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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 ?
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.
"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
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."
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).