Talk-Polywell.org

Not a whole lot. The WB7.1 is being used to address some issues we uncovered with the WB-7. It doesn't have a lot more capability than the WB-7, but we will use what we learn from it to better design the WB-8. We will also be testing and validating some diagnostics.

That's interesting, I see the WB-7 pic every day (it's my desktop) but the area it shows is too small to give the shape of the vessel. I always assumed it was spherical. Are you able to share any details on WB-8 (e.g. size, magnet strength, changes to the interconnects, geometry changes, etc.)? From...

It's a 1 meter cube.

It's a 1 meter cube.

I think you are comparing apples and oranges here. MHD stability isn’t an issue for Polywells, just like it isn’t an issue for mirrors, spindle cusps or toroidal octupoles. I doubt that anyone would claim that MHD is an issue for any of these devices. But that doesn’t mean that Polywells are necessa...

The major focus for the next generation Polywell is transport. We will be trying to take the machine from "OK" confinement to "good" confinement. Historically, this is a step that has been difficult for fusion machines. The next couple of years are going to be interesting. I also notice that a numbe...

The present projected Q values for p-11B vary from about 1.7 to about 12, depending on how the physics breaks. The details of how you do that are surprisingly subtle and coupled, and I'm not going to go into that in this forum. I view this as an "optimistic problem". There are a lot more serious iss...

Barry:

The transport issue is how fast energy leaves the system. You need to substantially more energy out in fusion than you inject into the machine. Transport losses determine how much energy you need to inject.

Nothing is a slam dunk. If the transport doesn't work out, then none of the systems will work. Right now, the transport looks fine. The question is whether or not it will scale.

I think we have a real shot at p-11B. I think it is possible to beat the Bremstrahlung issue.

I don’t have strong opinions about wind power one way or the other, but I suspect that they are going to have some difficult logistics problems. One example of that is Illinois, where M. Simon lives. It’s flat and it has a lot of wind potential. It also has close, large markets in Chicago and St. Lo...

We looked at He3-He3 and concluded that the fusion reactivity was just too low, as several posters have pointed out.

We are not running p-B11. These references were all to the eventual reactor. The side reaction rates are calculated.

Ed was a tokamak person at PPPL before he went to LLNL. Don't expect any changes from OFES.

Congratulations Tom. It's well earned.