Talk-Polywell.org

Don't worry about "risking" your career by doing you PhD work on this kind of thing. With a PhD in engineering you can pretty much write your own ticket a lot of places. I never did work in my degree field after I left academia. Just having the piece of paper puts you playing on a whole other ball f...

That's why I suggested E fields. It can be fitted to any coil shape. (I hope) I'm thinking of starting with electrodes placed in the shadows of all the coils. An electrostatic lens nominally consists of 3 charged tubes in series with the center one having the opposite charge from the end ones. No, I...

A fission plant I toured once had several (3?) diesel-electric railroad locomotives parked on site for their emergency backup power.
Those are a few thousand horsepower ~= a few megawatts each.

When you talk of "convergence" what do you mean?
Do you mean physically aimed at the device center?
Do you mean in the time domain ie. they arrive at the same time?
Do you mean in the velocity domain ie. keeping the ions mono-energetic?
Or
Do you mean something more esoteric?

We could validly assign ground to the alpha collecting grid, the trap grid, the magrid, or any other convenient point in the device. For safety I think of putting the conversion shell and the vacuum tank at V=0 and at earth ground. For separating the different energy alphas I'm thinking of somethin...

You will never be able to convince some people. So be it. But, notice the even Jeremy Rifkin has come over to reluctantly supporting Fission plants as the years advance. IMHO there are lots and lots of environmentalists who would embrace this technology as an alternative to fission. [msimon- please ...

The direct conversion anode sure looks like a Van de Graaff generator top end to me. But instead of putting charges of a few volts at time onto its id, we are putting charges onto the id at 1.25 MV. What voltage will we see on the outside? Pretty high, I think. Ummm Wacky Idea: I wonder if this effe...

Aluminum (my industry) smelting is very electricity-intensive. Most of the smelters are located next to dams, etc. BFR technology could put the smelters where the bauxite is... A mothballed aluminum smelter might be a good site for an early BFR-100 test. It has a huge current capacity to jump-start...

Hmmmm…
Plasma is almost super conducting
Lighting is order of 2MegAmp
Lighting scar diameters 1” to 6” (confined only by its own z-pinch).
Talk about high temperature superconductors.
Nah, it can’t be that easy
Plasma Conduits!
Save us from ourselves.

DrMike, Well, like I said it was half baked. Now that you point it out I see 2 null field points just outside the small overlapping region rather than one inside it. I was only seeing the space inside it. There are other concerns too but that one is a show stopper. Do you think Tom Cuddihy’s concern...

Cuddihy, draw a single equipotential field line "surface" around the coils . You could be right. But I’m not quite sure what you are pointing at. Which equipotential surface are you looking at? I see the fields of each adjacent pair of leads adding in the space between them (except on the one line i...

Yes,
Like a Dynamo like the earth's core.
But, how does it help?
I would expect the equator to bulge pushing against the containment.
It might be useful if there were two weak points in the containment to assist
or if there were a particularly strong ring in the containment to take advantage of.

OUCH! I've made that emergency room trip a few times too. No permanent damage so far. 14 is that age. I may have misinterpreted the picture (in previous post). 1:00 & 8:30 may well be the cylindrical plumes from point between 3 coils. It would take a picture from another angle to see where those plu...

At about the 1:00 and 8:30 positions (from center of apparent triangle) I see a sheet of glow seen edge on squirting out between the coils at their closest approach. I also see a cylindrical plume at 11:00 through the coil center. OK, I think I get it now. The POINT cusp is the LINE from the sphere ...

There are a few specially designated very large load routes.
For example one goes from Morton Thiokol in Utah to a barge terminal in Louisiana for the SS Boosters.