Talk-Polywell.org

The interesting thing about what they are doing at Auburn is the disruption prevention. Driving the current in a tokamak is one challenge, but that may be partly met by leaning on the bootstrap current to reduce the current drive demand. The other issue is that current disruptions are hazardous and ...

@Dan Tibbets: Nice find! There's more info in that presentation than I saw at Dr. Park's talk here at the UW last year. I'm glad they have done more work to shore up the interpretation of the X-ray blips, but I am still skeptical. For instance, if you look at the purple trace in the figure on slide ...

Says here that (as of last year) the plan was to run DT again in 2017. Here they say that the plan is to produce 15 MW of fusion power in essentially steady state (5 s duration), which is better performance than the previous DT campaign where they achieved 16 MW transiently, but only 4 MW in steady-...

Crowberry, mvanwink5: you're quite welcome! Unfortunately the presentation was arranged at the last minute, so there was no abstract or videotaping. I think there were nine explosive tests. mvanwink: you jogged my memory, I think the speaker did claim that they were optimistic that with a larger num...

A GF staff member presented at the UW-Madison plasma physics colloquium yesterday. From memory: *He was focused on plasma injector development. They were getting adiabatic compression up to a point, but as the plasma was focused down at the end of the gun, it did not heat up as much as expected. The...

You have to read between the lines a bit to understand this proposal. MIT is going to be forced to shut down C-Mod, their high-field tokamak. They would like to continue by building a new, higher-field tokamak. I'd give both this and the dynomak a snowball's chance in hell of being built in the curr...

Budker is working on two different linear (magnetic mirror) devices. One is the Gas Dynamic Trap, which is being pitched as a neutron source for a hybrid fission/fusion machine or for fusion material science (wall/blanket testing). It is powered by large neutral beam injectors. It can run in more-or...

YUP, they are going to try it mid-Dec: nasaspaceflight.com article

lajado: precisely. One senior professor remarked (and I wish I could find the reference now :( ) that the design seemed to be ignoring some fundamental plasma physics, but that it is difficult to tell anything from the limited amount of information. Evidently, McGuire's thesis was on a topic somewha...

So word through the grape vine at the recent APS meeting is that this project was about to get shut down by Lockheed-Martin, and the publicity stunt was an effort to secure some extra funding and/or an internal-politics move to keep them from being de-funded. Makes sense now.

I was at APS, I don't recall there being a Polywell presentation. Also, no search results on the APS meeting website either.

With mechanical supports for the coils, this idea is dead in the water. You cannot get 'recirculation' that way. All the plasma on the field lines that pass outside those 'internal' rings can ExB or grad-B drift around azimuthally until it collides with the stub and is lost. So you basically turn it...

I'll be there. They've evidently made some gains in the lifetime of the FRC, but it's still dying quickly due to rapid losses, despite the large amount of injected neutral beam power. They plan to add more, but I am skeptical of how much it will buy them in performance. They are beginning to charact...

I have it from a reliable source that the explosive tests are continuing, in parallel with some electromagnetic implosions. The implosions have not so far been able to maintain the plasma while compressing it, and it's hard to tell what's going wrong since diagnosis of the implosion is difficult. Se...

That's pretty much the conclusion I came to as well, based on the limited evidence at hand.