1981 Omni interview with Robert Bussard

[scareduck]

Robert Bussard was connected with Penthouse's Bob Guccione for a while in the 1980's via a company called INESCO. Guccione also owned the science-fiction/fact magazine Omni for a time; here's an interesting 1981 interview with Bussard (PDF). I find this bit (about one of his review panels on the Riggatron, on page 4 of the document) interesting:

Yes. We utterly destroyed them, technically. We were right and they were wrong. Congressman Mike McCormack [of Washington] asked the people at DOE to arrange another review committee from outside of the system. The second group was headed by honest guys with track records of some stature. Their report showed conclusively by all known physics that the machine will ignite.

Well, of course it never did (though Tom Ligon's postscript mentions the fact that Guccione had to pull the plug on funding as part of the reason). He assumed the physicists of his era knew what they were talking about (plasma instabilities apparently killed it). Bussard's track record, at least, is suspect; he's made sweeping claims and been wrong at least once before.

[MSimon]

So Bussard tried the Tokamak approach. Failed. Learned something. Gave up that approach and tried something else.

All points in his favor IMO.

His central theme? How small can we make it?

What is the approach of the other Tokamakists? "If we build it 3X larger it will for sure work. We understand the problems at this level and they can only be overcome with a larger machine." For 50 years.

[MSimon]

Bussard from Omni:

In fact, one can show by known physics that most of these solutions don’t work, which is why the DOE in its reasonable wisdom has chosen not to fund them. But we did not invent a new magical confinement scheme. All we did was to take the world standard confinement mechanism, the Tokamak, and shrink it in size by an engineering approach, not a physics approach. The physics is perfectly sound. We don’t want to fight unproven physics. We never did.

So what does that tell you?

We haven't done enough small experiments to understand the physics of IEC Devices. Or Tokamaks for that matter.

[MSimon]

You know what he most reminds me of? Now that the Omni article has shaken a few brain cells?

A sales engineer.

One of the best in the world. IMO.

The question is: can we make it work?

You know where we are most ignorant? How intermediate energy ( 1 to 1,000 KeV) high volume plasmas behave. We need more experiments to verify what is going on.

We need better low density ion - plasma diagnostics.

[TallDave]

Bussard's track record, at least, is suspect; he's made sweeping claims and been wrong at least once before.

Oh, I'm sure he's been wrong more often than that. Scientists making claims in new fields usually are, pretty often. It's the few things they get right they're remembered for.

New data makes a big difference. Steady State was the consensus before the Hubble observations. The QM measurements were another revolution that made a lot of very smart people look foolish.

We still don't know if Polywell or any other IEC fusion setup will work commercially. But we don't know of any persuasive argument that it won't work -- at least not yet.

[scareduck]

So what does that tell you?
We haven't done enough small experiments to understand the physics of IEC Devices. Or Tokamaks for that matter.

But that's not what he said. He said the physics were "perfectly sound". Which they weren't. Not a very cautious man.

[MSimon]

So what does that tell you?
We haven't done enough small experiments to understand the physics of IEC Devices. Or Tokamaks for that matter.

But that's not what he said. He said the physics were "perfectly sound". Which they weren't. Not a very cautious man.

How in the heck was he supposed to know that the standard physics of the era was not sound?

All you can go on is the best info available. If it turns out wrong smart people head in another direction. You don't (like all too many) keep going in a bad direction to avoid looking stupid.

The really smart men are not afraid of looking stupid. Which puts the Tokamak people in the category of too smart by half.

[scareduck]

We still don't know if Polywell or any other IEC fusion setup will work commercially. But we don't know of any persuasive argument that it won't work -- at least not yet.

I can think of two issues that need to be answered solidly:

1) How did Bussard arrive at such low bremsstrahlung loss rates from ion/electron interaction?
2) What is the argument that the proposed de-thermalization process ("beam bunching", something I'm not sure he was aware of at the time the Google video was made) is not a major loss mechanism?

In addition, I'd just like to ask some more questions generally.

Why is it he felt the scaling would require a larger machine? B^4 gives you a much bigger headache if you have to do it from a larger distance. You'd think it would be easier to get the plasma density you hope to achieve in a smaller machine (albeit not the number of collisions = volume).

In addition, I'd like to see the code that Chacon, et al. used in their analysis, set to be published in Phys. Review Letters but not available at the time of publication.

[drmike]

The really smart men are not afraid of looking stupid.

That's my philosophy. You don't learn anything without diving into the unknown as a clueless but hopeful geek. If it turns out to be a mud pit, you get covered with mud.

It washes off and you pick a new place to take a dive. "Fulton's folly" ushered in a new age of machines. The guy who discovered prions was a "fool" for long time - but got lucky and was proved right in his life time. Boltzmann wasn't so lucky.

Bussard's reactor may not work - but there's enough clues to say it just may be a good starting place and that a few tweaks can make it go. Enough for me anyway.

I'm not afraid to be a fool

[drmike]

I can think of two issues that need to be answered solidly:

1) How did Bussard arrive at such low brehmsstrahlung loss rates from ion/electron interaction?
2) What is the argument that the proposed de-thermalization process ("beam bunching", something I'm not sure he was aware of at the time the Google video was made) is not a major loss mechanism?

In addition, I'd just like to ask some more questions generally.

Why is it he felt the scaling would require a larger machine? B^4 gives you a much bigger headache if you have to do it from a larger distance. You'd think it would be easier to get the plasma density you hope to achieve in a smaller machine (albeit not the number of collisions = volume).

In addition, I'd like to see the code that Chacon, et al. used in their analysis, set to be published in Phys. Review Letters but not available at the time of publication.

So let's write some code and build some test devices and see what the answers are. Talking doesn't get answers - hard work does.

And along those lines - I'm coding up the electron distribution potential function code - that will eventually lead to answers about thermalization. I'll have to go past Vlasov to get into Brems answers - so that'll be a while.

The better the model, the better the answer to those questions. And I agree with you - they are good questions. Let's go find answers!

[MSimon]

Why is it he felt the scaling would require a larger machine? B^4 gives you a much bigger headache if you have to do it from a larger distance. You'd think it would be easier to get the plasma density you hope to achieve in a smaller machine (albeit not the number of collisions = volume).

The problem is the superconducting magnets. They are a certain minimum size.

In addition Amp*turns go up as the square of sized while magnetic effects decrease linearly. So doubling the size doubles the magnetic field - all else being equal.

[tonybarry]

Real science is not about being right or wrong. It's being honest with your findings, and reporting them clearly. Now it's harder to get a "negative" paper published unless it has some interest factor that makes it a bit sexier (or something). But negative papers do get published.

I understand Bussard's claims in the Omni paper turned out to be incorrect. That happens in science. But did he follow the scientific method in finding out the truth? If he did, then he was a good scientist regardless of the outcome.

As far as I can see, the polywell really lacks hard data (which Richard Nebel and company are attempting to dig up). That hard data is real gold, whether it says the polywell is a goer or a dream. Dr. Mike's (and Indrek's) sims are also valuable efforts - although they may not provide all the answers, they do allow us to test some things much more easily than by building them.

I echo Dr. Mike's statement:-

So let's write some code and build some test devices and see what the answers are. Talking doesn't get answers - hard work does.

Regards,
Tony Barry

[Keegan]

Thanks for the link scareduck that was a really interesting read.

Good Picture as well. Worth framing and putting next to Tesla and Langmuir In the workshop

Im a little saddened by how most of the magic i got from Dr Bussard in his google video speech was merely recycled rhetoric from the failed RiggaTron campaign, evident in this interview. What a dumb name. I would say a fusion projects success is exponentialy tied to how cool its name is *joke*

But hey, still got heaps of praise for the good doctor B. He lived, he learned and out of the whole Riggatron experience he probably learned that bremsstrahlung exceeds fusion power in maxwellian plasmas, and that eventually led him to the polywell.

Im with Dr Mike. Im not afraid to be a fool. A scientifically grounded fool at that. Theres just too much at stake.

[seedload]

Bussard's track record, at least, is suspect; he's made sweeping claims and been wrong at least once before.

Bussard: ... If for some reason:, unknown to all, a new physics problem appears, we will learn it sooner than anyone else at modest cost. We may even find out that Tokamaks don't work...

The guy anticipated the possibility of failure and suggested why his program was better if it did fail. He failed with almost three orders of magnitude less cost than ITER will cost. ITER is just a big experiment anyway. It can't fail because it has limited goals. There is no vision for a 'product'.

This is exactly what Bussard was saying in the interview. Other experiments can't fail because they are just overblown physics experiments. He was trying to find a REAL solution - a product.

He failed only because he gave himself the opportunity to fail.

... and you take this as a negative?

[Tom Ligon]

Somewhere around 1996-97 I brought up the subject of the Riggatron, and I was a bit cautious about it because I also perceived Dr. Bussard had a credibility problem because of it. He was quite willing to discuss it. As late as that date, Dr. Bussard still thought it would have worked.

My poor memory is no substitute for his direct opinion, and I apologize if I manage to mangle his views.

His version of why the financial plug was pulled was that Bob Guccione had planned to use profits from an Atlantic City casino he intended to build to fund the Riggatron. (Guccione's wife had actually pushed him to fund it in order to improve his tarnished image, the same reason she pushed for Omni.) Guccione had put about $17 M into it, but building a machine capable of ignition would have required a facility of about $150M (inflation adjusted, about like the p-B11 Polywell), the lion's share of which would be for a humongous homopolar motor/generator to flash the coils. That's another of those 10/90 % things. The reactors themselves were expected to be throw-away cheap ... good thing, since they were also projected to have a life of about 30 days. However, the US government evidently believed Guccioni ran with an unsavory crowd, and denied the license for the casino, so the expected obscene profits failed to materialize.

Dr. Bussard did not believe the Riggatron would be as prone to instability as the larger superconducting Tokamak designs, by virtue of having the coils inside the lithium blanket. The copper coils would run right against the vacuum vessel, instead of thru 5 meters of lithium and vacuum gaps, so would be better "pinned" in place: the field could still squirm around some, but without that dead space to squirm into he thought it was managable. He did specifically mention this issue to me because the stability of the magnetic fields in all tokamaks is plagued by appearing "concave" to the plasma, whereas they are "convex" in the Polywell, thus inherently more stable.

He believed the machine had a margin of power out compared to power consumed of about 4, enough to be marginally profitable to operate, even with the lousy life expectancy.

He said the idea for the Polywell emerged from his disappointment over the demise of the Riggatron. He needed something that worked better and would be cheaper to develop. In fact, the development costs seem to be about the same. He specifically mentioned having a flash of inspiration when he considered how good a tokamak should be at confining electrons, since their mass is so dramatically less than any fusion fuel ions.

The silly name made some sense initially: his first bit of funding came from Riggs Bank, befor Guccione came on board. And Guccionitron would have been worse!

While we were in San Diego, Dr. Bussard was interviewed by a video crew from E!, the entertainment cable production company. They were putting together a documentary on Guccione. I've seen the finished show just once, but it does delve into the history of the Riggatron at least some. I doubt the participants of this forum usually bother with that channel, but this might be an exception.