Microsoft Looks At Polywell

Well not Polywell directly. More like a fusor. A program started by Richard Hull at the instigation of Robert Bussard and Tom Ligon.

Here is part of a message on the subject I got forwarded to me by e-mail.

On April 28th 2011, the Microsoft Corporation held its annual Hardware Summit. This year’s theme was “Envisioning the Future”. The Summit was comprised of three primary technical offerings. The first was the Hardware Summit itself with featured presentations and keynote address. The second was a vendor showcase, and finally there was also a “Garage Science Fair”. I was unaware that a decision was made at Microsoft Headquarters early on to move our offering from the “science fair”, to the “Featured Speakers” forum. We directly followed Dr. Brian Greene the keynote speaker on the first day of the forum. Our team was offered to several hundred corporate employees, as nothing less than professional scientists.

The cool and collected demeanor of our team under extreme pressure, as well as solid execution of their operational duties left the audience drop-jawed. Many of the early arrivals began snapping pictures with their cell phones, and forwarding them to other employee’s. The result is that we concluded with standing room only. Dr. Brian Greene, noted author and physicist from Oxford University was conducting a book signing on the first floor when he heard about our team. He left his signing to personally attend the rest of our presentation. Below was the write-up on the Agenda. Next Wednesday, Channel 9 from Microsoft will be here to film us in action. And we hope to do a presentation at the Pacific Science Center sometime this summer. The reactor was reviewed in detail by fire, security and nuclear safety personnel who found us to be in compliance for the show.

You can find out more about what they do at The North West Nuclear Consortium.

The North West Nuclear Consortium is a privately held youth group currently meeting in Federal Way Washington. It was created in direct response to needs expressed by both parents and students of public and private schools in South King County. They feel that Technology and Science curriculums are no longer interesting to students, due to budgetary constraints, and changes in school policy brought about by the abuse of tort law. Mr. Greninger leads a Christian fellowship at his home, and felt this was a challenge his group could not ignore. Starting in mid-2009, Mr. Greninger begin visiting a local youth camp with a “high voltage” show, in which he demonstrated large tesla coils and Van De Graaff generators, as well as other “gee-whiz” physics.

The youth group that was spawned through these shows now meets at Mr. Greninger’s home and studies one of the most exciting high end physics curriculums in the state.

You can find out more about Polywell at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

Fusors: Fusor.net

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Polywell - Positive Results

Alan Boyle has the latest on Polywell.

A Navy-funded effort to harness nuclear fusion power reports that its unconventional plasma device is operating as designed and generating "positive results" more than halfway through the project.

And that is not all:

"It's a very nice machine," he said. "I like what we have so far. It's quite well-built, relatively flexible to actually explore a lot of areas and find what's best. Achieving the plasma for fusion is obviously a tall order. ... You don't just push the pedal on a Ferrari and drive the car. Like an F-18 or a stealth bomber, you have to learn how to operate it properly."

And:

Park figures that the money provided under the WB-8 contract should last until the end of the year, depending on how efficiently the EMC2 team is able to stretch the money out. By then, the engineers in New Mexico and their backers in the Navy should know whether it's worth going ahead with the next step, perhaps even with the big demonstration reactor. Park hopes that WB-8 will be the last small-scale experimental machine EMC2 will have to build.

"This machine should be able to generate 1,000 times more nuclear activity than WB-7, with about eight times more magnetic field," said Park, quoting the publicly available information about WB-8. "We'll call that a good success. That means we're on track with the scaling law."

Don't expect weekly updates about EMC2's progress. "Currently all our funding comes from the Navy," Park said. "That's our customer. Our customer desired that we keep most of our progress confidential. ... They're somewhat concerned about making too much hype without delivering an actual product."

Go read the whole thing.

Thanks to the boys at Talk Polywell for the heads up. Good discussion of the implications there.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Sun Erupts

My post Some Interesting Science Papers drew some sceptical responses. Fine. Theories should be picked apart until we can be sure they will hold water. But we should also be on the look out for new data.

And here is a piece of new (for me) data that will knock your socks off. Vast Solar Eruption Shocks NASA and Raises Doubts on Sun Theory. That would be the old sun theory: the sun is a big ball of mostly Hydrogen gas that gets its energy from the fusion of that gas.

We are forever being told that the sun is a vast gas ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our solar system. But new evidence may help prove this isn’t the case after all, according to solar experts who say the sun has an iron core.

A stunned NASA admits, “Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big. It was so big, it may have shattered old ideas about solar activity.”

The vast global solar eruption covers ~10^9 km of the solar photosphere. The US space agency reports, “The whole solar hemisphere erupted simultaneously in an avalanche effect that had been triggered in the tiny solar core and propagated outwards” (NASA: Dec 13, 2010).

That is interesting. To get a whole hemisphere to erupt something has to happen in the core and propagate outward. It can't happen on the surface that way. If it was a surface effect the disturbance would have a different center.

Scientists have confirmed that the explosion that occurred on August 1, 2010 is unprecedented in recorded history and caused filaments of magnetism to snap and explode creating enormous shock waves that raced across the stellar surface. This caused billion-ton clouds of hot gas to billow out into space.

This unprecedented event is claimed to give support to an alternative theory long held by Professor Oliver K. Manuel, a Postdoctoral Fellow of the University of California, Berkeley.

Oliver and I have joined in a number of discussions about Global Warming on the 'Net. He is a sceptic of the CO2 theory (not the effect - the magnitude).

Controversy about our understanding of the sun has been fomenting for years. In 1980, solar science researcher, Ralph E. Juergens lamented, “The modern astrophysical concept that ascribes the sun’s energy to thermonuclear reactions deep in the solar interior is contradicted by nearly every observable aspect of the sun.”

The astrophysics establishment has long shunned the idea of the sun having any such iron core. But this momentous event is consistent with the theory that there is a tiny dense neutron core the size of a city powered by neutron repulsion. Professor Manuel believes there is a super-conducting iron-rich shell the size of a moon or small planet surrounding the neutron core.

Backing the theory is astrophysicist Carl A. Rouse, who calculated a tiny iron-rich solar core from helioseismology data, but he has also been ignored up until now.

Up 'tll now. The times they are a changin. FYI Oliver is the University of Missouri-Rolla and ex-NASA man.

The delighted University of Missouri-Rolla and ex-NASA man says that the event, contrary to modern theory, is new evidence for the Sun’s tiny (~10 km), dense neutron core being powered by neutron repulsion, and/or the super-conducting iron-rich shell (~10^3 km) surrounding the neutron core.

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before."

The four key points made by the iron core theorists are:

1. We do not “see” the Sun;
2. We see waste products emitting light when they reach the top of the Sun's atmosphere (photosphere);
3. The "smoke" we see is (H and He) from a neutron star;
4. The global eruption was triggered by the tiny, energetic, dense neutron-rich core of the Sun or by the iron-rich mantle that surrounds it.

Time for ‘Truthing’ Says Solar Professor

This monumental solar eruption may finally challenge the accepted theories about how the key driver of Earth’s climate actually works. Manuel sagely observes, “Although NASA seems to be catching up, after decades of ‘group-think’ it will be very difficult for NASA scientists to comprehend the Sun.”

Indeed, this latest evidence is unsettling not just for accepted ideas about how our Sun works but it also impacts assumptions of how the Sun effects Earth’s climate. Oliver insists “ Science is a continuous process of ‘truthing’ without ever claiming that you have the ‘whole truth.’”

So there may be something to the idea that the sun has a neutron/iron core. We shall see.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Atmospheric Fusion Reactions

My friend chrismb at Talk Polywell alerted me to this Russian paper on atmospheric fusion reactions caused by Deuterium - Deuterium (heavy hydrogen) reactions in lightning.

To produce thermonuclear reaction it is necessary, firstly, to have nuclei with a large quantity of neutrons available, for example, deuterium nuclei, and secondly, these nuclei should possess sufficiently high velocity and merge together upon collision, having overcome the Coulomb barrier. It turns out that all these conditions are observed in the course of a stroke of lightning - such a conslusion is evident from calculations by B.M. Kuzhevsky, Ph.D. (Physics&Mathematics), head of the neutron research laboratory, Skobeltsin Scientific Research Institute of Nuclear Physics (Moscow State University).

Deuterium is always present in water: on average, a molecule of DHO (water, where one of hydrogen atoms is replaced by deuterium) falls to 6,800 molecules of H2O. That means - taking into account the quantity of water vapour available in the atmosphere (i.e. 5õ10^-4 g/cubic centimeter) - there will be 10^15 deuterium atoms per cubic centimeter. In lightning, these atoms turn into ions and are capable of gathering speed up to considerable energy. With the lightning canal diameter varying from 2 millimeters to 5 centimeters, and discharge duration making the ten-thousandth of a second, it proves that billions of deuterium atoms will have time to start reacting with each other and to generate precisely two times less atoms of helium-3 and neutrons. These neutrons already possess enormous energy - 2.45 MeV. However, in the atmosphere of our planet they are capable of living at most for 0.2 seconds, during which they will inevitably meet with nitrogen atoms and be absorbed by them. This time period is sufficient for neutrons to fly a distance of one or two kilometers.

The calculation has been also confirmed by experimental data. The DYAIZA facility developed at the Institute and installed in Moscow at the Vorobyevy Hills repeatedly recorded neutron emission peaks during thunderstorms, their magnitude exceeding that of the background by hundreds of times.

Several important conclusions can be drawn from the above effort. Firstly, this helps to solve a long-standing puzzle: why cosmonauts on board the MIR space station observed high neutron background in the area of the equator. Keeping in mind that thunderstorms permanently burst out in this region, it is easy to guess where high neutron background comes from. Secondly, the same mechanism should also work in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter where thunderstorms are also frequent and sporadic neutron streams should arise there.

In effect the atmosphere has been running its own fusor experiments for billions of years.

The Future Of Energy

I don't agree with all the prescriptions presented. However, his outline of the problem is good for some critical thinking. The secret word is Terawatt. But a terawatt is only a rate of delivery. To be really useful it has to be ready to go when you need it. That would be terawatt-hours. And terawatt-days. And terawatt-months. And terawatt-years. And then comes reliability. Can the production be sustained? What is the up time? Is the resource seasonal? Can it be matched to demand?

I do like his idea about upping the research budget to $10 billion a year. I know. A quick ramp up will encourage a lot of waste. The problem is that you never know where a good idea will come from. Suppose we spend that amount in inflation adjusted dollars for 20 years. That is $200 billion. Suppose we only get a significant pay off from 10%. If that 10% covers even half our energy supplies (i.e. what ever technology that is developed is cheaper than the alternatives) it will have paid for itself.

There are a lot of interesting ideas available. Pebble Bed Reactors, Molten Salt Reactors, and others.

We need to phase out subsidies for solar and wind. When they become economical they will roll out on their own.

My thoughts? Well they drift back as always to The Polywell Fusion Reactor.

You can learn the basics of fusion energy by reading Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

Polywell is a little more complicated. You can learn more about Polywell and its potential at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

The American Thinker has a good article up with the basics.

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Amateur Nuclear Fusion - The Book

I just came across a book Amateur Nuclear Fusion that is the tale of one guy's efforts to make neutrons in his basement. Here is the blurb from the book:

Here's a look inside an amateur lab that does nuclear fusion. I outline the basic principle of the Farnsworth fusor, and describe my fusor in detail, accompanied with tales of its construction.

The book is not expensive at $12.50 but even better you can get it as a free down load. Both are available at the above link.

H/T Open Source Fusor Consortium

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Diamond Encrusted Fusion Reactor

It is ITER time again. They are experimenting with diamond coatings to withstand the high heat loads at the walls of the ITER reactor. One thing to keep in mind. Diamond is good for a few thousand degrees Kelvin. ITER plasma is in the 100 million degree range. If plasma and diamond meet - diamond doesn't have a chance.

I found a press release from sp3 Diamond Technologies, a company involved in the semiconductor industry but with tentacles in many places announce that their technology is being used by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. The University is using the technology to evaluate the benefits of using diamond-coated reactors for the next generation of fusion reactors due to diamonds’ ability to withstand the intense heat involved in the process.

The University has purchased one of sp3’s CVD diamond deposition tools as part of a €10 billion research project aimed at developing waste-free nuclear energy without contributing to global warming via the Euro International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program.

ITER may be really good science, the future of low cost energy it is not.

False Report

Tom Ligon reports that the report I posted about the Bussard Fusion work being funded was incorrect.

The contract has merely been continued for a year without funding.

Time to contact your Government to see if we can't get this ball rolling.

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

Good News - Fusion Project Funded

This report was not entirely correct. The contract has been extended for a year without funding.

Please write your Government:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

and sign this on line petition and send it to your friends to get Dr. Bussard's work funded.

====

Further update:

Bussard Reactor Funded.

I have inside info that is very reliable and multiply confirmed that validates the above story. I am not at liberty to say more.

06 Oct '007 2138z

==========

Mark of Ask Mark reports that because of Dr Bussard's winning the Outstanding Technology of the Year Award for 2006 and his widely reported Google talk the US Navy has decided to fund the final year of the his contract. (I contacted my Congress critter with no obvious result. However, maybe others had better results.)

That may be enough to get WB-7 and WB-8 funded. I hope his results from his new experiments will not be embargoed.

So far I have been unable to confirm this report. However, I have corresponded with Mark and from his e-mails he seems to be an OK guy.

Update: 19 April 2007 1200z

I found confirmation at Speculations 10 April 2007 post. There is no permalink for the post so I'm going to reproduce it here:

Greetings, future-watchers .... got some really interesting news about five minutes ago, straight from the man himself. Dr. Robert Bussard, of whom you may have heard, says that because of the publicity around his November 9th talk at Google and his International Academy of Science Outstanding Technology of the Year Award, the Navy has sent him a contract extension to continue his fusion research. It's two orders of magnitude below the $200 million Dr. Bussard says he needs to produce a full-scale 100mw system, but it's a start. If you're interested in helping out, see emc2fusion.org for more.

More details may be found in The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion, Dr. Bussard's contribution to the 57th International Astronautical Congress.

Come discuss this and other technology developments in The Expert Is In!

Update: 13 Oct 007 2007z

Dr. Bussard has died. However, the work continues. Two scientists from Los Alamos joined the project in August before the Dr. died. One of them was a long time friend of the Drs. As I said above, we need to keep the pressure on the political critters to make sure if the research results are positive that the project gets the funds needed to make the Bussard Reactor a reality in the shortest time possible.

Update: 14 Jan 008 1525z

Good news. The experimenters have achieved WB-7 First Plasma. Results are consistent with WB-6 results - so far. Further experiments are underway.


Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

What If The Chinese Beat Us To It?

I have been obsessed the last couple of days with the Bussard Fusion Reactor.

While reading around I have gotten the most depressing news. What if the Chinese get there first? Or the Russians. There is a lot of technical stuff in the article and Dr. Bussard talks about why raising funds is so hard. Then he gets down to his current situation.

Bussard is getting discouraged.

"The [U.S.] government, I don't think, is going to do anything," he said.

So he has begun to look elsewhere. Last October he published a paper detailing his work for the 57th International Aeronautical Congress in Valencia, Spain. In it he named eight countries, including China, India, Russia and Venezuela, that "could logically develop interest" in his research.

In November, Bussard presented his work in a 90-minute lecture at the headquarters of the Internet search engine Google.

The lecture is archived at [here with a text preview of the geo-political points - ed.] and had been viewed 87,700 times by early March.

The lecture generated a lot of e-mail, but so far, no funding, Bussard said. His next effort may be a book-length publication detailing his fusion work.

Much as supporters Gay and Triola want to see Bussard's fusion work resume, they worry about the broadening appeal for funding.

"My concern is China," Gay said. "If they have more vision than we do, they could jump on it."

Triola shares the worry. "I think it's a matter of engineering now, not physics any more. Once Bussard gets enough publicity, one of our not-so-friendly allies, probably the Chinese, will go do it."

It will all depend on who owns the patents.

Current grid structures with no magnetic shielding are about 98% transparent. Dr. Bussard says he has improved that by a factor of 100,000. That would make the losses in the range of 2E-6 much better than the expected requirement of 1E-4 or 1E-5.

The critical thing to do now is to go ahead with the low power pulsed experiments with better instrumentation to verify the results and if that proves out go whole hog. Dr Bussard says that the full scale reactor will take 4 to 5 years to design and build. However, if a full scale reactor was run in a short pulse mode. Say 1 millisecond pulses once a second. Copper coils could probably do the job and test out the full scale reactor while the superconducting coils for actual power production were being contracted for and fabricated.

For a 100MW reactor operating in a 1 millisecond per second pulsed mode the total power involved would be about 100 KW. Very tolerable for a system designed for full load operation at 100MW.

Such a program would allow for faster evaluation and design changes before every thing is completed.

It might allow for a full scale proof in much less than 5 years and possibly reduce the cost to $20 million to $50 million instead of the $200 million required to build a power plant. Once we know what to do we can pour on the coal (so to speak ) with higher cost but much lower risk.

That is the big deal for every business. Managing risk.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Bussard Fusion Discussion

There is a very interesting on going discussion of the Bussard Fusion Reactor at NASA Space Flight Forums. I'm going to excerpt some choice bits but if you are nerdy like me you will want to read the whole thing. Here is a bit from Dr. Bussard explaining why funding is hard to come by.

As for energy companies "stampeding" to support us -- It is clear that a view like this is ignorant of the reality of energy companies. There is only one thing the oil cvompanies want, and that is to sell oil, and more oil. So long as the fields pump, the oil companies will squeeze. They have NO, absolutely NO interest in anything new, ins spite of all their foolish ads in magazines for wind mills and solar-PV roofs. It is all just show and tell. I know these guys, and there is no way they would support anything that might get in the way of oil. The only way to stop oil, from their view, is when it does run out. And then they''ll go for deeper drilling, new fields, Gulf geopressure gas, LNG, etc, etc, and keep raising the price, until finally foolish solar and windmills become competitive.

Tom Ligon gets technical:

At one point in his paper, Rider seemed to make the assumption that the machine would maxwellianize because all plasmas maxwellianize. That's how plasmas are usually taught. But a properly designed IEC machine has a very non-maxwellian energy distribution, and ions reaching the center are nearly mono-energetic. IEC machines are particle accelerators, not heat machines. The only place where a properly-run machine maxwellianizes is close to the inner surface of the MaGrid, where the ions slow down and turn around for another pass. At that point, the density is high and they actually do maxwellianize ... and in the process equalize out any kinetic energy imbalances they developed due to collisions at higher energies. Rider raised the objection that the high energy non-fusion collisions would result in maxwellianization, and the machine itself responded by using maxwellianization to fix the problem!

The whole key is finding a density low enough to allow decent mean free paths for the ions when transitioning most of the radius of the machine, but still high enough that fusion is likely in the high-density central focus region. Done right, you find this sweet spot, which is not unlike finding the right fuel/air ratio to make an internal combustion engine run.

Maxwellianize means that the plasma would have the energies of its particles thermally distributed. That means few at high energies most at a lower energy peak and almost none with zero energy. It would look like this. As the temperature rises the peak flattens and the peak also moves to a higher velocity. You don't see this effect in the Bussard reactor because it is in effect a linear accelerator and the atoms and electrons are not in any kind of thermal equilbrium. They are constantly exchanging energy with the electric field as they move in and out of the reaction volume.

There is lots more including lots on space flight possibilities and more on Dr. Bussard's funding problems.

To view the thread with posting options go here.

Mr. Fusion

Instapundit says that we will need coal, oil, and natural gas for some time even if some one invents Mr. Fusion tomorrow. Which is true.

However, Mr. Fusion was invented yesterday (several years ago actually).

It was invented by Dr Robert Bussard formerly of the AEC fusion office. He did the work under a Naval contract.

The Bussard Fusion Reactor will lower electrical costs at the busbar by at least 10X over coal or fission nuke power plants. Capital cost for electical plants using the Bussard Fusion design will decline by at least 5X mainly because no turbines, condensers, steam generators or electrical generators are required. With such a lowering of costs and simplicity of required equipment, roll out will be very fast.

The reactor is just a big sphere surrounded by electro-magnets. The main cost of the plant is converting the 2 million volts DC output to AC for local use. The direct 2 million volt output would be great for long distance transmission. Although the plants could be sited in just about any reasonably sized electrical yard since any required cooling would not requre a water supply. Air cooling would work fine.

The power generator is about 10 to 12 ft across for an output between 100 MW and 1,000 MW. Power output scales as the 7th power of size. Double the size and you get 128X as much power.

No thermal plant is required. Thermal plants - steam generators, turbines etc. - are long lead time items. They can take from 3 to 5 years from start of production to delivery. The Bussard Fusion Reactor output is direct 2 million volts DC. (a very large battery).

Unlike fission plants there is no fuel stored in the reactor core = no Three Mile Island kind of problems. Turn off the electricity or turn off the fuel and the reaction stops.

It would make a good rocket engine for fast interplanetary travel.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion - video plus technical details.

Dr Bussard needs $2 million in start up funds to verify reaction constants. He will need $200 million for a test reactor.

The fuel is Boron 11 which is very abundant. We have 200,000+ years of reserves on the planet if it is used exclusively for power. Most borax is used now for borosilicate glass.

Let me take this time to specifically thank the crew at Classical Values, Justin and Eric, for giving me a heads up on this.

Update: 11 May 007 2002z

There is a petition started on 20 Nov 2006 calling for Congress to support the Bussard Fusion Reactor.

The short version: Dr. Bussard has a Navy contract that is unfunded.

Also please write your Government to urge them to fund the Navy contract:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

In addition Dr. Bussard is taking donations to help fund his work at EMC2 Fusion.

Update: 30 Aug 007 0032z

The US Navy has funded the next phase of Polywell research. This is no reason to let up. The Navy plans a five year program to construct a 100 MW test reactor. With more money they could speed up development. With enough cash a three year time line ought not be difficult. Two years is an outside possibility if we really pour it on.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Real Men Do Real Physics

There is a discussion going on at Matt Yglesias' place about the future of the Republicans if they stay the course of the war. Matt thought the odds for the Rs was not good.

I made the point that we needed to stay the course in the Middle East as long as our civilization depended on Middle Eastern Oil.

I said that with out access to that oil we would Decline and Fall leading to Desolation Row.

Then I suggested that an alternative existed, but we would have to develop it. That alternative is Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion.

Well I got the usual wise guy comments. Some fool thought I was talking about cold fusion and dismissed what I had to say with derision.

Then we get this from commenter Ed who actually visited my blog for at least 3 seconds to get ammunition for the following comment

The fusion thing is hillarious. M. Simon's blog has a post about how Muslim's aren't very good at science...it's right next to some Christian Zionist kookery.

Well if the Muslims are good at science why do they depend on oil for almost all their income? As to Christian Zionism, I replied:

BTW the Christian Zionist piece quotes Democrat Tom Lantos extensively.

Christian Zionism

And I would not go around bashing Christianity too much. The Blue Dog Democrats might not like it. There are 40 some in the House. LOL

From the above:

Rep. Lantos then said, “All Christians, please stand.”

Really if you look at the election results the D party has moved to the right. Get with the program.

Well we get one more ignorant guy with an opinion.

M, you're talking physics on a political blog, and 'free power' is something that high school physics says cannot happen, so this is hardly the right place to be advocating it.

Then some real men came on the scene and asked some real questions.

When I spoke to a plasma physicist at Texas A&M about one version of the electromagnetically accellerated boron-proton fusion schemes, he told me that a lot of these results are suggestive but misleading. Sure, you can use simple devices to accelerate particles to speeds that approximate the temperatures needed to fuse borons and protons. But the problem is in equating these particle speeds to temperatures. Particles in a thermal distribution come in lots of different speeds, centered around a peak in the center (which is what we call the temperature). But fusion doesn't happen at the peak--it happens at the tail of the distribution. Non-thermal particles have to reach much higher speeds than what you'd expect to reach the energy needed to ignite fusion.

I've loved the idea of boron-proton fusion every since I read the Monkhorst paper in Science back in the mid-1990s. But it's gonna take more than tearing apart someone's Trinitron to make it happen.
Posted by: jlw on January 18, 2007 02:08 PM

To which my response was:

jlw,

The really neat thing about the Bussard Reactor is that the particle speeds in the reaction area are not thermally distributed. They are all moving at around the speed determined by the potential gradient. Just as the speeds of particles in a linear accelerator are nearly idenitical.

You do have the vector problem but the particles oscillate into and out of the reaction space. The vectors are all into or out of the reaction space.

Really, go to my link and watch the video. I had to see it several times to get all the points he was making.

In addition I have links to the papers that describe the science, the reaction rates, etc.

After you have watched the video I think I can answer any of your questions.

You have made a really austute observation about thermal equilibrium. Which is why the Bussard reactor is so interesting.
Posted by: M. Simon on January 18, 2007 03:55 PM

Then another real man steps up to the plate:

I looked over some abstracts and citation lists on Web of Science. Bussard's work is published in aparently reputable journals, and frequently cited, though he is not very prolific. These are not self-citations by co-authors, or circle-jerk citations by collaborators.

The fusion is quite real, unlike the cold-fusion fiasco. What seems like the biggest problems are energy break even and durability of the equipment. The conventional fusion reactor has achieved energy break even already, the next step for it is economic break even.

One advantage Bussard has is that he could fail to accomplish his goal much more cheaply than the big fusion project.
Posted by: Njorl on January 18, 2007 03:44 PM

And my reply was:

Njorl,

Some very good points.

Bussard says that his idea could be proved or disproved for $200 million and 5 years of effort.

So far "conventional fusion" has cost multi billions and has gone on for many decades. With no end in sight because of the thermal equilibrium problem.

Look at the video of the talk he gave at Google. A neat physics lecture if nothing else.

Here is the Monkhorst paper mentioned above.

More Monkhorst The University of Florida. Another Monkhorst paper: Science 281.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Reactor Scaling

I have been doing a little back of the envelope calculations on the scaling laws for the Bussard Reactor.

Power scales as the 7th power of volume. Reactivity scales as the 5th power. If we assume unit radius and reactivity for a 1 MW unit what will be the relative radius and reactivity for other power outputs?

Power	Radius	Volume	Reactivity
1,000MW	2.68	19.31	138.950
100MW	1.93	7.20	26.827
10MW	1.39	2.68	5.180
1MW	1.00	1.00	1.000
100KW	.72	.37	.193
10KW	.52	.14	.037

So control will be a problem with larger outputs due to high gain and sufficient reactivity will be a problem with smaller outputs due to low gain. It will be interesting to see what the actual reactivity is in the test reactor.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Justin at Classical Values has put up a posts about fusion energy machines way different from the magnetic confinement and heating machines the government is building.

You can read the post here. Eric of Classical values has another post on the subject.

For more details on the physics visit EMC2 Fusion. You can also make a donation there to help the work go forward.

An interesting question is: when was the first steady state (operation times of at least 10s of seconds) electrically operated nuclear fusion machine which produces at least 10s of millions of fusions a second built? The astounding answer? 1959. So far 18 experimenters have produced similar machines including this young experimenter.

The next question is: why have advances been so slow in since then? The answer (and a lot more) is given in this video by Robert Bussard. (note: dial up is going to be incredibally slow as the video is around 1 hour and forty minutes - aproximately 170 mega-bytes) The video tends to the technical and I will have to study it a few times to get all the details. However a fair understanding of high school physics should suffice. Even if you don't understand the physics the general concepts are easy to understand and Dr. Bussard's enthusiasm is infectious.

In any case the idea is to build a fusion device that produces no long lived nuclear radiation and that works with the forces of nature instead of against them. The voltage required to make these devices work is on the order of 10 to 20 thousand volts or less. About the same voltage as you would find in a tube type monitor or TV set. Nothing very exotic. For a full scale power producer it is predicted that you would need about 2 million volts. Well within the range of current technology for small scale devices. Currently the highest voltage used in electrical transmission is 1.15 million volts. Scaling that up to two million volts for production devices should not be too difficult.

Near the end of the lecture (about 1 hour in)Dr.Bussard gets to the heart of the matter by listing the advantages of this type of power plant.

Stop Greenhouse Effect

Eliminate Acid Rain Sources

Decrease Thermal Pollution Sources

Stop Nuclear Waste Production

Destroy Nuclear Waste Inventory

End Water Shortages Forever

Cheap Fuel Free Electric Power

Clean Low Cost System

Fresh Water From The Sea

Practical Space Flight

Global Economic Stability

Cheap, Clean Thermal/Electric Power Readily Available

Fixed Energy Prices Stabilize Economy

Low Value Cane In Third World Countries Becomes High Value Export Product

Third World Nations Can Become Economically Viable

Profitable Industrialization Possible

Destroys World Market For Gasoline

Eliminates Effect Of Oil Cartels

Oil States Suffer Drastic Income Losses (audience: laughter - ed.)

Desalinization Plants Allow Irrigation Of Arid Lands

Cheap Water Allows Effective Agriculture

Low Cost Power Stabilizes Industrial Nations

Oil Wars Vanish

Mid-East Stabilized by Economics

Third World Becomes Fiscially Responsible (comment: not likely, more energy does not fix bad government - ed.)

End Use Market Price Ca. $5,000 B In Year 2000 $(all products the machine can replace - ed.)

Sell/Lease Systems To Supply Energy Plants/Production

Royalty/Lease Fees at 2% of Market Price Equivalent To Ca. 2m/kWhr Surcharge Yields Net Income (Profit) at Ca. $100 B/Year (which means an estimated electrical cost of 100 mills/kWhr - ed.)


Dr. Bussard says he needs $200 million dollars and five years to build two full scale demo plants. The first year of his five year plan will replicate with improvements his last experiments to get data on the process that can be verified by a review comittee. The First year will cost $2 million dollars.

He says that a computer to do proper simulations on the system would cost $8 million dollars.

Wiki on Dr. Bussard:

In the early 1970s Dr. Bussard became Assistant Director under Director Robert Hirsch at the Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division of what was then known as the Atomic Energy Commission. They founded the mainline fusion program for the United States: the Tokamak.

George Miley at the University of Illinois is doing some work in the field. As is Gerald L. Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin. Here is the U. Wisconsin IEC Fusion page.

A review of the lecture.

Dr. Bussard Talks

An executive summary of Dr. Bussard's Google talk.

The Bussard Reactor for space propulsion.

A number of links to Dr. Bussard's work. Scroll down.

More good links including links to the Farnsworth patents.

Update: 15 Dec'06 0431z

Mark Duncan in the comments left a link that refers to the Bussard paper given in Valencia, Spain [pdf].

A transcription of the Google presentation [pdf] with illustrations.

Mark has more at Fusion.

Here is a follow up article on the engineering: Reactor Scaling

Hendrik J. Monkhorst did some interesting work on a linear (as opposed to the Bussard spherical design) reactor. Here are a couple of articles one from Science 278 and another one from The University of Florida. Another Monkhorst paper: Science 281. Here is the patent for the Monkhorst/Rostoker design.

Wiki has a nice discussion of the reactions and some techinical details of the various Nuclear Fusion schemes including Dr. Bussard's Boron 11 - Hydrogen reaction.

Update: 11 May 007 0202z

Dr Bussards contract with the Navy has been extended for a year without funding.

Please write your Government and ask them to fund the contract:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

and sign this on line petition and send it to your friends to get Dr. Bussard's work funded.

Update: 30 Aug 007 0032z

The US Navy has funded the next phase of Polywell research. This is no reason to let up. The Navy plans a five year program to construct a 100 MW test reactor. With more money they could speed up development. With enough cash a three year time line ought not be difficult. Two years is an outside possibility if we really pour it on.

Update: 20 Sept 007 1012z

If you want to get more into the design details of the Polywell Reactor you might want to try:

IEC Fusion Newsgroup

Details on the design of an open source fusion test reactor.

IEC Fusion Technology blog

Update: 29 Dec 2007 2112z

I should have posted this here months ago. It is a link rich overview of Dr. B's life. He died in early October 2007. The work goes on with Dr. Nebel and Dr. Park of Los Alamos National Laboratories leading the effort:

Dr. Bussard has died.

==

Here is a report on what is going on at the lab.

Bussard Fusion Update

Update: 19 June 008 0739z

Here are some recent additions you might find useful.

Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town

The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited

Fusion Report 13 June 008

Rick Nebel Updates The Latest News (Dec 2008)