Talk-Polywell.org

If he wants to limit greenhouse gasses but is againts fission, then he's ignorant enough to not know the difference between fusion and fission, and would care less. Fission has its downsides, but none of them are bad enough to dismiss it completely. You must get far with people skills like those. :...

Zixinus, I'm detecting some prejudice on your part again. :) Politicians are not useless at getting things done; they can get a great deal done (sometimes, even good things!). Moreover, Al Gore is no longer practicing politics; he's a former politician, now better classified as a celebrity — and he'...

Tony's basically right; the UW work is on a standard fusor, whereas a polywell machine is sometimes described as a "gridless fusor" — the grid is replaced with magnetically confined electrons. This is a key difference, since in any fusor, ions will strike the grid, quickly destroying it if you try t...

Another consequence is that, since this technology is highly scientific, it will not benefit so-called poor countries as much as rich ones. This will not help equalize world wealth; in fact those who can harness fusion will become more powerful at the expense of those who cannot. I disagree with th...

Yes, the fusion products can be used directly as reaction mass. I think this is what Dr. Bussard refers to as the "QED engine systems," referred to in the 2006 IAC paper, but I haven't yet followed the references. However, the performance of this approach sounds impressive. It's tunable — you can ex...

pstudier wrote:Nothing newer than 12 years ago?

No, not at a technical level — the research was under a Navy publishing embargo for 11 years, remember? The IAC paper and the Google video give the more recent results in broad strokes, but there have not yet been any technical papers since before the embargo.

I try to be realistic. Enthusiasm is fine and is a powerful engine for this enterprise. The equilibrium between being enthusiastic and rational is the key point. In my opinion too many people try to see a far future ahead. Although p-b11 may be reachable the first generation of Polywell (if success...

It's not just "great investors" that would solve EMC2's funding needs; regular people would too. I've donated $50; if we could get 99,999 other people to do the same, that'd be $5M, which should be enough to build WB7 and WB8, verify the results, and from there investment for the full-scale power pl...

I guess we can argue theory forever, so why not show the experimental data. What is the electron density over space, and how was it measured? Go get a copy of Krall et al. (1995) . It will of course explain it in much better detail than I could summarize here. MSimon over on the IEC Yahoo group was...

Again, suppose for the sake of this thread that p-B11 fusion becomes as practical and economical as Dr. Bussard projects. Would this make large-scale desalination of seawater practical? There is currently a lot of concern about the global need for fresh water increasingly outstripping the supply. Wi...

Suppose, for the sake of this thread, that Dr. Bussard is correct, and in a decade or two we could have fusion plants across the country using the p-B11 reaction, extracting energy from the fusion products using decelerator grids (so no thermal cycle is needed, except to keep the machine cool). Let'...

The video at the first link is totally unrealistic. It shows electrons leaving the cube in the center of the coils going parallel to the field, and then coming back even after they leave the area of maximum magnetic field. Such an electron will go straight off into infinity, just like in a mirror m...

Joe, I just want to say, great job, and thanks! You are clearly a php whiz. Hah! You're far too kind. Actually I detest PHP only slightly less than Perl, but this isn't the place for language wars. The phpbb2 software we're running here, combined with the ISP I'm using, really makes it all pretty e...

They have get funds to keep on researching. The main difference, in my opinion, between then and Bussard is that they have many technical papers published (one of them in Science Magazine, 1997 ). All these papers helps to find investors because they give a strong base to justify the project budget...

Short version: Not likely, consider that environmentalist are protesting againts ITER. They have reason to. ITER, whether it's successful or not, is going to generate prodigious amounts of radioactive waste. It's not a clean technology, and almost certainly never will be, because p-B11 fusion is to...