IEC Fusion Technology

Understand The Evolution Of Polywell

2012-01-11T18:02:00.001Z

Mashpedia Polywell

I'm also going to add it to the sidebar under Polywell Primer.

H/T Choff and Betruger at Talk Polywell.

What A Commercial Polywell Might Look Like

2012-01-10T23:42:00.000Z

Polywell Report - 3 Nov 2011

2011-11-03T22:50:00.001Z

The researchers at Polywell Fusion have issued a report on their progress.

Project Status More than 50% Completed

Final Project Report Submitted No

Project Activities Description Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services

Quarterly Activities/Project Description As of 3Q/2011, the WB-8 device has generated over 500 high power plasma shots. EMC2 is conducting tests on Wiffle-Ball plasma scaling law on plasma heating and confinement.

Jobs Created 12.00

Description of Jobs Created two full time plasma physicists and one full time microwave engineer. In addition, one full time equivalent electrical engineer.

It is not much of a report but it is all we have.

H/T The Boys and Girls at Talk Polywell where you can find a discussion of the nuances.

Polywell - News From Our Government

2011-09-30T17:49:00.000+01:00

I have been too much into politics at my other blogs and so have been remiss in reporting Polywell news. This news is about a month old.

It is from pdf page 35 (numbered page 25) of Recovery Act Tracker [pdf].

10. Plasma Fusion (Polywell)

The Plasma Fusion (Polywell) project is a combined Navy/Defense-wide effort to demonstrate a fusion plasma confinement system for shore and shipboard applications. This procurement is a follow-on to initial research into small-scale nuclear fusion systems using a unique approach of energy matter conversion. It covers research, analysis, development, and testing to validate the basic physics of the advanced gaseous electrostatic energy concept. The objective of this procurement is to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of advanced gaseous electrostatic energy. It builds on previous concept-demonstration benchtop versions of plasma wiffle balls. NAWCWDChina Lake awarded one contract action, valued at $1.3 million, for this project. NAWCWD-China Lake contracting efforts complied with Recovery Act requirements, the OMB guidance, the FAR, and DoD implementing guidance.

H/T ladajo at Talk Polywell

Screaming Very Low Power Microprocessor

2011-09-30T07:34:00.000+01:00

I have a new article up at ECN Magazine about a microprocessor that can do 90 billion instructions per second for a power cost of about 1 watt. Pretty good huh? It gets better. The chip has 144 processors in the package and when they are all idle the chip uses only 14 microwatts.

GreenArrays (the company that makes the chip) has partnered with another company to make the processor available to hobbyists.

Microsoft Looks At Polywell

2011-05-15T02:43:00.004+01:00

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

2011-05-11T17:18:00.000+01:00

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.

General Fusion Gets Funds

2011-05-08T00:38:00.001+01:00

General Fusion is getting funding to continue their experiments.

General Fusion Inc. has closed a US $19.5 million Series C round of financing led by Cenovus Energy Inc. (TSX/NYSE: CVE) with participation from Bezos Expeditions (Jeff Bezos), Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, Working Opportunity Fund (EVCC) Ltd., Braemar Energy Ventures, Entrepreneurs Fund, BDC Venture Capital, and SET Venture Partners.

This is good news for the General Fusion guys.

You can read more about the General Fusion concept at Steampunk Fusion.

Polywell Update 1 May 2011

2011-05-01T04:45:00.002+01:00

Finally there is some news about Polywell Fusion progress. From recovery.gov here is the essential news.

Projects and Jobs Information

Project Title Federal Contract

Project Status More than 50% Completed

Final Project Report Submitted No

Project Activities Description Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services

Quarterly Activities/Project Description As of 1Q/2011, the WB-8 device operates as designed and it is generating positive results. EMC2 is planning to conduct comprehensive experiments on WB-8 in the next 9-12 months based on the current contract funding schedule.

Jobs Created 11.00

Description of Jobs Created two full time plasma physicists. one full time equivalent electrical engineer.

So figure another year before the final report. In the mean time testing is ongoing.

There is a funny in the report. Note: jobs created = 11 and actual jobs created (as provided by a description of the jobs) is 3. Government accounting.

If you would like a fuller discussion of what this report means may I suggest a visit to the Talk Polywell board.

Fusion - A New Hope?

2010-07-27T02:05:00.000+01:00

A private company has just gotten a $50 million cash infusion for its fusion experiments.

A private company in Foothill Ranch that is reportedly experimenting with nuclear fusion power has raised $50 million in funding, according to a report from Socaltech.com.

Little more information was available Monday about the experiments at the company, Tri-Alpha Energy, or the funding itself. In the past, Socaltech reported, Tri-Alpha has received funding from Goldman Sachs, Venrock, Vulcan Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

Tri-Alpha's experiments, based on the work of UC Irvine plasma physics professor Norman Rostoker, have been rumored for years, but the company has not revealed the nature of its experiments to the public.

Solcaltech calls it a "stealth developer of advanced plasma fusion technology.

Well not exactly stealth. I reported on the work of Rostoker and Monkton in additions to something I first posted in November of 2007. Still, the fact that they are either getting new money or a release of promised money is good news. The more different ideas we explore on the way to practical fusion the sooner we will reach that goal. Because this is an experimental field. And as Einstein once said, "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

Tri-Alpha Energy, Polywell Fusion, and Dense Plasma Focus are all working on the holy grail of fusion physics. The combining of Hydrogen (a proton when ionized) and Boron 11 which is a fusion reaction that gives off very few neutrons and whose reaction product is high energy (relatively) charged particles which would allow converting the resultant energy directly to electricity. This greatly lowers the cost of a power plant. Consider that for a fission (currently Uranium) power plant 80% of the cost is in the steam plant which is used to convert the heat output of the reactor into electricity or shaft horsepower in the case of a ship.

One other point. Consider the millions being spent on these fusion experiments with the billions being spent on ITER which is currently in big financial trouble. The reported fix is to steal money from small research projects in other disciplines.

Of course I like Polywell Fusion. 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

And the best part about Polywell? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Second Hand Report From The American Society of Naval Engineers Symposium

2010-07-18T11:34:00.002+01:00

rschaffer8 at Talk Polywell gives a third hand report of a second hand report about the symposium.

The American Society of Naval Engineers held a symposium on "Engineering the Total Ship" on July 14 and 15. The session titled “Technology for the Future Navy” was moderated by Dr. John Pazik, Director, Ship Systems and Engineering Division, Office of Naval Research. I was not in attendance at the meeting, but a colleague in his meeting report and follow-up discussions with me indicated that Dr. Pazik made several favorable references to Polywell Fusion to the point where my colleague immediately did a google search to find out more. Although I don’t know specifically what Dr. Pazik said and I don’t know who was in attendance at this session, I believe it is significant that he would mention it in this forum. The meeting was attended by about 130 naval engineers and analysts including nine admirals constituting the leadership of the Navy’s engineering establishment. Ron O’Rourke, a very influential naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service was also in attendance. I do not know if Dr. Pazik’s comments reflected any preliminary results of the ongoing ONR funded research at EMC2. However, I don’t think Dr. Pazik would jeopardize his professional reputation or ONR’s before such an influential audience if he did not believe Pollywell Fusion had genuine technical potential. More information on the symposium is available at: Engineering the Total Ship

I think this means the experiments to date show promise. I will try to get more details.

The Quantum Mechanic

2010-07-12T17:18:00.002+01:00

If you are interested in quantum physics as I am I think you will find this paper very interesting: Modern Physics is Rotting [pdf]. You can also follow the discussion and read some words by the author at Talk Polywell.

You can also read more sections of Prof. Johan F. Prins's forthcoming book at Cathodixx.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the pdf linked above. He then goes on in this piece to give a simplified explanation of his theory with simple math.

Physics is considered to be the purest of all natural sciences. Scientists practising physics are supposedly those “special” people who search for knowledge with an “open mind”. New ideas and concepts are supposedly welcomed and objectively considered and tested. Since my own training is in physics and materials science, I also believed that this behaviour must reign supreme in science. I have applied these rules diligently while building my own career.

It thus came as a traumatic shock to discover when already approaching retirement that the real bigots in the world are to be found within the physics community, and more specifically amongst our modern-day theoretical physicists who have lost the plot many years ago when Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) convinced them during the 1920’s that it is impossible to “visualise” what happens on the atomic scale.

One other quote from the bottom of the second page of the Talk Polywell link above that I thought was very pertinent to the subject:

But the most important fact is that I should have been able to predict the result WITHOUT ANY EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION, since the impeccable solid state physics on which electronic devices are based demand that it must be so.

What he is saying is that we have empirical physics (transistors) that does not match current superconductor physics. What he has come up with (if true) is a unifying principle that explains both.

His complete book is due out later this year and I will do a post on it when it is available.

BBC Covers Amateur Fusion

2010-06-24T01:05:00.002+01:00

My friend Famulus whose blog is Prometheus Fusion Perfection has just had his efforts (and in part mine too - I helped him with a Polywell research proposal) picked up by the BBC

Mr Suppes, 32, is part of a growing community of "fusioneers" - amateur science junkies who are building homemade fusion reactors, for fun and with an eye to being part of the solution to that problem.

He is the 38th independent amateur physicist in the world to achieve nuclear fusion from a homemade reactor, according to community site Fusor.net. Others on the list include a 15-year-old from Michigan and a doctoral student in Ohio.
The fusion reactor in the Brooklyn warehouse Mr Suppes has spent the last two years perfecting his reactor

"I was inspired because I believed I was looking at a technology that could actually work to solve our energy problems, and I believed it was something that I could at least begin to build," Mr Suppes told the BBC.

Here is sort of an offhand reference to the proposal work I did with him. Let me add that we were assisted by a knowledgeable physicist friend of mine who wishes to remain out of the spotlight for now. Our physicist friend is also working on an amateur fusion experiment.

Mr Suppes is hoping to build a break-even reactor from plans created by the late Robert Bussard, a nuclear physicist who drew up plans for a fusion reactor that could convert hydrogen and boron into electricity.

Work on a scaled up version of a Bussard reactor, funded by the US Navy, has already been taking place in California.

But Mr Suppes believes he will be able to raise the millions of dollars it takes to build a Bussard reactor because he feels someone with enough money "will feel they cannot pass up the opportunity" to find out if it will work.

Iter said it would be wrong to dismiss out of hand the notion that an amateur could make a difference.

"I won't say something that puts these guys down, but it's a tricky situation because there is a great deal of money and time and a lot of very experienced scientists working on fusion at the moment," said Mr Calder.

"But that does not eliminate other ideas coming from a different group of people."

The work is actually going on in New Mexico but other than that they have most of the details correct. I'm hoping that he connects with enough money to do his proposed prototype reactor. Because I'd dearly like to help.

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.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Smaller, Cheaper, Tokamak

2010-05-12T10:25:00.005+01:00

The Italians and Russians are working on a cheaper version of ITER.

Russia and Italy have entered into an agreement to build a new fusion reactor outside Moscow that could become the first such reactor to achieve ignition, the point where a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining instead of requiring a constant input of energy.

The design for the reactor, called Ignitor, originated with MIT physics professor Bruno Coppi, who will be the project’s principal investigator.

The concept for the new reactor builds on decades of experience with MIT’s Alcator fusion research programme, also initiated by Coppi, which in its present version (called Alcator C-Mod) has the highest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure of any fusion reactor, and is the largest university-based fusion reactor in the world.

Bruno Coppi was an associate of Dr. Robert Bussard (of Polywell fame) when they worked together on the Riggatron concept [pdf].

Clearing Up Misconceptions

2010-03-25T07:53:00.000Z

Rick Nebel who is in charge of the Polywell Experiments at EMC2 comments on Alan Boyle's article on progress in Fusion Power on MSNBC's Cosmic Log.

As usual, I seem to have created some misconceptions by my comments. First of all, what we said on our website is that the work on the WB-7 has been completed. We did not discuss the results. If you would like to conjecture what those results are, let me suggest that you notice the fact that we are working on the WB-8 device. The WB-8 was not a part of Dr. Bussard's original development plan. This device came about as a result of the peer review process which suggested that there were issues that needed to be resolved at a smaller scale before proceeding to a demo. This was a conclusion that EMC2 heartily concurred with. I don't want to leave people with the impression that everything on the WB-7 is identical to the WB-6.

Secondly, in our contract with the DOD, EMC2 owns the commercialization rights for the Polywell. However, commercialization is not something that we can do with our DOD funding. That is what we would like to look at with any contributions from the website. This will enable us to:

1. Design an attractive commercial reactor package.
2. Identify the high leverage physics items that most impact the design (i.e. how good is good enough).
3. Give us a base design when we are ready to proceed to the next step.

rnebel (Sent Wednesday, March 24, 2010 9:12 PM)

I think it is evident that the Polywell people are making progress. Will it actually lead to a viable fusion power machine? There is no way to know for sure until the experiments are done. I am hopeful. It seems like Rick is hopeful as well and with better reason. He has the data.

Some of my more recent articles on the subject:

Rick Nebel has a few things to say:
Polywell - No BS - No Excuses

Pictures of past and future Polywell efforts:
WB-D

Where the money for commercialization will come from:
Venture Capital Likes Fusion

H/T DeltaV at Talk Polywell

Polywell - No BS - No Excuses

2010-03-23T23:09:00.001Z

Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log has a new article up on Polywell Fusion.

You won't hear Rick Nebel talking about fusion as a challenge requiring billions of dollars and decades of experimentation. For the past couple of years, Nebel heads up a handful of researchers following the less-traveled path to fusion at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in Santa Fe, N.M. That path involves creating a high-voltage chamber to sling ions so energetically at each other that at least some of them fuse and release energy.

EMC2 recently created a buzz in the fusion underground by reporting on its Web site that a series of experiments was able to "validate and extend" earlier results reported by the late physicist Robert Bussard. The company is now using a $7.9 million contract from the U.S. Navy to build a bigger test machine, known as WB-8. (WB stands for "Wiffle Ball," which refers to the shape of the machine's magnetic fields.)

What's more, Nebel and his colleagues are now seeking contributions to fund the development of what they say would be a 100-megawatt fusion plant - a "Phase 3" effort projected to cost $200 million and take four years.

"Successful Phase 3 marks the end of fossil fuels," the Web site proclaims.

Success isn't assured. The WB-8 experiment could conceivably show that the approach pioneered by Bussard, known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion or IEC fusion, can't be scaled up to produce more power than it consumes. And if Nebel's team comes to that conclusion, he doesn't plan to pull any punches.

"No B.S. and no excuses," Nebel told me over the weekend. "If it looks like we have a problem with this, we're going to tell them."

Now that is a really different attitude from what has gone on in ITER. It was obvious to me a few years ago that the program was in trouble. But only in the last year have they admitted it by slipping the schedule by almost three years. So far.

You can read my earlier post on what I learned from EMC2 at WB-D which has some nice pictures of experiments and their proposed 100 MW device.

WB-D

2010-03-18T00:13:00.002Z

EMC2 (Polywell Fusion) has updated their site with an image of WB-8 shown above. The Drawing is labeled as "with diagnostics".

And then there is this picture:

Labeled:

WB-D 100MW Polywell Demo Device

Your Contributions Will Help Us Design The WB-D Polywell Device

Send your supporting contributions to:

New Mexico Community Foundation

Contact Energy Matter Conversion Corporation

1202 Parkway Drive Suite A
Santa Fe, NM 87507
Phone: 505-471-2050
Email: Rick at Emc2fusion dot com

There is considerable speculation at Talk Polywell as to what it all means.

And since from time to time there are people reading here who need to be brought up to speed on fusion I'm reposting my usual: 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.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

I'm a big fan of small fusion projects. Especially after hearing what Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma PhysicsDr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good." And they seem really hard to build even. And who knows, if the Polywell experiments being done by the US Navy are successful the ITER project may just wind up as a big hole in the ground in France.

Update:

Here is the progress report given so far by EMC2:

EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation has been formed as a charitable research and development organization in frontier energy technologies with emphasis on fusion.

Fusion R&D Phase 1 - Validate and extend WB-6 results with WB-7 Device: 1.5 years / $1.8M, Successfully Completed

Fusion R&D Phase 2 - Design, build and test larger scale WB-8 Polywell Device: 2 years / $7M, In Process

Fusion R&D Phase 3 - Design, build and test full scale 100 MW Fusion System: 4 years / $200M, In Design Phase

Successful Phase 3 marks the end of fossil fuels

Good luck and happy fusing to the EMC2 folks and Rick Nebel who is leading the project.

Venture Capital Likes Fusion

2010-03-12T17:27:00.000Z

If you read my post Investing In Polywell you would know that venture capital seems interested in funding fusion start-ups. We now have more confirmation in this Finance Business article.

A prominent venture capitalist, Wal van Lierop, of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, has begun to invest in companies (such as General Fusion) who are providing patents and technologies for economical fusion power. in a recent interview at the Clean Tech Investor Summit (which we're very sad we're not attending), van Lierop said that he expects large energy companies to start thinking about building fusion plants within the next five years.

As we've noted before here at EcoGeek, the best way to track down that technologies are going to (very shortly) change the world is to watch what the venture capitalists are doing. these are people who basically make ridiculous sums of cash by predicting the future...and investing in it. and since they've got so much riding on their bets, they like to do a lot of research.

Often this is research that people like me (because I don't have billions of dollars to invest) can't do. So I follow the VCs, and pay attention to what they're saying.

And what van Lierop is saying seems almost crazy, on the surface. But dig a little deeper, and things start looking exciting. despite sounding like a comic book hero, General Fusion's technology is very realistic. in a world where we're all used to hearing that "Fusion power has been twenty years away for twenty years" hearing that it's five years away is pretty remarkable.

Yes. It does seem remarkable. Except if you have been reading articles of mine like: We Will Know In Two Years or less. Or one of my more recent ones like: Advanced and Delayed.

Let me also say that I have been approached several times over the last few years to personally develop a project that would reach the fusion goal faster than any government project. One of these days I will connect either with my own project or as an assistant to some one else's project.

Investing In Polywell

2010-03-10T12:47:00.003Z

Famulus at Prometheus Fusion had a close encounter with an angel investor from Europe. He gives an account of his interactions. Famulus was kind enough to ask me for some assistance with his proposal. I also got one of my physicist friends (Dr. Mike) to help out.

Famulus needs to raise funds to continue his experiments. He is getting close to his goal.

Donate Here.

Open Source With Superconductors

2010-02-17T22:48:00.002Z

My friend Famulus is building an open source Polywell with super Conducting magnets. It would be the first superconducting Polywell in the world as far as anyone knows. Follow the link to see pretty pictures of the plan.

Here he discusses power supplies for the coils.

All very impressive. I wish I was there. There is a slight hitch. Famulus has run into a money problem.

As of the last time I checked he had 25 donations and only needs $1,958 to reach is goal. You can check his latest fund raising stats and donate at the link. And click on the "Updates" link at the top of the page. There are 6 of them.

But that is not the only motivational trick he has in his bag. He has custom T shirts too! I think he needs a better slogan for the shirt. Maybe I Helped Fund An Open Source Bussard Fusion Reactor And Got The Shirt As A Bonus. With suitable type faces.

And just in case you haven't heard of Polywell I can bring you up to speed. 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.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

I'm a big fan of small fusion projects. Especially after hearing what Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma PhysicsDr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good." No I'm not against ITER, totally, but it is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. For a project that will not be done (regular power production) for 40 to 70 more years. With that kind of schedule we can afford to wait for some breakthroughs.

Oh yeah.

Pledge Some Money to help keep amateurs on the cutting edge.

ITER Image Trouble

2010-02-08T22:51:00.004Z

The above Image is from the top of this page. It is a working fusor grid working in star mode. In other words the image is from an IEC device not a tokamak device.

Maybe it is a subtle sign the tokamak folks are losing hope.

H/T chrismb at Talk Polywell.

Shake Up On The Way

2010-02-06T01:23:00.001Z

For those of you not familiar with Latin "iter" means "the way". And the ITER Fusion program now headquartered in France is undergoing a top management shake up.

In an effort to put the world's largest scientific experiment back on track after delays and cost overruns, Europe is shaking up the agency overseeing its portion of the multinational ITER reactor.

On 16 February, Frank Briscoe, a British fusion scientist, will take the reins as interim director of Fusion for Energy (F4E), the agency in Barcelona, Spain, that manages Europe's ITER contribution — the largest of any partner's. Briscoe replaces Didier Gambier, a French physicist who joined the F4E as director when it formed in 2007. Gambier was originally appointed for a five-year term.

The European Union (EU) is also formulating a plan to complete construction on the multibillion-dollar machine in 2019, a year after currently scheduled, Nature has learned.

ITER aims to prove the viability of fusion power by using superconducting magnets to squeeze a plasma of heavy hydrogen isotopes to temperatures above 150 million °C. When full-scale experiments begin in 2026, the machine should produce ten times the power it consumes.

It seems the shake up is due in part to unhappy customers. You know - the people putting up the money.

Europe has faced increasing criticism from ITER's six other international partners: Japan, South Korea, Russia, India, China and the United States. A budget proposed last week by US president Barack Obama would slash America's funding for ITER in 2011 by 40%, to US$80 million; it cited "the slow rate of progress by the [ITER Organization] and some Members' Domestic Agencies". And on 2 February, Evgeny Velikhov, a Russian fusion researcher and head of ITER's council, called Europe a "weak link". "Unfortunately, their organizational structure is very poor," he told Russian President Vladimir Putin in an interview that appeared on a Russian government website.

Finishing ITER in 2019, a goal that the F4E is now working towards with industrial contractors, would involve risks such as producing components in parallel, but scientists think that those risks can be managed. "There should be no doubt that Europe is trying hard to get ITER ready in the shortest time that is realistic," says one senior European scientist. The new schedule will be presented to other ITER partners at a meeting on 23–24 February in Paris.

In a recent post, Spiraling Out Of Control, I discussed some of the financial problems at ITER. And for those of you interested in the technical problems may I suggest (actually highly recommend) the Talk Polywell link at the end of that article.

And let me leave you with a few words from a Polywell Fusion fan who is no fan of Tokamak designs (ITER and similar devices): Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma Physics Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And the best thing about Polywell is what Physicist Rick Nebel, who is now herding the project, has to say about it: We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Spiraling Out Of Control

2010-02-04T13:09:00.002Z

I have covered the troubles the ITER fusion project is having in ITER Gets Clipped which covered the American view of ITER's troubles. The The European Voice is taking a look at the problems from an European view.

ITER's projected costs have soared since the first estimates were made in 2001. Contributions will generally be made in kind (through provisions of construction materials, reactor components, labour and expertise). The EU's total in-kind contribution was estimated at €1.491 billion in 2001. By 2008, when the EU's Fusion for Energy agency, which was set up to manage the EU contribution to ITER, reviewed the costs, the estimate had risen to €3.5bn.
Rising costs

Concerns about the ballooning budget led the Commission last year to set up an expert group tasked with reviewing the construction costs. The group's report, released to member states last month and seen by European Voice, said that the construction costs alone could rise as high as €1.5bn (compared to a 2001 estimate of €598 million).

The report said that the increase was a result of “omissions or underestimates” in the original estimates, inflation in concrete and steel prices and “changes in specifications”.

The Commission has set up a task-force to identify sources of additional funding for ITER. One option being considered is a loan from the European Investment Bank.

The latest budget numbers I have seen have the project estimate at around $7 billion US (€5.1 billion).

Interesting that the budget was low balled to get things going and then things started spiraling out of control. Making up for missing resources in out years always costs a lot more than budgeting for them from the start. We see this in the space program all too often. The reason is that you have people you have to keep on board while changes are being made. What we in engineering like to refer to as "the burn rate" - the amount you have to spend to keep going while actual progress halts to make the changes. Every day's delay can cost millions of dollars. Then there is the problem of bringing new people up to speed. Adding people to a late project will often increase the delay over what making do with the people you have will cause. It is easy to get into a regenerative mode where you can never finish at an acceptable time with an acceptable budget. Another thing that happens when you add new people to a project is that the design suffers because the new people never know as much as the old hands.

Fredrick Brooks originally looked at this problem with respect to big software projects. He published his observations in a 1975 book called The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering.

It is probably the best book on big project management ever written so far. I have used his insights often in my engineering career. Management will hardly ever listen to these types of insights at the beginning. But occasionally you can get them to accept the insights provided once a project is in trouble.

Let me add that the much smaller Polywell Fusion project is not having any such difficulty. Physicist Rick Nebel said of his WB-7 experiment: it "runs like a top". Rick has been mum about WB-8 progress. Since he has the same team that did WB-7 working on WB-8, I expect he will deliver the knowledge required on time and within budget. Of course he has an advantage. It is easier to keep a small project ($ millions) on time than it is to do the same for a large project ($ billions). If the experiments look promising I expect that he will have a lot more trouble getting a real power plant operational. The logistics get harder.

You can look at recent list of the design problems ITER faces at Talk Polywell.

ITER Gets Clipped

2010-02-02T00:23:00.005Z

It looks like the Obama Administration is cutting back its support for ITER in next year's Federal Energy Budget.

...funding for DOE’s fusion energy sciences (FES) program gets clipped from an estimated $426 million this year to a requested $380 million next year, a reduction of 10.8%. That reduction would come out of the United States’s contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, which will be built in Cadarache, France. Under the proposed budget, ITER would get $80 million next year, down from an estimated $135 million this year. The decrease marks the latest dip on the ITER budget roller coaster. In 2008, Congress zeroed out $150 million of spending on ITER in a squabble with the White House. The project got $124 million the following year.

Ironically, the current cut comes about because ITER itself has slowed down as researchers contend with design revisions that could double its $7 billion price tag. “We need to make sure that we don’t get ahead of the project as a whole,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, home of the U.S. ITER project office. The proposed $80 million would keep U.S. researchers fully engaged next year, Mason says. However, he worries that the dip this year will make the required funding increases in 2012 and beyond all the larger and harder to achieve.

I looked at the ongoing design review in ITER Back To The Drawing Board. I believe ITER is in big trouble for two reasons. One is that the engineering is not solid even for an experimental project and also that even if it is successful in its 40 or 50 year time line it will never produce a commercially viable fusion reactor.

New IEC Fusion Research Group Opens

2010-01-27T20:32:00.001Z

Space Ports reports the opening of an IEC Fusion Research facility to develop fusion for spacecraft propulsion.

AVRC has been awarded a contract by Wise County's Industrial Development Authority to manage a $7 million energy research center now under construction in the Lonesome Pine Business and Technology Park [PDF] in Wise, VA focused on the development of inertial electrostatic confinement aneutronic fusion energy at the Appalachia America Energy Research Center along with other projects in a significant energy technology portfilio.

Plans are in the works to conduct a multimillion-dollar research project in Wise to develop fusion technology into a cheap source for everything from electricity to spacecraft propulsion. Invented by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Dr. George Miley, the process involves pumping aerosol boron plasma into a spherical container where it is made very, very hot. The atoms begin to fuse, creating energy.

The project will start small, with about 6-8 researchers, and could employ 20-28 researchers within 18 months.

That is interesting.

Whose work is this based on? George Miley who I mentioned in A New Theory Of Electrodynamics. A look at the AVR page on fusion has some more hints.

The Intertial Electrostatice Confinement (IEC) Fusion Propulsion technology being promoted by AVRC was developed by Dr. George Miley.

Fusion reactions release an enormous amount of energy which is why there is such a large push for research in harnessing the energy for propulsion systems. A fusion propulsion system could have a specific impulse about 300 times greater than a conventional chemical rocket engine. Fusion-powered rockets would use hydrogen as a propellant, which means it would be able to replenish itself as it travels through space.

I wonder how they plan to fuse hydrogen which is very difficult to fuse because it requires converting a proton into a neutron to make the reaction work. Or maybe they just plan to use hydrogen gathered in space as reaction mass and plan to fuse something else. Sort of like a modified Bussard Ramjet.

AVR has a slide show in pdf of their design. It is a variant of a Farnsworth Fusor operating with 600 to 800 volt drive which will burn Hydrogen and Boron 11. I wonder how they plan to make it work with such low drive voltages? Perhaps their plan to begin with a Deuterium-Helium 3 fuel has something to do with it.

This paper [pdf} indicates that they are planning to use the IEC design as just a thruster to start with.

A novel plasma jet thruster, based on Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) technology, is proposed for ultra maneuverable - space thruster for satellite and small probe thrust operations. The IEC Jet design potential offers an unique capability to cover a wide range of powers (few Watts to Kilowatts) with good efficiency while providing a plasma jet that can start with a large diameter but be narrowed directionally to focus on targets The IEC thruster uses a spherical configuration, wherein ions are generated and accelerated towards the center of a spherical vacuum chamber A virtual cathode forms in the high-density central core region, combined with a locally distorted cathode grid potential field, extracts accelerated ions into an intense quasi-neutral ion jet. Thus, the IEC thruster is roughly analogous to a planar electrostatic ion thruster "folded" into spherical form. Estimates suggest that its electrical efficiency would match conventional plasma thrusters, while offering advantages in design simplicity, reduced erosion giving long life time, reduced propellant leakage losses, and high power-to-weight ratio. Heat rejection is eased due to large heated surface areas making the unit especially well suited to high power operation.

That might work. And if it does fusion could come later.

Kind of like the progression in piston pump technology. First you build pumps. Very handy. Then you apply steam and pumps become a power source. Then you figure out how to burn the fuel inside the cylinder and you get an internal combustion engine. Let's hope we can compress the development cycle from hundreds of years to a couple of decades.

Update: 1934z 29 Jan 2010

Next Big Future has more.

A New Theory Of Electrodynamics

2010-01-27T00:14:00.004Z

I have just sent this out to a group of physicists and scientists to see if it has any merit.

Here is the cover letter I sent:

George Miley of U Illinois, Champaign is involved.

I am passing this on after a cursory review. It was published yesterday. Please give it 5 minutes before you give up. The speed of light bit in the beginning was off putting for me. But it gets explained better later. The equations at first glance are compelling. They are better covered in the second 5 minutes. I'm going to review it more carefully with multiple stops to get a better feel. This is rapid fire and not typical lecture speed.

I'm more at home with engineering but I am at least conversant with all the material presented. I have also introduced the video to Lubos Motl to see what he thinks.

It will be interesting if anything comes of it.

Here are some of the documents in the video:

Evidence of Cold Fusion?

Impulse Gravity Generator?

Gravitomagnetic Field of a Rotating Superconductor
and of a Rotating Superfluid [pdf]

Researchers now able to stop, restart light

The Control of the Natural Forces by Frank Znidarsic [pdf]

BBC News - Boeing tries to defy gravity

Quantum Chemistry - McQuarrie

http://www.cravenslab.org

Tapping the Zero Point Energy

H/T jlumartinez at Talk Polywell

Nerd Night Report

2010-01-16T16:45:00.002Z

Here is the first sketchy report on last night's nerd night in New York.

If you've never been to a Nerd Nite before, here's how it goes down. Take a college PowerPoint seminar on bird migration or muscular dystrophy or nuclear fusion or what have you, and hold it late at night in a hip bar in DUMBO. Allow anyone to present on any scientific subject, regardless of obscurity, social appropriateness, or sobriety. Yes. It is exactly as crazy and surreal as you imagine. And it is great.

Tonight's lectures were on open source Bussard reactors, the neuroscience of visual perception in the context of art, the anti-ergonomic effects of running shoes, and teledildonics. I think you can probably imagine how each of those went.

Perhaps most notably, this is the first large social event I've been to in NYC in which I've actually succeeded in getting to meet and hang out with random strangers in my general age cohort. Maybe I don't completely suck at making new friends after all.

I missed nerds so much.

Here is my original announcement of Nerd Night with fusion.

Nerd Night

2010-01-12T04:26:00.000Z

Famulus of Prometheus Fusion will be featured at Nerd Night, Friday, January 15th, in NYC.

*Presentation 1

Fusing the Atom and Living to Tell
by Famulus

Description: We have built an open source nuclear fusion reactor and fused the atom. This is the story of a remarkable fusion device called the Farnsworth Fusor and its successor, the Bussard Reactor (aka. Polywell). The Bussard Reactor holds the promise of clean cheap abundant energy from fusion. This is a story of research on the edge.

Bio: Famulus is an entrepreneur, hacker, and rails developer. In 2008 he learned of the Bussard fusion reactor and left the software world to try and build a working Bussard Reactor.

If you have the time and the inclination a night out with the nerds could be fun. And if you want learn the basics of fusion energy so you can ask intelligent questions you can start 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.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years

The University of Sydney Is Building Small Polywell

2010-01-03T13:07:00.002Z

Prometheus Fusion reports that the University of Sydney is building a small Polywell with copper coils.

He has picture and a link to a series of Power Point slides explaining the work.

IEC 2009 - Wisconsin

2009-12-18T11:38:00.003Z

The reports from IEC 2009 are available. Lots of meaty pdfs and Power Point presentations.

It looks like work on IEC Fusion has picked up compared to 2008.

H/T Tall Dave

The Current State Of Fusion

2009-12-04T17:21:00.003Z

Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log has the latest broad look at the state of Fusion. He discusses the state of laser fusion. The the $3.5 billion American National Ignition Facility seems to be doing well. But what excites me is that he has some indirect news on The Polywell Fusion Reactor experiments.

The dark horse in the fusion race is an approach known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, or Polywell fusion. This method, pioneered by the late physicist Robert Bussard, involves designing a high-voltage cage in such a way that atomic nuclei slam into each other at high speeds, sparking fusion.

That is the hope. Now what about some news?

In September, EMC2 Fusion was awarded a Navy contract, backed by $7.9 million in stimulus funds, to develop a scaled-up version of a Polywell fusion reactor. Development and testing of the device is expected to take two years, and there's an option to spend another $4.4 million on experiments with hydrogen-boron fuel (known as pB11).

In the past, EMC2 Fusion's Richard Nebel has been able to describe the team's progress in general terms, saying that he was "very pleased" with the performance of an earlier test device. But now, with more Navy money on the line, Nebel has been constrained from saying anything about the project. The fact that the research is continuing, however, appears to indicate that the results have been promising enough to keep the Navy interested.

My sources on the project have dried up as well. No one is talking. I am running on unsupported rumors and conjecture. Some think that the silence is a cover up for failure. Being a fanboy I'm more inclined that they are so wildly successful that the Navy doesn't want to let the cat out of the bag any sooner than they can help. Reality is probably some where in the middle or worse. The design is so simple that if the Navy gets it to work no country is more than 5 years behind in producing a working model from scratch (given a crash program).

As you know I have been closely following the progress of the WB-X contracts at EMC2. If you want to get deeper into them:

WB-8 Contract Progress

Polywell Gets The Dough

The Boys At Talk-Polywell Have Struck Paydirt

WB-8 In The Works

Polywell Gets In On The Act

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.

And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years

H/T rschaffer8 at Talk Polywell

ITER Back To The Drawing Board

2009-12-01T17:03:00.000Z

The ITER fusion test reactor project is getting a schedule review [pdf] because the project is seriously out of whack.

The scientific and engineering team building the ITER fusion reactor failed to win an expected endorsement from the project’s governing council last week. The council, which represents the seven international partners in the project—China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and the United States—sent the team back to do more work on the proposed construction schedule for the mammoth undertaking.

So what is being done to fix this mismatch between means and ends?

...ITER staff have been racing for months to get the final project baseline documents, which describe the design, cost estimates, and planned schedule, ready for the 18–19 November council meeting at Cadarache (Science, 13 November, p. 932). But some council members voiced concern that the schedule, which aimed to start the reactor by 2018, was not realistic and that there was too high a risk that some part of the immensely complicated effort could go wrong.

A slip in the schedule would invariably mean increased costs, and the council is already concerned about budget estimates, which, sources say, may have doubled from 􀀀5 billion since the partners signed up in 2006. So the council told ITER staff to nail down more firmly the risks, both technical and organizational, involved in the schedule and come back in February with earliest and latest possible start-up dates.

And they are not even going to discuss costs until they get a schedule estimate. Good.

I wonder if the fact that Focus Fusion, and Tri-Alpha Energy, and General Fusion, and other groups promise results much sooner at much lower costs also has something to do with the reevaluation.

Of course you all know my favorite. 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. And the best part? We Will Know In Two Years.

Here is a good page to keep up with ITER news. I love what it says at the top of the page:

18 Years Until 1st Q = 10 DT pulse 400s long at 500MW on ITER

Plasma Physicist and author of Principles of Plasma PhysicsDr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

Tom Ligon On Space Show

2009-11-28T12:33:00.004Z

Tom Ligon is going to be on the Space Show this Sunday from 12 to 1:30 PDT. You can call in or listen. Information at the link.

Update: 29 Nov 2009 2020z

I had my dates mixed up. Tom will be on the Space Show for Tuesday evening, December 22, 7-8:30 PM California time. There is a good chance I will be on the show as well.

Designing Computer Chips

2009-11-22T07:08:00.001Z

My latest article at ECN discusses how to design computers in the context of FORTH chips.

First Fusion

2009-11-20T04:21:00.002Z

Prometheus Fusion has announced his first fusion neutron.

Drop by and give him an atta boy.

H/T Talk Polywell

The DOD Looks At Energy Security

2009-10-25T13:59:00.000Z

The gentlemen and gentlewomen at Talk Polywell have come across a couple of major finds. The first is a discussion of American energy security and its military implications. Energy & National Security: An Exploration of Threats, Solutions, and Alternative Futures [pdf].

Abstract – Findings of multiple Department of Defense (DoD) studies and other sources indicate that the United States faces a cluster of significant security threats caused by how the country obtains, distributes, and uses energy. This paper explores the nature and magnitude of the security threats as related to energy—some potential solutions, which include technical, political, and programmatic options; and some alternative futures the nation may face depending upon various choices of actions and assumptions. Specific emerging options addressed include Polywell fusion, renewable fuel from waste and algae cultivation, all-electric vehicle fleets, highly-efficient heat engines, and special military energy considerations.

Interesting (to say the least) that Polywell gets a mention in the very beginning of the paper. We have come a long way since the Polywell program was nearly permanently shut down in 2006.

The second paper is about funding for various quick reaction [pdf] programs by the DOD. The interesting bits are on page 11 of the document. Look at just how small the effort was in fiscal year 2008.

EMC2/IEF
Boron Fusion The objective of this project is to continue research towards a proven, validated, and reviewed and approved final design basis for engineering development and construction of full-scale clean nuclear power plants. Boron/hydrogen reactions are radiation-free and non-hazardous and well-suited to direct electric power applications to Navy propulsion, as well as to modest scale ground power plants/systems, able to be run without fossil fuels. Such power plants would revolutionize DoD power systems applications and requirements.

FY 2008 Accomplishments:
This project continued research towards a proven, validated, and reviewed and approved final design basis for engineering development and construction of full-scale clean nuclear power plants. Payoff would be elimination of the need for fossil fueled plants. Boron/hydrogen reactions are radiation-free and non-hazardous and well-suited to direct electric power applications to Navy propulsion, as well as to modest scale ground power plants/systems, able to be run without fossil fuels. Such power plants would revolutionize DoD power systems applications and requirements.

Things are picking up speed in the Polywell research. You can find out more about the latest funding for Polywell at WB-8 Contract Details and at WB-8 Contract Progress.

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.

Mach-Einstein Drive

2009-10-22T09:55:00.000+01:00

I have a new article up at ECN Magazine on experiments testing out the possibilities of a Mach-Einstein Drive. I call it: Maching Einstein.

Why is this important? If the experiments work (and even if they don't) we will learn more about how our universe is constructed. If they do work we can get propulsion without having to build huge rockets. Earth to Mars travel in a few days would be a definite possibility. If it works really really well faster than light speed travel is a definite possibility.

A New Look At PID Loops

2009-10-06T03:41:00.000+01:00

My latest at ECN Magazine.

WB-8 Contract Progress

2009-10-04T12:59:00.000+01:00

The US Navy has just published a Justification and Award for EMC2's Polywell Fusion Reactor experiment.

The highlights:

* The award is for $10 million
* WB-8.0 report to be delivered 30 March 2010
* WB-8.1 report to be delivered 30 March 2012

The WB-8.1 effort is contingent on success with WB-8.0 experiments.

What does all this mean? It is possible that there has been much more progress than was expected. You can read about the expected progress at: We Will Know In Two Years. That was published in May of 2009. The minimum time expected for results when that was published was 18 months which would have been November of 2010. Actual time from the prediction to the end of the WB-8.0 contract is 10 months. Of course this is speculative. It may be that we won't know until March of 2012. Which would make the actual time line almost three years and not two.

You can read some of my previous posts on the WB-8 contract at:

Polywell Gets The Dough

The Boys At Talk-Polywell Have Struck Paydirt

WB-8 In The Works

And if you are not familiar with fusion in general or Polywell in particular may I suggest:

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 Polywell basics.

Major Electronics Magazine Covers Polywell

2009-09-22T00:08:00.000+01:00

ECN Magazine has an article up on Polywell and other small fusion efforts. You will never guess who the author is. Heh.

Polywell Gets The Dough

2009-09-12T11:51:00.004+01:00

EMC2 has gotten almost eight million dollars to do further experimentation on the Polywell Fusion concept.

Energy Matter Conversion Corp., (EMC2)*, Santa Fe, N.M., is being awarded a $7,855,504 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for research, analysis, development, and testing in support of the Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) Project. Efforts under this Recovery Act award will validate the basic physics of the plasma fusion (polywell) concept, as well as provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion. Work will be performed in Santa Fe, N.M., and is expected to be completed in April 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured pursuant to FAR 6.302-1. The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake, Calif., is the contracting activity (N68936-09-C-0125).

I think this is the award based on the solicitation discussed here and here and here.

Evidently the $2 million promised in May was just a place holder and the actual funds are significantly greater. This means that the work on WB-8 and the engineering for WB-9 will go forward with the next milestone in April of 2011. Which is in accord with Rick Nebel's promise that We Will Know In Two Years.

If you would like to keep these reports coming visit Five Years of Blogging and do what you can.

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.

H/T Marc Bruggeman via e-mail.

Thanks to Instapundit for the link!

Update: 14 Sept. 2009 22:59z

There is new information about the award:

Research Development Test Evaluation (RDT&E) Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) project. The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake has awarded a Cost Plus Fixed Fee contract for research, analysis, development, and testing to validate the basic physics of the plasma fusion (polywell) concept as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) and options for a modified wiffleball 8 (WB8.1) and modified ion gun. The requirement is sole sourced to Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2) who is the original developer of the plasma fusion (polywell) approach and holds the proprietary data rights. The address for EMC2 is 1202 Parkway Dr, STE A, Santa Fe, NM 87507-7253. Award includes an option for a Wiffleball 8.1 for an additional $4,455,077.

By dividing up the contract this way there are probably milestones that need to be met before further work is authorized.

A Word For The Sceptics

2009-08-23T10:44:00.001+01:00

I was looking at the comments to my American Thinker article Fusion Energy and came across an interesting sequence of comments I had missed earlier. The first comment is by a sceptic. There are earlier comments by him in the comment section.

Posted by: WR Jonas Jun 19, 01:18 PM

I have spoken out here about my skepticism based on a provable dynamic and truth. There will always be ample reasons to spend other peoples money. To give this research or any other some noble purpose or cause does not necessarily make the aims correct or worthwhile.

If we were still shooting rockets at the moon and coming up empty or failed we would have stopped it a long time ago. This canard of ,try until we run of money, is the basis for continuing a proven failure. Because it is Navy project doesn't give it any greater chance of success.

So , how about we put the fusion research industry on a time, results or dollar limit to see if it is ever going to produce anything. Any takers?

I added the emphasis. And then there is a reply to the question by Rick Nebel:

Posted by: rnebel
Jun 23, 04:11 PM

Mr. Jonas:

I'll take you up on that.

It seems Rick is confident of getting a yes/no answer on time and within budget for the question "Is it worthwhile to scale up the Polywell Fusion Concept to the size of a modest (~100 Megawatts) net power reactor?

And what is Rick's time frame? The answer Rick gives is "We Will Know In Two Years."

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. (same article referenced above)

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

Feynman Physics Lectures Video

2009-08-02T18:17:00.003+01:00

Eric F via e-mail alerted me to the fact that Microsoft has made the Feynman lectures on physics freely available. You can watch them here.

And as a very helpful adjunct may I suggest the book version:

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Room Temperature Superconductors One Step Closer

2009-06-18T13:42:00.003+01:00

We are one step closer to room temperature superconductors.

Menlo Park, Calif.—Move over, silicon—it may be time to give the Valley a new name. Physicists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have confirmed the existence of a type of material that could one day provide dramatically faster, more efficient computer chips.

Recently-predicted and much-sought, the material allows electrons on its surface to travel with no loss of energy at room temperatures and can be fabricated using existing semiconductor technologies. Such material could provide a leap in microchip speeds, and even become the bedrock of an entirely new kind of computing industry based on spintronics, the next evolution of electronics.

Physicists Yulin Chen, Zhi-Xun Shen and their colleagues tested the behavior of electrons in the compound bismuth telluride. The results, published online June 11 in Science Express, show a clear signature of what is called a topological insulator, a material that enables the free flow of electrons across its surface with no loss of energy.

Pretty darn exciting. It all depends on something called topological insulation. The article gives some details on how that works. Which gets a bit heavy on the physics. I'm going to skip that here. However, if you have heard of the Pauli exclusion principle it is worth a read.

There are some limitations. For now.

Topological insulators aren't conventional superconductors nor fodder for super-efficient power lines, as they can only carry small currents, but they could pave the way for a paradigm shift in microchip development. "This could lead to new applications of spintronics, or using the electron spin to carry information," Qi said. "Whether or not it can build better wires, I'm optimistic it can lead to new devices, transistors, and spintronics devices."

Fortunately for real-world applications, bismuth telluride is fairly simple to grow and work with. Chen said, "It's a three-dimensional material, so it's easy to fabricate with the current mature semiconductor technology. It's also easy to dope—you can tune the properties relatively easily."

"This is already a very exciting thing," he said, adding that the material "could let us make a device with new operating principles."

Bismuth Telluride is a semiconductor that is currently used for solid state refrigerators. It is also used to generate electricity from small temperature differences. That means the semiconductor industry has more than a little experience in fabricating the material.

If the lab boys have developed a repeatable formula it is possible we might see useful devices using this superconducting property in as little as three years. One use of such properties might be to make a super low noise microwave filter that doesn't require cooling to Liquid Nitrogen temperatures (77° Kelvin). That could be very helpful.

I will be keeping an eye on this one.

If "normal" superconductivity interests you this book is a good place to start:
Introduction to Superconductivity

And if you are a little further along and contemplate building a fusion reactor in your garage, this book could help:
Case Studies in Superconducting Magnets: Design and Operational Issues

More books:

Superconductivity

Handbook of Superconductivity

Engineering Superconductivity

The Boys At Talk-Polywell Have Struck Paydirt

2009-06-17T02:14:00.000+01:00

The boys at Talk Polywell have uncovered the details of the WB-8 contract [pdf]. Those details can give us some insight into how WB-7 has gone. From the looks of things - rather well.

The current effort will build on what has been completed under these previous contracts as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of AGEE with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) and options for a modified wiffleball 8 (WB8.1) and modified ion gun. The objective of this procurement is validation of the basic physics of the AGEE concept as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of AGEE. It builds upon previous concept-demonstration bench top versions of plasma wiffleballs. As such, it comes under the FAR 35.001 definition of applied research. The contract will be for a wiffleball 8 with 2 options for modifications to the wiffleball based upon it’s success.

OK. They are going into deeper validation. Which means WB-7 went OK.

3.1.1 The Contractor shall construct and test a small-scale MG Insulated, Wiffleball Polyhedral Device, WB8. WB8 shall be built based on results of WB7 (built under contract N68936-03-C-0031) and shall utilize design and performance knowledge gained from test of prior WB machines.

3.1.2 The design shall use circular coils around each main face cusp axis. The device shall use emitter electron gun arrays and an ion beam drive. The machine will be operated in magnetic fields with pulsed currents. WB8 shall be operated at a magnetic field strength of approximately 0.8 Tesla, which represents an increase of 8 times the magnetic field strength of previous WB machines. Improvements over previous WB machines in WB confinement, ion energy and fusion reactivity are expected as a result of these changes to WB machine design.

3.1.3 Within 20 days of completion of testing of the WB8, the contractor shall deliver a report detailing the results of the experimental testing of this MG Insulated, Wiffleball Polyhedral Device, WB8. The report shall provide sufficient information to guide programmatic and design decisions about further, refined design efforts for similar devices. The report shall address the plasma dynamics of WB devices, and shall address the scaling laws that apply to polywell fusion. (A001)

Circular coils means that there will be no significant change in geometry. That is good. Apples to apples comparisons. An increase of field strength by a factor of 8 means - if the scaling laws hold a factor of about 4,000 increase in power out. If WB-7 was similar to WB-6 it means an increase from 3 neutrons a shot to 12,000. A real countable number i.e the error bars will be much lower. A count of 3 can actually be considered a count of 3 +/-2. That is a big error bar. For 12,000 the error bar is on the order of +/-100 about 1%. That makes improvements or degradations of 5% easily detectable. Where as in the first situation (WB-6/7) changes that doubled or halved the output rate would be hard to detect.

3.1.4 Within 30 days of build and test of WB8, the contractor shall provide a predictive model of WB behavior including data points for detailed 2D/3D profile measurements of plasma density, ion energy and WB magnetic field structure during follow-on tests to validate the scientific basis for a Polywell fusion power reactor, and guide further research. The contractor shall coordinate with the Government for a program review meeting at the contractor’s facilities to be held no later than 40 days after the testing of the WB8 and shall provide the detailed predictive model and data points at this program review meeting.

3.1.5 The contractor shall deliver a periodic progress report specifying status information of the experimental testing of the MG Insulated, Wiffleball Polyhedral Device, WB8. (A002)

The magnetic profile of an operating device is critical for knowing how the device actually operates. Without that it is very difficult if not impossible to design in improvements.

3.1.6 The contractor shall deliver a conceptual design for a follow-on fusion demonstration device, WB-9. Conceptual studies will focus on the feasibility of extending the WB-8 results to this device and determining the suitability of this concept as a fusion reactor. This design will be delivered at the end of the contract.

So the program is starting to take on a life of its own. A WB-9 device is already under consideration even before experiments on WB-8 are even completed. This indicates a fair amount of confidence in the forthcoming results. Excellent.

Now here comes what I consider the most critical requirement of WB-8testing.

3.2.1 Enhanced Ion Drive with PB11 (proton/boron 11): Based on the results of WB8 testing, and the availability of government funds the contractor shall develop a WB machine (WB8.1) which incorporates the knowledge and improvements gained in WB8. It is expected that higher ion drive capabilities will be added, and that a “PB11” reaction will be demonstrated. The contractor shall investigate and validate the plasma scaling laws with respect to B-field, voltage and reactor size. The contractor shall investigate the feasibility of a neutron-free fusion power reaction using a polywell WB machine. It is anticipated that improvements in WB confinement, ion energy, and fusion reactivity will be demonstrated in WB8.1. Improvements over the WB8 predictive, computational model are expected, which should yield a better understanding of the WB fusion reaction thus allowing optimization of the WB machine.

3.2.2 The contractor shall deliver a report detailing the results of the experimental testing of WB8.1. The report shall provide sufficient information to guide programmatic and design decisions about further, refined design efforts for similar devices. The report shall address the plasma dynamics of WB devices, and shall address the scaling laws that apply to polywell fusion, and the feasibility of the PB11 reaction. The report shall address the conceptual requirements for a polywell fusion reactor capable of generating approximately 100mW. (A0001)

3.2.3 Within 30 days of testing, the contractor shall update the predictive computer model of WB behavior created under paragraph 3.1.4 using the PB11 reaction and shall deliver the model within 30 days of completion of initial tests specified in paragraph 3.2.1.

The fact that they are contemplating work on the pB11 reaction is very encouraging. That fuel is one of the most difficult to burn in a fusion reactor. Which means testing with lesser fuels (or simulated fuels) has gone very well indeed.

At 100 milliwatts for a follow on reactor they are starting to get into the power range. If they can get that kind of power with .3 m dia. coils and .8 T fields, then a reactor with 3 m coils and 10 T fields should produce about 2.5 Mega Watts if the scaling laws hold.

And just as a little kicker:

3.3.1 The contractor shall develop an enhanced ion drive system that is compatible with Wiffleball 8.1 and projected future wiffleballs. The ion drive system shall be capable of injecting protons (ionized Hydrogen), and ionized Boron 11. The ion drive system shall be capable of generating ions in sufficient quantity to fully fuel the wiffleball fusion machines.

If they are going to fuel even a small machine the ion guns are going to have to be capable of multi amp currents - each.

Well that is my first cut at digesting the news. If you want to figure out more a look at all the links at Talk Polywell will be helpful. I especially liked this inventory [pdf] of items purchased since about 1999.

All in all the new contract has a lot of good news. To sum up:

What it means about past work: it went well.
What it means for the future: verifying engineering rules
More: there is a plan to test the Hydrogen/Boron 11 fuel combination
More: They must be confident of results since they are planning a WB-9

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?

The Feynman Physics Lectures

2009-06-02T05:23:00.006+01:00

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Let me put it to you straight and simple. If you do not own this set of books and peruse it as bedtime reading three times a week or more you will not be able to fully participate in the Polywell Project except as an interested observer. Of course if you have the time put in an hour or two a day of serious study.

Don't get me wrong. This project needs tens of millions of interested observers. I welcome every one. Bring your friends and relatives, children, cats, and dogs. Parrots too. Especially parrots named Poly.

But if you are going to do physics or engineering these books are treasures. Not just for the understanding behind them but also for the feel Feynman has for the subject.

ITER Delayed, Scaled Back

2009-05-29T11:59:00.000+01:00

Nature News is reporting that the ITER fusion experiment is in big trouble. Very big trouble. It is way over budget, way behind time, and the experimental efforts are being scaled back.

ITER — a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source — will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped, Nature has learned.

Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first. The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen (see Nature 453, 829; 2008). But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.

The new scheme, known as 'Scenario 1' to ITER insiders, will be discussed on 17–18 June in Mito, Japan, at a council meeting that will include representatives from all seven members: the European Union (EU), Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United States, China and India. It is expected to be approved at a council meeting in November.

Indeed, the plan is perhaps the only way forward. Construction costs are likely to double from the €5-billion (US$7-billion) estimate provided by the project in 2006, as a result of rises in the price of raw materials, gaps in the original design, and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement. The cost of ITER's operations phase, another €5 billion over 20 years, may also rise.

All the while a five man team in New Mexico that is actually getting results and is expected to solve the fundamental problems of their fusion method in two years or less is being starved for funds. I'm referring to the Polywell Fusion experiments being done by EMC2. Now it is true that Polywell might not work. But it is also true that at the level of funding they are getting they may be unable to do the all the experiments and tests that would speed the project along. All this for a project whose funding is in the millions per year vs ITER at billions per year. I don't get it. Well maybe I do. ITER has loads of political support. Lots of engineers scientists, and government labs have their thumbs in the pie. The support for Polywell is a grass roots rag tag effort. That effort has done some good. It has gotten the US Navy to restart the efforts in August of 2007 after the project was considered dead in 2006. So there is that.

One year of the USA contribution to the cost overruns on the ITER project could fully fund Polywell to a working 100 Mega Watt demonstration reactor (if that is feasible) in four to six years. What are we waiting for?

I will leave you with the usual message I leave at the end of posts on fusion:

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

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

WB-8 In The Works

2009-05-22T09:52:00.002+01:00

EMC2 has just been awarded (a solicitation actually but sure to go through) a contract for a WB-8 and WB-8.1 device under the America recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. I reported on the prospects for this in mid April in my post Polywell Gets In On The Act. Here is some of the text of the solicitation:

THIS OPPORTUNITY IS AVAILABLE ONLY TO CONTRACTORS UNDER theAmerica recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 Research Development Test Evaluation (RDT&E) Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) project. The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake intends to procure on sole-sourced basis, a Cost Plus Fixed Fee contract for research, analysis, development, and testing to validate the basic physics of the plasma fusion (polywell) concept as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) and options for a modified wiffleball 8 (WB8.1) and modified ion gun. The requirement is sole sourced to Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2) who is the original developer of the plasma fusion (polywell) approach and holds the proprietary data rights.

It looks like EMC2 is getting closer to full funding and will be building a follow on machine to WB-7 and WB-7.1. There is still a ways to go (about 18 to 24 months) but it is fair to say we have come a long way since early summer of 2007 when it seemed like the project was dead in the water with no prospects.

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

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

H/T marc b via e-mail

An Interview With Tom Ligon

2009-05-17T16:47:00.001+01:00

Tom Ligon is an engineer who worked with Dr. Robert Bussard on Polywell Fusion. Tom explains the technology and his work with Dr. Bussard. There are seven videos in the series. You can watch the rest of them here:

Tom Ligon Interview 2
Tom Ligon Interview 3
Tom Ligon Interview 4
Tom Ligon Interview 5
Tom Ligon Interview 6
Tom Ligon Interview 7

My thanks to Matt M. who did the interview and posted the videos.

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

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

We Will Know In Two Years

2009-05-12T17:30:00.001+01:00

Rick Nebel, the head of EMC2 Fusion (Polywell), has a few words to say in the comments at Next Big Future about the progress he is making in understanding The Polywell Fusion Reactor and its chances for power production.

rnebel
I believe we will know the answer for the Polywell in ~ 1.5-2 years. I haven't looked at MSimons design, but I know he has a lot of good ideas. We'll probably take a closer look at D-D reactors over the next 2 years.

I'm honored Rick thinks that I have made some useful contributions to the advance of this technology.

What most excites me is that we will probably know in two years or less if this technology is viable. That is very exciting.

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

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

If you want to learn more about the basics of fusion (Polywell is a little more complicated) may I suggest:

Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering.

H/T Roger Fox via e-mail. You might want to have a look at Roger's video IEC Fusion for Dummies v5.7

Tom Ligon Wins Award For Polywell Article

2009-05-09T23:28:00.002+01:00

You can read about it here.

You can read Tom's article at World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited

H/T Hobby Space

LANL Helps Polywell

2009-04-30T09:14:00.004+01:00

Los Alamos National Laboratory gave the Polywell Fusion Experimenters some critical help when they needed it.

It all started out with this program.

Northern New Mexico businesses are getting financial help from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and there are plenty of ways LANL can help boost local economies, according to LANL Director Michael Anastasio.

"There are plenty of challenges the country faces, and the lab has a lot to offer in that regard," Anastasio told guests at a recent breakfast meeting where lab personnel and prominent northern New Mexicans, including Santa Fe Mayor David Coss, met to discuss LANL's role in economic development around the region.

And the help the Polywell folks got was not a grant. It was a loan of some equipment.

Richard Nebel's Santa Fe company EMC (which stands for Energy/Matter Conversion Corp.) has much grander designs. Like saving the world.

"If this works, we can end dependence on oil, end global warming," Nebel said of a radiation-free nuclear fusion technology he's developing called "polywell," which "is clean, inexpensive and has enormous potential."

Nebel emphasizes polywell is "risky, because the physics may not work. It could be great or it could be a bust."

When EMC hit technological roadblocks, it got an assist from Northern New Mexico Connect's New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program. The whole experiment, Nebel said, had cost EMC about $200,000 when the company realized it needed the assistance of highspeed cameras -- which run more than $200,000 apiece. The program enabled EMC to use LANL's cameras.

"The stuff we do operates at hundredths of a second," Nebel said. "The cameras were critical."

"Northern New Mexico has tremendous resources of people," he said. "We're a hightech company, and I can find experts around here to help with anything."

I'm glad to get some more of the details of the Polywell Fusion Experiments.

As you can see the experimenters are starved for funds. So far the US Navy and the DoD are very interested in the experiments but the funding has been sparse. Upping it from its current rate to about $40 million a year would get us answers (like can it work) a lot faster. Now does this mean that the efficiency per dollar put into the work will decline? Of course. However, sometimes it is worth trading money for speed. I think this is one of them. If it can work it will change everything in America and the world. You can find out more by reading:

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

50 Years of Stories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

and if you want to read about Los Alamos:

Secret Mesa: Inside Los Alamos National Laboratory

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

H/T an e-mail from reader LCO

Thanks to Instapundit for the correction. LANL is Los Alamos National Laboratories. Corrected above.

Polywell Gets In On The Act

2009-04-15T21:18:00.001+01:00

Polywell Fusion looks to be getting a $2 million boost from the DoD Recovery Act Plan. Here is what the DoD has to say about their plan.

Today, March 20, 2009, the Department of Defense (DoD) released its EXPENDITURE PLAN for the projects to be funded with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Recovery Act provides $7.4 billion to the Department largely for projects that are located at Defense installations spread across all fifty states, District of Columbia and two U.S. territories. The report includes $2.3 billion in construction projects, including two major hospital construction projects: Camp Pendleton, California; Fort Hood, Texas; and a hospital alteration project at the Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, Florida. The plan also contains $3.4 billion for nearly 3,000 facility repair and improvement projects that will immediately generate additional employment in communities around Defense installations. Furthermore, the plan details how $300 million for near-term energy technology research will be allocated. The allocation of the remaining $800 million for Defense facility infrastructure investment be announced at a later date.

There is a pdf of the plan. On pdf page 166 there is a small item under the heading Domestic Energy Supply/Distribution. It is as follows:

Plasma Fusion (Polywell) Demonstrate fusion plasma confinement system for shore and shipboard applications; Joint OSD/USN project. 2.0

The "2.0" is the amount of funding in millions. This indicates the military has a fair amount of confidence in Polywell and the progress made so far in the research.

There is no doubt that if Polywell can be made to work a shore installation would probably be the first and easiest application. Next would come size reductions for shipboard use. And if we can get the weight down enough - rockets for space. Or perhaps use as low cost power supply for a ground based laser propulsion system.

I just looked at Amazon and there is no book out yet on Polywell Fusion. I have heard rumors of people writing books on the subject so maybe we will see one in the coming months.

In the mean time you can look at this www page to get some understanding of what is involved:

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

H/T KitemanSA at Talk Polywell

In The Dark

2009-04-07T10:16:00.001+01:00

Rick Nebel, the lead guy in Polywell Fusion Research has a few things to say about his current state of knowledge with reference to the Polywell Fusion Reactor. He also discusses some rather technical questions about his research and findings. You can read those by following the link.

To a certain extent we are in the same boat as everyone else as far as the previous experiments go since Dr. Bussard’s health was not good when we started this program and he died before we had a chance to discuss the previous work in any detail. Consequently, we have had to use our own judgement as to what we believe from the earlier experiments and what we think may be questionable.

That may explain why the US Navy has contracted Rick's company, EMC2 Fusion, (formerly run by Dr. Bussard until his death) to do several different measurements on the plasma including density, and magnetic fields.

In various Polywell discussion groups a lot of the talk is focused on how little published information there is about Polywell. The above may be part of the explanation.

I must say that this news is a surprise to me. I was under the impression that the knowledge was out there. Now it appears that however much there was a lot of it died with Dr. Bussard. However, some very big names in plasma physics, like Nicholas Krall, who wrote Principles of Plasma Physics are interested in the progress of the Polywell reactor. In fact Dr. Krall who famously said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good.", wrote a paper with Dr Bussard titled Forming and maintaining a potential well in a quasispherical magnetic trap. So despite our current state of knowledge I'd have to say the effort to find out more is very worthwhile. Especially given the relatively low cost of knowledge. So far the US Navy agrees. Here is what Dr. Nebel recently said about what the experiments show.

"There's nothing in there that suggests this will not work," Nebel said. "That's a very different statement from saying that it will work."

If we upped the burn rate of the project from $2 million a year to $10 million a year we could learn more faster. Which means faster decision making. And that is almost always a good thing. Right now we are in the position of not having enough solid information. More is better.

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

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

Wait Until The Last Possible Moment

2009-03-26T09:40:00.003Z

Here is some good system level advice as it pertains to electronic engineering. I think it is true of other branches of engineering as well.

System-level design is all about thinking early and implementing later. So why not apply what we already know? We even have statistics. Fifteen years ago, I was part of projects where we measured how effective methods like manual code inspection were in preventing bugs from propagating into the next project phase.

Everybody seems to know and agree that it becomes more difficult to find and fix defects the further a project has progressed. More recently, studies sponsored by NASA show that an embedded software bug introduced in the requirements phase is 130 times more expensive to fix during integration and 368 times more expensive after rollout of the embedded device.

So what do you do? Prototypes for one. And not just hardware. Software too. Sometimes it is only in the process of implementing a solution that you come up with a better idea. How do you make sure that idea does not wind up on the drafting room floor? Delay the decision to commit big resources to the last possible moment. Which means a manager must not only be a master of technology. The manager must also be a master of logistics and the PERT Chart.

You also have to recognize the pressures to decide quickly: top management asks, "what is your plan?" and you have to say "I don't have one yet, I'm looking at the options." It requires a lot of trust. And a lot of program time discipline when it comes to execution because you will be using a lot of your project time margin to make sure you get it right the first time.

A Big Motor For The Electric Navy

2009-03-04T16:57:00.001Z

Here is something I should have posted here a while ago.

Last week I did a post on the the science of electric motors that featured a learning kit for kids that provided the parts required for a kid (of any age) interested in the science and technology of electric motors to build a small one. I'd estimate that the motor, which you could hold in in the palm of your hand, produced less than 1/1,000th of a horsepower. Here is a motor whose power is about ten orders of magnitude bigger. And that is a whole lot bigger.

The Next Big Future reports on the really big motor that uses high temperature superconductors.

American Superconductor Corporation, a leading energy technologies company, and Northrop Grumman Corporation announced today at the Surface Navy Association’s 21st National Symposium the successful completion of full-power testing of the world’s first 36.5 megawatt (49,000 horsepower) high temperature superconductor (HTS) ship propulsion motor at the U.S. Navy’s Integrated Power System Land-Based Test Site in Philadelphia. This is the first successful full-power test of an electric propulsion motor sized for a large Navy combatant and, at 36.5 megawatts, doubled the Navy’s power rating test record.

The Business Wire tells a little more of the story.

This system was designed and built under a contract from the Office of Naval Research to demonstrate the efficacy of HTS motors as the primary propulsion technology for future Navy all-electric ships and submarines. Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) funded and led the successful testing of the motor.

Incorporating coils of HTS wire that are able to carry 150 times the power of similar-sized copper wire, the motor is less than half the size of conventional motors used on the first two DDG-1000 hulls and will reduce ship weight by nearly 200 metric tons. It will help make new ships more fuel-efficient and free up space for additional warfighting capability.

“The successful load test of our HTS motor marks the beginning of a new era in ship propulsion technology,” said Dan McGahn, senior vice president and general manager of AMSC Superconductors. “This motor provides the U.S. Navy with a truly transformational capability relative to size, stealth, endurance and survivability, providing our Navy with a clear performance advantage for years to come. We are grateful for the steadfast support from the Office of Naval Research, Naval Sea Systems Command and the Naval Surface Warfare Center.”

A different branch of the Navy, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, is funding work that may lead to a shipborne fusion power reactor. Which would be kinda handy to have to power two or four of those electric motors turning the screws of an aircraft carrier. You can read about the latest contract for development of the Bussard Naval Fusion Reactor at IEC Fusion Technology.

And that is not the only electric propulsion system that future aircraft carriers will use. There is also the electric catapult being developed by General Atomics (GA).

GA and its Team have completed the Program Definition and Risk Reduction (PDRR) phase of the Navy's electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) program and have been selected to perform the System Development and Demonstration phase. The goal of the EMALS SDD phase is to develop the existing design chosen during PDRR into an integrated shipboard system that is both operationally suitable and effective, thus replacing steam catapults with an electric system that will reduce maintenance and provide flexibility and growth potential for carrier aviation throughout the 21st century.The GA Team EMALS design is a robust, highly reliable launch system that will meet or exceed all Navy performance goals. This design will provide significant reductions in installed weight, volume, and workload compared to the existing steam catapult. The design uses state-of-the-art technologies that we believe will demonstrate our system is affordable and producible.

There are more details at the link.

And guess what else the US Navy is working on? A real honest to God beam weapon. The Free Electron Laser

The Navy is pushing ahead with a five-year, $163 million dollar plan to bring the "Holy Grail" of energy weapons up to battlefield strength.

For decades, scientists have been slowly working on a laser that never runs out of shots -- and can be "tuned" to blast through the air, at just the right wavelength. For most of that time, all they could get was a laser at lightbulb-strength. But in 2004, researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility finally managed to assemble a "Free Electron Laser," or FEL, that could generate 10,000 watts of power. Now, the Navy has started an effort to design and build a new FEL, 10 times as strong. That would bring the laser up to 100 kilowatts -- what's considered the minimum threshold for weapons-grade. But it would also be just a stepping stone, on the way to an energy weapon as powerful as any produced. If ray gun researchers can get the thing to work, that is.

And lest we leave out projectile weapons how about an offshoot of the electric aircraft catapult. The rail gun which fires projectiles with electricity at a muzzle velocity of better than 8,000 ft per second.

The Navy is researching rail guns because they would weigh less than conventional ones, and since they rely on electromagnetics to fire rounds, you wouldn't need a big, dangerous pile of explosives stored in a magazine. All of that means a lighter ship, and a much more deadly ship: a combat-ready rail gun would be able to fire Mach 5 projectiles over 200 miles with pinpoint accuracy, hitting 5 meter targets.

Yesterday's test firing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division used just some of the potential 32-megajoules the laboratory test gun is capable of, and that's only half the 64-megajoules the Navy is aiming at for the final weapon.

If you follow the link you can watch some really cool videos.

It looks like the US Navy has a plan. And you know? I just love it when a plan comes together.

H/T just_an_observer at Talk Polywell

Solid State Photomultiplier

2009-02-15T11:02:00.002Z

A company called Amplification Technologies has invented something called a solid state photomultiplier.

Amplification Technology Inc. has developed a new solid-state semiconductor technology solution for low-level signal detection: multichannel Discrete Amplification (DA).

The patented DA platform technology, invented by company scientists, is a breakthrough in the design of photon detectors, providing these detectors with unique competitive advantages. Use of DA in semiconductor detectors increases their sensitivity markedly, and enables the creation of new detector systems for various applications including medical diagnostics, security systems, telecommunications, environmental monitoring and drug discovery.

They really don't give many details of their technology but if it works as stated it could be a real boon to designers of particle detectors. The output of the device is low impedance (50 ohm) so that it should be much less susceptible to electric field noise such as is found in installations that depend on high voltage for their operation.

Tube photomultipliers, because they are high impedance devices, are notorious for their susceptibility to electric field noise. Like a photomultiplier this device is inherently high speed. The company recommends a standard microwave amplifier rated at 4 GHz for use with the device. Such solid state amplifiers are available for a dollar or two in small quantities. Pulse lengths of under a nanosecond are resolvable. In that respect their performance is similar to a photomultiplier and like a photomultiplier it can detect single photons with about the same efficiency as a photomultiplier. The gain of the device is around 1E5. Similar to that of a photomultiplier.

The question of course is: are all these improvements available at a reasonable price?

Engineering Plan

2009-02-07T21:46:00.003Z

I was having a discussion with a correspondent about how to organize a Polywell Fusion engineering program. I though I had discussed that here but it turns out that I made my remarks at NASA Spaceflight. So I would like to revise and extend those remarks.

==

Since I'm thinking along Manhattan Project lines I think we need a name for our little venture. I propose the "Rock River Engineering District". I don't know, it just came to me. So how should the Rock River Engineering District be organized?

We start with a project management (PM) team with representatives from each of the labs and the main functional groups. Project management is above all responsible for results. Budgets and schedules too. The job of PM is to make sure all the horses are pulling in the same direction.

Now what about project teams? Start with a power reactor group. A thermal group. An electrical group (power and control). A test reactor group. And a support group consisting of mathematicians, metallurgists, electronic design, etc. and administrative support - purchasing, contracts, etc.

The reactor group alone is going to have to have subgroups: electron guns, fuel injection, vacuum group, magnetics group, collection grid group, plasma physics. Possibly others - all working with the thermal group. Plus you want to have some mathematicians on staff for helping the engineers with the hard stuff. Reduce the engineering to algebra/trig or computer programs with graphical and table outputs.

Then you have to have some one who can ride heard on this collection of prima donnas. If they aren't prima donnas I don't want them on the program. Think Manhattan Project. Or Rickover re: nuke subs. We want very smart experienced people with an excess of confidence. With a pessimist riding herd.

I think it took the Naval reactor group from 1948 to 1953 to get delivery of the sub reactor prototype. With 6 years prior experience in low power and low power density reactors.

So I'm Discussing With Art Carlson

2009-02-04T10:02:00.003Z

So I'm discussing with Art Carlson whether it is worth it to look deeper into the Polywell Fusion Reactor design and do some experiments with superconducting coils and continuous operation of a test reactor. Said experiments to cost about $10 million. Well Art is sure that the explanation that Physicist Robert Bussard gave for how the device works can't possibly be true and it is all just a bunch of believers. Cultists if you will. He did not hold back when expressing his views.

StevePoling wrote:
Can anyone articulate an experiment that would falsify either proposition? I mean something cheaper than building a fully-operational Wiffleball-N?
I spent some more time pondering this. I was thinking in the direction of leaving out the cusp itself and just investigating a pencil of plasma propagating along a field through hoops of various potential. Then I realized this is pointless because whiffle-ball theory is not falsifiable.

I mean, suppose I set up an experiment involving cusp physics and electric fields and I showed that it all worked as I expected. What would the polywell proselytes say? That the real polywell has (unspecified) non-Maxwellian effects that my setup didn't take into account. That is basically the last answer I got from Rick Nebel. Of course I can't refute that because nobody has ever said what those effects might be in detail. Maybe if I worked real hard for a year or so (Are there any volunteers to pay my salary?), I could prove a fairly general theorem that would rule out a large class of options. (My shining example for this type of calculation is Todd Rider.)

Basically, there is no whiffle ball theory, only some handwaving with manifest inconsistencies. On the experimental side, there is no published, robust evidence that anything unusual is happening at all. What are we doing here?

But it is falsifiable at least ultimately in an engineering way. Either you get more power out than you put in or you don't.

For $10 million we build the Super Conducting coil job and that should tell us if a power producer is possible. It should also be possible to measure the wiffle-ball. Lasers. Microwaves. Field probes. Whatever.

Or we might go with a lower cost liquid nitrogen cooled copper magnet coil version. It would have a much lower magnetic field than a superconducting coil. But you can build it faster. Vary the current through the magnet coils and see how the losses scale.

I must say though that I'm starting to feel like a tokamak guy: "there are problems that can only be worked out at the next larger level". It must be a plasma physics disease.

Interesting Power Supply Company

2009-02-03T14:15:00.003Z

Commenter windmill at Talk Polywell has brought to my attention an interesting power supply company Diversified Technologies Inc. Here are a couple of short (under 10 pages) papers that explain the technology.

Solid State High Voltage DC Power Distribution & Control [pdf]

Here is the key point from the above [pdf].

The largest cost components in this design are the semiconductors (IGBTs). Because of their widespread use in locomotive engines, subway cars, elevators, and a wide range of electrical motor drive and power supply systems, these devices are evolving at a rapid pace, especially in comparison with vacuum switch tubes. In the last decade, we have seen the switching speed and power handling capability of IGBTs increase by an order of magnitude (200 kVA to 4 MVA), at essentially constant prices. This puts high power electronics, for the first time, on a favorable, long term cost reduction path. This is the equivalent of the computer industrys Moores Law of continually higher performance per unit cost, but applied to power systems.

Today, a 100 kV, 2MW buck regulator, with a series switch, can be built for approximately $500k USD. This cost will decline due to increased semiconductor performance and decreased manufacturing costs. In contrast, estimates for the equivalent conventional approach are $2- 3M USD, and show no trend towards cost reduction.

Quite so. IGBTs with a voltage rating of 6,500 Volts and a 600 Amp current rating are now off the shelf.

A Solid-State Switch for 13.8kV Power Distribution [pdf]

The company claims to be able to make power conversion equipment that costs in the range of 10¢ a watt in production quantities. That is a very good number. Diversified claims specifications for their supply technology that are very not too bad. An adjustable 100 KV DC supply can deliver 1% regulation and .1% ripple. That is just the ticket for Polywell Fusion experiments using D-D. For pB11 at the resonance peak I'd like to see tighter regulation. Say .1% regulation and .01% ripple. I have some ideas.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

2009-01-30T18:14:00.005Z

I thought it was about time to post this here. Originally posted at: Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion. Let me note that Low Radiation is more apt than no radiation. The main reaction between Hydrogen and Boron 11 produces only alpha particles which can be stopped with a layer or two of aluminum foil. However there are side reactions which will produce about one millionth the neutron flux of an operating fission reactor. If construction materials are chosen carefully there should be no long lived radioisotopes.

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

==

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.

==
Some books on fusion:

Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

New Developments in Nuclear Fusion Research

Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy

Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

==

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)

Polywell Fusion - Keeping It Alive

2009-01-30T17:45:00.001Z

Another short term contract [pdf] for wiffle ball fusion is out for bid by the US Navy. Here is the interesting part.

3.1.1 Contractor shall review the results from Contracts N00014-93-C-0224, N00014-96-C-0039, contract N68936-03-C-0031, and any other publically available current documentation regarding the technical research and development in the field of energy production using a fusion reaction.

3.1.1.2. The review shall primarily investigate the effects of parallel electron heat loss to the coil joints with respect
to plasma stability and electron confinement time.

3.2 TESTS

3.2.1 The contractor will modify/upgrade the existing wiffleball #7 (WB-7) device by installing compact, high temperature coil joints to investigate the electron parallel heat loss. This modified device shall hereafter be identified as Wiffleball #7.1 (WB-7.1).

3.2.2 The Contractor shall test the WB-7.1 to measure the plasma beta (ratio of plasma pressure to the applied magnetic field pressure) and to monitor the wiffleball formation process. The contractor will deploy multiple magnetic field probes inside the device to generate time varying magnetic field mapping to investigate the wiffleball formation.

3.3. The contractor shall take the results of the review specified in 3.1 and tests specified in 3.2 and provide a report detailing workable instrumentation set-ups to resolve the plasma production and physics questions raised in the review and tests for a final report for contracts.

This doesn't look like it amounts to any more than a few weeks of work. I'm going to look into the contracts mentioned and see if I can figure out the intention here.

Update:

Contracts
N00014-93-C-0224 Jan 1995
N00014-96-C-0039 Jan 1996
N68936-03-C-0031 March 2003

H/T KitemanSA at Talk Polywell

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been funded by the Obama administration? IEC Fusion Technology blog.

What Next For Polywell Fusion?

2009-01-30T15:51:00.004Z

Dr. Bussard thought that a full scale net energy Polywell Fusion program could be done for $200 million. What could be done to advance the knowledge base that wouldn't require that kind of commitment?

I have been giving some thought to what the next step in the Polywell Fusion experiments might be. Here is what I have so far:

I think a continuous operation experiment (LN2 cooled Cu magnet coils described at WB-7x Design) could reach .45 T for about $20 million. Most of that going into power supplies. That is a rough estimate: +/- 5 million is probably 1 sigma.

If I was begging that is one place to start.

Or maybe forget the big power supplies and go for a pulsed small superconducting model. If a lot of neutrons (1E12/sq cm Second) were not generated (or only generated in pulses) MgB would be a good candidate for the coil material if the coils were totally custom.

Heck it might be good just to buy an MRI machine for the coils. An MRI can be had for about $1 million. If you can get just the coils they might only be $200K. A WB machine built like that could be done for probably $5 to $7 million. If it shows good pulsed results pony up for the power supplies. And start thinking about a 100 MW machine.

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

Polywell Fusion

2009-01-29T20:53:00.008Z

It seems to me that funding for the Polywell Fusion Project being run by EMC2 Fusion has stalled.

So I want to do something about that. When ever you post a comment on a blog use this tagline:

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been funded?

If the blog allows embeded urls you can post this:

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been funded?
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/

or this:

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been funded?
<a href="http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/">IEC Fusion Technology blog</a>

Contact your Congress Critters and President too.

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

What is Polywell Fusion?

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Rick Nebel Updates The Latest News

Room Temperature Superconductors?

2009-01-12T21:38:00.001Z

We normally think of carbon as a high resistance material. The first practical electric light bulbs produced by Edison had carbon filaments. However, there is a new kid on the block based on carbon and it is not a superconductor, but it is close. Some recent research in nanotube properties shows very high current carrying capacities.

Relatively early in the research of nanotubes, Thess et al. calculated the resistivity of ropes of metallic SWNTs to be in the order of 1E-4 ohm-cm at 300 K. They did this by measuring the resistivity directly with a four-point technique. One of their values they measured was 0.34E-4 ohm-cm, which they noted would indicate that the ropes were the most highly conductive carbon fibers known, even factoring in their error in measurement. In the same study his measurements of the conductivity, Frank et al. was able to have reach a current density in the tube greater than 1E7 A/sq cm. Later, Phaedon Avouris suggested that stable current densities of nanotubes could be pushed as high as 1E13 A/cm2.

A SWNT is a Single Walled Nano Tubes.

So how does that compare to copper? For household wiring typical current density is 500A/sq cm and ultimate current density is maybe 10X that with the wires near the melting point or beyond. In round numbers 1E4 A/sq cm vs 1E7 A/sq cm for carbon nanotubes. In other words 1,000 times the current density. At a weight per unit volume of about 1/4 that of copper. Copper resistivity at room temperature is about 1.7E-4 ohm-cm. So carbon nanotubes can carry about 5X as much current as an equivalent volume of copper for the same losses.

If we can get this stuff into mass production - which is likely to take twenty or thirty years - we can rewire the grid we have for 5X times as much power as it handles now or the same power with 1/5th the losses. Not room temperature superconductors, but a definite improvement.

Update: A good overall look at Carbon Nanotubes: Carbon nanotubes (CNTs): A small review

H/T IntLibber at Talk Polywell

A New WB-7 Contract

2009-01-11T00:01:00.002Z

There is a new contract out for further testing of WB-7.

H/T Aero at Talk Polywell.

Mechanical Design: Open FEM

2008-12-30T10:19:00.003Z

Open FEM is a mechanical design program that can help figure out the stresses and strains caused by the magnets in a Bussard Fusion Reactor. It is based on Scilab, a numerical computation program.

H/T Prometheus Fusion Perfection

Free Plasma Physics Book

2008-12-27T10:04:00.004Z

You can read reviews and buy a hard copy of Plasma Physics and Fusion Energyby clicking on the link.

Or you can get a pdf of the book at this detailed review or by going directly to the download link.

The book is very much tokamak oriented so the calculations have limited value for plasmas that are far from thermal equilibrium. However, the ideas presented are of interest to anyone working with plasmas.

Steampunk Fusion

2008-12-23T22:20:00.000Z

The picture you see above is a steam driven fusion reactor. I know what you are thinking. This is some kind of joke. It is no joke. General Fusion has a design that I think has an outside chance of working.

I was discussing it with some of the boys at Talk Polywell and I'd say it has no fundamental flaws.

Popular Science also gives some of the details of the machine and its inventors. The drawing at the top of the page shows a schematic of the machine that has 200 pistons. Now to give you some idea of the scale here is a picture of one of the pistons.

Huge sucker huh? Now imagine 200 of them all firing away at the rate of once a second. When the piston hits (and yes it will hit) the end of the cylinder it will be going about 250 mph and it will induce a shock wave into a sort of ball of liquid lithium and lead. But first two rings of counter rotating plasma will be shot into the middle of the rotating metal and then all the steam (yeah steam) driven pistons will fire and hit the molten metal with a timing of better than one microsecond.

Can it be done? My rough calculations at the above Talk Polywell link say yes. Not easy, but possible. So would I put money on it? Not me. But I'm an IEC Plasma Fusion type of guy. However, if the idea excites you (a steam driven fusion reactor) I'd say it has as much a chance of working as anything being done now. Definitely worth a shot. And besides how many of your friends can say they are investing in a steam driven fusion reactor? It has got to be worth some bucks just for the conversation starter value alone.

Rick Nebel Updates The Latest News

2008-12-23T00:58:00.003Z

From Cosmic Log:

First of all, our work has been peer reviewed. An independent panel of experts has looked at these results. I don’t believe that there was anyone on the panel who has less than 40 years experience working with magnetic confinement. It included senior professors and people who have managed the fusion program. We asked them for their honest opinions and that’s exactly what we got. We are proceeding with our program in line with their recommendations.

Secondly, the talk-polywell blog has a large variety of people who post there. There are Phd plasma physicists as well people from the general public. I think that’s a good thing. Science needs to be accessible to people.

Rick Nebel (Sent Saturday, December 20, 2008 12:08 PM)

and

Yes, there are neutrons and the numbers are consistent with the plasmas we are measuring. However, neutrons can be deceptive. A lot of fusion researchers have gotten in trouble in the past by relying on these types of measurements. You need to know where they come from and that's difficult to measure.

R Nebel (Sent Saturday, December 20, 2008 4:31 PM)

Discussed at Talk Polywell. This is one of the places (among several) at the board where the news is being discussed.

Liquid Cooled Grid IEC Reactor

2008-12-23T00:48:00.003Z

Roger at Talk Polywell provides a link to experiments done with a liquid cooled grid Farnsworth - Hirsh type IEC Fusion device. The device uses a magnetron type ion injector.

You can read about it at RTF Technologies.

I especially recommend the paper describing the construction [pdf].

IEC 2008 - Kyoto

2008-12-17T15:19:00.001Z

I just received a report on the IEC Fusion 2008 conference from Joel Rogers - one of the participants. This is a report of the conference schedule which has links to the abstracts of the papers presented. You can also see the poster for the conference [pdf] which has a very nice picture of a temple on the Uji-Campus of Kyoto University.

Uji is surrounded by beautiful landscapes centering on the Uji River with more than a thousand years of history. It is abundant with historical assets including Byodoin Temple and Ujigami Shrine, both of which are registerd in the UNESCO world heritage list. A lot of historical assets and autumn tints in early December attract many visitors to Uji.

The Byodoin Temple was first a villa owned by Fujiwara Michinaga, the model for the hero Genji in the Tale of Genji. Then in 1052 it was converted into a temple by his son. The central hall in the above photo is popularly known as Hoohdo (Phoenix Hall), an image of which is found on 10-yen coins.

Here is the abstract of the talk [pdf] Dr. Rogers gave.

IEC Polywell[2] is a candidate for commercial power generation. Particle-in-cell simulation was used to follow the time sequence of plasma development starting from neutral deuterium gas in a cubic Polywell. The left figure below shows electrons flowing in and out of the core along 8 cusp lines. The 8 rectangles are 1.0kG coil-magnets separated by 30cm (inside core diameter) and biased to 15kV. Electron guns (5A) are centered on the 4 vacuum tank walls, held at 0V. The center figure shows the ion distribution at Beta ≅ 1 density. Bounded by a 2cm thick shell, the interior ion population is uniform inside the shell. The shell is composed of ions that have slowed prior to reflecting at the edge of the potential well. The right figure shows the ion velocity (U) population. The flat top indicates uniform inside magnitude, |U| = 1.3x10E6m/s (18keV). The fusion rate was computed as n2·<σ(v)·v>·a3/2, where n is the ion density (n=1.1x10E11/cm3), σ is the parameterized DD fusion cross section, v is the ions’ relative velocity, and a is the diameter(20cm) of the ~cubic volume inside which the velocity is uniform. Substituting the simulated n, v, and a, resulted in a fusion rate prediction of 9x107 fusions/s, in fair agreement with Bussard's measured WB-6 neutron rate[2]. The simulation predicts the following features of Polywell: (1) Electrons circulate out and in freely along cusp lines. Very few electrons hit the magnets. (2) Ions are trapped in an electrostatic potential well, which maintains a steady state, spatially uniform, monoenergetic ion population long enough for substantial fusion to occur.
(3) The surface density of trapped electrons corresponds to a Beta value on the order of unity.

Particles reaching the tank wall will generate electricity efficiently while particles hitting the magnets will generate electricity less efficiently. The effective power gain factor (Q) can be estimated as the ratio of fusion power output to the portion of electric power input spent to replace ions hitting the magnet boxes. Simulated Q-factor as a function of device size has predicted the size of a steady state, break-even (Q=1) device which needs to be tested.

The pictures mentioned are included in the pdf.

WB-6 Results Confirmed - Continuous Operation The Next Step

2008-12-17T11:19:00.006Z

Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log announces the results of the WB-7 Bussard Fusion Reactor (BFR) experiments. And the results? No show stoppers so far.

An EMC2 team headed by Los Alamos researcher Richard Nebel (who's on leave from his federal lab job) picked up the baton from Bussard and tried to duplicate the results. The team has turned in its final report, and it's been double-checked by a peer-review panel, Nebel told me today. Although he couldn't go into the details, he said the verdict was positive.

"There's nothing in there that suggests this will not work," Nebel said. "That's a very different statement from saying that it will work."

By and large, the EMC2 results fit Bussard's theoretical predictions, Nebel said. That could mean Polywell fusion would actually lead to a power-generating reaction. But based on the 10-month, shoestring-budget experiment, the team can't rule out the possibility that a different phenomenon is causing the observed effects.

"If you want to say something absolutely, you have to say there's no other explanation," Nebel said. The review board agreed with that conservative assessment, he said.

The good news, from Nebel's standpoint, is that the WB-7 experiment hasn't ruled out the possibility that Polywell fusion could actually serve as a low-cost, long-term energy solution. "If this thing was absolutely dead in the water, we would have found out," he said.

If Polywell pans out, nuclear fusion could be done more cheaply and more safely than it could ever be done in a tokamak or a laser blaster. The process might be able to produce power without throwing off loads of radioactive byproducts. It might even use helium-3 mined from the moon. "We don't want to oversell this," Nebel said, "but this is pretty interesting stuff, and if it works, it's huge."

The next step in my opinion should be a continuously operating version about the size of WB-7. A device I used to call WB-7x and will probably be called WB-8.

Here are some links to what I think a liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooled magnet coil WB-8 (WB-7x) should look like.

Design Issues including laboratory equipment.
Reactor Vessel Requirements.
LN2 Storage
Magnet Power Supplies
Reactor Building And Reactor Controls
Power Supplies Update #1
Reactor Building Sketches
Electron Guns
Lab Tools
Other Instrumentation - Mass Spectrometer
Research Speed
PID Loops And Leak Valves
Orifice Sizing for leak valves.
Thinking About Control
Ionization Pressure Gauges
Detectors
Turbo Pump Ratings
Gas Valve Design
Data Collection
Vacuum Pumping
Transimpedance Amplifiers
The First Wall Problem
WB-6 Shopping List
LC POPS
Standardizing Fusion Test Reactors
Gauging With Intent
CAN Bus And System Control
Magnetic Field Measurement

For those of you not up to speed on the basics may I suggest:
Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion
The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited

And for those of you who would like to join in on the research at a very modest cost may I suggest Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town. There is a lot that can be learned from these very simple devices and some simple instrumentation. There is so much we don't know yet.

H/T Instapundit

Amateur Nuclear Fusion - The Book

2008-12-16T14:33:00.002Z

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

Incoming Energy Secretary On Bussard Fusion

2008-12-12T13:27:00.001Z

In this Google Tech Talk from about 28 February 2007 you can see Incoming Energy Secretary Steven Chu discussing what he knows about Bussard Fusion about 1 hour 1 minute and 10 seconds into the video. The rest of the talk is about alternative energy, power sources for the future, and how to run a good development program. And what does he know about Bussard Fusion Reactors? Not much. He is looking into it.

I got the heads up from cybrbeast at Talk Polywell.

Tom Ligon To Talk About IEC Fusion Developments

2008-11-17T00:01:00.000Z

Tom will be at the Philcon Science Fiction convention this coming Saturday, 22 Nov 2008. You can read what Tom has to say about his upcoming talk at Talk Polywell.

New IEC Fusion Experiment Contract

2008-10-30T08:25:00.003Z

FedBizOpps.gov has a solicitation for a bid for more experiments by EMC2, Doc Bussard's company now being run (at least on the experimental side) by Rick Nebel.

The Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division, China Lake, CA intends to procure on an other than full and open competition basis a service to provide: 1) Research of Electrostatic "Wiffle Ball" Fusion Device. The contractor is to specifically investigate the required instrumentation to achieve spatially resolved plasma densities and spatially resolved particle energies. This requirement is sole sourced to Energy Matter Conversion Corporation, 1202 Parkway Drive, Suite A, Santa Fe, NM 87501, as the only company in the world investigating and developing this type of device.

What does that mean in terms of progress with the Bussard Fusion Reactor? It means that the experiments delineated in the Fusion Report 29 August 2008 had at least enough success to warrant further work.

Dave Price has some thoughts and more details.

Fusion Report 20 October 2008

2008-10-21T03:54:00.001+01:00

Alan Boyle brings us up to date on the latest news from the world of fusion. Of course I'm especially interested in what he has to say about Bussard Fusion and their progress to net power. I'll give you the short version:

"We've been pretty busy, but it's the same situation," Nebel told me today. "We're kind of in a holding pattern."

He's been able to keep the five-person team together and "doing a few things" during this holding pattern. There have been some rumblings to the effect that EMC2's results have been encouraging enough to justify pressing forward, but Nebel has declined to make a prediction about the project's future.

Nebel worries about the same kind of budget limbo that the U.S. ITER team is worrying about, even though his budget is an order of magnitude lower. Among the factors on his mind are the change in the White House and the changes in economic circumstances.

"The thing that usually gets hit the hardest is what they call discretionary funding," Nebel said, "and that's what we're looking at here. That'd be the biggest fear everywhere."

So the news is the same as it was at the end of August. No news. Alan Boyle has more on fusion power in general and Bussard Fusion in particular. You can also read my previous Fusion Reports by following the links in: Fusion Report 29 August 2008.

A New Sigma

2008-10-10T06:06:00.001+01:00

My friend Tom Ligon has just been inducted into the Sigma Society. Here is what Sigma does:

Many SIGMA members are Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers; all are science fiction writers who have spent careers applying their technical and literary talents in exploring the future of science, technology, society and cultures. SIGMA provides a significant pool of talent for volunteer pro bono consultation with the Federal government and other organizations which need the imagination that only speculative writers can provide.

SIGMA members have each committed to consult with Federal authorities for taskings on vital national issues for several days, for travel and lodging expenses only. For extended effort or research, compensation may be based on individual contracts, as appropriate. Current Federal employees may be available on detailee status.

All SIGMA activities are strictly voluntary, and any member can decline any proposed tasking or meeting for any reason, with no further explanation.

Tom was instrumental in starting the fusor movement (home made experimental fusion reactors) due to the encouragement of Dr. Robert Bussard. He also worked with Dr. Bussard on the Polywell Fusion power reactor (no net power though at the size of current experiments). You can read about that effort at: World's Simplest Fusion Reactor Revisited. There are links on the sidebar to the Fusor Consortium and lots of other good stuff.

You can also read a science fiction story Tom wrote on fusion which had its world premiere here in July of 2007. Getting Tuned Up.

Congrats Tom! And with any kind of luck you can help us to deserve the best future we can get, because if we don't deserve it the getting will be much harder.

ITER vs The Stone Axe

2008-09-30T10:34:00.001+01:00

Stephen Strauss takes a look at big science and comes away unimpressed. He talks about two exhibits he saw. One for the $15 billion ITER (pronounced EATER - heh) and another about neolithic technology - mat weaving, pottery making, chipping stone axes.

At the recent European Science Open Forum conference in Barcelona, for example, I was strolling through exhibits aimed at — please don't gag — science outreach. The underlying theme of all these displays seemed to me to be: since their schooling actually teaches many ordinary people to be discomforted by — if not to actually fear and loath — science, let's see if we can't do something in these venues to get people to hate science a little bit less.

And why do people hate science so much? Well it is hard to understand and requires a lot of complicated math and difficult concepts. I'm pretty good with that sort of thing. I understand Einstein but the math is beyond me. String Theory? Fuhgeddaboutit. So how about neolithic technology?

Right across from ITER was an exhibit in which a group of paleo-archeologists had set up a display to show the technology of the past in operation. So you had a guy sitting cross-legged, banging away at a rock to make a hand ax. Chip, chip, and chip. You had someone else weaving plants together to make a mat. Weave, weave, and weave. Someone else was taking clay and making a pot. There was no placard asking: Hand axe making, will it always be 40 years away? There were no critics of the effort calling it a huge waste of national resources.

So what does the juxtaposition of the two very different demonstrations of technology tell us about disbelief?

To begin with, the ITER project and all hugely expensive big science efforts — think the International Space Station, think Large Hadron Collider, which recently has received a tonne of press — aren't like making hand axes. I looked at the man diligently chipping away and realized that the price of his failure wasn't very high. So what if it turned out the rock type you made axes from wasn't strong enough to chop wood? You simply went back and made axes from something else until you got an ax that worked.

And you, in this case, would simply be some intrepid carver and not some large part of the Paleolithic science world.

On the other hand, if ITER fails, it is massively unlikely there is going to be another effort to correct its errors. Research on its level is simply too big and expensive and time-consuming. But what if it succeeds — but only kinda? What if its results show that you can produce energy, but that it is 10 time times more expensive than energy from other sources? What if figuring out how to make that equation more favorable will require at least three iterations of ITER?

So how should we be thinking about such projects? A little differently to be sure.

What you put in place with these vastly expensive research efforts is a "can't afford to fail" paradigm. Unlike trying to find the best plant material to weave into a mat, ITER, the Large Hadron Collider, etc., must succeed on first go-round. With ITER, there is no second kind of rock to be chipped away, no other plants to be woven, no different type of clay to be baked into a plate.

And that's what I so disbelieve about it. It's not really experimental science; it's risky, we-can't-fail, all-or-nothing science and I would respond to that paradigm with the wisdom of stone axe makers.

Sometimes your research should be based not on how glorious success might be, but on how little you will have lost if you screw up.

So what should we be doing about fusion? Lots of small "understand the science" and "proof of concept" projects. Say 100 two million dollar efforts. About 10 twenty million dollar efforts based on the successes of the two million dollar jobs. And one or two two hundred million dollar efforts based on the promise of the $20 million efforts. Total cost of around a billion dollars a year when everything is fully ramped up. Nothing that is too big to fail and nothing where testable results are fifteen to thirty years off.

Of course I have my favorites. Here is one that I described in the Fusion Report of 29 August 2008.

Fusion Report 29 August 2008

2008-08-29T01:40:00.002+01:00

Alan Boyle has the latest on the EMC2 fusion experiments.

Researchers have finished the first phase of an unorthodox, low-cost nuclear fusion experiment that has generated a megawatt's worth of buzz on the Internet – and they are now waiting for a verdict from their federal funders on whether to proceed to the next phase.

Richard Nebel, leader of the research team at EMC2 Fusion in New Mexico, declined to detail the results of the project, saying that was up to the people paying the bills. But he did said “we have had some success" in the effort to reproduce the promising results reported by the late physicist Robert Bussard.

"It's kind of a mix," he said.

That is a disappointment. However it is not completely negative so maybe further work is warranted.

Nebel said his leave from Los Alamos is due to reach the one-year mark in mid-September, but he doesn't foresee any problem in extending the leave if the second-phase funding comes through. Whether or not the Navy funds the next phase, the past year's effort has been worth it, Nebel said. "We're generally happy with what we've been getting out of it, and we've learned a tremendous amount," he said.

All that learning won't go away. "Regardless of what happens to it, we're going to get this thing well written up and documented," Nebel said.

Getting the experiment's findings down on paper will help the EMC2 team - or future teams of fusion researchers - advance the legacy left behind by Bussard. And that's a fitting tribute to the unconventional physicist as the calendar rolls toward the anniversary of his death.

"Bob Bussard was a truly innovative person, that's abundantly clear," Nebel said. "I hope he will be remembered for that. I think that will be the case."

You will note that yours truly (IEC Fusion Technology blog) got a link from Mr. Boyle. I'm honored. If you haven't seen the material before read the link he gave Tom Ligon. And if you are interested in following the progress to date read Fusion Report 13 June 008 which has links to previous reports.

I can't wait to read the full report.

Math For Plasma Simulation

2008-07-29T08:02:00.002+01:00

I have added Math For Plasma Simulation [pdf] to the sidebar under Fusion Reference.

H/T drmike

Update 2317z 30 Jan 2010

Link broken. H/T AC via e-mail for the notification and the current correct link.

Magnetic Field Measurement

2008-07-25T22:37:00.001+01:00

Electronic Design News [pdf] has an overview of instruments and technologies for measuring magnetic fields.

A Certain Reality

2008-07-17T00:38:00.001+01:00

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."--Albert Einstein

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein

Critics

2008-06-25T00:46:00.000+01:00

Critics are a very valuable resource if the criticism is based on reason. All designs should be thoroughly reviewed by their harshest reasonable critic. You get better designs that way. Or you kill bad investments before they get too big.

I have to say that right now just from an engineering perspective (assuming the physics works) the challenges of building a 100 MWth BFR are daunting. Not all of them have answers at this time.

Students Achieve Fusion

2008-06-24T11:21:00.002+01:00

Students at Penninsula College have achieved fusion. I am more than a little proud to say I had a little to do with it. At least in so far as getting them on the right track.

From left to right: Devon, Ivan, Sarah, Chris, Aaron, and Derek.

The Reactor

It glows

Which just goes to show that fusion research need not take big labs and big budgets. There is a lot that can be done in small labs to advance the state of the art. So let me encourage the rest of you: Start A Fusion Program In Your Own Home Town. America needs your help. The world needs your help.

Let me add that the genesis of this report was a bit done by ClassicPenny at Talk Polywell

You Have To Be A Little Crazy

2008-06-20T01:00:00.001+01:00

Innovate Like Edison is a book about how to use Edison's system of innovation to improve business practices. Control Engineering discusses the book based on a talk given at the recent Society for Manufacturing Engineers Convention in Detroit, MI.

Detroit, MI – Understanding Thomas Edison’s patterns of thinking can help us be more like the guy who has 1,093 U.S. patents to his name, says co-author of the book, “Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor.” Sarah Miller Caldicott, also Edison’s great grandniece, helped a packed room of engineers at the SME Annual Meeting gain insights into Edison’s thought patterns, to improve U.S. competitiveness.

Bearing a family resemblance to her great great Aunt Mina Miller – who married Edison in 1886 – and telling stories of growing up with Edison phonographs in her bedroom, Caldicott offered exercises which seemed to win over SME attendees... along with a promise of an autographed book.

Caldicott, also founder of The Power Patterns of Innovation, noted five best practices based on her 3-year study of Edison: a solution-centered mindset; kaleidoscopic thinking; full-spectrum engagement; master-mind collaboration; and super value creation.

All the points are covered in the review, but I'd like to take up this one:

-Cultivate a solution-centered mindset. Do not seize an answer at the beginning of an initiative. A framework of options and pathways can lead to solutions. Look outward and scan the environment. Lean ahead and hunt for a solution. Combine factual information with what-if or if-then thinking. Envision the solution and “emotionalize” the state that will be experienced upon getting there.

Which could be translated into be patiently crazy. Also note that emotion is considered an important part of rational thinking. In fact emotion may be one of the most critical feedback mechanisms. We have a very good pattern recognition system in our brains. If you train your brain with good patterns, after a while you get a "feel" about the right way and the wrong way to do things. Caldicott also goes into the need for thinking before acting. She even calls it contemplation. Be quiet. Sit Still. Shut up. And good preparation for that contemplation time is to get on the www and start looking around. Go deep. Some times the good stuff is on the 30th page of a search.

I always had a standard which I tried to stick to when it came to development: Five days of planning, two days of work. That is both imperative and descriptive. You must recognize that this method is scary for most management. The typical exhortation is: put in all the time you need to, but meet the schedule. My answer was: I'm not putting in any extra time. I will meet your schedule. In two days I will have a plan. How did that work out? Three months were alloted to get the project on track. I did it in five weeks. Without raising a sweat. Of course once you have proven yourself it is easier the next time.

Some Objections - Some Answers

2008-06-14T07:28:00.007+01:00

Art Carlson, who was commenting on an Alan Boyle article about the progress the EMC2 team was making with the Bussard Fusion Reactor tests, had some objections to the whole concept.

It's fun to daydream, isn't it? And it's easy, too, as long as you don't know too much.

There's more reasons than you can shake a stick at that this won't work. For starters, you can forget about aneutronic fusion. It's not just the temperature, Bremstrahlung is almost to certain radiate more energy than you produce by fusion no matter how good your confinement is. Even if you somehow manage to get a decent power balance, for a given plasma pressure and fusion power, a p-B11 reactor would have to be about 1000 times bigger (and more expensive) than a corresponding D-T reactor.

The next thing to worry about is the electrons. The magnetic configuration has not only lines of radial field from the center to the edge, which is bad enough judging from the experience with mirror machines, it also has lines of *zero* field along which the electrons will gush out. The idea of recycling electrons lost through the cusps won't work because they will come out almost parallel to the field but hit the return cusp with a large perpendicular velocity component they picked up going around the bend.

And the ions? The device is conceived to utilize a bi-modal velocity distribution, which will be destroyed very quickly by the two-stream instability. The anisotropy of the velocity distribution is also know to be a big problem, again from experience in the mirror program.

We haven't even started to talk about energy loss to the grids, the consequences of tiny field misalignments, charge-exchange ion losses, energy coupling between electrons and ions, and whether the potential distribution envisioned is even possible at a non-trivial ion density.

Since they managed to sweet talk somebody into giving them money, let them finish and publish their results, but let's not stop looking for ways to save energy and trying to develop other, less sexy but more reliable energy sources.

Art Carlson, Munich, Germany (Sent Friday, June 13, 2008 1:17 PM)

rnebel who is conducting the test and is definitely not day dreaming had a response.

Just a few comments for Mr. Carlson

1. The theory says that you can beat Bremstrahlung, but it's a challenge. The key is to keep the Boron concentration low compared the proton concentration so Z isn’t too bad. You pay for it in power density, but there is an optimum which works. You also gain because the electron energies are low in the high density regions.

2. The size arguments apply for machines where confinement is limited by cross-field diffusion like Tokamaks. They don't apply for electrostatic machines.

3. The Polywell doesn't have any lines of zero field. Take a look at the original papers on the configuration. See :
Bussard R.W., FusionTechnology, Vol. 19, 273, (1991) .
or
Krall N.A., Fusion Technology. Vol. 22, 42 (1992).

Furthermore, one expects adiabatic behavior along the field lines external to the device. Thus, what goes out comes back in. Phase space scattering is small because the density is small external to the device.

4. The machine does not use a bi-modal velocity distribution. We have looked at two-stream in detail, and it is not an issue for this machine. The most definitive treatise on the ions is : L. Chacon, G. H. Miley, D. C. Barnes, D. A. Knoll, Phys. Plasmas 7, 4547 (2000) which concluded partially relaxed ion distributions work just fine. Furthermore, the Polywell doesn’t even require ion convergence to work (unlike most other electrostatic devices). It helps, but it isn’t a requirement.

5. The system doesn’t have grids. It has magnetically insulated coil cases to provide the electrostatic acceleration. That’s what keeps the losses tolerable.

6. The electrostatic potential well is an issue. Maintaining it depends on the detailed particle balance. The “knobs” that affect it are the electron confinement time, the ion confinement time, and the electron injection current. There are methods of controlling all of these knobs.

rnebel (Sent Friday, June 13, 2008 6:17 PM)

One must be wary of a certain kind of dreamer:

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

—T. E. Lawrence from "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

Fusion Report 13 June 008

2008-06-13T17:53:00.001+01:00

Alan Boyle has a new report on the goings on in New Mexico at EMC2 Fusion Labs.

Emc2 Fusion's Richard Nebel can't say yet whether his team's garage-shop plasma experiment will lead to cheap, abundant fusion power. But he can say that after months of tweaking, the WB-7 device "runs like a top" - and he's hoping to get definitive answers about a technology that has tantalized grass-roots fusion fans for years.

Dr Nebel has been rather quiet lately in the usual forum he frequents, so this update is very welcome to all us grass-roots fusion fans.

"We're kind of a combination of high tech and Home Depot, because a lot of this stuff we make ourselves," Nebel told me today. "We're operating out of a glorified garage, but it's appropriate for what we're doing."

The Emc2 team has been ramping up its tests over the past few months, with the aim of using WB-7 to verify Bussard's WB-6 results. Today, Nebel said he's confident that the answers will be forthcoming, one way or the other.

"We're fully operational and we're getting data," Nebel said. "The machine runs like a top. You can just sit there and take data all afternoon."

Now compare "We're operating out of a glorified garage... with ITER's 30 % cost over run so far.

an independent panel of experts will be coming to Santa Fe this summer to review the WB-7 experiment, Nebel said.

"We're going to show them the whole thing, warts and all," he said.

Because of the complexity, it will take some interpretation to determine exactly how the experiment is turning out. "The answers are going to be kind of nuanced," Nebel said.

The experts' assessment will feed into the decision on whether to move forward with larger-scale tests. Nebel said he won't discuss the data publicly until his funders have made that decision.

"Warts and all now isn't that refreshing.

Nebel may be low-key about the experiment, but he has high hopes for Bussard's Polywell fusion concept. If it works the way Nebel hopes, the system could open the way for larger-scale, commercially viable fusion reactors and even new types of space propulsion systems.

"We're looking at power generation with this machine," Nebel said. "This machine is so inexpensive going into the 100-megawatt range that there's no compelling reason for not just doing it. We're trying to take bigger steps than you would with a conventional fusion machine."

With my typical engineering sensibilities I still think some intermediate steps would be required. Like a continuously operating experiment. It need not be a very big machine but it will require a big power supply. It might need to draw 4 to 6 MW on start up. In fact it might need that for the whole duration of operation. The machine scales in a funny way. Coil power (for a copper coil demo) goes up as the reactor gets large but the accelerator power goes down.

Over the next decade, billions of dollars are due to be spent on the most conventional approach to nuclear fusion, which is based on a magnetic confinement device known as a tokamak. The $13 billion ITER experimental plasma project is just starting to take shape in France, and there's already talk that bigger budgets and longer timetables will be required.

If the Polywell system's worth is proven, that could provide a cheaper, faster route to the same goal - and that's why there's a groundswell of grass-roots interest in Nebel's progress. What's more, a large-scale Polywell device could use cleaner fusion fuels - for example, lunar helium-3, or hydrogen and boron ions. Nebel eventually hopes to make use of the hydrogen-boron combination, known as pB11 fusion.

"The reason that advanced fuels are so hard for conventional fusion machines is that you have to go to high temperatures," Nebel explained. "High temperatures are difficult on a conventional fusion machine. ... If you look at electrostatics, high temperatures aren't hard. High temperatures are high voltage."

Most researchers would see conventional tokamak machines as the safer route to commercial fusion power. There's a chance that Bussard's Polywell dream will prove illusory, due to scientific or engineering bugaboos yet to be revealed. But even though Nebel can't yet talk about the data, he's proud that he and his colleagues at Emc2 have gotten so far so quickly.

"By God, we built a laboratory and an experiment in nine months," he said, "and we're getting data out of it."

By God I hope it works out.

If you want to know what you can do to help have a look at Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town.

H/T Instapundit

Literate Programming

2008-06-08T01:38:00.002+01:00

Literate Programming

Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.

I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: "Literate Programming."

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other.

I have always programmed like that once I started writing professionally in Forth. Leo Brodie's book Thinking FORTH [free download] was all about using the literate style. The most important thing after Naming the Parts is good factoring.

CAN Bus And System Control

2008-06-06T13:02:00.006+01:00

I like CAN (Controller Area Network) Bus for control systems. It has moderate speed (1 Mbs), it is deterministic., it has priority control for multi-master operation, and because of its use in autos it is robust and low cost. In addition it has been on the market for about 10 years so it is well established with lots of vendors to choose from. In addition there are a number of MCUs with built in CAN.

For test reactor operation I see a hierarchy of CAN buses, each devoted to a given function and then all melded into a master bus. Let me start with the sub nets.

1. Vacuum Gauge/Vacuum Pump Control Bus
2. HV Power Supply Internal Buses
3. Instrumentation Buses (Temp Monitoring, Flow Monitoring, Master Clock, Neutron Counter, Electrical Power Measurement and Control, etc.)
4. Auxiliary Control (Electrical Power Measurement and Control, etc.)

And then a master bus to send messages to/from the sub buses.

I haven't decided on an MCU yet. One of the requirements would be that it is FLASH programmable and have a built in CAN bus. I have been thinking about pressure measurement lately so I'd like to lay out what a CAN bus interface would look like.

The pressure transducers I have in mind (MKS 722 and MKS 626A) have a 0 to 10 V output. I haven't picked any other components yet. So we will just look at functions.

1. Pressure (dependent on transducer - from 1000 torr to .1 torr full scale, 17 bits)
2. Board temperature (0 to 100 deg C, nominal 30 deg C 10 bits nominal - 8 actual)
3. Board power bus voltage (20 to 60V, nominal 48VDC, 10 bits nominal - 8 actual)
4. Board power bus current (0 to 255 mA, nominal TBD, 10 bits nominal - 8 actual)
5. Various internal power supplies (TBD, TBD, 10 bits nominal - 8 actual)
6. Isolated CAN supply, Isolated Pressure transducer supply, Isolated MCU supplies.

Lets start with the transducer front end. It should have an op-amp (fully differential).

For the 24 bit converter I like the AD7767 it has an accuracy of 17 bits which matches the one part in 1e5 resolution of the pressure transducer.

The ADA4941-1 is a nice companion amplifier. And the ADR425 looks like a nice reference. Good specs, not too expensive.

That covers the main parts of the analog side. What about the computing side? I have been looking around and I think I like the Fujitsu CAN bus microprocessors the best. Its architecture is a mixture of a FORTH engine and a Z8 register bank.

Fujitsu 16 bit microcontrollers

Fujitsu 32 bit microcontrollers

Fujitsu microcontrollers

I haven't addressed the CAN interface yet. It is pretty simple: a few high speed optocouplers, a bus driver chip, a separate isolated power supply, some protection components and away we go.

Let me add that Fujitsu has 8 bitters that I have yet to take a serious look at. I'll probably remedy that in the next few days.

The Atmel CAN processors would be a good second choice. The reason I like the Fujitsu stuff better is that it has a very good migration path and I'd like to use one software model for as many of the process tasks as possible.

I also like the Infineon TC1166 32 bit processor with CAN. Digikey sells them for about $39 ea. Quantity one. Since programming and hardware design is going to be the big cost for the initial units I'm going to do what Chuck Moore suggests. Get the biggest fastest processor you can afford to start. Then reduce the foot print if volumes warrant.

The Fujitsu part is more open ended and has a very simple CALL structure. However, there are no automatic register saves with calls. Thus every CALL must have at least one PUSH and one POP if you expect nested calls. The Infineon has a more definite programming model with user space registers and system space registers. They each save registers on a CALL (but different sets). The cost is 2 to 5 clocks. Not a big hit (but they could have done better). The Infineon part also seems like it might be harder to learn due to instruction pipeline flushing requirements in some situations that require an instruction to finish before the following instruction(s) are executed. I do like the floating point and some other features of the Infineon, but I will set it aside for now. Well I read on and find that the Fujitsu Part also has a 5 deep pipeline. I guess when you need to flush it you just do a bunch of no-ops.

The Fujitsu also is more deterministic and can do tail end recursion since the pipeline is only one level deep (actually it is five deep also but it can do tail end recursion.). However the divide routines are not as mechanized as they are in the Infineon. Since I hardly ever use them except with user input to precalculate multiply constants that is not such a big hit.

Update 09 Jun 1534z

I have been looking at the Freescale MPC551x MPUs. I like them. Plus Freescale gives away an assembler good enough to get a FORTH up on the chip.

I like the Atmel ATA6660 CAN bus physical interface. There are later and greater chips out with more functionality , however I like to keep the interface simple and electrically isolated. You can do that with three high speed optocouplers and an isolation supply. A 48 V to 5 V job at about 1 W would be good.

FORTH Is Back

2008-06-06T04:10:00.002+01:00

The FORTH programming system is one of my favorites. The language is simple, compact, and extremely powerful, and almost dead. It has been kept alive over the years by a few fanatics including myself. Well, it looks like it is coming back in a big way. A lot of big names are now into the game.

By INQUIRER staff: Friday, 07 December 2007, 2:40 PM

PATRIOT SCIENTIFIC, which jointly owns a microprocessor related patent porfolio, said that Taiwanese firm Lite-On has bought a licence, becoming the third firm in a week to do so.

According to the firm, it's the first Taiwanese system company to buy a licence. Daewoo and a US manufacturer said they'd buy a licence earlier this week.

The firm's "Moore Microprocessor Patent Portfolio" that holds IP including seven US patents covering microprocessors, system on chip stuff, and microcontrollers.

This lot have also signed up for licences already. AMD, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Casio, Fujitsu, Sony, Nikon, Seiko Epson, Pentax, Olympus, Kenwood, Agilent, Lexmark, Schneider Electric, NEC Corporation, Funai Electric, Sandisk, Sharp Corporation, Nokia, Bull, Lego, DMP Electronics, Denso Wave, Philips, TEAC, Daewoo Electronics. And now Lite-On.

Now that looks like a rush. Why? Well, a dual stack architecture is pretty well fitted to C. Although C is no near as efficient as FORTH with such an architecture. EE Times Asia has more on the story.

06 Mar 2006

Alliacense announced that Fujitsu Ltd has licensed its intellectual property protected by the Moore Microprocessor Patent (MMP) portfolio. Alliacense is the subsidiary created last year to administer the portfolio on behalf of owners Patriot Scientific Corp. and TPL Group Financial terms of the licensing arrangement were not disclosed.

Fujitsu becomes the third system manufacturer to publicly disclose licensing of the MMP portfolio, following Hewlett-Packard (HP) in January and Casio Computer Co. Ltd last week. In announcing the Casio deal last week, Patriot Scientific revealed that semiconductor makers like Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are not being required to pay royalties on MMP licenses.

Note the earlier date. About a year and a half before the Dec 007 announcement. Also note that I have a friend who works for the TPL Group. I'll have to ask him what happened.

In any case a little more background from the March 006 article:

Patriot and TPL came together in June 2005 to settle a long-standing patent dispute so they could jointly pursue licensing revenue from third parties. The TPL Group has been granted full responsibility and authority for the commercialization and licensing of a unified portfolio of 10 patents.

The MMP portfolio is named after inventor Charles H. Moore, chief technology officer of TPL Group, who is known for inventing the Forth software programming language and for his work in the 1980s on stack-based microprocessors.

It looks like FORTH as a chip architecture is back big time. I wonder if the language will come back as well.

In any case I really like the Fujitsu 16 bit and the Fujitsu 32 bit versions of the architecture.

The Infineon TC1166 32 bit processor looks nice. Digikey sells them for about $39 ea. Quantity one. Since programming and hardware design is going to be the big cost for the initial units I'm going to do what Chuck Moore suggests. Get the biggest fastest processor you can afford to start. Then reduce the foot print if volumes warrant.

Gauging With Intent

2008-06-04T12:23:00.000+01:00

We are going to have to read pressures both for experimental purposes and to decide when to turn pumps off and on. Of course first start with minimalist education available on page 7 of this [pdf]. The first critical piece of data is that only capacitance gauges are gas independent. The second critical bit is that the output is linear with pressure and they can cover a 10,000 to 1 pressure range. i.e. 1 millivolt to 10 Volt output.

The Adixen Capacitance Vacuum Gauges come in four models.

1100 to 1e-1 torr
110 to 1e-2 torr
11 to 1e-3 torr
1.1 to 1e-4 torr

Two is probably the minimum for a system. One (1100 torr to 1e-1 torr) to monitor the backing pump inlet pressure. Plus one other chosen for the chamber operating pressure. The 110 to 1e-1 torr model would be good for most current fusor experiments. The minimum output to realize the inherent accuracy of the instruments is around 20 to 50 mV.

Here are some more capacitance gauges.

MKS 722 which has some really nice specs but only comes in a KF 16 flange. Which means an adapter. It covers the 1 torr to 1000 torr full scale range. Around $900 with flange mount. Add about $100 for a flange adapter.

MKS 626A can be ordered with a CF40 (2 3/4") flange. Full scale ranges from .1 torr to 1,000 torr. Around $950 with flange mount.

What if you want to go to lower pressures? I'll go into that in another post.

Fusor Vacuum Pump Choice

2008-06-02T23:02:00.016+01:00

I have been neglecting general education on vacuum pumps. So here is Technical Notes on Various Vacuum Pump Types. And of course the wiki on Vacuum Pumps. All for the purpose:

I'm trying to decide on a vacuum pump set up and have come up with two candidates based on their compression ratios for H2:

Adixen ATH31+. 1E11 N2, 1E5 H2 Compression Ratio
Aprox Prices:about $4,700 pump, about $1,700 controller, about $600 required accessories. 4 1/2" CF High Vacuum connection.

Pfeiffer TMU 071YP >1E11 N2, 1E5 H2 Compression Ratio
Aprox Pricesabout $5,200 pump, about $1,300 controller. 4 1/2" CF High Vacuum connection.

	l/s	CR	TU	Wt	IF	OF	FP	FPS	$Pmp	$Cnt
ATH 31+	14	1e5	5e-10	2.7	4.5" CF	KF16	45	1	$4,700	$1700
TMH071P	42	1e5	5e-10	8.4	4.5" CF	KF16	18	2.5	$5,208	$1,298

Abreviations:
l/s = Pump Speed in liters per second For H2
CR = Compression Ratio H2
TU = Ultimate pressure in mbar
Wt = weight lbs
IF = Input (High Vacuum) Flange
OF = Output (Fore Pump) Flange
FP = Max Foreline Pressure mbar
FPS = Min Foreline Pump Speed m^3/hr
$Pmp = Cost of the Pump
$Cnt = Cost of the Controller

The Pfeiffer looks like a better pump for the money. A lot will depend on the fore pump. I'm leaning to a roots blower or some other oil less type pump. So let us look at some. First some education: Scroll vs Rotary Lobe Pumps.

IDP-3, technical [pdf], dry scroll, 3 m³/hr rate, 2.5e-1 torr. ultimate, $2,650

ACP15, technical [pdf], rotary lobe, 14 m³/hr rate, 3.8e-2 torr. ultimate, $5,134

1 torr = 1.33 mbar

Vacuum Flanges

2008-06-01T18:11:00.010+01:00

DN	NW	Tube ID. mm	CF Flange O.D. mm	CF Flange O.D. (inches)
DN16	16	16	34	1 1/3"
DN25	25	22	-54	(2 1/8")
DN40	35	35	70	2 3/4"
DN50	50	47	-86	(3 3/8")
DN63	63	57	114	4 1/2"
DN100	100	98	150	6"
DN150	150	146	203	8"
DN200	200	197	254	10"

Taken from 5Pascal [pdf]

Fusor Vacuum Pumps

2008-05-31T19:01:00.016+01:00

I'm going to start with turbo pumps and then add roughing pumps later. I'm going to add some compression ratio numbers which will determine final pressure. Plus prices for pumps and controllers if I can find them.

Adixen ATH31+. 1E11 N2, 1E5 H2 Compression Ratio
Aprox Prices:about $4,700 pump, about $1,700 controller, about $600 required accessories. 4 1/2" CF High Vacuum connection.

Varian Turbo V81M. 5E8 N2, 7E3 H2 Compression Ratio
Aprox Prices $5,900 Pump + Controller. CF 63 High Vacuum connection

Pfeiffer TMU 071YP >1E11 N2, 1E5 H2 Compression Ratio
Aprox Pricesabout $4,700 pump, about $1,200 controller,

Oerlikon Leybold TURBOVAC 50 2E6 N2 Compression Ratio
Aprox Prices:about $3,300 pump, about $1,500 controller. CF 63 High Vacuum connection

Fusor Power Supplies

2008-05-31T18:47:00.004+01:00

I think a supply in the 15KV to 30KV range with an available current of 30 mA would be good for general purpose experimentation and neutron generation. It should be adjustable, regulated, and current limited. It should be immune to the usual lab accidents such as shorts and current bursts. It should have an emergency fast trip.

I have some candidate mfgrs:

Glassman High Voltage Inc.
Spellman High Voltage
Universal Voltronics

Fusor Vacuum Vessel

2008-05-29T10:32:00.009+01:00

The Kimball Physics spherical cube and expanded spherical cube seem like very good designs for the project and the price is right.

I like the 4.8", 6.5" and 8.4" sizes. The prices run from $1,700 to $9,600 depending on size and features desired.

Here is what I think are useful sizes and prices:

MCF450-SC60000 4.8" ID; 57.91 cu inches, .95 liter Volume; 6 - 4 1/2" CF (DN63) Vacuum Ports; $1,700

MCF450-ESC60800 6.5" ID; 143.79 cu inches 2.36 liter Volume; 6 - 4 1/2" CF (DN63), 8 - 2 3/4 CF (DN40) Vacuum Ports; $3,550

MCF600-ESC600000 8.4" ID; 310.34 cu inches 5.09 liter Volume; 6 - 6" CF (DN63) Vacuum Ports; $6,800

Boron Vapor Pressure

2008-05-26T04:17:00.003+01:00

This question of Boron vapor pressure has come up a number of times in various discussions so I think a reference post is a good idea.

From Boron Properties:

Vapor Pressure: 4.6 x 10-4 to 8.5 x 10-3 mm @2200K

From Boron - Yahoo Answers:

Temperature/Vapor pressure:

2348K 1 Pa
2562K 10 Pa
2822K 100 Pa
3141K 1 k Pa
3545K 10 k Pa
4072K 100 k Pa

Constructing a Fusor - Joseph Zambelli

2008-05-25T13:27:00.004+01:00

Joseph Zambelli has built a fusor. He starts out with a very nice picture of his device.

This Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion (IECF) fast neutron generator is a complete, easy-to-operate tabletop system. As presently configured, it produces up to 6.75E5 2.5 MeV neutrons per second with an acceleration voltage of 42 KV and a current of 18mA, at a pressure of 11.5 mTorr, with a start-up time of 10 minutes or less. It can easily be upgraded to yield even higher neutron production rates if so desired. This design has extremely low operational costs, and requires only a single 120V outlet for power. It features an 8” UHV Stainless Steel spherical, multi-port chamber evacuated with turbo-drag and rotary backing pumps.

He has another picture and link page here. The link page has links to the following the following sections:

Theory
Construction
Operation
Demonstration System
Further Links