Talk-Polywell.org

Much of the show was background information. My notes from latter part of the interview: 1:41 With FRC, one can recover the input energy at 90 or 95%, and the fusion energy at 80% 1:43 D-T fusion requires about 100 million degrees. D-3He requires a higher temperature (200 or 300 million degrees), wh...

I can't imagine a flywheel being practical, at the very least because it would require a very high power motor/generator. The twin assembly sounds more interesting. I would require slowing down the "expansion" phase of one machine so it could supply power for the FRC formation, acceleration, and com...

They're emphasising their efficiency, which as a physicist agree is important, but I can't help thinking that it's much more important to eliminate the cost and delay of obtaining and installing all those heat exchangers, turbines, and generators. Speaking of supply chains, has anyone at Helion spec...

That would be H. R. 5441 https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5441/text/ih . Some of those "fusion energy components" sound pretty generic: “(vii) A high-voltage capacitor. “(x) High-power switches. “(xii) High-voltage conductors and insulators. “(xvii) Cooling system components. ...

John Slough has written an article "A compact fusion reactor based on the staged compression of an FRC". He describes an approach to forming and heating an FRC that "is expected to achieve fusion gain as large as 10" with D-T fusion. He describes a number of constraints on device parameters to ensur...

Suppose that, on each pulse, a fraction s of the He3 does not fuse. So a fraction s^2 survives two pulses, a fraction s^3 survives three pulses, etc., and a given He3 survives n=s/(1-s) pulses on average. Now let c = the energy per pulse per He3 to heat and compress the plasma, y = energy yield when...

With He3 selling for $20,000/g and tritium for $30,000/g, I wonder if they can make a profit running on D-D without generating net electricity. At least until the markets for those gasses crash.

There's a new paper entitled "Polywell revisited" at https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06761 by Jaeyoung Park, Nicholas A. Krall, Giovanni Lapenta, and Masayuki Ono Here's the abstract: The Polywell fusion concept, originally proposed by Robert W. Bussard in 1985, has been investigated for over four decade...

Hmm. So I guess the strategy is to use D-D to tune the device for the right plasma conditions (e.g. triple product), then D-He3 and further tuning to maximize the fusion, then yet more tuning to maximize the direct energy out. Hopefully that will demonstrate net electricity production. It seems to m...

Do you expect they'll work on DT for now, and work up to using He3 later? Or will they have to be using He3 to get net electricity without using a thermal cycle?

It's not entirely clear what exists and what's simulated. I assume everything through the first paragraph in section 3 exists, and everything after the phrase "simulation results" within section 3 is simulated. I'm not sure about the parts in between. In particular, have they tried puffing in hydrog...

On further examination, maybe this doesn't look so good. First, I should correct my nomenclature. I referred to this as "beam-target fusion", but it's actually closer to a colliding beam reactor. There was a comparable proposal by Rostoker, Binderbauer and Monkhorst [1]. Lampe and Manheimer [2] poin...

On further examination, maybe this doesn't look so good. First, I should correct my nomenclature. I referred to this as "beam-target fusion", but it's actually closer to a colliding beam reactor. There was a comparable proposal by Rostoker, Binderbauer and Monkhorst [1]. Lampe and Manheimer [2] poin...

So, bang two spinning (counter-rotating? not clear from the paper) rings of plasma together at (presumably) high frequency to get fusion? Is that the gist of it? I believe it's a single FRC. Magnetic fields constrain it axially, so all the particles in the plasma are in a potential energy well. The...

Yes, the article about the soldered joints was very interesting. Apparently they plan to use compressed air to blow solder wherever they want it. I wondered how they'd avoid the solder short-circuiting the various joints - but then realized that would be no worse than the stainless steel that alread...