My name is Bob Canup, and I am en senior electronics engineer at NASA (JSC - Houston). I would like to make a few comments about amateurs. The word amateur means someone who does something for the love of what they are doing - as opposed to a professional - who does something as a living. In the US - where money is king we have a view of amateurs which is rather derogatory.
I think it important that people not fall into the trap of believing that amateurs are somehow inferior. Amateurs may not have large resources but that doesn't mean that their work is insignificant.
During the 1930's VonBraun and company at the German Vfr were true amateurs. Their work led directly to the V2 - then to the Redstone - then to the Saturn V and the moon landing.
Richard you have gotten 10e5 neutrons/sec from your fusor tube. This is a PROFOUND result. Here are the reasons why: small thermonuclear plasmas are the MOST difficult to create.
The reason that Tokomak experiments are so large is that the bigger the plasma the easier it is to produce a successful fusion plasma. Plasma losses tend to go as the surface area of the plasma - while fusion energy production goes as the volume of the plasma. Because of the squared / cubed ratio in surface area to volume large plasma are favored.
An increase in 10 in the diameter of the plasma results in 100 times the losses - but 1000 times the energy production. It does not take to much of this sort of trend line before the loss and power production lines cross. In fact this scale factor is so important that if you make the plasma large enough no confinement is required; it is called a star.
I have to disagree with the pessimism that Richard has stated about ever being able to recover the fusion energy. Since so much of the energy is carried off by neutrons is is a fairly easy job to moderate these neutrons to thermal velocities and trap them in Boron 10 (which releases an addition 2.5 Mev per neutron) and use the heat produced in the moderation process and that from the Boron fission for a power plant.
Scaling the plasma by a factor of 100,000 would increase the neutron production by a factor of 10e15. At 10e20 neutron per second and 5 mev per neutron that would be 5 x 10e20 mev/sec which is 80 Megawatts - while the drive power would be around 30 Megawatts. Clearly the tube couldn't be 100,000 time as large (12.6 miles in diameter) but the beam currents from the ion guns would have to be that much larger.
If we scale the tube up by a factor of 100 (800 inches) we have room for 10,000 times as many ion injectors. If we scale the power by 10 on each injector we are at the 80 MW power production level. I think that Farnsworth understood that - which is why he was encouraged by his results.
I would be very interested in comments about scaling problems.
By the way I saw on the web that Chrysler has got a neutron source (10e6 neutrons/sec) which sounds exactly like a Farnsworth tube. They say the neutrons come from fusion. Has anyone else seen this?
Created on Sunday, January 21, 2001 9:36 PM EDT by Robert E. Canup