Talk-Polywell.org

On a physics site, the title of this post was quite alarming.

This article may have been the trigger: June 2, 2015 UW researchers scaling up fusion hopes with DOE grant by Jennifer Langston http://www.washington.edu/news/2015/06/02/uw-researchers-scaling-up-fusion-hopes-with-doe-grant/ Here are the slides linked to in the press release. This thing looks... ki...

Dan--

Here's the main patent. There are others mentioned up-thread, but I haven't gone through those.

The patent never mentions a potential well, although it does refer to a magnetic well. (I just did a search through the text.)

I keep staring at the patent application for this thing every so often and I think it's a lot simpler than a lot of you are making it out to be: 1) This is just a plain ol' magnetic confinement system, not IEC in any way shape or form. 2) The nod to the polywell they've made is because they're capit...

New article on the L-M CFR is up, link: http://www.physics-astronomy.com/2015/02/lockheed-martins-new-compact-fusion.html#.VPXjHk03Njr Here's the Aviation Week article that's the source. http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details Overall, McGuire says the ...

A little bit of radioactivity in the atmosphere is completely irrelevant. Besides, the hydrogen reaction mass barely gets radioactive anyway. Also want to point out that subsequent projects to NERVA demonstrated much higher T/W than 1, high enough to SSTO. If we're talking about a solid-core engine...

And spewing radioactive junk into space on an interplanetary mission is not so much of an environmental problem. I think the Orion project studied this issue and determined that you had to be effectively outside the magnetosphere before you dumped any kind of radioactive stuff outside the spacecraf...

A steady state reactor wont be able to do Tritium suppressed and He3 boosted D+D though, unlike Helion's pulsed reactor, which can do just that. So they would have to go all the way to PB11, which is a lot more challenging. I'm having a hard time imagining how you'd get charged fusion products out ...

As usual, I'm confused.

The abstract here says this is a spheromak. Have these guys made a genuinely stable spheromak? How? And wouldn't that make General Fusion pretty much a slam-dunk?

I missed this last year. Nice overview, about a half-hour long.

I wonder if this magnetic field applied to the Z- pinch is similar to the mild magnetic field that apparently helps the DPF . The initial motivation for adding the axial B-field was to inhibit energy losses from electron and ion transport out of the fuel. They preheat the fuel with a laser fired at...

http://www.nature.com/news/triple-threa ... on-1.14445

Always nice to get the paper in just under the wire before the new year...

This seems to be the money quote: Moreover, as we are employing the TNSA mechanism to produce the proton pulse, we know that the proton beam is Coulomb-pulled by a relativistic electron pre-pulse cloud. This cloud contains around 10–30% of the pico pulse energy and has an impact on the boron plasma ...

From the paper: A more substantial method of mitigation is to confine the electrons with an appropriately shaped magnetic field. Such a field has been implemented by Bussard in his PolywellTM “cusped” field configuration, where the fields are generated electromagnetically. The magnetic fields necess...

Betruger wrote:Range? Ha! Supercar Tesla...

You're not trying to build the equivalent of the JATO-equipped Chevy, are you? That didn't end well, apocryphally speaking.