Robert Bussard, one of the giants of the field, claimed to his dying day he had cracked the problem
![Homemade_fusion_reactor[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/homemade_fusion_reactor1.jpg?quality=83)
Above: a homemade “fusor” similar to the Polywell nuclear fusion reactor
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Not many people have heard of Robert Bussard, but he was one of the giants of nuclear fusion research. But if an engineering solution for viable small, household size nuclear fusion reactors is ever discovered, they will almost certainly be largely based on Bussard’s work.
Bussard’s focus was on a field of Nuclear fusion research known as electrostatic confinement. Unlike the better known magnetic bottle reactors, such as the $20 billion ITER project, electrostatic confinement can be applied to fusion plasmas which are the size of a small glass fish tank.
Electrostatic confinement has been well known since the 1930s. Small electrostatic nuclear fusion devices are sold commercially – as neutron sources. A small nuclear fusion reactor is an incredibly convenient way to produce a dense stream of neutron radiation, because as soon as you switch off the power, the plasma cools, and the radiation stops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_generator
The problem is nobody has figured out how to extract more energy out of an electrostatic fusor, than you put into it. There is a long list of problems to be solved. One of the big problems with viable nuclear fusion is keeping the plasma hot enough – when you heat something to millions of degrees, it really wants to shed some of its heat. In electrostatic confinement systems, the violent acceleration / deceleration, as charged plasma particles bounce off the high intensity electric fields, causes a significant cooling of the core. There are also problems with the electrodes – keeping an electrode from melting, when it is in close contact with a superheated gas, is a significant engineering challenge.
Bussard at the end of his life, claimed to have solved these problems. He built a small prototype using a grant from the US Navy. Right up to his dying day, he was trying to raise funds, to build a full scale prototype, of his Polywell nuclear fusion reactor design.
The late physicist Robert Bussard worked for decades to try to show Polywell fusion could work, using a variety of Wiffle-Ball configurations. Just before his death in 2007, he claimed that he was getting close to solving the challenge with his WB-6 device.
After Bussard passed away, other researchers picked up the baton at EMC2 Fusion in New Mexico and continued building test devices. Most recently, Park and his colleagues used a redesigned Wiffle-Ball test device in a San Diego lab to show the Navy that their configuration could enhance plasma confinement even under incredibly high pressure — pressure levels that could not be achieved by, say, the ITER reactor.
Bussard’s prototype might not have worked. However Bussard was an extremely credible fusion researcher – unlike some rather dodgy characters in the “bubble” fusion field, Bussard really might have made that crucial breakthrough. When you consider the eye watering sums which are wasted on renewables, such as the huge loss sustained by the Federal Government when Solyndra collapsed, it really seems a shame that Bussard never got a chance to take the final step, to realise his dream of seeing his ideas tested in a full scale prototype.
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Bussard
So long as practically all funding for fusion research is being thrown at the ITER Tokamak, fusion power will always be 50 years away. That’s why concepts like Polywell and Spheromak fusion only get chickenfeed, otherwise the fossil fuel energy is screwed.
Re: “under incredibly high pressure”
What pressure did he propose?
I have a blog that goes into the science and technology deeply.
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/
I am also working with a group that wants to fund the experiments as an open source project. If you are interested contact me. My addy is on the sidebar.
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/
I had the chance to talk to Dr. Bussard on internet radio a few months before he died.
I also moderate this chat room/blog – http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
M Simon – great to see you here! I occasionally browse talk polywell. It would be great to have a news feed there – some where the very latest on it is updated. I know that most of it is secret but there are tidbits here and there.
Going to be a difficult problem to solve. The energy produced by the Sun by fusion has about the same energy per pound of matter as a compost heap produces. I’m not optimistic that fusion will ever be practicable and is itself just another money pit.
There is one major problem with any kind of household size nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactions create gamma rays. There’s no stopping it. Even if the reaction itself creates no radioactive waste, there’s no way to get rid of that radiation. The more energy you create, the more gamma rays is released. And you need about one meter thick concrete wall to stop that radiation, or you’ll irradiate your whole neighborhood. Plus you’ll get secondary radiation on the inner side of that wall – and you’ll need to enter the space time to time to perform maintenance. In total it’s going to be expensive and dangerous, with no added value compared to centralized production where maintenance/security costs per MWh can be substantially reduced.
Yes. There will be gammas to deal with. And a meter of concrete is not particularly expensive. We build bridges with it after all. The key is direct conversion. And the net gain for that is low. You need as much energy to run the reaction as you get net from the equipment. The actual gain for direct conversion runs about 3X because of the fuels used. Protons and Boron11.
If one burns P+B11, there won’t be any gammas; there are hardly ever gammas in (interesting for power) fusion reactions because the starting masses are low. Fusion assays are also much tighter, statistically speaking, then fission assays.
There are potential daughter-reactions in P+B11 burning where output He4 alphas collide with the fuel – but none reduce to gamma outputs.
No gammas? You mean the reaction magically appears in the nuclear ground state? Almost every nuclear reaction has an intermediate excited state in the product nucleus that emits a gamma when it settles to ground. Some are more energetic than others, but I would be surprised that the configuration just appears in the nuclear ground state. I suspect this reaction is taking boron and a proton and making at first a 12C which is in such an elevated state that it breaks into three alpha particles. There would be no beta + or – as everything stays as it started, there would be no neutrons either. The problem is how can it go from such an elevated state in the highly stable 12C nucleus that it breaks up into a ground state in three alpha particles and not emit a few fairly strong gammas? I also wonder if basing an energy source on a low abundance element like boron is a good economic starting point.
If an alpha particle strikes an 11B with the correct energy to bond it will form 15N which is stable, but again I would think the odds of a ground state product unlikely and a gamma ray (or two) as the configuration settles in would be all but inevitable. I also don’t know what an extremely excited 15N might be induced to break into but I could see three alphas and a 3HE nucleus. – don’t know what the cross section might be on that branching, but also don’t know what the energy on the protons and 11B we started with were (probably a few 10s to 100s of eV or less since I don’t see an accelerator). Likewise I don’t know what sort of kinetic energy the alphas get kicked out with or how we are trying to extract this energy.
There is enough boron in the world to supply civilization for 10K to 100K years. And that is before we extract any from the oceans. The US and Turkey have the major supplies.
That is not at all correct. The LPPFusion reactor design is a super high energy design that creates no radiation at all. The study reactor is licensed to operate in a storage unit in a commercial district. This reactor that’s based on the principles of Dense Focused Plasma can be entered within hours of shutdown with no radiation protection at all. This is a small unit designed to generate 5MWs, though several can be operated in parallel for higher output.
All energy in general is in the form of photons. And for nuclear processes, these photons are gamma rays, that’s just the energy level of nuclear bonds. There are nuclear reactions that don’t produce photons, but these also don’t produce any energy.
Kushua: Aneutronic fusion (radiation free) is described here:
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/fusion-power/aneutronic-fusion/
One of the cheapest things there is in a house – and I have built one – is concrete.
A meter of concrete is nothing.
I am not sure that secondary radiation happens though. Not with deuterium and no spare neutrons.
Photodisintegration and photofission might produce something, but my guess is these would be very short lived products and would not be a barrier to maintenance after the thing had cooled down.
Concrete is certainly cheap. Maintaining millions of such concrete bunkers for decades and making sure they’re all safe is in my opinion almost impossible. People are stupid.
Photodisintegration and photofission is exactly what I had in mind (I just did not know the name). I can’t say for sure but in a mix of elements I think any kind of decay half-time can be expected. LHC’s beam dump has pure carbon in it and it is expected to be very dangerous at the end of its lifetime. It depends on what kind of photons is released, though – if their energy is low enough they won’t cause photoeffects.
Kasuha
April 1, 2015 at 3:34 am
You don’t need millions. Tens of thousands is more like it. And a fusion reactor will be cold – radioactivity wise – in not more than 100 years. The fission stuff takes about 1,000. That is not to zero radiation levels but to background levels.
Here is some recent work on magnetic confinement …
Split an atom, release energy, fuse atoms…….input energy?
tell that to the sun
Wicked, the notion is that while protons repel because of electrical force, there is a distance within which the strong force — an attractive force — wins out over electrical repulsion. So it takes energy to get protons close enough for the strong force to take effect, but once it does, there is a net energy release as the protons come together. This is how a fusion bomb works.
For atoms at the heavy end of the periodic table, if a critical number of neutrons are added to the nucleus, they act like spacers between protons, thereby defeating the short-ranged strong force, allowing electrical repulsion to win out. The large unstable atom will split into two more stable atoms, and release energy. This is how a fission bomb works.
🙂
Look up the binding energy curve dear. See the reversal that happens at Iron.
With apologies to serious nuclear scientists everywhere:
Crudely speaking, atoms lighter than iron sort of “have” more energy separately than they do if they are “fused” into a heavier — but still lighter than iron — atom. So if you can fuse them, the extra energy is released. But an atom heavier than iron “has” more energy than the two elements it could be “fissioned” to produce, so if you split a heavier-than-iron atom, the extra energy is, again, released.
Imagine that H has 10 energy units, He has 5, and Li has four. Fuse one H and one He to form Li. 10 + 5 (from the H and He) – 4 (carried off by what is now Li) = 11 units released via fusion.
Imagine that U has 10 energy units, Cs has 4 and Sr has 1. Split U into Cs and Sr. 10 (from the U) = 4 (carried off by Cs) + 1 (carried off by Sr) + 5 released via fission.
I made these numbers up; their only relevance to the real world is that they increase as you move away from iron. I don’t mean to imply that fusion offers more energy than fission (it might, but that is beyond my knowledge).
For whatever reason, iron seems to be the “bottom” of the “energy valley”. At any rate, stellar fusion apparently stops (as a self-sustaining process) when iron is produced. The energy from p-p fusion can propel H-He fusion; energy from that can drive He-He fusion, and on down. When fusion creates iron, though, there is no leftover energy to drive further fusion. (Production of heavier elements in a nova or supernova is something else again.)
(I’ve been known to explain fission to laymen in terms of chocolate-chip cookies. If you can present a nicer analogy than the one I’ve just done, please do — and please let me use it in future.)
It is all in the magic of the binding energy per nucleon. In the lighter isotopes the binding energy per nucleon goes up as you get to heavier atoms with a notable spike at 4HE. and a peak at about iron. For those elements heavier than iron, the binding energy per nucleon actually goes down as you get to heavier nuclei.
The upshot of that is light elements release energy when you fuse them, while elements on the other end of the list release energy when you split them.
• “The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”- Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Let’s give Paul Ehrich a machine gun.
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
At the time, I think it was assumed that free energy would allow more and more massive consumption of natural resources until used up. But they didn’t consider recycling and substitution. For example the wide use of plastics to replace metals and even wood.
Not their (Erlich, Rifkin) intention, I think, but Do the Math.
Except of course we’ll develop the technology to beat the math, because tech, even though driven by math, trumps everything.
A “wiffle-ball” configuration? Are we being spoofed?
No. Look it up in relation to Polywell.
I didn’t see any one mentioned these:
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/10/15/lockheed-martin-claims-fusion-breakthrough-that-could-change-world-forever/
The project was mentioned, but not those links. The impression I got from the articles last year was that they were designed to pique the interest of investors. The technology seemed to be the leaky magnetic bottle architecture people have been trying to seal for some time.
I figured the Rossi device had a better chance of going commercial.
Rossi’s 1 MW unit is supposedly functional at present and under test at a commercial facility for the rest of this year. The problem, assuming that it is legitimate, is that like Black Light Power, it doesn’t agree with known physics. If either of these come to fruition it’s going to set physics scrambling for a while and I can’t see that rather arrogant community simply handing over the helm to maverick’s like R. Mills or Rossi.
You have to assess the probability of any given breakthrough being a real new bit of science that upsets existing science, or pure fraud,
In the case of most renewable energy, its all been pure fraud. I dont think the probability changes much for cold or alternative fusion.
Remember what “they” did to Nikola Tesla. The power of greed has not changed. Remember, electricity rates will necessarily have to increase. The green movement is empowered by those who will keep the poor poorer and the rich richer.
Remember, “they” destroy power producing dams, rather than construct new.
If you have a big stream of neutrons, you will activate some of what the neutrons hit, and when you turn off your reactor, the radiation will NOT stop. There will be less radiation than fission reactors produce. But the statement that the radiation will stop is not correct.
A fission reactor is designed so you can walk in the reactor compartment ten days after shutdown. With a well designed fusion machine it would be less to much less.
BFL.. The problem with taking all the good ideas and combining them for the “ultimate solution” is that you end up with ALL the problems and short falls combined as well. … A lot like averaging climate models….
..see what I did there ….
@Kirkc:
The difference is that this is a reputable company known for getting results (not that past successes guarantee future promises as they like to say in stock pitch fine print) and is a private company that is not addicted to government grants. And the grant side may be why the big fusion plants never get anywhere as I’ve seen reports of cases that when there is a review then they dump tritium into the system to improve efficiency to encourage more taxpayer investment.
http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details
The ITER, for example, will cost an estimated $50 billion and when complete will measure around 100 ft. high and weigh 23,000 tons.
The CFR will avoid these issues by tackling plasma confinement in a radically different way. Instead of constraining the plasma within tubular rings, a series of superconducting coils will generate a new magnetic-field geometry in which the plasma is held within the broader confines of the entire reaction chamber. Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. “So for us, instead of a bike tire expanding into air, we have something more like a tube that expands into an ever-stronger wall,” McGuire says. The system is therefore regulated by a self-tuning feedback mechanism, whereby the farther out the plasma goes, the stronger the magnetic field pushes back to contain it. The CFR is expected to have a beta limit ratio of one. “We should be able to go to 100% or beyond,” he adds.
This crucial difference means that for the same size, the CFR generates more power than a tokamak by a factor of 10. This in turn means, for the same power output, the CFR can be 10 times smaller. The change in scale is a game-changer in terms of producibility and cost, explains McGuire. “It’s one of the reasons we think it is feasible for development and future economics,” he says. “Ten times smaller is the key. But on the physics side, it still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable configuration.” One of the main reasons for this stability is the positioning of the superconductor coils and shape of the magnetic field lines. “In our case, it is always in balance. So if you have less pressure, the plasma will be smaller and will always sit in this magnetic well,” he notes.
Overall, McGuire says the Lockheed design “takes the good parts of a lot of designs.” It includes the high-beta configuration, the use of magnetic field lines arranged into linear ring “cusps” to confine the plasma and “the engineering simplicity of an axisymmetric mirror,” he says. The “axisymmetric mirror” is created by positioning zones of high magnetic field near each end of the vessel so that they reflect a significant fraction of plasma particles escaping along the axis of the CFR. “We also have a recirculation that is very similar to a Polywell concept,” he adds, referring to another promising avenue of fusion power research. A Polywell fusion reactor uses electromagnets to generate a magnetic field that traps electrons, creating a negative voltage, which then attracts positive ions. The resulting acceleration of the ions toward the negative center results in a collision and fusion.
The team acknowledges that the project is in its earliest stages, and many key challenges remain before a viable prototype can be built. However, McGuire expects swift progress. The Skunk Works mind-set and “the pace that people work at here is ridiculously fast,” he says. “We would like to get to a prototype in five generations. If we can meet our plan of doing a design-build-test generation every year, that will put us at about five years, and we’ve already shown we can do that in the lab.” The prototype would demonstrate ignition conditions and the ability to run for upward of 10 sec. in a steady state after the injectors, which will be used to ignite the plasma, are turned off. “So it wouldn’t be at full power, like a working concept reactor, but basically just showing that all the physics works,” McGuire says.
An initial production version could follow five years after that. “That will be a much bigger effort,” he says, suggesting that transition to full-scale manufacturing will necessarily involve materials and heat-transfer specialists as well as gas-turbine makers. The early reactors will be designed to generate around 100 MW and fit into transportable units measuring 23 X 43 ft. “That’s the size we are thinking of now. You could put it on a semi-trailer, similar to a small gas turbine, put it on a pad, hook it up and can be running in a few weeks,” McGuire says. The concept makes use of the existing power infrastructures to enable the CFR to be easily adapted into the current grid. The 100-MW unit would provide sufficient power for up to 80,000 homes in a power-hungry U.S. city and is also “enough to run a ship,” he notes.
Lockheed estimates that less than 25 kg (55 lb.) of fuel would be required to run an entire year of operations. The fuel itself is also plentiful. Deuterium is produced from sea water and is therefore considered unlimited, while tritium is “bred” from lithium. “We already mine enough lithium to supply a worldwide fleet of reactors, so with tritium you never have too much built up, and that’s what keeps it safe. Tritium would be a health risk if there were enough released, but it is safe enough in small quantities. You don’t need very much to run a reactor because it is a million times more powerful than a chemical reaction,” McGuire notes.
Although the first-generation reactors will have radioactive parts at the ends of their lives, such as some steel elements in the shell, McGuire says the contamination situation “is an order of magnitude better” than that of contemporary fission systems. “There is no long-lived radiation. Fission reactors’ stuff will be there forever, but with fusion materials, after 100 years then you are good.” Contamination levels for fusion will improve with additional materials research, he believes. “It’s been a chicken-and-egg situation. Until we’ve had a good working fusion system, there has not been money to go off and do the hard-core materials research,” McGuire says. “So we believe the first generation is good enough to go out and do, and then it will only improve in time.” Old CFR steel shell parts can be disposed of with “a shallow burial in the desert, similar to medical waste today. That’s a major difference to today’s fission systems.”
Operational benefits include no risks of suffering a meltdown. “There is a very minimal amount of radioactive tritium—it’s on the order of grams—so the potential release is very minimal. In addition, there is not enough to be a risk of proliferation. Tritium is used in nuclear weapons but in a much larger inventory than would be involved here, and that’s because you are continually making just enough to feed back in [to maintain the reaction],” he adds.
Preliminary simulations and experimental results “have been very promising and positive,” McGuire says. “The latest is a magnetized ion confinement experiment, and preliminary measurements show the behavior looks like it is working correctly. We are starting with the plasma confinement, and that’s where we are putting most of our effort. One of the reasons we are becoming more vocal with our project is that we are building up our team as we start to tackle the other big problems. We need help and we want other people involved. It’s a global enterprise, and we are happy to be leaders in it.
The CFR has the problem of leaky end cusps. It will be interesting to see if they can reduce the leakage enough to be practical. In the Polywell machine leakage is a small problem because the particle beams can re-enter the system. That keeps the energy cost of “lost” particles low. The Wiffle Ball sealing keeps the number of particles escaping low. too. Electrons are naturally recycled by the positive charged grid. They tend to haul the heavier particles wit them.
If Bill Gates had any sense he’d fund Polywell for a demonstration reactor. Good to see M.Simon defending Polywell here. As I understand it the work so far has not found any show stoppers. Like Doc Bussard, I too am a spaceflight enthusiast. Get on with it!
Thanks!. Several people notified me this was up.
I also gave Tom Ligon – Bussards electronics guy – a heads up. But he likes spending time in the woods so it may be a while before he shows up.
Alas, I think the problem here is the PRESUMPTION that stellar bodies obtain their energy from “nuclear fusion”. Rather than a central core, which acts as a melange of “super heavy nuclei”, allowing dropping into deep potential energy wells, and conversion of matter to antimatter, with subsequent annihilation to yield pure E=mc^2 energy.
See this work:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/260545083/Results-of-experiments-on-collective-nuclear-reactions-in-superdense-substance
Now compare the overall ability to model “many body nuclear” systems (I.e., the elements as they go UP from Helium and above..with the ability to model SPD orbitals and the “electron clouds” around atoms and molecules. The electronic modeling of atoms and molecules is QUITE advanced, and totally understood. The modeling of the many body problem, has something like 15 competing “theories” right now, none of which are comprehensive, and give no ability to “predict” interactions such as observed in the Scribd cited above. Thus, the reason a successful “fusion” reactor has not been developed, may be because stellar energies DO NOT COME FROM FUSION REACTIONS!
“may be because stellar energies DO NOT COME FROM FUSION REACTIONS!”
Then how are all the upper elements made from Hydrogen if not by successive fusion reactions???
That, my friend, is utter poppycock.
I too am a spaceflight enthusiast.
But the only viable energy form we have ever created is heating H2O.
All else is speculation.
What Up With That community — The 2015 microsoft talk is the best source on the latest Polywell information:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=238715
Also My blog:
http://www.thepolywellblog.com/
And the Navy paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0133v1.pdf
From the article:
“He (Krall) acknowledged that EMC2 Fusion hasn’t yet determined whether or not a working Polywell fusion reactor is feasible”
Krall is a plasma physicist and adviser to EMC2 Fusion. I think ITER is ahead of the game. Krall et al have yet to build a working fusion reactor, much less a reactor that produces more energy than its input. If they have a superior design, they can get funding to build an experimental reactor from private investors like Bill Gates, Google, Richard Branson, or research institutions like MIT, Caltech. When there is lack of funding, it is often because investors are not convinced.
And ITER’s working reactor is located at? And the papers proving it works are? Krall has not given up on Polywell. I assume he would do that if there was a show stopper.
It is not convincing investors need. It is a good deal.
ITER is building a Tokamak reactor, a design that has been in operations since 1960s. While Krall is still dreaming, no shortage of funding for Tokamak reactors. Below are the Tokamak reactors.
Currently in operation:
1960s: TM1-MH (since 1977 Castor; since 2007 Golem) in Prague, Czech Republic. In operation in Kurchatov Institute since early 1960s but renamed to Castor in 1977 and moved to IPP CAS, Prague; in 2007 moved to FNSPE, Czech Technical University in Prague and renamed to Golem.
1975: T-10, in Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia (formerly Soviet Union); 2 MW
1983: Joint European Torus (JET), in Culham, United Kingdom
1983: Novillo Tokamak, at the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares,in Mexico City, Mexico
1985: JT-60, in Naka, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan; (Currently undergoing upgrade to Super, Advanced model)
1987: STOR-M, University of Saskatchewan; Canada; first demonstration of alternating current in a tokamak.
1988: Tore Supra at the CEA, Cadarache, France
1989: Aditya, at Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) in Gujarat, India
1980s: DIII-D, in San Diego, USA; operated by General Atomics since the late 1980s
1989: COMPASS, in Prague, Czech Republic; in operation since 2008, previously operated from 1989 to 1999 in Culham, United Kingdom
1990: FTU, in Frascati, Italy
1991: Tokamak ISTTOK, at the Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Lisbon, Portugal;
1991: ASDEX Upgrade, in Garching, Germany
1992: H-1NF (H-1 National Plasma Fusion Research Facility) based on the H-1 Heliac device built by Australia National University’s plasma physics group and in operation since 1992
1992: Alcator C-Mod, MIT, Cambridge, USA
1992: Tokamak à configuration variable (TCV), at the EPFL, Switzerland
1994: TCABR, at the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; this tokamak was transferred from Centre des Recherches en Physique des Plasmas in Switzerland
1995: HT-7, in Hefei, China
1999: MAST, in Culham, United Kingdom
1999: NSTX in Princeton, New Jersey
1999: Globus-M in Ioffe Institute,Saint Petersburg, Russia
1990s: Pegasus Toroidal Experiment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; in operation since the late 1990s
2002: HL-2A, in Chengdu, China
2006: EAST (HT-7U), in Hefei, China
2008: KSTAR, in Daejon, South Korea
2010: JT-60SA, in Naka, Japan; upgraded from the JT-60.
2012: SST-1, in Gandhinagar, India; the Institute for Plasma Research reports 1000 seconds operation.
2012: IR-T1, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran
2012: ST25 at Tokamak Energy at Culham, Oxfordshire, UK (now at Milton Park)
2014: ST25 (HTS) the first tokamak to have all magnetic fields formed from high temperature superconducting magnets, at Tokamak Energy based in Oxfordshire, UK
Previously operated:
1960s: T-3 and T-4, in Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia (formerly Soviet Union); T-4 in operation in 1968.
1963: LT-1, Australia National University’s plasma physics group built the first tokamak outside of Soviet Union c. 1963
1971-1980: Texas Turbulent Tokamak, University of Texas at Austin, USA
1973-1976: Tokamak de Fontenay aux Roses (TFR), near Paris, France
1973-1979: Alcator A, MIT, USA
1978-1987: Alcator C, MIT, USA
1978-2013: TEXTOR, in Jülich, Germany
1979-1998: MT-1 Tokamak, Budapest, Hungary (Built at the Kurchatov Institute, Russia, transported to Hungary in 1979, rebuilt as MT-1M in 1991)
1980-2004: TEXT/TEXT-U, University of Texas at Austin, USA
1982-1997: TFTR, Princeton University, USA
1987-1999: Tokamak de Varennes; Varennes, Canada; operated by Hydro-Québec and used by researchers from Institut de recherche en électricité du Québec (IREQ) and the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS)
1988-2005: T-15, in Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia (formerly Soviet Union); 10 MW
1991-1998: START in Culham, United Kingdom
1990s-2001: COMPASS, in Culham, United Kingdom
1994-2001: HL-1M Tokamak, in Chengdu, China
1999-2005: UCLA Electric Tokamak, in Los Angeles, USA
Well there is actually no proof that a tok can generate net energy. By prro paper I meant a paper write of of a net energy experiment. BTW a tok big enough to economically generate energy is too big. You get too many GW. Too many steam plants. Good for base load. And not much else if even that. Power companies like 100 MW units that can be throttled economically. You can put the plants near the loads. That lowers transmission losses. Transmission is 1/2 your electric bill for a home owner. The cost of transmission goes way up with a 10 GWe plant.
Vincent Page of GE covered the desirable qualities of a fusion reactor: http://www.askmar.com/Fusion_files/2005-3%20Desirable%20Fusion%20Qualities.pdf
Fusion reactors must be sized reasonably.
Current cost estimates for the ITER project are approximately $6 billion.
GE’s present quarterly earnings are “only” $4 billion.
We don’t want governments to build fusion reactors, we want private industry to build them.
Designs need to be feasible with power output in the 15 MWe to 1500 MWe range and cost < $6700 per KWe.
(MWe = MW electrical, KWe = KW electrical)
More expensive machines will not be commercially viable.
Competition will only occur if private industry is involved.
I guess you’re not an engineer in the power industry. Papers “proving” technical feasibility are a dime a dozen. The only way to actually prove it is to build a reactor. 100 MW is less economical than 1,000 MW for the same technology. Transmission cost is a function of distance not the capacity of the plant.
ITER $6 billion cost is small. That’s a 1,500 MW nuclear plant. The 1970s Chernobyl plant was 4,000 MW. Your $6700 per KWe is expensive. Solar PV is less than $4000 per KWe. Natural gas plant is less than $1000 per KWe.
Tell your private industry friends to invest in fusion instead of complaining in blogs.
Reblogged this on The Arts Mechanical and commented:
The Polywell isn’t “lost.” Just not handled right.
Aneutronic fusion (radiation free) described here:
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/fusion-power/aneutronic-fusion/
Too many comments here for me to have read them all, but it seems all the fantasized “future power” speculations still require a boiler and turbine, effectively eliminating them from consideration as ‘domestic’ sources of electricity. You don’t want a steam turbine in your basement.
A real breakthrough will be one that produces electricity directly, without heat.
No, that’s not true. Polywell and especially Focus fusion derives electricity straight from the apparatus. In the case of the focus fusion, you can think of it as like a particle accelerator in reverse. Electricity is sent along a cathode at extremely high voltage until it gets to the end where the plasma collapses within an atmosphere of boron and hydrogen forcing them to fuse. This creates a burst of energy which sends energy back down the cathode where it is collected and sent to capacitors. Some of that collected energy is sent back to the cathode and some of it is drawn to be distributed.
But they still won’t be in our basements. It would still be too expensive – there is a critical size these devices need to be in order to produce net power. Too large and they would burn up, too small and they won’t produce more energy than they require. with the Polywell, the ideal size about 3m sq, but it would produce enough energy for a town. Likewise the fusor, you would be looking to produce energy for about 5000 homes. What’s great about them is that designs are relatively simple and economic and presumably will slot nicely into existing infrastructure.
That is exactly the design of LPPFusion… no boilers and turbine… incredibly cheap energy production.
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/fusion-power/dpf-device/
Yes that is the one I was referring to. IMO the focus fusion project is the one closest to commercial feasibility. That doesn’t mean I don’t think the polywell isn’t a contender, but their problems seem a little more difficult to overcome.
We ought really hear more from “The Polywell Guy” than the few links he posted. This whole area is incredibly interesting and exciting.
– This article presumes that the development of the wiffle-ball design has stopped, but to my knowledge it is still continuing.
– Bussard originally developed the concept as a form of highly efficient rocket propulsion for interplanetary flight.
– As someone pointed out earlier, one of his earliest projects was the “Ramjet”. He comes from a propulsion background.
– The US Navy funded him on a shoestring so that the IEA wouldn’t notice and complain that “they were the ones doing fusion, we should get all the funding”.
– The reason you don’t know much about the Polywell development is because it was developed by the US Navy in secret. The potential for a safer form of submarine propulsion than conventional nuclear was what attracted them.
– Another reason for its slowed development is that it initially showed so much promise that it was felt it was worth developing a boron-hydrogen fuelled version as that would be aneutronic. WB-8 is still being developed in secret but what we know is that results have been good and funding is continuing.
– There are problems with the Polywell design such as thermalization from “brehmstrahlung”. Bussard considered these problems to be non-trivial but solvable.
– He also considered it not to be worth going to a middle stage in design, it was worth going straight to full scale. Because of the scale of the power output, that put the limit of the size of a polywell reactor at about 3m sq. (1.5m is the minimum size to break even)
– At that size, roughly the size of a jet engine, it would produce roughly a little more net energy as a jet engine. About 95 – 100 MW. Enough for a small town.
The Polywell is not the only game in town. Sarastro92 posted a link to the focus fusion project. IMO I think this project is the closest to getting usable and commercially running fusion. The disadvantages with it is that it is not as efficient as the polywell design (my understanding), and it will have parts that will wear out – specifically the rod along which the plasma pinch travels. By not as efficient, the proposed net power gained is less in relation to the power input. Also, you have to ‘re-fuel’ it every so often and I think that would be a non-trivial exercise. Never-the-less, it’s also quite a small and relatively cheap design – or so it seems to me, and would fit easily into existing infrastructure.
IIRC Doc Bussard said during his Google Tech talk that “we’ve spent $16 billion on Tokamaks and found they won’t work”.
No Slywolfe, p-B11fusion done right with direct conversion is essentially a couple of million volt DC power supply. No turbines, no steam.
C’mon people, look up the Google Tech Talk and watch. A great 90 minutes entertainment and you’ll learn enough not to post commnets which are wrong or miss the point on this topic.
I’m off to watch Park on Microsoft.
Actually the drive voltage is in the 50KV to 300KV range.
You are correct about direct conversion. A couple of million DC volts. I actually got a quote once for conversion equipment. It is not very expensive as those things go.
Sounds like wishful thinking to me.
And aren’t we on this blog allergic to articles with the words “claimed”, “could” and “might”?
Check out the literature on this. Electrostatic confinement has been around since the invention of the TV. But there are a number of reasons why it hasn’t been explored properly earlier, some of which are outlined by Bussard himself.
One of the reasons is that the kind of physics involved isn’t “sexy”. You’re a young physicist, and every one is interested in Higgs Bosons, quantum mechanics, and black holes and things. This is pretty arcane physics, advanced high school level, but involving really tricky engineering solutions.
Another reason is that all the focus on fusion (pardon the pun) has been in plasma confinement such as JET or ITER. It seems the more expensive the project, the more likely it is to get funding, and indirectly proportional to its likelihood of ever being commercially viable.
Another reason is that, just throwing money at the problems don’t make them go away. There are engineering challenges that need to be solved but it requires understanding of fields and energies way beyond anything that has been studied. So the science has and understanding has to be there first. You need the right people, performing the right experiments, and building that understanding. That simply takes the time it takes.
Another reason is that this is vacuum tube physics. And everyone knows vacuum tubes are obsolete. I was fortunate to grow up at the end of the vacuum tube era. “Space charge” is an old friend. No one studies that stuff any more. So when does a person get into tubes these days? When they get a job that requires it. As you point out there is not much primary interest.
In the deep oceans you can find temperatures that will melt glass, and 100c minus without freezing the water, all the energy we need is down there, where are those research $ ?