Talk-Polywell.org

"The JET tokamak has reached Q=0.65 and ITER is designed to reach Q=10." I think expectations have been conditioned by semi-conductors, where chip consolidation and shrinking die size make improvement predictable and seemingly inevitable; just add more money. Lyman Spitzer planned a fusion demo mach...

5 years ago petroleum soared to unprecedented prices with unprecedented speed, seeming to validate the dire energy predictions of Matthew Simmons and others. The result was an unprecedented worldwide economic craseh which may have had more to do with energy than with banking. At the same time, there...

I would posit this is more of a function of politics and administering bureaucrats The other point of view is -- "bureaucrats" have been practically the only forces keeping fusion research going -- which is true of Polywell, true for the NASA years of Dense Plasma Focus, and continuing to be true f...

as far as I know, nobody was able to assemble the 3 meters diameter Polywell Does the patent specify that size? If the scaling laws say that size is required, the patent must say so. The Patent Office isn't rejecting fusion out of hand, as it routinely does (say) perpetual motion machines. It's jus...

let´s say Polywell breaks even. But because its not patenteable because the patents office ruled it could not break even, its copied. Can you sue the patents office for billions of dollars that you lost because of their misruling? Except it does NOT break even. The patent system was supposed to be ...

would leave it open for anyone to "refine" this process and make their own patent application? Nope. Anyone who succeeds in making a useful invention -- a Polywell that actually does something useful, for example -- can patent that. But invention is required -- more than a refinement of a device th...

The NIF was never going to work as a good commercial reactor anyway. I think everybody knew that. That may be so. I'm not a physicist, but even I could see NiF is an awful lot of machinery to point at a single tiny pellet without any mechanism to rapidly repeat shots. But that doesn't make the fail...

well dang it. If demonstrating and commercializing the polywell is turning into another lifelong career prospect, Dr. Bussard is cussing up a storm from beyond the grave and hopefully cursing those that have made it so. Freaking bureaucrats. :evil: and also if this is the case, i sure hope the chin...

A BTU is a BTU Is a BTU at 50C worth the same as a BTU at 1500C? I expect the engineer trying to generate electricity or mechanical work would say no. The point is cash is *already* crudely equivalent to money. Everything of value comes out of the ground, or from human or animal work. The closest e...

As I said early in this thread, not all forms of energy have equal economic value A BTU is a BTU and a joule is a joule. Energy per capita is a very useful metric -- the only really meaningful one: -- to evaluate a culture's prosperity -- to analyze the prospects of a growth culture (which depends ...

The idea that money IS energy is old -- dating back at least to the Technocrats of the 1930s. In effect, a nation's wealth can be measured in terms of energy per capita. This reflects in a very literal sense the more a person purchases (whether food or automobiles) the more energy it took. Food calo...

Tri-Alpha may be the best privately funded fusion effort (at least that anyone knows about) and Polywell fans will appreciate its p-11B goals. My guess -- my *hope* -- is the best research is the research no one knows about. Tri-Alpha and Polywell are in the shadows (in terms of status updates and p...

I suppose this is a good place to put this link: https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/project_status/2012/october.php NIF October status update. Still plugging along. http://dvice.com/archives/2012/11/largest-laser-i.php "We know, the fact that the largest and most powerful laser in the world is now be...

1 company at the very front, and I dont think there's any other organization even close to emc2 Why? Isn't Polywell a very simple device, easy to replicate? at the very least it's immediate predecessors are well known. What could someone with $100 million do? Or 10x that? --- build the demo machine...

Do you think this is Good or Bad news for the Polywell? I vote good news. It's bad news for fusion, which is the key point, and what's bad for fusion is bad for all fusion research. NiF seemed ill-conceived to me -- even if it works, it doesn't (in the sense of pointing the way to a practical machi...