Bussard's Polywell patent application is finally dead.

[Robthebob]

I'm unsure what you're talking about as far as waves is concerned. Different machines suffers primarily from different instabilities, or the same kinds, but to compare beam compression to donut machines isnt the right way to go; it depends on the machine. Oh i see, I read what you wrote earlier, but the thing about it is, mag pressure isnt like the volume of a pool. Also it depends on what you mean by stable. I'll give it to you that if it's long term thermal equilibrium MHD stable, then yes, Beta cant be greater than 1, but there are other forms of stability, and for some machines, they dont care about MHD stability. So you cant just say, it's like water in a pool.

I'm going to say it again, that paper you brought up that was 40 years old, that's not how WB effect works (what I was talking about before was ballooning effect, which is due to bad curvature, but that's not the WB effect, I promise). In fact, you know how I know WB effects never happened in those cusp machines and mirror machines? because they couldnt get the beta high enough for the diamagnetic effect to dominate the structure of the machine field. If WB effect really operates on this diamagnetic effect of electrons, you need high density, they never got there anyways, all those fusors and mirror machines couldnt get beta high enough for it to work that way.

For other machines that had high enough beta, there werent really magnetic fields present. I swear it's not something that has been around for a long time. Interactions of external fields and internal fields have happened before, but more specifically interactions of external fields and internal fields due to diamagnetic effects, I cant say, but probably not.

[Joseph Chikva]

Are you somehow suggesting it's impposible to get to beta=1, because I can assure you that's not true.

Rtb, don't waste your time. Joey doesn't accept that 0.99 with occasion forays into 1.0+ is close enough to call beta=1.

From where you took the number beta=0.99? As I know much different numbers: beta in mirror machines varies from nol to 0.7 with unexpected bigger (for developers) cusp losses. And those are experimentally proven numbers and not Dan's assumptions: "1000 passes or 1001 passes".

[Joseph Chikva]

Oh i see, I read what you wrote earlier, but the thing about it is, mag pressure isnt like the volume of a pool.

Much more qualified in physics than you Mr. 9…3 like this analogy. If you don’t I am repeating you without that: namely instabilities presenting in any plasma machine do not allow them to run at beta=1. More intense instabilities allow lower beta.

Also it depends on what you mean by stable.

Stable? Instabilities level allowing acceptable confinement time.

[CharlesKramer]

would leave it open for anyone to "refine" this process and make their own patent application?

Nope.

Anyone who succeeds in making a useful invention -- a Polywell that actually does something useful, for example -- can patent that. But invention is required -- more than a refinement of a device that so far has failed.

So if I understand correctly, they say it is not patentable because it will not go past break even point.

Not exactly.

To be patentable, a device must be "useful" (a word with a special meaning as applied to patents). If it produced net energy it *would* be useful. Bussard's patent also might have succeeded if it could be shown to be an improvement at ANYTHING (Xray production, neutron generation, lava lamp, anything).

The Examiner also appears not to believe that someone with appropriate skills could, using the patent, create a useful device -- which also is a basis to deny a patent, and not crazy in light of the apparent failure of Polywell (so far).

One of the things that makes the patent decision difficult to understand is it could appear to require proof the device works. The Patent Office doesn't actually require such proof, which is why some patented inventions (in fact) don't work. Patents are, however, required to be "reduced to practice" -- described in sufficient detail that someone could build it. Tom Edison's invention of the phonograph was arguably reducted to practice when he gave his crude drawing of the idea to his brilliant machinist John Kruesi.

I'm not anti-Polywell, or any of the other fusion efforts, and I am aware of the little bits of buzz here and there that hint General Fusion, or Tri-Alpha, or even EMC2's Polywell might one day make it. But fusion continues to disappoint, and to prove Bugs Bunny was right ("that last step -- is a doozy!"). Certainly the current state of Polywell is not what Bussard expected when he died in 2007.

IAAL (but not a patent lawyer)

[CharlesKramer]

let´s say Polywell breaks even. But because its not patenteable because the patents office ruled it could not break even, its copied. Can you sue the patents office for billions of dollars that you lost because of their misruling?

Except it does NOT break even.

The patent system was supposed to be an antidote to the way technology used to work: someone with a better idea kept it secret within the company (often literally within a family). And he continued to be the only person who could take advantage of the idea for as long as he could keep the secret -- forever, potentially.

That system was okay, but it prevented others from trying to make improvements to the idea, and the idea was lost when the people with the knowledge died (which happened often over the millenia).

So the patent deal is this: we'll let you continue to be the only person who can use your idea for a limited time EVEN IF others figure it out. But you gotta tell us the secret -- and tell it in such detail that anyone else in the field (anyone skilled in the art) can follow the recipe and create the same sauce.

However history measures Bussard's genius and fusion contributions, the one sure thing is 7 years after his death no one has been able to follow his patent and make a net-positive machine.

IAAL (but not a patent lawyer)

[AcesHigh]

Except it does NOT break even.

you have no proof of it.

the one sure thing is 7 years after his death no one has been able to follow his patent and make a net-positive machine.

as far as I know, nobody was able to assemble the 3 meters diameter Polywell, which would cost at least some $200 million. And as far as I remember, it was expected that to break even, you needed a larger Polywell at least that size.

Smaller Polywells are useful for testing the tech, finding solutions to small problems. To break even, you would need a larger one.

Noone investing $200 million in a 3 meter polywell is not proof it doesnt break even.


Am I wrong that there was a minimum Polywell size to break even, and that sized prototype was never built?

[CharlesKramer]

as far as I know, nobody was able to assemble the 3 meters diameter Polywell

Does the patent specify that size? If the scaling laws say that size is required, the patent must say so.

The Patent Office isn't rejecting fusion out of hand, as it routinely does (say) perpetual motion machines. It's just saying even if Bussard has an idea in there somewhere, it will take lots of experimentation to make it work -- so the idea is not yet "reduced to practice" (which means not yet patentable).

[as a tiny aside -- the USPTO's attitude towards perpetual motion may be out of date, if Frank Wilczek and his time crystals have validity]

Smaller Polywells are useful for testing the tech, finding solutions to small problems

Yep, and so far all the testing on smaller Polywells, and the testing of fusors for the 60 years before that, have not led anyone with access to money to confidence a big one will work.

Consider:

-- the USPTO is recognized to have a patent problem and it is not that it is granting too FEW patents. Lots of idiocy-- far too much -- is patented.

-- the history of fusion has been characterized since at least the 1950s and Spitzer's Stellarator with confidence that early models will test, and then the demo machine. In Spitzers case models A, B, C, and D were planed with D for Demo. Sound familiar? Spitzer's D never got built, and so far neither has the Polywell $200m Demo. Worse, for technologies like NiF's giant laser, when the demo was constructed was a dud -- NiF so far has flat out failed. The INTER Tokamak (huge, but still pre-demo) may be another similar dead end.

None of those are reasons not to keep trying -- eventually maybe Tri-Alpha or someone will succeed -- but it does suggest your absolute certainty should be a little tempered by the possibility Polywell is junk and Bussard's near messianic confidence was as misplaced as Spitzer's, and that of the NiF mob, and so far every other fusion visionary and hopeful.

I also think this is no place for conspiracy type "the oil companies will never allow it" thinking. Once Fusion becomes possible -- in an affordable way -- it is likely to solve so many problems (energy, global warming, resource wars) as to be unstoppable.

[mvanwink5]

CharlesKramer, re:

Yep, and so far all the testing on smaller Polywells, and the testing of fusors for the 60 years before that, have not led anyone with access to money to confidence a big one will work.

I would posit this is more of a function of politics and administering bureaucrats. After all, it is being funded by the government. The problem with government funding is it poisons the field. Still, there would be billions to be made if someone developed a working polywell in stealth and leveraged that to resurrect struggling aluminum foundries as an example.

One more point, it is dysfunctional that the government would fund research on the polywell for purposes of making a commercial fusion power source, and at the same time not grant a patent because it won't work, despite the test data that would support the belief that it would.

PS We are at the end of the Holocene, and given that we don't know the exact point of obliquity that glaciation starts, I would worry about agricultural insufficiency for 9 billion mandibles. Irrigation would solve that and truly economical fusion power would be just the ticket. (and higher CO2 would be a boon due to the effect that higher levels of CO2 has on plant growth rates (shorter growing seasons) and production.

[Robthebob]

CharlesKramer, re:

Yep, and so far all the testing on smaller Polywells, and the testing of fusors for the 60 years before that, have not led anyone with access to money to confidence a big one will work.

I would posit this is more of a function of politics and administering bureaucrats. After all, it is being funded by the government. The problem with government funding is it poisons the field. Still, there would be billions to be made if someone developed a working polywell in stealth and leveraged that to resurrect struggling aluminum foundries as an example.

You're pretty much right, fusion technology has been pretty much dominated by politics instead of science. It has a lot to do with the history of what has happened in the USA, and now if you ask folks doing toroidal magnetic confinement, their answer (which you can read on that thread on reddit a while back) to the question why X approach to fusion isnt better than toks is "look at how much better we understand toks and how much money we get."

which is a circular argument: our approach is better because we studied it more and get more money, but you should give us more money to study it more because we studied it more and get more money.

A lot of approaches went away because of the budget cuts back during the Reagan years. There were only a few that stayed around, and I think their reasoning back then was, this is promising and we studied this the most amount of time.

PS: Just FYI, fundamental problem with any form of toroidal magnetic confinement (there are other ones), is how are you going to get the energy out? Dont tell me liquid lithium walls, they've never actually done that before.

[Robthebob]

Oh i see, I read what you wrote earlier, but the thing about it is, mag pressure isnt like the volume of a pool.

Much more qualified in physics than you Mr. 9…3 like this analogy. If you don’t I am repeating you without that: namely instabilities presenting in any plasma machine do not allow them to run at beta=1. More intense instabilities allow lower beta.

Also it depends on what you mean by stable.

Stable? Instabilities level allowing acceptable confinement time.

Not sure what you're saying in the first response. It's not a good analogy, because not all machines views plasma like a fluid. Also it depends on what you mean by beta, like globally or locally?

For one, locally, the number doesnt mean much, (even globally for some machines). Take any form of beam compression machines, none of them have any magnetic fields, which would mean that their beta= infinity... lol. Even in certain regions of magnetic confinements, like polywell, say near the core, the field is already near null due to the machine field configuration, then you add on the fact that the electrons are pushing the field back by diamagnetic effect, you get lots of electrons and very little magnetic field, which means beta is probably greater than 1. So in that region, the plasma would be MHD unstable, but since the cusp is closed off, the machine is confining the plasma by field configuration, as in the electrons have a high chance of sticking around the core and not elsewhere.

Listen, plasma is a kinetic media that sometimes can be view like a magnetized fluid, but not all the time, get that through you head. Too many plasma physicists, because of their specialization just view plasma like a magnetized fluid, that's really bad, because they're not seeing the big picture.

Listen, you're not wrong about what stable means, but you're missing the point, some machines dont care about MHD stability, because the time scales are very different. Dont act like the only kind of fusion reactor that can work are toroidal magnetic confinement machines; knowing what matters in what situation and seeing the picture is the important thing.

Oh, I see what you're talking about, 93143 is an aerospace engineer, who knows a lot about physics and plasma physics. I'm a plasma physics student. I've taken a couple classes in plasma physics, I've done research in plasma physics, all on fusion plasma. But none of that matters, the problem is that you only see plasma in the MHD frame work, which will cause you problems.

[Joseph Chikva]

If you are a plasma physics student you should understand that beta is considered only at the edge of plasma and not inside plasma. This is only first approach primitive mechanical approximation: one pressure from outside (mag pressure) balances the second pressure from inside (kinetic or gas or plasma pressure). Do not apply the model (this is only the model) there where that (the model) is totally not applicable. As considering beta inside plasma does not make any sense.

If you want to consider what is happening inside you should solve for example Poisson equations which are the system differential equations, you need Green function, etc.

Take any form of beam compression machines, none of them have any magnetic fields,...

Please inform what compresses beams except mag fields. For example if you would propagate beam through the plasma column.
If you are a plasma physics student, you are not a good student. May be because of it we can read so many Russian or Russian-Jew names when see the list of researchers in any USA plasma researching team.

[CharlesKramer]

I would posit this is more of a function of politics and administering bureaucrats

The other point of view is -- "bureaucrats" have been practically the only forces keeping fusion research going -- which is true of Polywell, true for the NASA years of Dense Plasma Focus, and continuing to be true for NiF, ITER, stellerators at Princeton, and so on.

There's nothing to stop ANYONE from playtime with Polywells. For the cost of a single jet fighter a country (or large corporation or one of the world's billionaires) could build and spend years testing 10 polywells -- with different materials and configurations and voltage levels and... whatever.

Maybe an effort like that would work, and -- very possibly -- is going on somewhere. China , Russia, Britain, the rest of the EU, Japan and others have been spending billions on fusion research -- on efforts that are well known, and (you can be sure) on efforts no one will ever learn about. It's not part of the national debate -- but governments are well aware of the stakes.

The first fun with fusors started FIFTY years ago -- so it and its successors (including Polywell) are not mysteries. Why did Paul Allen and Goldman Sachs fund reverse field configuration fusion (Tri-Alpha) and not (say) Polywell or Dense Plasma Focus?

In my dream world a much bigger percentage of the world's intelligence and money would be devoted to fusion research, but the sad reality is fusion since the 1950s has eaten up MANY billions of dollars -- I'd love to know the real number -- and, so far, humanity would have been better off if the money was spent instead on improving donuts. At least we'd have better donuts.

[Joseph Chikva]

which is a circular argument: our approach is better because we studied it more and get more money, but you should give us more money to study it more because we studied it more and get more money.

Not because “get more money” but because “our approach unlike others always showed better results and also showed well visible and well understood scaling”.

PS: Just FYI, fundamental problem with any form of toroidal magnetic confinement (there are other ones), is how are you going to get the energy out? Dont tell me liquid lithium walls, they've never actually done that before.

Why not to tell about liquid walls? All the more for ITER are developed at least seven different designs of Tritium Breeding Modules (TBMs) ready for installing and testing..
http://fire.pppl.gov/isfnt7_giancarli.pdf
http://www.iter-industry.ch/wp-content/ ... itevin.pdf
So, now done.

Would you like to say that Direct Energy Converter was built ever? If so please inform when and where? Thanks.

[Robthebob]

1. So it's good you defined the location, so it's a local beta. You run into problems going from machines to machines, because different machines have different designs. The family of donut machines, generally defining beta at the plasma edge is reasonable. However, once you start looking at beta in other designs, it's not good to compare them. I'll let the sloopy language go, because you did say it's impossible for beta to go above one for any machine, which you didnt specify how you defined beta.

2. The MHD, fluid picture, of viewing it as external pressure balancing internal pressure is useful in some cases, not very useful when the machine doesnt care about the fluid picture. And you said it yourself to not apply models where it's not good to apply it, but your earlier statement was to include all machines (and potentially everywhere), which I assure you is wrong.

3. There are more powerful analytical tools, but yes, you can solve system of differential equations to gain an insight on what's going on inside.

4. Beam compression machines, or as they're commonly (but incorrectly named) inertial fusion, using beams of laser or particles to compress to fusion. They have no magnetic field, because they dont operate like that. Their time scale and configuration also makes it that the MHD picture doesnt do much good.

5. That's not their arguements. Besides, you're statement isnt true anyways. Toks dont always show better results, what they do show is actual results. This is due to the fact that the fusion program in USA is already dominated by only two types of approaches, beam compression and donut machines. You cant say Toks are better because they have results, when there's no results from say stellarators of similar parameters to compare to. You can say Toks have results, and stellarators dont have results, which is a valid statement.

However, you can potentially say that the stellarators back then performed poorly, which is true, but that's due to limitations of technology, which we can overcome now. There are just no other approaches studied as much as Toks; there are no equivalent machine for polywell, stellarators, spheromak, etc, etc to the Toks' JET machine. There is somewhat of a equivalent machine for a type of beam compression machine, that's NIF, to JET, and you can say that NIF underperformed compared to JET (then again I dont know enough about NIF to say much).

Comparing JET's results to WB8, or any existing stellarators, spheromaks, is just flat out unfair. Even after all that, some of the other approaches show better results in terms of certain things compared to Toks (yes, the results of JET), but that's not fair, because the machine designs are wildly different.

6. Liquid lithium walls have never actually been built, which isnt to say that it wont work. However from the problem solution perspective, you have a plan to solve the problem, but you still have the problem, you didnt solve the problem. On the other hand, direct conversion is based on well studied technology and they've built it for other situation, this form of energy capaturing for polywell is most definitely more mature than liquid lithium walls for donut machines.

[mvanwink5]

Charles, government funded research grew to be leviathan, motivated by its successful application to military purposes. Even now, the polywell research is focused on its military utility. But what happens when the government funding becomes so massive? Two significant negative effects, it decreases the available funding for private research, and it increases the risks as mentioned above. This is not including the effects of reduced profits by the overall stultifying encumbrances of regulations and heavy taxation. In fact, this issue has become so overwhelming that whenever there is a problem, the common refrain is what can the government do to fix it? In the distant past, it was, "oh look, an opportunity." Further, great advances including the well that polywell sprang from, Farnsworth fusors, came from that private research era. Remember Bell Labs? But this positing is moot like wishing lemming would see the error of their ways or that sheep would not continue to jump to their river drowning like the others before them.

Insofar as what others are doing, there are several private approaches going on at this time as you pointed out. If your argument had weight, though, that would not occur as each would "prove" the other different approach would not make sense. In fact, the choice of approach is different simply because of different judgements on the myriad factors and their weightings. How a bureaucrat makes decisions is dependent on a completely different environment. I know this first hand. As an example, a bureaucrat would not fix something until it was "Proven" by several massive failures that it was needed. In the real world, massive failures are too expensive to shoulder and must be avoided. Hence, prevention is preferred.

So, the progress pace we see in a bureaucrat managed project is dictated by a different mindset. By the way, it is obvious why a cathedral sized ITER machine would not be of interest to the Navy, and of course even if it was of interest, why would the Navy do it if the DOE is funding it (see how that works?)

Actually, the issue is that we are in a bureaucrat and political dream world and the consequence is what you see, a result of bureaucrats and politicians making decisions as a reflection of their nature, billions over decades for an ITER dream cathedral.