I'm certainly available if any colleges in Northern Virginia want to give it a go. We have NOVA CoCo, George Mason, and a few others. The University of Maryland is a bit of a drive, but they're a science/technology powerhouse, and certainly capable.
When I was at Virginia Tech, I studied Health Physics under A. K. Furr. They have a reactor and have a fully set up safety program, so the infrastructure is all there. I think UVA does, too. Students at these institutions ought to be able to push to fairly high yields.
Back around 1975, George Sanzone, for whom I was doing undergraduate research in chemical kinetics, was slapped with the job of seeing if there were anything Virginia Tech could do to gobble up some fusion grant money for new approaches. He was into time of flight mass spectrometry, and would have been a natural for a fusor. I was thinking even then that accelerators ought to provide a way to do it, and was thinking along spherical lines, but "the experts" assured me it would never have worked, so I didn't push. The fusor was well established by that time, and we probably could have gotten some funding to pursue it.
I am in the process of getting Dog and Pony 2 back in working order, and ready for a SF convention, so a demo after that would be no problem. I don't have a good enough power supply to drive it to easily-detectable fusion, but those are not too hard to come by. My deuterium bottle has only a trace in it (it is a back-filled empty from EMC2, and I never put more than a few PSIG in it). |
2008-05-09 16:07 Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town (M. Simon) [Latest: 2008-05-13 15:18]
2008-05-09 17:17 Re: Starting A Fusion Program In Your Home Town (Tom Ligon)