The details of the Jan 8 pre-solicitation are now available at:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity ... e&_cview=1
Solicitation Details Available
Blogged it:
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2009/ ... alive.html
gave you a H/T - I add a few details and link to the contract pdf.
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2009/ ... alive.html
gave you a H/T - I add a few details and link to the contract pdf.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Re: Solicitation Details Available
This is the appropriate next step to take in the development of polywell fusion. Even though the WB-7 experiments last summer were promising, polywell is still very much a speculative technology. We cannot expect the bureaucracy of the Federal government to fund it at a higher level than this.KitemanSA wrote:The details of the Jan 8 pre-solicitation are now available at:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity ... e&_cview=1
Success with this follow on contract will build more "yes" momentum for further development.
If my understanding is correct, the keepalive contracts previous to these, were to modify WB7 by adding ion guns+instrumentation. The idea was to test if the neutron counts were misleading and caused by ion-background gas collisions as opposed to ion-ion collisions. By awarding these new keepalive contracts, one could infer the neutron counts are indeed from ion-ion collisions, since there would be no point in awarding the new contracts otherwise.
My worry is that the U.S. government will skip a major funding decision until at least 2010, if ever. The DOE guys may want to take it over, decide to spent many millions more running computer simulations based on the data collected rather than just building it, claim it probably won't work on the large scale, and bury it until ITER or some other pet tokamak project has run its course. It just doesn't fit into there models of what a fusion reactor should look like.
My worry is that the U.S. government will skip a major funding decision until at least 2010, if ever. The DOE guys may want to take it over, decide to spent many millions more running computer simulations based on the data collected rather than just building it, claim it probably won't work on the large scale, and bury it until ITER or some other pet tokamak project has run its course. It just doesn't fit into there models of what a fusion reactor should look like.
CHoff
It is all a little hazy. I thought the $200 million was for a whole program. i.e. intermediate tests to work out the engineering and then WB-100.Torulf2 wrote:$200 million, Is that the cost of build a WB100?
I thought it is $2 million. $200 is for develop it for electrical production.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Later in the paper he mentions two more small scale machines (WB-7, a "squared" coil truncated cube, and WB-8, a dodecahedron, which he wrote he expected ~5 times better output due to less pseudo, more sphericity.In his 2006 Valencia paper, Dr. Bussard wrote:It is thus NOT POSSIBLE to test at steady-state ALL of the physics working in concert, in a Polywell machine, in devices below about 1.5 m in size/radius. This fundamental fact, driven by the realities of mechanical and thermal engineering design and construction - to meet immutable constraints of the basic physics -, has made it impossible to reach the objective of a break-even fusion power machine at
the sizes and scales used in the U.S.Navy IEF program conducted by EMC2 since 1991. To achieve this objective, it has now been conclusively proven that machines in this larger size range must be used.
Since the cost of these scales roughly as the cube of their size, the costs for proof of net power is estimated to be in the range of $ 120-180M, as compared with the approximately $15-18 M that has been spent over the past 13 years in this program. This estimate turns out to be completely consistent with those made originally in the earliest studies (1987-91) ever done (by EMC2) for this concept and program, which estimated a cost to proof-of-breakeven (or net power) in the range of $ 50 - $ 60 M for DD fuel, and $ 120 +M for pB11, in 1992. Scaled to today‘s (2005) dollars, these numbers would be very much larger.
With this added work, we are up to ~$200M.