Dr. Robert Bussard, one of the founders of the Department of Energy's fusion program in the '70s, claims to have come across a breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion using Inertial Electrostatic Confinement. In a proposal to Google for funding, he lays out the how & why....
Nuclear physics isn't exactly my area of expertise, so I was wondering what people in the know think?
Bussard, who is the same man responsible for coming up with the Bussard Ramjet, claims the current investment into fusion reactors that use magnetic confinement to achieve Fusion with a Tokamak (such as in the international project called ITER) has fundamental flaws, and are driven largely by politics & greed....
We know fusion works, go outside look up in the night sky, billions of working fusion reactors... none of them toroidal.
More specifically, Bussard has said....
The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.
Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support.
According to Bussard, he & his team have been operating under a grant from the United States Navy for the last decade, in which time their work has been embargoed. He also claims the machine they created produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. It did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation.
Bussard's device seems to be something of a variant of the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. Originally conceived by Philo Farnsworth (the inventor of television), it uses a more convenient fuel (Boron-11) than the Tokamak reactors, requires no radioactive tritium, and produces no neutrons in the primary reaction....
This system consists largely of two concentric spherical electrical grids inside a vacuum chamber into which a small amount of fusion fuel is introduced. Voltage across the grids causes the fuel to ionize around them, and once ionized (and thus charged) it is accelerated towards the center of the chamber due to the voltage. This constant "inrush" of fuel ions keeps the hot plasma confined in the center of the system. Fusors can also use ion guns rather than electric grids.
The problem with the device when it comes to nuclear fusion is "pollution of the plasma area due to collisions on the grids which spray high-mass ions into the reaction chamber and cool the fuel." This makes getting to "break-even" in energy almost impossible.
From what I could understand from Bussard's presentation, while his machine is not exactly the same as the original Fusor, his team rethought the dimensions of the grid & changed it to a polyhedral with magnetic shielding, which made the system more efficient....
First, what we have achieved in our rather unexpectedly good tests of last November 9 and 10th was an output of DD fusion at about 10 kV, at B fields of 1300 G, in a 30 cam dia device (WB-6) run in a pulsed mode from big capacitors, with a fusion rate of about 1E9 sec. This works our to be about 100,000 X higher than the data of HirschFarnsworth at similar well depth and drive conditions. The test duration was only about 0.4 masec, but since the electron lifetime is ca 0.1 microsec this is steady-state to the plasma particles. We had neither the money, nor the cooling, nor the power supplies, nor the controls to run this small device steady-state, which is what we need to do, and what requires us to build the full-scale device.
This was a direct result of discovering something during late Spring/ early summer tests of WB-5, which was a closed boc machine, like the early HEPS of 1989. What we discovered was - in hindsight - elementary; it was that indeed God is in the details, and the detail of particular importance is that no metal surface penetrated by B fields must occupy more than about 10E-4 to 10E-5 of the total surface available to the recirculating electrons. If this dead fraction is larger, there is NO hope of net power from any such machine. AND, it is essential that the device be recirculating, i.e. that the electrons can circulate out and back through the cusps all over the machine. Of course, this is obvious; but in 15 years no one saw it, not Hirsch, not our consultants not our opponents, not our staff, and not me.
It is consistent with the need for electrons to recirculate about 100,000 times before being lost to collisions with structure, to yield net power.
Please remember that our device has the property that the electron flow and losses are decoupled from the ion flow and fusion generation. Power balance depends on suppresssion of the electron losses, which are derived from the energetic electron injection that forms the gridless negative potential well that traps the ions.
When we figured this thing out, in summer 2005, we quickly designed and quickly built WB-6, using only conformal (with the B fields produced) coil cans, so that no B field uniquely penetrated the cans, and then placed the coils in a special array so that no corners touched (this latter is a long topic having to do with local B fields, and loss of WiffleBall trapping due to line cusp effects at the corners, etc, etc, and is the baisis of our final patents on this thing). It IS the details that make or break the device. And this particular set of details absolutely dominates the performance.
If they were able to get a power surplus out of this kind of system, it could make "small" fusion power plants possible. Maybe like Mr. Fusion type small....
Today it was reported that a 17-year-old kid in Michigan was able to put together a Fusor Nuclear Fusion reactor in his basement....
He's on the cross country and track teams at Stoney Creek High School in Rochester Hills. He's a good-looking, clean-cut 17-year-old with a 3.75 grade point average, and he has his eyes fixed on the next big step: college.
But to his friends, Thiago is known as "the mad scientist."
In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.
Someone who wears a tin-foil hat would argue that if such a system could be a viable power source, there would be a lot of business interests that would be harmed by it.
So should Google invest in Nuclear Fusion, or is this snake oil?
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