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http://talk-polywell.org/bb/vi...

We should be pursuing the legacy of Robert Brusard https://www.youtube.com/watch?... like these folks http://www.talk-polywell.org/b.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... It works, 15 year old students have made it work in a lab http://www.popsci.com/diy/arti... and $100m would build a proof of concept energy positive plant. I have no idea why we have not done this other than we may have already under the NAVY but they aren't talking. NASA should build one for interplanetary ion engines.

What do you think of the efforts at http://www.emc2fusion.org/ and http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php ? They seem to be making real, measurable and open results but the mainstream physics community seems to ignore this progress.

A lot more discussion on PWs here.

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php

Richard Nebel (who is running the project) left a couple hundred comments but has been quiet since the last contract was awarded.

This again. Todd Rider's paper is essentially a straw man; his criticisms to do not apply to the Polywell, and they may not apply to the DPF either. His assumptions are flawed, and the resulting claims are too general.

I can't find the specific post I was looking for, but here is a comment from Dr. Nebel, the lead researcher of the Polywell. Dr. Nebel has also co-authored research on the periodically oscillating plasma sphere (POPS), which provides direct experimental evidence for something which should be impossible given Rider's claims.

I'm surprised that the DPF work has elicited nothing more than fusion humor from slashdot. While it is facing some significant engineering challenges, it is one of the approaches which should be taken seriously. (Along with the Polywell, General Fusion's approach, and the FRC based approaches from Helion and Tri-Alpha.)

While tokamak based fusion may still be 50 years away, will never burn p+B11, and may never be economically viable, there are other promising alternatives. We may very well have working fusion reactors in a few years, some even based on the elusive p+B11 reaction.

Specific results aren't shared, no, but there is a pretty active community. The project leader, Dr. Rick Nebel, shares what information he can and there are some pretty in-depth discussions between him and other people who are very knowledgeable about physics and fusion. The best thing though, is that they are very likely to have a solid yes or no answer on Polywell within a year or two and it's going to cost them a tiny fraction of what ITER and similar are costing.

Sorry.... my HTML was ignored there for some reason... the community is here. They post all kinds of fusion news, do their own research, and are even working on an open source Polywell design. I've been lurking there for a while now. Some of it can be very dry reading, but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

There is a high quality neutron source existing. The fusion reactor that was push by Dr. Bussard a few year ago. For those that don't remember it was a reactor called a polywell.

Dr.Bussard was believing that it could break even and the remaining question was one of scaling and engineering not physics.

Depending on the fuel and the scaling you could have your combined fusion-fission reactor probably under a decade if you want to burn fission material. For net power the time frame was somewhat similar for commercial power plant that wouldn't produce neutron.

There was news of a review of a new set of experiment and the result where interesting enough that the navy is still interested in funding it.

If you want more info here a few links :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
http://talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/

Focusing on Farnsworth fusors in an article written in part about fusion as a possible energy source seems as poorly researched as writing about steam engines in an article about internal combustion. The polywell seems be the heir apparent for serious work in energy out of the fusor lineage.

Bussard's Polywell approach is pretty promising, and is being funded by the Navy at the moment under a contract that finishes up in August. There's lots of discussion of the concept here:

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php

There's some talk that an attempt to build a Polywell reactor similar in power to ITER might be funded if current experiments go well. It would cost about 1/100th of what ITER would.

Except for the recent and obvious example of Dr. Robert Bussard's Inertial Electro-static Confinment method

Indeed. Unfortunately Dr Bussard has passed away recently. However the project has funding again, and
apparently they are builing a new prototype, WB7.

There's a discussion site at http://www.talk-polywell.org/ .

Mike.

The catch to these devises appears to be that if you have a strong enough electrostatic field to contain the ions then you will also lose A LOT of high energy electrons (Rider 1995)

And Bussard insisted that Rider's math model was flat out wrong. Recent experiments by Yoshikawa and MIT have both demonstrated that Rider's model is, in fact, wrong.
The Polywell design has tremendous merit to it and the experiments that Bussard managed at the end of his life were successful in measuring fusion scaling factors and electron loss factors. From those experimental results Bussard's team rushed together what was expected to be their last device in WB-6. On analyzing the data it generated, it achieved record breaking fusion rates. Now that the navy has re-funded his team to finish WB-7, expect to see some big announcements in a year or so.

For more on Polywell theory and background go here.

Linking to Wikipedia is sheer laziness. I'm surprised "passed" and "away" weren't Wikipedia links.

Even a simple Google search for (polywell && "dr. bussard") turned up a variety of sources, including http://www.talk-polywell.org/