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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.
...about the reactor having an "I feel lucky" button, but with a "Do you feel lucky, punk?" Navy twist to them.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
"Thank God for cold fusion"
-Terran marine, getting a can of beer from a nuclear device
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.
Even wind power, which has been around in rotary form for over 1000 years, is proving slower to adopt than expected. Wind power is very conventional technology, but scaling up is quite hard and taking a lot more than 10 years.
So here we have a process based on a rareish isotope of boron, which will require major engineering developments just in the delivery and manufacturing system alone, along with a novel method of extracting power which has never been used on a commercial scale. A bit different from piling fuel rods and boiling water.
Being practical, let's say three new technologies to be industrially scaled along with the infrastructure, regulatory and planning issues and call it at least 50 years to real commercialisation. It's unsurprising, given the need for real energy output contribution by, say, 2030, that this is not likely to get much funding.
Pining for the fjords
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 |
Welsh "dd" is kind of a shortish "th" sound, so I "R'd" meaning "Readtha".
"F" is silent, although some folk say it stands for "Fine".
And a long time ago in the IT profession (back when it was known as "Programming") we had these innovations held together by thin strips of razor blade called "printed Manuals" with words like "PL/I" and "CORGZ" and "DBOMP" on them. ("Paper" is kind of like a blank .html file, only well, sort of entirely different. Ours had holes punched in them and the odd bloodstain). So RTFM meant, loosely, "Read The Fine Manual". I wrote that abbreviation (and why is "abbreviation" such a long word?) so many times my fingers kind of took over there for a moment. Perils of old age slipping into me dotage. Apologies to all you young nerds who couldn't make the linguistic transition there. But brush up on your "old", if you're lucky you'll need to speak that language some day.
Iffn' ye don't like that explanation, give me a few and I'll invent another one. In the mean time, "dddd" to the lot of ye.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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."
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...
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.
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'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.
So RTFM meant, loosely, "Read The Fine Manual". I wrote that abbreviation (and why is "abbreviation" such a long word?) so many times my fingers kind of took over there for a moment.
If you using the Emacs usenet client to do tech support for noobs on the Linux kernel forums, you might like to know that you can type "Read The Fine Manual" quickly with Meta3-Ctrl-~ Shift-R Shift-T Shift-F Shift-M Meta2-Ctrl-~ !-%-Esc-Alt-Meta-Escape-Return. You need to install lisp-acronym-expander obviously, and change the bindings from the default which needs a keyboard with Meta4 and Meta5 keys.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.