Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Bussard Passes Away, Polywell Fusion Continues
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."
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), thus reducing the confinement efficiency. As Rider notes, capturing the escaping electrons to recover their energy may make the scheme feasible for D-T fusion ( there are other issues as well however).
Personally I think stellarators are more promising. For those who don't know stellarators are a bit like Tokamaks, except rather than relying on an electric current in the plasma to create the necessary twist to the magnetic field for confinement, they twist the confinement vessel itself ( a bit like a moebius strip ), making them a lot more stable than Tokamaks, and allowing them to operate continuously (You can't induce a DC current in the plasma so Tokamaks necessarily operate in pulses ). Main problem seems to be that since stellerators have a lot less symmetry than Tokamaks the calculations become more difficult, but if computing power continues to rise this will probably be solveable.
As a bonus stellarators look damn cool ; )
http://www.efda.org/pictures_html/stellarator_schema_and_live.jpg
http://www.psl.wisc.edu/hsx.jpg