Polywell size? How small can you get it?

[Nanos]

Is that simlar to;

http://mr-fusion.hellblazer.com

Whatever happened to progress there I wonder ?

[Richard Hull]

What happened to the progress on Mr. fusion?...............

He discovered girls................
He discovered fast cars................
He discovered The newer RC modeling.........
He discovered playing the stock market............

He woke up to the fact it would never work...........

What ever.............

Who knows..........Who cares.......... The project appears still born and all the brilliance dulled to the level of not even a brown dwarf star.

This is not the exception, but the norm here. Loss of interest. Realization that you won't make a difference. Found another cooler website. Baby needed a new pair of shoes. Ran out of disposable income for the project. Wife put her foot down. Got hit and killed by a bus.

We are left with a 2003 "cliff hanger".

Such internet danglers left floating in cyberspace will represent the detritus of brain farts for years to come like a badly maintained family photo album where images appear in bursts rather than a useful enduring flow.

If the Mr. fusion guy is still around and lurking, he might speak for himself rather than have us guess.

You may safely assume he never got near over unity but did have a very flashy, showy start at some sort of dream.

This is the reason I pay little to no credence on anything I find in cyberspace. It is the ultimate place to record wide-eyed, failed dreams interspersed with some useful data.

Mining the internet is just like mining for real in an old abandoned mine. There is some good stuff that might still be there, but most everything you touch in just worthless silicon dioxide or some perverted alteration product.

Richard Hull

[Nanos]

I had wondered in case someone knew, it always interests me to understand why someone suddenly loses interest in a project.

Its a common theme I see in other areas, the lack of staying power in some people.

I'm careful around buses just fitted a new 139 decible airhorn to my cycle to help with traffic issues, now that I've lost enough weight to go cycling again. (Got to clear out them clogged arteries..)

Do you have any secrets that help you maintain your steady flow of interests ?

[Richard Hull]

Steady flow of interests?! That is like a steady flow of girlfriends.
Some are more able, capable and interesting than others. Hobby's, endeavors, jobs and girlfriends are all just along for the ride in most peoples lives. Most of these just flip one or two of our switches and, as such, fade rapidly. Some consume us with a fire that is intense. Unfortunately, whatever fueled the fire burns rapidly and is consumed....In short order, another siren sings her song and we are off.

This is amplified in youth where everything is new and to be sniffed, tasted and consumed with a special gusto.

There is no secret to maintaining interests. You either have such an interest for life or you don't.

I collected stamps as a youth and still do, but there are often 2 to 5 year spells that I do not collect as I am off chasing other rainbows. Still I return to stamps, often with a $2,000.00 vengence, enjoy the collection and then put it away again.

Some interests will endure for life. You will never know which will survive.

For me, amateur science is one that always is there smoldering and flaring without abatement. There is always something scientific going on 24-7 in my mind or being melded into reality with my hands.

I entered fusion wise and cautious at 51 years of age and still maintain an interest and working level relationship after 10 years. I only do fusion to get at the neuts and hold out little hope for a fusion powered future. The polywell, for me, is just another failed iteration, another tilt at the windmill.

My interest in th' ladies, of course, is perennial.....

Richard Hull

[obergmann]

Richard,

Your literary output on this website is prodigious and never fails to evoke either a smile, or, even better, a thoughtful thread.

You should consider collecting your observations, getting a good editor, adding a little content to make it all cohesive, and publishing a book.

I'd buy it.

Sorry to break out of lurker status, but your insights into Mr. Fusion, God rest his soul and let's hope he shows up to respond, made me laugh out loud. Most here are not as cynical as you, I suspect, but it keeps the conversation balanced.

All the best,

Oliver Bergmann

[MSimon]

Richard,

I have been doing some continuous gas flow back of the envelope stuff at IEC Fusion Tech the last few day. Nov 1 to present, 007.

IEC Fusion Technology blog

I look at ion gauges for pressure measurement. Reactor size vs flow rates. Control issues. etc.

For small reactors the problems are devilish. I am looking at a reactor 1 meter (aprox) outside diameter. Hardly basement experimenter size. Bigger is better.

[Richard Hull]

"bigger is better"

"They" have been sayaing this since Lyman Spitzer's grad students just knew they could do fusion to "net burn" or "ignition" by ditching that first table top stellarator.

I go back to what Hirsch told me in an interview....Real proof of useful fusion should be able to be done in "the small" as well as "in the big". This was from a man who saw the error of his ways after personally pushing fusion from large, failed, room sized devices that kept 3-5 scientists funded, to the tokamak race where separate buildings were built to house incredibly larger and more expensive, failed devices.

Enlarging failures with the hope of bigness overpowering the physics seems a bit on the bizarre behavior side. What you might expect is an enlarged ego due to an enlarged budget and power over a large staff coupled with a perception that you are really, now, on th' move.

I am moving from a 6" fusor to a 10" fusor with the realization that I will only be doing a greater amount of pitiably ineffiecent fusion than before.

Beware of the lure of the big or bigger.

Richard Hull

[msutton]

I like Hirsch's sentiment. Proving what you are doing at the small level as well as the large level seems prudent. That said, in regards to the polywell device, Dr. Bussard said there was a minimum size required to produce net power. This was 1 to 3 meters, if I recall correctly. Smaller for D-D or D-T, but larger for pB11. Certainly a small machine in comparison to the Tokamak.

I went back and read all of Dr. Bussards publications (Other than the scientific papers) looking for information on the question of polywell size. Basically I got the impression that there wasn't a fundamental reason that you couldn't make these machines work on the small scale. However, there are engineering and technical troubles with it. WB-6 was larger than the rest, but all of the WB series of devices were this class of small device. It ran in pulse mode due to the copper wound magnets. There just isn't anyway to run those steady state without some serious cooling. Using super-conducting magnets is way beyond the realm of someone like me. Furthermore, Dr. Bussard claimed that they couldn't be used practically on machines under the 1.5-2m range. Maybe you could build a small machine in pulsed mode operation, like Dr. Bussard said, even running in pulsed mode it "looks steady-state to the electrons".

[nathematics]

Brett Bellmore wrote:
> A thought has just occured to me, I don't claim it's original: Is there any particular reason you couldn't combine the polywell concept with a charged grid, and charge the polygonal coil?

It was my understanding that charged polygonal coil was essentially part of the design already. Electrons from the emitters head for the positively charged coils, but are deflected by the magnetic field those coils produce.

[MSimon]

Seems like a good idea to me.

[MSimon]

I think there is a great need for medium sized reactors now with a capacitor bank good for 3 to 5 mS of operation.

It has to do with measurement. Suppose you made a machine of such a size that you could guarantee 1 Watt fusion output. that is only 7E11 fusions a second (say about 50% producing neutrons with D-D). Spread that out over a sphere. Then add in detector efficiency and you can see that measurement will be difficult. Go up in size by a factor of two in linear dimension and you are very sure (if you are getting any fusions at all) to increase the output by a factor of 8.

Then there are the coils. You have to pump X amps through Y turns to get the required field. You can do this in the small. In fact smaller helps. As I recall from my calculations smaller coils use less power for the same field and the function is linear. I haven't looked at the numbers for a while so I could be mistaken about the function. The general idea is correct.

So then you want superconducting. You might as well build a full up device.

I would want a device sized to produce 10 or 100W out that operated continuously before I went to full power. No instability gotchas.

Now we know that fusion is already done pretty easy on a table top. The questions are two. And a half.

Can you scale it up?
Can you get net power?
Will POPS help?

Table top guys should definitely be able to do POPS experiments so there is a way to see if higher gain is possible in a table top machine.

================

What I would like in my reactor is room for about 6 or eight ionization probes, three or four ionization pressure gauges. Four electron guns. A LN2 cooled magnet structure. And other stuff I have yet to think of. As of this time there is no way to fit all that and 50KV into a table top bell jar.

Still - POPS should be doable. 200 VAC @ 20 ma = 4 Watts. What does a 2 to 30MHz 10 watt output power amplifier cost? Not much.

How to transform that to a 10K impedance from the typical 50 ohm output? A transformer. 14:1 turns ratio. Sure it is going to be lossy. What do you think the extra 6 watts is for?

Really. This is low hanging fruit. A chance for amateurs to make a contribution.

Anyway. My hobby is designing medium to large machines. You know. As an exercise for the student.

No matter its uses in fusion. There is an opportunity to design very low flow gas delivery systems with high frequency response and high accuracy and stability. On the order of 1E-5 cc at STP, bandwidth to 1 KHz minimum.

Raise the frequency response of ionization gauges and see if there is any information there. An ionization gauge is a vacuum tube. Even with its generous dimensions response out to 1 MHz ought to be possible.

[Richard Hull]

Unfortunately, based on the reports, I remain unimpressed by the actual results obtained by the polywell design.

One key point is that we took a pure concept of electrostatic fusion and are now piling on the magnets, AGAIN, just like the stellator, pinch and tokamak machines.

It looks again, like it is all about magnets and damned strong one too that need cooling, isolation, etc. All of these naturally lead immediately to larger devices and soon we are sure that a 50 meter polywell device will finally do what was promised way back when. Pour on the magnets; pour on the extra energy and, of course, the extra dough and, thus, lose the amateur effort and amateur or dilettante cache.

I'm not so naive as to wish and hope for only electrosatic fusion reamaining pure in order to work, I am just in a modality where I don't see anything really working to create massive fusion energy in controled form and the appearance of "special magnet sturctures" smacks of a giant leap backwards.

I am forced to mentally equate fusion's efforts to magnetically confine to those of the new energy, perpetual motion freaks lamentation and old saw such that ..."if I only had slightly more powerful magnets, this machine would rotate on its own with no input".

Don't laugh, I have had this told to me in a very serious vein at a new energy conference one time in the mid ninties. The folks at ITER are, I am sure, just as convinced that their latest wheel with its super magnets will indeed spin longer if not forever. But, as always, it will indeed be observed to function following the intial seed energy input and continue to run for a much longer period before the enevitable and predictable stop.

Richard Hull

[Brett]

I think you're being unduly harsh, comparing steady state fusion research to perpetual motion machines. Perpetual motion machines are theoretically impossible. Fusion is just really, really hard.

In point of fact, we already know how to achieve fusion ignition, with massive energy gain. What we don't know is how to do it on a scale smaller than freaking powerful bombs. But if we had to, we could use those bombs as the 'fuel pellets" for a fusion power plant. No physics breakthroughs would be needed, the engineering would be largely conventional, it would just be a really, really LARGE power plant.

We don't do that because, fundamentally, we don't yet need fusion. Oil may be running out, but oil shale and coal are good for a long while yet, and nuclear fission is a proven technology with the potential to keep our society powered for centuries to come. There isn't the desperate need for fusion power that would cause us to set aside all the extraneous political considerations, and just go with what works.

Barring some significant breakthrough, fusion will be on the horizon until it's actually needed. But if we do need it, it's there.

[DaveC]

Ummm... Brett - lemme see if I get your concept....

A hydrogen bomb (mini bomb??) fusion power plant?? We already know how to do that? Well as far as earth moving and gross South Pacific atoll rearrangement, I would agree with you, but energy extraction, waste management, continuity of output, efficiency and etc and etc.... No way Jose! We aren't within a mega-parsec of that!

This thread may not be the best place to pursue the following idea, but it can be continued elsewhere if there is any interest.


Richard Hull frequently has reminded us that fission went from theory to demonstrated concept - a power producing non-exposive reactor to a practical energy producing process in just a few yrs. Fusion is still the energy source of the "future".

The are known ways to extract energy from the fusion byproducts, kinetic (thermal), electrostatic, electromagnetic (MHD-like) and so on... the trouble is, other than the big boom, nothing else works. We do not know how to peacefully put out more energy that we put in.

Now in thinking about Fission and Fusion... there are some big differences besides the obvious one, that Fission blows nucleii apart, and Fusion joins light nuclei to make heavier ones.

Both involve a mass energy difference released as sensible energy.. something we can measure... moving stuff, rays, whatever.

Now, Fission goes on, using a chain reaction principle... neutrons released by a nucleus splitting, strike other nucleii and continue the process with a net gain in released energy. Since the fissionable material is spontaneously fissioning, it only needs to get up close and personal with some more fissionable material, and.. presto chango ipso facto... we have a working reactor.

What is diffierent with in a Fusion "reactor" ? Well, for starters, there is NO chain reaction. Every time you want a fusion event, you have to create one, using external energy. The process is terribly inefficient, so you need LOTS of energy to get a little fusion. This is going nowhere, real fast.

And it won't go anywhere, until.... some of the released energy of fusion is able to either directly cause another fusion event, or enhance the probablilty of external energy causing another fusion event. This is what is missing in our fusors..

Maybe... just maybe ... it's a really good thing... or neighborhoods might have some uninhabitable wasted areas surrounding what had been amateur's laboratories and workshops and homes.

All humor aside, it seems this is the missing factor in the fusor... the absence of a process to directly use some of the released energy to cause more fusion.

Looking at the IEC device, it doesn't seem to be likely that it will allow this to happen. But maybe one needs to address where neutrons go after they are released when a pair of D+ ions fuse. Do they leave the fusion site with direction determined by momentum and energy issues... (I think so) ...If so, then HOW the ions arrive is at least as important as what fraction of them will fuse. Because the incoming trajectories will in part determine the outgoing neutron's trajectory. I think this suggests certain geometires as much more favorable to neutron usage than others.

Then there's the proton...does it have a role to play here? It's a high energy charged particle... it could do the gas ionizing... if it could be harnessed. But thenmaybe it should be the major energy release vector, and therefore needs to be captured... by electromagnetic/electrostatic means?

When you carefully consider the fission reactor...the energy comes out as simple heat... an atomic teakettle. There is NO energy input.. except as miniscules amounts of control energy and the much larger.. thermal energy extraction via moving water and steam component.

At present the IEC fusor battles the vast inefficiency of microscopic probability of collision per ion pair. How to boost this about 8 or 9 orders of magnitude without a commensurate increase in input energy is THE ISSUE, it seems to me. External versus internal seems to be crucial question.

The Polywell scheme is a hardware embellishment, that is peripheral to the main process.

FWIW....

Dave Cooper

[Brett]

Dave Cooper wrote:

> A hydrogen bomb (mini bomb??) fusion power plant?? We already know how to do that?

Yes, we do; I saw a design study on it while in college, back in the late '70's; I think it had been done as part of that big push to find civilian uses for the atomic bomb. It was just a really large underground chamber, big enough that the blast was survivable by the time it reached the wall, full of steam. You used it to power turbines, and when ever the steam temperature dropped, you set off a bomb in the middle.

Mind you, it was designed around a fission bomb, but I think it could have been scaled up a bit to handle the smallest feasible fusion bomb.

[Mike Beauford]

Brett Bellmore wrote:

>
>
> Mind you, it was designed around a fission bomb, but I think it could have been scaled up a bit to handle the smallest feasible fusion bomb.


The question would be what is the smallest H-Bomb that would yield fusion? I believe the h-bomb would be too large to be useful for a supposed power producing scheme.

[djolds1]

Brett Bellmore wrote:

> Yes, we do; I saw a design study on it while in college, back
> in the late '70's; I think it had been done as part of that big
> push to find civilian uses for the atomic bomb. It was just
> a really large underground chamber, big enough that the
> blast was survivable by the time it reached the wall, full of
> steam. You used it to power turbines, and when ever the
> steam temperature dropped, you set off a bomb in the
> middle.

Project PACER

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

Also the idea I posted last year:

http://tinyurl.com/l3egu

Duane

[DaveC]

That idea died quietly, when the actual environmental issues began to come into focus. Yes it could be done, but almost anything else was a better choice.

In an ordinary steam power plant, the fuel-air-water-steam-generator excitation-heat exchanger/cooling control loops are rather more complex than might initially be thought. Doing something similar with a more or less uncontrolled thermonuclear giant pulse heat input would be a staggeringly complicated process - at least with steam.

But the concept is appealing simple. The nastiness only begins to emerge when the specifics of how to actually accomplish it are studied.

Of course, this is what awaits whatever process (if any) ultimately surfaces as a practical, controllable fusion technique.

Dave Cooper

[Richard Hull]

Project pacer sounds like an extension of "plowshare" and the gas stimulation blasts, Gas buggey, Rulison, etc.

Plowshare involved itself mostly with peaceful uses of atiomic energy including using the heat of the blasts to generate steam. Two of the tests were the only nuclear detonations ever set off EAST of the Mississippi.

Small nuclear blasts, be they fission or fusion, are not the way to get usable megawatts of energy but are a great way to contaminate whatever and wherever they are setoff, be it a large man-made vessel or a giant cavern/cave.

Again, most folks minds are not used to thinking of nuclear energy densities of the type needed to be present in a 100 megawatt power plant running 24-7.

Richard Hull