reactors promise cheap, limitless energy without complications of nuclear power—particularly nuclear meltdowns and the generation of nuclear waste. 

bashing lockheed martin's purported fusion breakthrough

BI |  Researchers at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Skunk Works, announced on Wednesday their ongoing work on a new technology that could bring about functional nuclear reactors powered by fusion in the next 10 years.

But most scientists and science communicators we talked to are skeptical of the claim.

"The nuclear engineering clearly fails to be cost effective," Tom Jarboe told Business Insider in an email. Jarboe is a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, an adjunct professor in physics, and a researcher with the University of Washington's nuclear fusion experiment.

The premise behind Lockheed's 10-year plan is the smaller size of their device. The scientists are designing an improved version of a compact fusion reactor. The CFR generates power from nuclear fusion by extracting energy through the extremely hot plasma contained inside it.

The plasma consists of hydrogen atoms that, when heated to billions of degrees, fuse together. When this happens they release energy, which the CFR then extracts and can eventually transfer into electricity.

Traditional containment vessels for these plasmas are called tokamaks, and they look like hollowed-out doughnuts and are the size of an average apartment. Lockheed says its new CFR can generate 10 times more power than a tokamak in a space that could fit on the back of a large truck, according to Aviation Week. But Jarboe disagrees.

"This design has two doughnuts and a shell so it will be more than four times as bad as a tokamak," Jarboe said, adding that, "Our concept [at the University of Washington] has no coils surrounded by plasma and solves the problem."

Although Lockheed Martin issued a press release saying it had several pending patents for its approach, the company has yet to publish any scientific papers on this latest work.

"It's really great that Lockheed has taken an interest in this important challenge of providing carbon-free energy to the world," Michael Zarnstorff, deputy director for research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, told Business Insider in an email. "We haven't seen any results from the Lockheed experiments but the design is an interesting concept and it looks like they are at a very early stage of exploring this configuration."

The Pais Effect

vice |  Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais is the man behind the patents and The War Zone has proven the man exists, at least on paper. Pais has worked for a number of different departments in the Navy, including the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAVAIR/NAWCAD) and the Strategic Systems Programs. (SSP) The SSP mission, according to its website, is to “provide credible and affordable strategic solutions to the warfighter.” It’s responsible for developing the technology behind the Trident class nuclear missiles launched from Submarines.

The patents all build on each other, but at their core is something Pais called the “Pais Effect.” This is the idea that, “controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields.” 

Essentially, Pais is claiming to use properly spun electromagnetic fields to contain a fusion reaction. That plasma fusion reaction he claims to have invented will revolutionize power consumption. Experts theorize that a functioning fusion reactor would lead to cheap and ubiquitous energy.

One of Pais and the Navy’s patents described what the propulsion system and fusion drive would be used for—a “hybrid aerospace-underwater craft.” According to the patent, the craft could travel land, sea, and outer space at incredible speeds. Other patents invented by Pais and filed by the Navy include a “high temperature superconductor,” a “electromagnetic field generator,” and a “high frequency gravitational wave generator.”

It all sounds like science fiction, and the Navy has been skeptical too. Navy authorities called bullshit on Pais’ inventions and his patents went through a lengthy internal review at NAVAIR. The War Zone obtained emails about the bureaucratic fight between Pais and the Navy through a Freedom of Information Act Request and revealed that the mad scientist won. According to the patents, some of the technology is “operable.” That means the Navy is claiming some of Pais’ wild tech works and has been demonstrated to Navy officials.

The physics of what Pais is claiming are beyond theoretical and beyond the ken of the layman or lowly science reporter. But a paper about his compaction fusion reactor was accepted by the peer reviewed Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Plasma Science and published in its November 2019 issue. “The fact that my work on the design of a Compact Fusion Reactor was accepted for publication in such a prestigious journal as IEEE TPS, should speak volumes as to its importance and credibility - and should eliminate (or at least alleviate) all misconceptions you (or any other person) may have in regard to the veracity (or possibility) of my advanced physics concepts,” Pais told The War Zone in an email.

Pais continued to toot his own plasma horn. “Do realize that my work culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect (original physical concept),” he said. “Such high energy [electromagnetic] radiation can locally interact with the Vacuum Energy State (VES) - the VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence), in other words the fundamental structure (foundational framework), from which Everything else (Spacetime included) in our Quantum Reality, emerges. The Engineering of the Pais Effect can give rise to the Enablement of Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, which if you have closely been following my work, you understand the importance of.”

The Whole Idea Started From Maxwell's Equations

wikipedia |  Salvatore Cezar Pais is an American aerospace engineer and inventor, currently working for the United States Space Force. He formerly worked at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River. His patent applications on behalf of his employers have attracted international attention for their potential military and energy-producing applications, but also doubt about their feasibility, and speculation that they may be misinformation intended to mislead the United States' adversaries or a scam.^[1]

Salvatore Pais received his advanced education at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, graduating with an MS for a thesis titled "Design of an experiment for observation of thermocapillary convection phenomena in a simulated floating zone under microgravity conditions" in 1993.^[2]

Pais received his PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Case Western in 1999 on the subject of "Bubble generation under reduced gravity conditions for both co-flow and cross-flow configurations" for which he endured a number of parabolic flights in order to produce a low-gravity environment.^[3] His doctoral advisers were Yasuhiro Kamotani and Simon Ostrach who had carried out spacelab experiments in low-gravity aboard the space shuttle STS-50 in 1992.^[4] Pais's research was sponsored by NASA.^[5]

Pais works as a scientist, aerospace engineer, and inventor, at the United States Navy's Naval Air Station Patuxent River. His patent applications on behalf of his employers have attracted international attention for their futuristic-sounding technology and potential military and energy-producing applications, but have also led to speculation that they may be misinformation intended to mislead the United States' strategic adversaries about the direction of United States defense research.^[1]

Pais left the NAWCAD in June 2019 and moved to the US Navy's Strategic Systems Programs organization. He transferred to the U.S. Air Force in 2021.^[8]

His patent applications include:

• A "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor" with the function of enabling "the transmission of electrical power with no losses."(2017).^[9][10] The Institution of Engineering and Technology commented that no evidence was presented to show that the device worked and that the highest temperature superconductors so far created worked at around -70 °C.^[11]
• A "plasma compression fusion device" (2018),^[7][12][13] described by Popular Mechanics as a "compact nuclear fusion reactor" that "seemingly stretch[es] the limits of science."^[14]
• An "electromagnetic field generator and method to generate an electromagnetic field" (2015), the principal stated application of which is to deflect asteroids that may hit the Earth. The patent is assigned to the US Secretary of the Navy.^[15]
• A "craft using an inertial mass reduction device" (2016), one embodiment of which could be a high speed "hybrid aerospace/undersea craft" able to "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level",^[6] the patent application for which was supported by the Naval Aviation Enterprise's chief technical officer on the grounds that the Chinese military were already developing similar technology.^[1]
• A "high frequency gravitational wave generator" that may be used "for advanced propulsion, asteroid disruption and/or deflection, and communications through solid objects."(2017).^[16]

Testing on the feasibility of a High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator (HEEMFG) occurred from October 2016 to September 2019; at a total cost of $508,000 over three years. The vast majority of expenditure was on salaries. The "Pais Effect" could not be proven and no further research was conducted.^[8] Brett Tingley wrote for The Drive that "Despite every physicist we have spoken to over the better part of two years asserting that the "Pais Effect" has no scientific basis in reality and the patents related to it were filled with pseudo-scientific jargon, NAWCAD confirmed they were interested enough in the patents to spend more than a half-million dollars over three years developing experiments and equipment to test Pais' theories".^[8] Pais remained defiant regarding the veracity of his theories, in an email to The Drive he wrote that his work "culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect...as far as the doubting SMEs [Subject Matter Experts] are concerned, my work shall be proven correct one fine day...".^[8]