Talk-Polywell.org

I'm hearing that the correct answer is that the jury is still out until the thing actually does or doesn't work, and then it depends on the particular design.

I've heard two different things that seem to conflict with each other. Can anyone clarify? 1. Fusion produces many orders of magnitude less radiation than fission (implying that it is safer or requires less shielding). 2. Fusion produces its radiation higher into the hard gamma area (implying that i...

Is there any belief in the nuclear physics community that someone will come up with a mathematical formula showing that ignition is impossible? How about the reverse: is there any math showing that ignition is fundamentally just waiting for the engineering kinks to be worked out? Edit: of course we ...

Art Carlson wrote: Meaningless question. There are good reasons to suspect that the polywell will never yield net energy in any way, shape, or form.

Then your answer is "neither/nor" at this time.

...you can choose assumptions that will make it better than fission or assumptions that will make it worse than fission. And here they (not sure who) had me believing that fusion is always better than fission at everything because it produces more energy. Fundamentally, leaving polywell per se out ...

Skipjack wrote:NTR= Nuclear Thermal Propulsion
NEP= Nuclear Electric Propulsion
If I am not mistaken here

That would be it.

Follow up question: does B-p fusion produce a lot of heat?

I am new to this board. I got here because I was on another board, newmars.com/forums, which was discussing the possibility of polywell for space propulsion. The two methods of using nuclear for space propulsion are nuclear thermal (in which a fluid is heated by passage through a nuclear reactor and...