Talk-Polywell.org

[chrismb]

I've just been trying to find the older posts where this "we'll know in 2 years time" thing came from. The earliest I can find is an article from December 2008 where Nebel says he's got an 18 month test programme.

Is there an earlier/later interview, and/or when did the clock start ticking (time seems to have flown by since it was first said) and when did it go up to 2 years?

Can anyone shed some light, because "we'll know in two years" seems to have been said for several months now. I'm getting that cold-shadow type feeling that the results will be in two years from now, and it will always be in two years "from now", as per the same joke now applied to tokamaks being "the energy of the future, and always of the future".

[krenshala]

I know the time frame was based on the contract the Navy made with EMCC. Unfortunately, I don't remember when the clock started on that 18 (or 24) months listed in the contract. I want to say April, 2009, but at best that is a guess. I know there was a thread about the contract, and another on updates to it. That is where things started to my knowledge.

[KitemanSA]

The latest Navy contract shows a significant deliverable about May (March?) of 2010; about 7 months from now. Some folks think this is a misprint like others think the 100mW output is a misprint. We shall see.

[choff]

My reading of the contract was end of April 2010 for WB8 and end of April 2012 for WB8.1. But?!?!?!, even if WB8 is a complete success running DT, and I also believe a DT reactor is perfectly useful, they would do well to keep the results under wraps until the end of the WB8.1 experiments.

Why, well the DOE could take one look at WB8 results and say fusion research is our department, hand it over Navy. Then they get hold of it and bury it because they're focused on Tokamaks. There wouldn't be a huge outcry because DT fusion at low output isn't considered all that extra-ordinary. But if they can produce PB11 fusion of some significance, everybody will stand up and notice, that can't be shunted off to some crate in a government warehouse like an Indiana Jones movie.

Another reason, lets say they announce success with WB8 in April next year. The press gets a hold of the story and reports it as a 100 Megawatt reactor. When, they figure out it's not, they denounce EMC2 like its cold fusion, it becomes a circus that forces the Navy to back away on funding.

Then there's still the danger of random drive by management killing the whole thing. Some bureacrat wants to make a name for himself as a major dinosaur with the other senior bureaucratic dinosaurs. He can put down on his resume he personally held up a world changing breakthrough by 5 years. Don't laugh, its called experience.

If after July we hear nothing we can guess they've moved on to WB8.1 and that WB8 was a success, silence will speak loudly. Maybe we hear something about the transition from FedBizOpps, but silence from EMC2 is a smart move.
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CHoff

[chrismb]

[Giorgio]

Well, we can "hope" to hear some news,but I have the feeling that if something good will come out from Doc. Nebel experiments we can easily expect that the Navy will cover up the whole research under some national security law, like they did with the experiment of Doc. Bussard, and they will keep everyone silent at least until they will figure out if there is a way to use those result in a practical way or not.

[chrismb]

[MSimon]

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2009/05/we-will-know-in-two-years.html

You can follow that back.

That takes you back to May of 2009. May of 2011 is 24 months. November of 2010 is 18 months.
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Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

[chrismb]

Sure, but he said '18 months' in December 2008 as well;
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/12/16/1718741.aspx

..maybe he said it earlier than that..

but I'm just not sure when that 18 months starts clicking. Maybe it hasn't. Maybe it'll always be 18 month from now!!

I wanna know when all this 25 years worth of tax-payer's will end up in the first "scientifically published, reviewed, relevant and repeatable" fact that I can look upon and go "gee, a good job well done" because at the moment it's diddlysquitwit and the other day I just felt like the expectation is another 2 years from now, when it should actually only be 7 months now. Time moves on. Time is clicking. Old ideas should be flushed out to make space for new ones. That's one of the reasons for having timescales... to know when you've failed.

[MSimon]

[rj40]

Yeah, this had always seemed a bit unbelievable to me, but I am very gullible and want to believe. And I very much enjoy my consumerist Western lifestyle. Not that this would fix everything people hate about the way the west lives, but it would be a big step. Oh well. Two years? I remember that too. OK, so now we have some sort of date. November 2010. But isn’t there something else about April 2010? Something to do with the current funding?

[Giorgio]

[cuddihy]

[TallDave]

chrismb,

By July one of two things will likely happen:

1) the WB program will no longer be funded by the Navy and we may get to see anything we want

2) the WB-9 prototype reactor will be started, and you may not get to see anything because if it works it's worth trillions and a significant military advantage

It's annoying that success probably means we learn less, but at worst we'll have spent orders of magnitude less than we've thrown at toks and we'll probably know why it doesn't work.

Tokamaks have lots of data available because they're essentially worthless as a technology. No one could afford to build a tok power plant, and if they did it would lose tons of money. It's a great big science project.

[rcain]