QuoteClearly the engineers building these devices believe they can make them safe and reliable enough not to go boom too often.

Believe it yes, but engineers are only told what to do.  Some engineers are paid to make the biggest boom possible.  Generally engineers have a personality that will consider destroying a village in order to save it.  It is not a matter of moral deficiency.  It comes from considering too many things.  If one of the many things considered is socially sanctioned nonsense an engineer can be bewitched by technology to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Techno-narcissism says the problems of hydrogen flight can be solved.  I am not a techno-narcissist.  Cryogenic tanks to hold liquid hydrogen that size are not light.  To make them light enough to fly safety has to be traded away.  A compromise will not be safe.

On a mass basis, hydrogen has quite a high energy density, almost 3 times that of gasoline. However, on a volume basis, although liquid hydrogen has a higher energy content than compressed hydrogen, it is still much lower than most of traditional fossil fuels.  It works out to be three to one in the other direction.



History will rhyme.


Don't try this at home.  You have heard this before.  Seriously.


The Dog Mini Nuke:

(to understand this you should watch the second video)

A pipe with a shutter at the end connects to an extension of pipe which is capped with a parabolic mirror.  A button of fusible material is suspended at the focus of this parabolic mirror.  A lithium micro-sphere held by spider web.  The other end of the pipe has a transparent window made of highly transparent quartz which is kept cool by a jet of chilled dry air.  You will know why in a minute. 

The front of the pipe is filled with the optimal three to one ratio of hydrogen to oxygen.  the shutter is closed.  the other end of the pipe with the polished mirror is filled with argon.

Three two one fire. 

The shutter is rapidly withdrawn.  The argon has no time to mix with the hydrogen oxygen mixture which is ignited by multiple sparks around the periphery of the transparent window when the shutter is ninety percent open.  This starts a shock wave which travels through the explosive mixture at supersonic speed.  The argon gas is at 20 atmospheres like the explosive mixture is, but there is no compression of the argon by the explosion because the shock wave is supersonic.

The shock wave hits the argon and propagates through the tube producing intense light.  The entire tube is reflective and light streams out the transparent window, while it streams into the parabolic mirror.  The fusible material heats to fusion temperatures.  The nuclear fusion pulse is short.  The target blows itself up, but an order of magnitude of energy is released and a second shock wave moves through the argon gas in the opposite direction.  Now the light coming through the quartz window is so intense that channels of chilled air have to streamed against it to keep it cool.  However everything is designed to survive.

Vacuum valves are opened as the shutter is closed.  A new target swings to the focus point while the tube is pressurized with gas for another cycle.  The tube is three feet wide and the length is chosen to give enough power to drive fusion, but not enough to destroy the equipment.  Spider web silk and lithium micro-spheres are the primary disposable.  The tube is built to recover residual energy of the hydrogen oxygen explosion.  I have another invention for this.  It uses a principle that is used on railroad tracks to slow trains down if they go too fast.  The end of the tube can lengthen to transfer energy from the chemical side of the explosion.  The fusion reaction is over before the end of the tube with the mirror moves to recover the hydrogen oxygen energy.  It is a two step process.  This is like harnessing the recoil of a gun after it fires a bullet.

Tubes are fired a hundred times an hour but the fusion energy released makes for a total energy release which equals tubes fired at an audible rate if only a hydrogen oxygen reaction is considered as the energy source.

The light leaving the window hits a target where the light energy turns to heat.  The heat is passed into aluminum tubes which boil water to drive steam turbines.  Light to heat is not hard.  Part of the produced electricity is used to split water in to hydrogen and oxygen to keep the power plant running on all cylinders.


But I am not a techno narcissist.  No I am not.