Talk-Polywell.org

I know they have been around for a while, but Wendelstein 7, the most advanced Stellerator is nowhere near JET levels.

Stellarators are still at a relatively early stage. They are complex, expensive and big. I wonder what compelled them to choose this particular design.

Lol, 90 days to Saturn is already better than expected. But 8 days to Saturn??? Screw impossible physics engines. There is a whole Star System to colonize. I was not even thinking 1g acceleration were possible Speaking of which... did you consider 1g just for fun or did you make some calculations r...

mvanwink5 wrote:It may also be a function of the ability of Helion to handle another huge project. They are right in the middle of developing, building, testing their reactor. Likely they are not pushing this other project.

Could very well be true.

I do not know where people are seeing 10 million Isp. I read an Isp of ~360,000 seconds and 330 kN of thrust for the D+He3 configuration. There are two big unknowns to me. They need 5 MA input current for a few microseconds. I have no idea what size of a power supply they would need for that. I did ...

I agree. The NIAC funding was not quite enough to get this project completed, but I am sure that they will have enough funding once Helion get's their reactor going.

Helion has not exceeded 50 million total to date. Thankfully, they have not needed more than that so far. Their full scale prototype was 35 million. If that one meets their milestones, they should not have trouble getting the money they will need for the commercial reactor prototype (which will cos...

Gotta love ARPA-E. Time and again, they have been the best source of funding for small fusion startups/labs in the country. Have helped quite a few get to that point, where private investors take interest.

Looks to me like they still have a long road ahead of them

I wished they would try to break their old record at JET, but it is not a priority. With this Super H Mode, they _might_ be able to reach a Q>1.

New paper from Uri's team: Kinetic simulations of sheared flow stabilization in high-temperature Z-pinch plasmas: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.5092241 Looks like more accurate simulation techniques confirm their approach and match experimental results. Also worth noting is that they ...

ARPA-E is seeking information from diverse R&D communities, from both within and especially outside the fusion R&D community, about technological solutions and innovations that can enable commercially viable fusion power plants. While it is impossible to predict precisely what is needed for...

Read an article recently on Europe's launch systems. It talked about what I recall was like a decade of plans, but no mention at all of developing a reusable rocket in the Falcon vein. Blew my mind. They do have plans for something like Falcon 9. First step is a "Grasshopper" like experim...

Whytes talk is now available on the conference site: https://indico.cern.ch/event/749923/contributions/3315374/attachments/1855772/3048091/SPARC_SOFE_2019_Whyte.pdf CFS has more than 100 people working now and 70 of them are working on the HTS magnets. The HTS magnet development project is schedule...

Are you sure about that? I know I've seen conversation about how the Starlink sats will actively de-orbit... though I have to admit I can't find an actual source behind that conversation for the moment. It doesn't make sense to me why you wouldn't. I imagine with an active de-orbit you could likely...