Dr. Robert Bussard gave a talk to Google people here. He told of an 11 year R&D program to achieve fusion thru a "compress to a point" process. Six electromagnetic coils are arranged in a cube. Their magnetic fields squeeze electrons into a trap in the center of the magnetic coils. A good big clot of trapped electrons creates a strong electric field that sucks in positive ions (hydrogen, deuterium, tritium, lithium or boron). Once in, the positive ions are trapped by the negative charge, and zip around at high speed until they go head on with one another and fuse.
Bussard's EMC2 corporation built a series of small (under a foot) models, ran them and took data. His last and best machine dubbed WB6, operated in a pulsed mode to keep the heat down, achieved a record setting level of fusion as measured by neutron detectors.
Bussard is convinced that break even fusion can be obtained by scaling the WB6 machine up to 5 or 6 feet (from the 1 foot prototype). He says a $200 million dollar budget over 5 years would lead to a 100 Megawatt fusion reactor.
Bussard is a serious scientist, well known and respected in the science and engineering community. $200 million isn't much money. You can only buy two jet liners for that price. It's peanuts compared to the spending in the ITER tokamak project. Maybe some fairy god senator could slip a $200 million earmark for Bussard into the federal budget.
5 comments:
WB-6 was operated in a pulsed mode because the power supplies for continuous operation were not in the budget.
Things have moved on (in a good direction). The world has just changed. Cheap fusion is on the way. About 5 years.
WB-7 First Plasma
If you want to get deeper into the technology visit:
IEC Fusion Technology blog
Start with the sidebar which has links to tutorials and other stuff.
Expect Congress to pony up big bucks once the experimental series currently underway with WB-7 are completed. About 60 to 120 days.
That's true too. They didn't have big enough power supplies. Bussard also stated that lacking water cooled or super conducting coils, WB6 would have melted with continuous current at the level the capacitor bank furnished momentarily. I'm pretty sure that had they thought the coils could handle continuous power they could have bought, borrowed, or scrounged the necessary power supplies for one good run. I certainly would have tried.
BTW, you are the first person to ever leave a comment on my young blog. Please come back. Bring friends.
Come join us at talk.polywell
Scientists, engineers, enthusiasts.
Seems like you would fit right in.
Saw a link to your blog on talk-polywell. It's good to see other (tech) people picking this idea up. The more people who are grounded in reality looking at this thing, the better off we all will be. As Simon remarks, we need lots of people solving all the (engineering) problems we are facing.
Dr Mike and Indrek are doing some good stuff with sims. You may like to see their work.
Indrek:-http://www.mare.ee/indrek/ephi/
DrMike:-http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/Fusion/
Regards,
Tony Barry
I was in NH the weekend before the Primaries, Nashua area. Beautifull country. Good to see a blogger on Polywell.
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