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Dr. Bussard Passes Away, Polywell Fusion Continues

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fighting-the-fight dept.

Vinz writes "Dr Bussard, the man behind the Bussard Collector and inventor of the Polywell fusion device, passed away last Sunday in the morning. He leaves behind him a legacy of EM fusion devices, and a team determined to continue his efforts. The news of funding extension for the construction of his WB-7 fusion devices made it to slashdot months ago (as well as his talk at google). They may be a serious candidate in the run to bring commercial fusion, and may work at lower scales than other projects. Let's hope the project continues in good shape despite his departure."

3 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. may work at lower scales? by fluffy99 · · Score: 3, Informative

    "may work at lower scales than other projects"???? - One of the main reasons for pushing for the WB7 model was that they couldn't get positive net energy at small scales. The prediction was that they'd need something on the size of a standard fission reactor to see viable energy output. Plus, the design team originally modeled all the coils with as a zero thickness circle and couldn't understand that when they built the thing that the coil circle centers had to be spaced apart which caused field losses. After seeing stupid design errors like that, I don't have much faith in the research team, but still the concept is worth investigation.

    1. Re:may work at lower scales? by BCGlorfindel · · Score: 3, Informative

      Plus, the design team originally modeled all the coils with as a zero thickness circle and couldn't understand that when they built the thing that the coil circle centers had to be spaced apart which caused field losses. After seeing stupid design errors like that, I don't have much faith in the research team, but still the concept is worth investigation.

      Actually, they initially designed it with permanent magnets and drove the electrons right into the magnets themselves. But the point was to prove electron densities in the center could get high enough for fusion. Regardless of the mistakes made along the way, the got the concept to work for their final tests and expect some big results from the new WB-7 some time next year.

  2. Re:Electron losses by BCGlorfindel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.