Talk-Polywell.org

Correct, also because until when a working reactor will arise (be it a Stellarator or a Tokamak or a Spheromak), there will be plenty of new issues/discoveries that will make the comparison bar swing in favor of one solution more than the others.

That said, once a commercial machine will arise than the points Dan mentioned will become totally relevant and there will be many other that will be more important than triple product evaluation. Fuel burn efficiency and overall fusion efficiency just to name two.

ladajo wrote:Dan,
Regarding your comments above, what temperature are the stored particles in a Penning trap? .....

An interesting, if tangential consideration. Certainly chilling the charged particle to a few degrees Kelvin greatly decreases the gyro radius in a given B field strength, so ExB diffusion steps will be much smaller. Conversely, the colisionality increases as ~ 1/ square of the temperature, so ExB steps will occur much more frequently. How things balance out is uncertain for me. The density though, irregardless of temperature, leads to increases in collision frequency as a function of the density squared. I am also uncertain how the temperature contributes to the growth of edge instabilities.

Dan Tibbets