Talk-Polywell.org

Bill,
You are making a lot of assumptions.

I say leave it be until Dr. Park indicates where he needs help.
We do not want to cause undesired pressure in directions he may not want to go.

And bluntly, without him and the team expertise, there is no advancement of the program in an efficient manner.
This is not a hammer and nail project that any carpenter can pick up in short order.

Yeah politicians' involvement doesn't seem, in my unwashed layman POV, to be how we can thread this needle

Consider this article about how they restored funding to the Alcator C-Mod tokamak program at MIT:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/ ... story.html

I'm sure the MIT crew has a lot of science in mind for their program, but moderate skeptics smell pork. (This is one of the few places where the members on this forum and OFES, the DoE Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, are likely to agree on a funding issue.) A line item for the Polywell will just look like "pork" to moderate skeptics of the Polywell, as well as OFES. And OFES doesn't like to be told how to spend its money.

Dr. Park knows this. If he gets a line item in the budget then it will bring the vultures like nothing else. Any little stumbling block in the development path and the whole thing gets called a failure, then is canceled to placate both the establishment and the small-government chunk of the electorate. On the other hand, if he gets VC, and then has a little trouble, he might get a little more cash out of them.

More subtle political pressure may loosen the purse-strings at the Navy again, but already I hear rumors of key people at the Office of Naval Research that find the Polywell still too speculative - it won't be ready to power a destroyer on their watch, so they want lower-hanging fruit.

And what rumors might those be?

ladajo wrote:And what rumors might those be?

Something in passing.

I hope it didn't hurt.

The navy is stupid if it thinks running destroyers off a tokamak is any way more likely (or practical) than a polywell.

In fact they are stupid not investigating polywell to the maximum, a metre-radius machine that generates 1GW would shortcut the military to the space age, and go halfway to solving the world energy problem at the same time.

It is not the navy per say.
In general, not many folks on the navy side know about the project.
At ONR, it was also kept to a relatively small circle and admin chain.

From my perspective, I think it is part perception of payoff risk in conjunction with a historically unclear timeline, mixed with a healthy dose of budget politics.

And the Navy wouldn't put a tokamak on a destroyer, there's just no way - the tokamak is too big and has too much radiation. A destroyer needs pB11 otherwise they can't float the shielding.

Any ship would need P=B11.
Maybe you could do D-T or D-D on a CV, but the activation would be brutal. The 0n1's coming off a D-D Polywell have a little more zip than fission plants.

As it is, the primary shield tank for a CVN Core is purdy darn big and heavy.

This begs the question, what is the radiation, primarily neutron for a D-D Polywell, FRC or DPF, etc compared to a fission plant. These are fitted to submarines, as an example of the most compact functional nuclear power plant that is in actual use.

I think D-T fusion in a tokamak is a no go for any ship, it is just too big, the energy density is too small. The neutron radiation is more challenging, especially with the complex and possibly Herculean efforts that might be needed to generate new tritium. How about a General Fusion D-T plant? The Navy could be banging around the oceans provided the tritium problem can again be solved.*

* Sonar- " Sir, We are picking up power plant sounds from an enemy destroyer." Captain- "what is the range?" Sonar- " about 10,000 miles sir"

Dan Tibbets

Actually, they would say "Control, Sonar, 333rd CZ"

Who was the nut I used to work with? Nuclear submariner. Said he used to take naps on top of the reactor because it was warm and nobody bothered him. Crazy as a loon, but I think he was that way before joining the Navy.

Neutrons in a water-moderated fission reactor are totally thermalized, and the shielding is pretty good. Just don't spill anything from inside.

Neuts from a D-T or D-D fusion reactor are hot. IIRC, most of the energy output from D-T is from a neutron of some 13 MeV. Of course, in the process of making steam, you thermalize those, too, one way or another. Usually there's lithium involved so you can make more T.

This is what I was talking about above.
It is an entirely different shielding problem.
The application of D-D may not find much use at all, if any, afloat.

Those neutrons are super zippy.

* Sonar- " Sir, We are picking up power plant sounds from an enemy destroyer." Captain- "what is the range?" Sonar- " about 10,000 miles sir"

Deaf whales and dolphin, oh my. The banging at 60 beats a minute too.