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Bussard Gets Navy Funding For Fusion Research
UnreasonableMan writes to let us know that Robert Bussard, the fusion researcher whose talk at Google was discussed here a few months back, has won continued funding from the Navy. The word on this spread from Kent Brewster at the Speculations blog, who reportedly had the word from Bussard himself. (The link is to another blog that reproduces Brewster's post, because Speculations has no permalink.)
"Evidently somebody got carried away with some fairly routine bookkeeping. The contract still exists, and there is still the same un-spent money on the books. Evidently, what happened is a "no-cost extension". That is, the period of the contract has been extended, but they're not sending any checks."
= fusor_historynews&key=1177038530
http://www.fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn
Anyone have further information ?
And there should be plenty of Boron about.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/04/false- report.html
It was a false report. The only good news I heard in a long time, this guy seemed so promising. But it is incorrect, the guy that posted the news piece took it down.
That's a rather huge if, he came across like someone who is desperate to make his idea work long after everyone has realized it won't. I wrote this just after having seen his Google talk so I won't rewrite it:
I watched the whole thing though I'm sad to say; what a waste of time. In a nutshell:
If you want to prove that you're not full of it why not rebuild the last machine you built, which would be relatively cheap, to recreate the results you got the day before you had to close the labs down?
- Well the $200M will build ones which will be 50x better, one of them will be a dodecahedron.
It looks like the military thought exactly the same thing by the way, hence the much smaller amount of funding.
Why is no-one funding you?
- No-one thinks outside the box. If you let me choose who goes on the panel who gets to decide whether it's worthwhile I'll pick some people who can think outside the box. There are lots of people in China and other countries who can think outside the box, and if I don't get funding here in America I'll give my patents to China for free and you wouldn't want that. (I'm not making this up, he literally threatened the audience with giving the tech to China for free)
How do you get the helium waste products out?
- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
# The Tomakak is just a problem on top of a problem, it's going nowhere fast.
# So we had this ingenious idea for making charged particles go into the center of a load of magnets oriented in a certain way which would solve all the Tomakak's problems.
FYI - it's a tokamak
Operator, give me the number for 911!
You'd have to go a long way to get oil down to 10 bucks a barrel. After converting all the natural gas and coal fired power plants (which don't have a lot to do with oil, by the way), you'd have to convince everybody to ditch their gas powered cars for electric cars. Then you've still got a whole transportation industry that probably will never convert. I've never heard of an electric airplane, have you? And diesel trucks are designed to drive for hundreds and hundreds of miles pulling huge payloads - not something that's practical with electricity yet. Trains, ocean tankers - same deal. Also, petroleum is used for quite a few other applications than fuel or lubrication. There are dozens of products that come out of oil that are used for making plastics which, in case you haven't looked lately, are EVERYWHERE.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Yes he is the same guy, but the sorta part comes from the Ramjet concept being part of the Warp Drive nacelles in Star Trek, but not the actual power source of them but part of it.
In the Star Trek concept, the forward part of a Bussard Ramjet is used to collect interstellar hydrogen which is then used as the matter portion of the anti-matter propulsion system (ie the actual Warp Drive reactor) The thing being its concept has been changed so much from the original series to Enterprise that its hard to pin down if this really is the matter portion of the reaction, or if this is now used as part of a supplemental system and the hydrogen is stored elsewhere for use in the impulse drive or for emergency power.
The other big kicker was the fact that between production of TOS and TMP it was found that there just wasnt enough hydrogen out there to actually make such a concept able (ramjet OR bussard collector) That was part of the reason Andrew Probert started to change the forward nacelle around on the Refit Enterprise to de-accentuate the whole collector portion. The Excelsior got rid of it entirely (though odds are this was more due to the stupidity of the ILM modelmakers in concepts related to Trek, which had a lot of real life science basis thanks to Genes work with NASA scientist). Then it reappeared on the E-D (which funny enough was also designed by Probert.) and the concept was retrod back into the concept.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Low neutron fusion means viable fusion. Neutrons are extremely hard to stop. Hence, they easily steal energy from the fusing plasma and require great amounts of shielding in order to intercept the energy that they carry.
Your argument is actually logical however their are options.
1. Natural gas and not oil is used for a lot of plastic and fertilizer production. It is cheaper and easier to work with. Coal could be used as well but natural gas is the cheapest.
2. If this power system lives up to its billing then yes you could power ships and trains with it. The US built a nuclear powered cargo ship in the 60s so a fusion powered tanker and or container ship wouldn't be that big of a leap. Using electric motors to power large ships has been done since the early 1900s. The first large US Aircraft carriers the USS Lexington and Saratoga where both "electric" ships.
3. A lot of trains in Europe and Asia run on electricity. While not real practical for large parts of the US if the cost of electricity was low enough then it would become practical along the east and west coast of the US.
Finally if you have enough cheap electricity it becomes practical to make liquid hydrocarbons from water and CO2.
If this will actually work then you could over time drastically reduce oil consumption.
BTW it is economical right now to convert Coal into gasoline and diesel fuel. I can only think of two things stopping it. Fear that the oil prices will fall. It will take billions to create refineries that can convert Coal into oil. And the fact that it will create a lot of Carbon, probably many times more than just burning Oil.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So? The International Academy of Science appears to be a tiny special interest association, mostly concerned with promoting the 'Acellus Learning System'. (And the list of other nominees is impressive with its concentration on consumer electronics.)
This 'award' is about as impressive and meaningful as being the Man of the Year for the East Podunk Elk's Club.
On what basis does he 'deserve' attention?
Back in the 80's, I was working on darpa grants. In one case, reagan and congress got into it over the budget. Just before the tussle started, we were advised that our research was good, but that our funding was frozen until the budget was approved. The military was simply making certain that they had their bases covered. It is likely that Bussard has the same deal going on. Though there is a problem with this. It is likely that he is BOTTOM of the priority since his money is now frozen. That means that if money is cut, he may be cut. It would be wise to write those letters and notify your local congressman, that they need to consider side-effects, including making certain that the contract continues. This is more important in whatever state that this is occurring in. They are VERY likely to make certain that this gets funded on the side by DOE or NASA (not likely) if needed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wonder if there's anything to this approach to fusion.
Ok, I R'd TFM. Now I'm even more impressed -- nuclear power without stray neutrons. Ubergreen.
p + 11B -> alpha + alpha + alpha has been known for a long time, and has some serious problems. Google "migma" to get some of the background.
The basic issue is that the Coulomb barrier is large and the radiative losses in the plasma will always be larger than the generated power for reasonable configurations. This is not to say that it is impossible, just very, very hard, and some of the most promising approaches involving disequilibrium plasmas have been proven on very general theoretical grounds to be unworkable.
Furthermore, any system that contains high energy alpha particles will also produce neutrons via secondary reactions. "A-neutronic" fusion is usually defined as "one neutron or less per hundred fusion reaction. pB fusion has the potential to reach this limit, but because the number of fusing nuclei is staggeringly large to produce interesting amounts of power, if you stood beside an unshielded pB reactor you would still die of radiation poisoning in short order. This does not really qualify as "without neutrons" as that phrase would normally be understood, making the "aneutronic" name an unfortunate piece of scientific marketing-speak.
Low-neutron-emission fusion scenarios are worth exploring, but it is important to have reasonable expectations of what the fundamental physics actually limits the technology to doing.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"I suspect the world was seduced by the fact that conventional nuclear energy did get up and running fairly quickly..."
Nuclear fission up quickly? This is not true! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project. Nuclear fission power was a huge undertaking, "...the Manhattan Project would eventually employ more than 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly $2 billion USD".
Just because it has not worked yet, or is not easy, is not the same thing as it is not a good idea or possible.
Uh, I was at the famous speech at Google and you don't know what you're talking about. The room was completely packed even though he went 30 minutes over.
His VC arm has put money into Tri Alpha Energy near Irvine, CA which licensed technology from UCI patents for creating the proton - boron 11 fusion/fission reaction. Paul Allen would not invest without some SERIOUS high level investigation by his own independent PHDs.
FocusFusion.org notes this as do other public references available on the web.
1. The proton - boron 11 fusion/fission reaction has been well known for decades & has been picked because is is "clean" of gamma rays and neutron production, meaning the equipment doesn't become radioactive.
2. Controlling a continuous reaction process has been the stumbling block
3. Tri-Alpha Energy has obviously produced enough test data and analysis to convince serious investors to fund development of a demonstration unit.
A quick web page for noting various fusion concept/projects:
http://www.eastlundscience.com/FUSION2050.html
What would be interesting would be if this device could demonstrate a high triple-product. I.e if it can achieve a high plasma density, high temperature, AND high confinement time simultaneously
High triple product is interesting and difficult to achieve for neutral plasmas because the have a Maxwellian temperature distribution. At pressures and temps we can achieve, only a small fraction of the ions in the plasma are available to fuse, because only that small fraction are in the small high-energy range where fusion occurs. The polywell design overcomes this by dropping the ions into a potential well at exactly the right energy. Everyone who gets into the party has sufficient energy to fuse. This is huge, as the the population of particles available in a neutral plasma are wayyy out on the long tail of the energy distribution curve.
n practice THAT is really difficult to do, mainly because for any feasible pressure the temperature required will be in the range of hundreds of millions of degrees,
The triple time is difficult to achieve in a toroidal field because the field is almost everywhere convex outwards. Every plasma instability there is drives the plasma away from the dense inner portion of the magnetic field to the less dense outer portion. This is why you need huge tokomaks. The Larmour radius of an ion is huge because of the mass of the protons and neutrons that make up the nucleii. For every collision that happens, whether or not it results in fusion, the colliding particles wander, on average, two Larmour radii outward. Polywell differs from this in two fundamentally important ways. First, the quasi-spherical field is convex inward everywhere except at the point cusps that serve as the injection points. This "spherical field" accomplishes this by being composed of smaller fields at it's periphery. An analogy: Imagine you're a ping-pong ball in a close packing of ping-pong balls. Everywhere you look you see your neighbors, and they are convex toward you. But the sphere that their centers lie upon is convex away from you. It's the same thing in the polywell. The plasma core is inside a sphere, but the geometry of the boundary is composed of smaller fields that are convex toward it. Second, the fields are containing electrons, not ions. The Larmor radius of electrons is much smaller than that of protons (and ions) because of their much smaller mass (on the order of 3000x smaller IIRC). Basically, this means that electrons stay confined for all practical purposes, subject to the constraint that they don't impinge on a conductor.
the sun gets away with "only" ten million centigrades because of the intense pressure in the core ).
Simply incorrect at a factual level. The corona of the sun reaches ten-million or more degrees, but the core of the sun, where fusion happens, is only ~ten-thousand. It's the extreme pressure and density of the hydrogen in the core that allows fusion at this relatively low temperature. (Imagine a place where a hot proton-electron soup had the density of seawater, if you can.)
The only way this could possibly work would be if he has actually reduced bremsstrahlung losses A LOT.
Irrelevant because of the above.
If I understand it correctly he claims to have done that by separating nuclei and electrons, which quite frankly is bullshit. 1 gram of hydrogen contains [roughly] 10^23 nuclei, giving 10000 coulomb's of charge if not kept neutral by electrons.
You do not understand correctly. The plasma at the center of this device is nearly neutral, with a charge sufficient to attract the ions at high velocity to the core. This is accomplished by recirculating the electrons in the magnetic field with the special geometry described above. Basically, the electrons stay confined in the magnetic field as they circulate toward the center, and the inverse-square function that their density follows as they approach the core creates a negative well there. Then ions are dropped into this well, almost entirely neutralizing it, and bumping into each other (with a probability that is a function of the ion density, which again follows and inverse square law).
The basic issue is that the Coulomb barrier is large and the radiative losses in the plasma will always be larger than the generated power for reasonable configurations. This is not to say that it is impossible, just very, very hard, and some of the most promising approaches involving disequilibrium plasmas have been proven on very general theoretical grounds to be unworkable.
Ah, you refer to Todd Rider. Interesting papers, to say the least, but they don't state what it is often reported that they state: that plasmas not in thermodynamic equilibrium cannot produce a net energy gain. In fact, in one of his papers, Rider himself proposes some nonequilibrium designs. The key is that you can't act on the ions in bulk; you have to filter out the low energy ions and focus on accelerating them. As collisions tend to bring the plasma back into a Maxwellian distribution, any uniformly acting accelerating force won't help.
I've also heard it stated that Rider's papers rule out fusion power from a IEC Fusor or Bussard's design. This also seems to be untrue, if you look at his assumptions: a quasineutral, anisotropic plasma. IEC fusion is not anisotropic (it operates in "star mode", in which most of the fusion occurs in focused beams), and it is most definitely not quasineutral (a grid won't accelerate a quasineutral plasma). He has one section titled "Fusion without electrons" or something to that nature, but it's simply a Brillouin limit calculation (magnetic confinement).
Present day. Present time.
Actually, pulling a large payload is more efficient with electric motors. If you are already hauling a large load then adding some heavy batteries is not that much of an addition to your weight compared to the load.
Almost all modern freight trains in the US are diesel-electric, which means their wheels are already driven by electric motors. It would be a fairly simple operation to convert a locomotive to run on batteries or fuel cells, providing the efficiency is increased or the hydrogen infrastructure is built, respectively.
Enigma