Betruger wrote:
The angle I meant to point out in the previous post is that ITER:Polywell is something of an apples to oranges comparison because of ITER's funding. The real comparison would be to equal funding.. Either ITER then, or Polywell after it were given ~12B$. Which it doesn't even need, apparently. A fraction of a single billion would settle the question for good.
For good? A few million. I doubt it. Nuclear fusion is so full of complexities the instant you expose a supposed fatal problem with a proposed energy system some bright spark comes with a solution that adds a little to the cost, then when you expose another problem another solution is found and the cost incrementally goes up etc. You don't seriously think if this 100 million pound Polywell doesn't achieve it's goals those working in the field will just throw in the rag that easily! No they'll start working around it and then propose another machine that solves the problems that were exposed by the 100 million dollar machine only that machine will cost 150 million. Then when that does better but still does work as anticipated they'll propose a machine to solve its flaws that cost 250 million.
If you listen to Bussard's talk that's exactly what he did, he built a series of machines that failed found out why they did and built more machines that failed and eventually got a small machine that produced three neutron counts.
In areas of design like nuclear fusion you don't get binary falsifiability or atleast only very rarely, instead you get different approaches evolving towards the goal. This incremental increase in complexity and cost happened to tokamaks, it happened to ICF and it'll happen to the Polywell you mark my words. Do you know there are old tokamaks in my Laboratory that are a foot in diameter and probably weren't much more expensive than WB6? The only thing is, they never had a cat in hells chance of producing net energy without getting drastically scaled up in cost... Though it wouldn't surprise me if such tokamaks occassionally spat out 3 neutrons once in a while...
You don't seriously think if this 100 million pound Polywell doesn't achieve it's goals those working in the field will just throw in the rag that easily! No they'll start working around it and then propose another machine that solves the problems that were exposed by the 100 million dollar machine only that machine will cost 150 million. Then when that does better but still does work as anticipated they'll propose a machine to solve its flaws that cost 250 million.
Yes, but at some point you would no longer be able to claim the concept could work economically. Tokamaks passed that point a while ago. If Polywells get there, fine, we can abandon them. Until that happens, it makes more sense to fund Polywells at two orders of magnitude less cost. It does not make sense to spend more on tokamaks just because we already spent a ton on them; that is a sunk cost.
Also, as Art pointed out there will probably be a limit to how large Polywells can get. It's unlikely we'll ever be talking about a $20B Polywell.
Last edited by TallDave on Tue Apr 07, 2009 4:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You don't seriously think if this 100 million pound Polywell doesn't achieve it's goals those working in the field will just throw in the rag that easily!
Not at all what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about whether fusion is feasible inside a polywell reactor. It may or may not end up costing 20 billion in some fractal budgetary and engineering nightmare, but one thing would be clear with 200M. Whether the polywell scheme is a workable fusion process, and whether it's in the economically feasible ballpark.
That the polywell reactor would grow to ITER sizes, I doubt.. Isn't that already shown to be uninteresting even in theory?
Helius wrote: ... and do fast development of the Thorium Molten Salt reactors, both Coal Killers.
The Thorium fueled slow breeder reactors may actually have a chance now that the military has realized it wants energy more than Plutonium. The Pu breeding IFR was what killed the MSR in the first place, and who wanted all the Pu? The military. JMHO.