Rick Nebel On The Limited Results

For what it's worth:

Here's what we know and what we don't know:

1. We don't have the spatial resolution of the density to see if the cusps are quasi-neutral on the WB-7
2. In one-D simulations the plasma edge (which corresponds to the cusp regions) is not quasi-neutral. Therefore, if the cusps are quasi-neutral it must be a multidimensional effect.
3. Energy confinement on the WB-7 exceeds the classical predictions (wiffleball based on the electron gyro-radius) by a large factor.

Our conclusion is that both the wiffleball and the cusp recycle are working at a reasonable level.

Also getting press elsewhere (Glenn Reynolds among others).

Well, It's Something: Polywell Review Panel Gives Thumbs-Up

From Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log blog, the panel reviewing the results of Dr. Nebel's recent Polywell work:

An EMC2 team headed by Los Alamos researcher Richard Nebel (who's on leave from his federal lab job) picked up the baton from Bussard and tried to duplicate the results. The team has turned in its final report, and it's been double-checked by a peer-review panel, Nebel told me today. Although he couldn't go into the details, he said the verdict was positive.

"There's nothing in there that suggests this will not work," Nebel said. "That's a very different statement from saying that it will work."

By and large, the EMC2 results fit Bussard's theoretical predictions, Nebel said. That could mean Polywell fusion would actually lead to a power-generating reaction. But based on the 10-month, shoestring-budget experiment, the team can't rule out the possibility that a different phenomenon is causing the observed effects.

"If you want to say something absolutely, you have to say there's no other explanation," Nebel said. The review board agreed with that conservative assessment, he said.

The good news, from Nebel's standpoint, is that the WB-7 experiment hasn't ruled out the possibility that Polywell fusion could actually serve as a low-cost, long-term energy solution. "If this thing was absolutely dead in the water, we would have found out," he said.

Polywell Gets Another Crack?

A couple contracts would make it appear that the Navy has decided to pursue Robert Bussard's Polywell design. M. Simon has more at Power And Control.

Update: Apparently stay-alive funding until the Navy decides what to do.

R.A. Nebel On Plasma Calculations

R.A. Nebel writes in the comments section of the MSNBC thread:

In general, some types of plasma theories work pretty well and others not so well. Plasma theories work pretty well for calculating equilibria and global stability. Transport calculations and kinetic calculations are considerably more suspect. The thing that raises the red flags about the collisionality calculations is that when you look at the Chacon work he sees a big difference between square potential wells (as assumed by Nevins) and parabolic potential wells. I would not have expected that result, and that tells me that none of these results are truly "generic". I think this issue has to be resolved experimentally. That's not to imply that these calculations have no value. What they do tell you is that collisions on the boundary are beneficial (they remove angular momentum) while collisions in the core can be a problem. This, of course, was known by Bussard and Krall a long time ago. It's also possible to affect these collision rates by techniques like gas puffing into the boundary (i.e. introducing neutrals).

Also, I would like to thank M Simon, TallDave and their fellow bloggers for their continued interest in this technology. We appreciate that a great deal, but as you might imagine we have been a little too busy to communicate very much with the on-line people.

It makes you wonder just how much could be accomplished with computers, or how little.

First Plasma In Los Alamos

It's really hard what to know what to say about this (MSNBC). I hope for the best. It's not nearly enough. It may never be. I keep my fingers crossed.

Update 1/11: Corrected the title to reflect reality (s/Fusion/Plasma/).

R-Squared's Top Energy Stories

Of course, my favorite on the list is number 10:

10. US Navy funds Bussard Fusion

I think you have to include the US Navy funding Bussard Fusion in there:

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=3139619&C=navwar

Bussard died a couple months ago. I had really given up on fusion, but his work actually appears to have a reasonable change to work. Hopefully with more funding his team will be able to make it work.

Yes, Dr. Bussard's work will be carried on. First step is to construct WB-7 and replicate the results achieved with WB-6. Hopefully by the end of April 2008. If that works, then on to WB-8, and then an actual power generating plant.

Number 25 is also pretty interesting:

25. Cooper Pairs in insulators

http://www.aip.org/pnu/2007/split/849-1.html

One of the AIP's top stories of the year, this discovery may well help us reach a better understanding of superconductivity and insulators both. Superconductivity is of course a holy grail in energy research, and while this discovery doesn't directly lead to a room temp superconductor, it does add to the fundamental knowledge of material in the solid state.

Read the whole thing. It's good stuff.

Interesting Bussard Obit In The New Mexican

From the comments in a prior post, Power And Control points to an obituary of Robert Bussard in The New Mexican.

March to May. It's no overstatement to say, as M. Simon does, that "Civilization depends on it."

Another IEC Fusion Company: Fusion Power Generation

A couple of Columbia grads are having a go at IEC fusion under the name Fusion Power Generation, and they're looking for funding. (Aren't we all?) Alex Klein used to work at EMC2; the meat of his approach can be found on their Q & A page:

9. What is different about our approach?

- By adding a particular type of magnetic field to a traditional spherical IEC machine, using a shaped electromagnet which doubles as the accelerating cathode, we are able to dramatically lower the losses of energetic ions that limit the efficiency of traditional designs.

- The magnetic field confines electrons to the reaction region at the center of the machine; electrons enter via secondary emission from the electromagnet itself. The electrons bulk-neutralize the positive charge of the ions, and allow the ions to converge to very high densities at the center: the density can be increased by a factor of 10,000 or more over conventional IEC devices.

- The magnetic field also creates space charge lenses at the openings of the electromagnet so-called magnetic mirrors, which in turn serve to continually refocus beams of ions as they pass in and out of the core. The focusing action can be made to exactly counteract the effect of Coulomb collisions between particles, and ions can re-circulate on stable orbits thousands of times through the device without colliding with a material structure, preventing the loss of energy that limits the efficiency of conventional machines. In this way the density will be greatly increased while the input power to the device will be reduced over conventional IEC machines.

- Both effects will help solve the problems that have limited previous IEC experiments' performance.

- With higher densities, electrons and ions can arrange themselves in alternating layers of positive and negative charge, forming "virtual electrodes" that can result in yet higher densities of ions at the center of the machine, and a trapped ion population that never intersects any material structure. Evidence for this effect has previously been observed in operating IEC machine.

- The addition of a small radio frequency modulation of the cathode voltage will drive trapped ions to converge simultaneously at megahertz rates in the very center of the machine at high energies, provided a harmonic electric potential can be maintained inside the cathode, an effect called POPS (Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere) that has been documented in previous IEC experiments.

- Pulsed operation will potentially raise the fusion rate still further.

- We have plans to extract ions which have developed non-ideal orbits at low energy, thus substantially increasing the energy confinement time and further raising efficiency.

Good luck, guys. (Hat tip: jumartinez at talk-polywell.org.)

Navy Funds EMC2 Efforts

Via Power And Control, the Navy is funding EMC2 Corp. to find out whether Bussard's claims about the WB-6 unit were correct, to the tune of $2M. The Defense News article's physics are a bit off, though:

Bussard received nearly $2 million under a U.S. Navy contract in August to continue work on an inertial electrostatic confinement reactor he had developed. The reactor uses magnetic fields to confine electrons, whose negative charge causes protons and Boron 11 atoms to fuse. The fusion sets off a chain of reactions that produces electricity.

The electrons actually get in the way of the process (see brehmsstrahlung radiation).