Slashdot Mirror
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.)
The international acedemy of science awarded Bussard & team the "Outstanding technology of the year award" last year (linky)
According to that page, Bussard's reactor could be on the market in 6-10 years.
Interestingly the design isn't a "steam kettle" system, like all existing thermal power plants - coal, natural gas or nuclear, which all use a heat source to boil water to spin a steam turbine.
Bussard's Pollywell design generates high-energy alpha particles, which can be used to directly produce an electrical current.
It looks like Bussard is finally getting the attention he deserves, rather than the incredibly expensive magnetic confinement systems like ITER, which has so far spent billions of dollars and needs billions more before anyone can even say for sure if it will work or not...
If Bussard pulls this off, this could be an incredibly disruptive technology. Clean, cheap power... what the nuclear age has so long promised but failed to deliver.
Looks like it works to me:
http://www.emc2fusion.org/
I can't believe the gov't doesn't just immediately fund the full-scale reactor, given the fossil fuel crisis we're currently stuck in. 200 million dollars is a handful of days in Iraq, and we could immediately drive the price of oil down to 10 dollars a barrel with fusion as a reliable commercial power source.
stuff |
First of all table-top fusion is really simple to do, and devices exist that achieve it using a 9V battery. Such devices are routinely used for various kinds of scanners, as neutron-sources for nuclear experiments, various kinds of material testing... etc Getting D-D fusion or D-T fusion is sufficiently easy for hobbyists to do it in their basement. What is tricky, however, is to generate a controllable plasma that can produce enough energy for it to be practical as a power source, and this is orders of magnitude more difficult. Every month I hear some new plan about how to achieve fusion, the truth is, getting fusion to work is not hard. 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. In 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, meaning it will radiate A LOT of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, leading to a low confinement time. ( the sun gets away with "only" ten million centigrades because of the intense pressure in the core ). The only way this could possibly work would be if he has actually reduced bremsstrahlung losses A LOT. 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. Now, for those of you who know your electrostatics, try sticking 10000 coulomb into coulomb's law of electrostatic repulsion for a device that separates the charges by a distance of 1 meter or so, and then tell me this scheme will work. There is a reason you need a strong containment field for a fusion reaction...
Sadly, no. The dense plasma focus is an excellent neutron and x-ray source, but an inadequate fusion reactor. Despite what the theorist that runs that site would have you believe, the focus does not produce a true thermonuclear plasma. It's more beam-like. There's simply no more funding to go to focus work RE: it's potential as a full scale fusion device. If we see practical fusion demonstrated in the next 15 years, it will be at one of these three places: NIF at Lawrence Livermore, the Z-Machine (soon to be Z-R) at Sandia, or at ITER in Cadarache.
I've followed Bussard's work in this area, and we're darn lucky to have him. Working for the Navy makes me nervous, though.
It's always been rumored that the Farnsworth fusor was buried (and it was, big time and deliberately) because it looked like it might work. While that device would probably never have become economically feasible as a power generator, there's not much likelihood the current Tokamak-based designs will either, and they're getting billions for research worldwide. One theory is that Farnsworth's method (a direct ancestor of Bussard's) was too easy to downscale to town or neighborhood size, where a working Tokamak would require an enormous plant that only government or big industry can build (and control.)
If the bad guys want to do the same thing again, it would be awfully easy to just classify Bussard's work (which is not yet practical for anything, and may never be), say it failed, and let it be forgotten. Or maybe just hide it until we're up against the wall (fossil fuel and uranium getting too expensive, breeders still won't work, other fusion research still going nowhere) when it would be the last hope of staving off the apocalypse. Maybe the governments will be sufficiently in Control by then that they'd risk releasing such disruptive technology.