Polywell Fusion, WB-7 cranked up to hi power

[FogerRox]

and heres a view port shot of the part of the magnetic core of WB-7

[Poll_Blind]

1. There's no way they're ever going to fit General Zod in there.

:shrug:

PB

[merwin]

2. Polywell?

What's that?

[TheWraith]

3. The future of human energy production.

An efficient design for a fusion reactor. Reliable power on the scale of nuclear reactors, without the drawbacks of having to deal with the spent fuel rods or a dozen other things.

[merwin]

5. Awesome!

Let's hope they keep making progress.

[TheWraith]

6. Indeed. Before Dr. Bussard (the inventor) passed away late last year...

... He was on the record as saying that he thought the design was ready to proceed to a full-scale testbed facility, at the cost of around $200 million.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

[merwin]

7. Which will be fought tooth and nail by the competing industries.

Conventional nuclear, oil, gas, coal, etc.

[Random_Australian]

16. Ah, tokomak confinement is a subset of polywell. Makes sense.

But isn't the cost of ITER about 9.3 billion over 30 years, or have I managed to confuse myself?

[TheWraith]

19. Yes, $9.3 billion.

And yes, you'd think that given the $800 million or so of that that's our price tag, we'd be willing to spare $200 million for something that's apparently much more promising. However, we've even zeroed our budget line for the ITER funding. Not entirely sure of the reasoning, but it's either the White House just ignoring the thing, or the Congress trying to slim down the defecit, or both.

[FogerRox]

12. Short Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmp1cg3-WDY

[Occulus]

15. See my post below for links n/t

[bananas]

4. Great news!

Keep us updated.
Thanks!

[LongTomH]

8. Links please!

The Wikipedia article on Polywell is interesting; but, if there are updates, I would like to read them.

[bananas]

9. Some links here

http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2008/06/fusion-report-13-june-008.html

Fusion Report 13 June 008
Alan Boyle has a new report on the goings on in New Mexico at EMC2 Fusion Labs.

<snip>

[LongTomH]

10. Thanks!

:yourock:

[FogerRox]

11. I have a few @ D-Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/user/Roger%20Fox

[FogerRox]

13. Polywell central right here

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php

[Occulus]

14. Okay, I keep bringing this up on environmental threads and nobody peeps about it

so bookmark this and help me out sometime:

ESSENTIAL POLYWELL LINKS

The Polywell

Robert Bussard's Wiki bio

Bussard's 1.5+ hour lecture on the IEC fusion reactor to Google employees

Talk-Polywell.org, where the director of the EMC2 lab in Santa Fe posts occasionally regarding their work (EMC2 built the device in the OP)

-----

This is the "magic bullet" if it works. Dr. Robert Bussard was working on this at the time of his death; in fact, he gave a talk (an hour an a half long!) to Google employees last October (?). It's available on Google Video as "Should Google go Nuclear?", which is a bad title, as the Polywell is fusion, not nuclear, power.

It's a very interesting concept, and as you all can see, they've gotten to the stage with their latest design, WB-7, that they're generating plasma and performing tests on their instruments. The test you're looking at above is using helium as a fuel for testing purposes; the fuel suggested by Dr. Bussard is boron ions, which are very plentiful on Earth- in fact, his estimate of the amount of fuel we have is on the order of several hundred thousand years' worth on Earth alone.

According to Dr. Bussard's calculations, per the Wiki on the Polywell:

He claimed that, assuming superconductors for the coils, the only significant losses are electron losses, meaning that the fusion power output of the device scales as the seventh power of the radius, and the energy gain scales as the fifth power.

Lots, lots more at the links at the top of this post. This is one of those Great Ideas we see maybe once in a generation or so. It needs money and support, though, to help them prove the concept. Bussard was absolutely certain this would work, and he has the sort of pedigree that is not to be taken lightly.

[caraher]

17. So just what is "fusing" here?

"It's available on Google Video as "Should Google go Nuclear?", which is a bad title, as the Polywell is fusion, not nuclear, power."

"Nuclear" energy refers to both fission and fusion, since the energy release come either from a nucleus coming apart (fission) or two nuclei coming together (fusion). It's amusing in a sad way to see all the linguistic hoops people jump through to avoid the word "nuclear" in discussing phenomena involving, well, atomic nuclei, because of negative connotations. The chief example of this is MRI, "magnetic resonance imaging," which was known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging before NRM was deemed too scary a term for the general public.

If your point is that this fusion process produces no radioactive by-products just say so!

From what I've read (from your links and more) it looks like Bussard has much more certainty than evidence. This is not to say that he's a crackpot; indeed, he does have a sound background and record of publication (though I didn't many recent (past 15 years or so) peer-reviewed publications, and crucially, none based on tests of the recent iterations of the Polywell).

One Polywell proponent listed several "recent works" that allegedly back Bussard's design. Two of these are 2007 PhD dissertations from the same research group in aerospace engineering at MIT. According to Thomas J. McGuire's thesis, "Several gridless IEC concepts have been proposed, including a Penning-trap experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a polyhedral magnetic cusp concept by Robert Bussard. Bussard’s concept is the subject of several papers and an experiment was funded by the Navy, but the results of those experiments have not yet been made public." A fair summary of the MIT work is that they think IEC for space propulsion is worth looking into, but there is no specific endorsement of Bussard's design.

An older work that addresses the basic physics challenges inherent to any IEC scheme is Todd Rider's PhD dissertation. There's also a summary and commentary on Rider's dissertation online.

I've also run across a LOT of posts from January and earlier saying to look for some results this spring, but not much followup. Bussard's claims about how the process would scale up are quite strange; the idea of going from a modest tabletop setup directly to a multi-megawatt reactor is an engineering absurdity. There seems to be an argument among Bussard's devotees to the effect that because ITER is a large, expensive and slow-developing project, Bussard's work deserve funding. I do accept the argument that it may be a better use of available research funding to fund a variety of competing approaches rather than one colossus; but what I see by way of evidence in favor of Bussard's scheme is very spotty at best.

The nearest thing to a real report on the "success" of WB-6 is Bussard's 2006 International Astronautics Conference paper. I'm sure Bussard was a bright guy, but this paper is a train wreck. The scant data he included consists of a few badly-labeled graphs in which basically nothing happens (Figures 17-18) until the arc at a feedthrough destroyed the machine. At this moment there are some transients of the sort anyone who's worked around sensitive test equipment and sparks will recognize not as a breakthrough but as the signature of arcs & sparks. It's logically possible that Bussard's optimistic interpretation is actually correct, but I don't think the smart money is on that side of the wager!

It's also interesting that he is an author of just about every work he references... again, not a proof that he's wrong, but it does show he was pretty far removed from the scientific community in this research.

This brief piece, apart from the gratuitous Star Trek digs, is a fair summary of how the project looks to people outside the circle of true believers. When I was a teen I thought Bussard's idea for a fusion-powered interstellar "ramjet" was pretty cool, and I still think it was a creative idea even though it turns out to be less feasible than he thought. His final project sounds like a decent "longshot" project worthy of some investigation, but Bussard and his fans seriously overstate the alleged successes of his experiments, which is unfortunate as anything that sounds "too good to be true" faces an automatic skeptical reaction in most people and may even prevent a fair hearing of the ideas.

[Occulus]

18. Okay, lemme give your post a shot:

(aside: "You have been hit by a Wall of Text for 16,384 points of damage. Would you like to make a saving throw? :D)

My comment about the title was in the same vein as yours about MRIs, and for many of the same reasons. People hear "nuclear" and think Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Those kinds of accidents can't happen with the Polywell, but scientific literacy being what it is in the US... it's just a badly-worded title.

The results of the experiments currently being done in Santa Fe are being kept quiet partly because the lab is operating under a contract and partly to avoid raising expectations that are unreasonable. That said, apparently Nebel & Co. are getting good results from WB7. To quote Dr. Nebel from this article:

No answers just yet

Nebel said it's way too early to talk about the answers to those questions. For one thing, it's up to the project's funders to assess the data. Toward that end, an independent panel of experts will be coming to Santa Fe this summer to review the WB-7 experiment, Nebel said.

"We're going to show them the whole thing, warts and all," he said.

Because of the complexity, it will take some interpretation to determine exactly how the experiment is turning out. "The answers are going to be kind of nuanced," Nebel said.

The experts' assessment will feed into the decision on whether to move forward with larger-scale tests. Nebel said he won't discuss the data publicly until his funders have made that decision.

For now, Nebel doesn't want to make a big deal out of what he and his colleagues are finding. He still remembers the controversy and the embarrassments that were generated by cold-fusion claims in 1989.

"All of us went through the cold-fusion experiences, and before we say too much about this, we want to have it peer-reviewed," he said.

So at least they're going about it intelligently.

One reason for the dearth of information from other sources apart from Bussard and the Santa Fe lab is that he was under a publishing embargo for several years, and the current take on giving out information is as above: they want to wait for a peer-review. That should happen by the end of the summer if all goes well.

I'm not nearly conversant enough on the actual science behind this to be able to answer Rider's objections, so I have to leave that to others who know what they're talking about. However, this could be relevant in some way. I'll quote the bolded part; it's anecdotal, but interesting all the same:

In fact, while he apparently does not like to refer to him by name, Dr. Bussard has basically addressed all of Rider's objections. He has not ignored them. He tries to point out the way he believes the machines operate. I was witness, in fact, in 1995-96, to Dr. Bussard thinking Rider had actually found a fatal flaw in the idea. He dissappeared in the office for a couple of days of furious analysis and calculation, and emerged about the most jubilant I'd ever seen him. He'd discovered that not only was Rider wrong, but the machine itself had held the built-in cure all along, and would work better than the original model had predicted. I believe that was the edge thermalization process that "anneals" out any tendency the device has to Maxwellianize.

I'll say it first, so others don't have to: "It's just a message board." :P

The more I read about Rider, the more suspicious of his (and only his- other critics of IEC fusion aren't nearly as 'stern' as Rider) motivations I become. If the post at that link quoting Tom Ligon is true, I think Rider himself deserves a bit more scrutiny than what he's received thus far.

The whole thing need to be peer reviewed, full stop. The sooner the better, IMO.

[caraher]

26. "The whole thing need to be peer reviewed, full stop. The sooner the better, IMO. "

Yup. I won't get excited about this before that happens. (No wall o' text :) )

[Greyskye]

20. They still have the problem of excess neutron emission, don't they?

Since deuterium and tritium release 80 percent of their energy in the form of radioactive neutrons.

They're going to have to mine helium-3 off of the moon before they get 'safe' fusion reactions in play. :(

[rayofreason]

21. Not quite.

1. Neutrons are not "radioactive". The neutrons produced by fusion are energetic particles produced by nuclear reactions. The emission of energetic particles produced by nuclear forces is what is popularly referred to as "radioactivity", while "radioactive" refers to a substance that produces such emissions.

2. Any fusion reaction releases energy in the form of energetic particles, fast neutrons in particular. Any fusion reactor must have a blanket of material that will stop these fast neutrons, converting their kinetic into heat, which can then produce steam to drive a turbine and power a generator. Helium-3 has nothing to do with it, since using helium-3 for fusion will still produce the energy in the form of fast neutrons.

[Greyskye]

22. You are partly correct.

1. I apologize for my sloppy wording. What I should have said, was that the release of high-energy neutrons will make the structural materials radioactive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

2. The proponents of Helium-3 fusion reactions claim otherwise. According to them, there is minimal radioactive waste, and no radioactive fuel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3

There are a number of people and organizations who are currently engaged in a new space race, with the moon's helium-3 deposits as the finish line. Ambitious? Yes. Realistic? I guess time will tell.

[hunter]

24. Try this link...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

A pretty one is this:

p + ¹¹B → 3 ⁴ He + 8.7 MeV

It's very cool, very Star Trek (if you like that sort of thing) because it might be possible to draw off most of the energy directly as an electrical current.

Fusion is remarkably easy to accomplish -- you can purchase off the shelf neutron generators or make them yourself. High school students have built fusion reactors for science fair projects. The problem is they are very inefficient. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that polywell fusion or something similar to it might be much more effective.

It's not the kind of thing I'd bet our civilization on, but no matter, I think this civilization is unsustainable anyways with or without inexpensive energy. When push comes to shove we will replace fossil fuels because we have to. Solar, wind, and nuclear all work well now, we just don't want to pay for them and would rather make ourselves sick and ruin the environment burning fossil fuels because let's face it, as a society we can just barely keep the lights on and the drains unclogged, and this only for a small percentage of the human population.

Nevertheless I have some enthusiasm for this fusion project. That helium plasma looks very interesting.

[Random_Australian]

25. Naw, unfortunately the scale needed for working reactors means that

converting neutron KE to heat isn't likely to be worthwhile. (In fact, it's hard enough fitting the wajillion sensors around the damn reactors, let alone something to convert neutron KE)

Guess who had a guest lecturer for Plasma Physics lately? :)

[On the Road]

23. Thank You for Posting This

In all the furor over the future of energy, fusion is seldom mentioned. Which is too bad, because it if could eventually be the best solution for electricity.

I don't know whether to attribute that that it doesn't have much of a lobby or that the feasibility is not as great as hoped for.

[caraher]

27. I'd say (b)

Fusion has been a magic bullet for energy for as long as I've been aware of the need to ditch fossil fuels (30-35 years). During that time, practical fusion has always been forecast to be about 30 years away. If something starts to look genuinely feasible the money will appear (and let's face it, existing conventional fusion research already does get money that's tiny compared to disasters like the Iraq war, but lavish compared to most scientific research).

If some fusion research paths are underfunded, I think Bussard himself is partially to blame. By his account, when he helped start the big-science fusion programs in the '70s they oversold it and padded the budget with the notion of diverting the fat into smaller, parallel projects. Now, my advisor used to say that it didn't matter whether you spent grant funds doing what you promised, so long as what you do instead gets you famous. I don't think that applies anymore when budget figures are several billion dollars as opposed to maybe a few million, whether or not it's true for small-scale research.

Ethical science requires a certain honesty between researchers and their sponsors. I don't think this has been consistently present through the years in fusion research, both in the "big science" and less conventional projects. The sad part is that years of overpromising and underdelivering have built a "credibility gap" that will probably delay introduction of a working power plant.

[Name removed]

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