Nuclear Fusion - US Navy Publishes on Polywell.

[The Polywell Guy]

Hello All,


The Polywell is an idea for a fusion reactor.

It is based off of the fusor: The Worlds' Simplest Fusion machine.

The Fusor was recently featured on The David Letterman Show.

A magnetic field traps electrons. These make an electric field. That field can heat ions to fusion conditions.
It is a possible path to fusion power. The US NAVY spent several millions building, testing and running this machine.

This is what they built:

[IMG][/IMG]

Download the paper here.

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Abstract:

We report experimental results validating the concept that plasma confinement is enhanced in
a magnetic cusp configuration when ? (plasma pressure/magnetic field pressure) is of order unity.
This enhancement is required for a fusion power reactor based on cusp confinement to be feasible.
The magnetic cusp configuration possesses a critical advantage: the plasma is stable to large scale
perturbations. However, early work indicated that plasma loss rates in a reactor based on a cusp
configuration were too large for net power production. Grad and others theorized that at high ?
a sharp boundary would form between the plasma and the magnetic field, leading to substantially
smaller loss rates. The current experiment validates this theoretical conjecture for the first time
and represents critical progress toward the Polywell fusion concept which combines a high ? cusp
configuration with an electrostatic fusion for a compact, economical, power-producing nuclear fusion
reactor.

[The Polywell Guy]

1. Issues this research raises.

Hello,

I have been in fusion research a long time - 7+ years.

I got in with the ideals that fusion, could be a holy grail solution for the worlds energy needs. The idea being that the price point was so low - the economics would drive the human race off of fossil fuels.

The polywell, Magnetized Target Fusion, Pinches, Tokamaks, ICF, fusors, Beam-Beam and Beam-Target fusion ideas are all exciting concepts. But, the more I dig in, the more I think they could lead to problems.

Unfortunately, giving mankind the "holy grail" of energy sources could be like giving civilization steroids. It merely causes us to chop down more trees, eat more resources and kill more species than we already are.

I am telling the DU this: because you seem like a hot-bed of forward thinking people.

We (researchers) we can build these tools: hammers, spears and maybe nuclear fusion reactors. But people like the folks on DU, need to decide how humanity will use these tools.