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
I posted the following to the TrekBBS: "Dr. Robert W. Bussard has died. Star Trek tech fans will know the name, though perhaps not the man himself, from the matter scooping mechanism he proposed and which we finally named in his honor on The Next Generation's U.S.S. Enterprise. By all means check Google and Wikipedia for further information about his accomplishments and hopes for new energy and propulsion systems. I knew him for a time in the early 1980s, as I had written an article on interstellar travel for Science Digest magazine that included his concepts as well as those of Drs. Robert Forward and Robert Enzmann (the three "Bobs" of far future flight). As part of the scientific help Bob Bussard gave me for that article, he sat in my living room in Irvine, California, scribbling calculations for waste heat radiators on a new version of his ramjet ship, and it was a wonder to watch and listen. It was an honor to translate his doodles and numbers into finished art. He was generous with his time and knowledge, and while I hadn't talked to him for a few years, I will miss him." It seemed fairly obvious that folks like "Franz Joseph" Schnaubelt, who drew up the deck plans for the original series U.S.S. Enterprise, knew something of Bussard's ideas for the ramscoop, since the spinny red caps were labeled as "matter/energy sinks" or something very close to that (my copy of the plans is away in a box). I'm not certain that Matt Jefferies heard about the scoop at the time he sketched the ship out, but he might have. When it came time to do Star Trek: The Next Generation, we in the techy side of the art department decided to give a name to the hardware, and so it shall stick. Rick Sternbach
Bow-ties are cool.
.."inventor of the Polywell fusion device, passed away last Sunday in the morning. He leaves behind him 2 long flaming tyre tracks and a mysterious note about Libyans"