high energy particle work

[kunkmiester]

Going either way, working for power or not working, a polywell seems to be a reasonable way to throw atoms together without too much trouble. You won't get the relativistic velocities that a real atom smasher can, but there's plenty of smaller work that could be done.

I thought about this for a simple paper I was doing for English class at the time, and the question an investor would ask is, "We spend $200 million on this thing and it doesn't work, then what?" Well, I was thinking that it would work well to explore the low energy stuff more easily, someone might be willing to pay for that. It also works to generate non-Maxwellian plasmas, so you can investigate that, I suppose.

I'm not a physicist though, so I don't know what's available at the energy levels a polywell could produce. Is there something it'd be worth using for, that would help hedge the bet should power generation fail? I was reminded of this by the thread on the Tokomak progress. Should the polywell succeed, all these magnetic donuts won't be worth much. What would you do with them to try and get at least some of your money back? That goes for both machines really.

[MSimon]

Going either way, working for power or not working, a polywell seems to be a reasonable way to throw atoms together without too much trouble. You won't get the relativistic velocities that a real atom smasher can, but there's plenty of smaller work that could be done.

I thought about this for a simple paper I was doing for English class at the time, and the question an investor would ask is, "We spend $200 million on this thing and it doesn't work, then what?" Well, I was thinking that it would work well to explore the low energy stuff more easily, someone might be willing to pay for that. It also works to generate non-Maxwellian plasmas, so you can investigate that, I suppose.

I'm not a physicist though, so I don't know what's available at the energy levels a polywell could produce. Is there something it'd be worth using for, that would help hedge the bet should power generation fail? I was reminded of this by the thread on the Tokomak progress. Should the polywell succeed, all these magnetic donuts won't be worth much. What would you do with them to try and get at least some of your money back? That goes for both machines really.

Large neutron generator?