Talk-Polywell.org

How did it go with fission powerplants? That was tech developed by DoD and the university system under the Manhattan Project. How were private co's brought into that later? Was it an insider thing? Was it all open and above-board? What lessons can we learn from that historical example? Also, what ca...

Even if Dr. Bussard over estimated scaling by 10% or 20% ...... IMHO, we can then, at that point, pursue the "Q", a tad more confident.

If Bussard's scaling laws were off 10-20% but correct otherwise, compensation would be trivial, since we're still talking r^5 or r^7 effects.

This is what I missed out on when I skipped upper division mechanics. This link filled me in:http://www.virginia.edu/ep/Interactions ... matics.htm

We're still left with energy transferred by electric interaction, no?

Energy transfer is going to be low because of a mass difference of roughly 7300 to 1. Simon, you got me scratching my head. Are you talking about overall density of a particle population or are you talking about mass difference between particles? Or ??? If I hit a cannonball with a BB, energy will ...

On the question of thermalization of the fusion plasma - it seems to me that there would be a correlation between tendency to thermalize and the probability of a fusion occurring in a given unit volume / time. If alpha products are coming out in random directions, but relatively infrequently, maybe ...

I've seen some discussion about multi core machines and thought I'd ask if everyone's sure that the problem is or can be reasonably parallelized. I did some work a couple years ago on a Beowulf type system that turned out to be a complete dog. Beowulf is not a shared memory model like multicore but ...

The UW Madison team was driving their fusor at 120 kV at 6A in the run they claimed was 5e9 n/s. By contrast, Bussard's best run was one of his two 12.5 kV runs at 800A. Looking at power in, that's 720 kW at Madison vs. Bussard's 10 MW. Judged by power in and power out, the Madison guys have Bussar...

I thought the whole point of polywell was to solve the electron losses inherent in fusors... the polywell & magnetic shielded grid were a radical departure. If UWM found other ways to achieve the same results then why bother with the complications of polywell?

Are there any details of WB-7 that can be shared? Is it a 100% clone of WB-6? Is it the same size? Does it have pulsed operation or is it continuous? What are the voltage / current levels? Did they make the coils more rugged vs WB-6?

If the Casimir effect is just a force, after the plates come together you have to pull them apart again. How're you going to get net energy from that?

I realize I'm missing something here about electron movement. What force keeps the electrons moving from the emitters to the center of the chamber? It would seem that since the outside grid is + at a potential of ~100KV, the easiest path would be from the emitter to the nearest point on the + grid. ...

Item #6 on the the quackery test http://www.psorsite.com/docs/quackery.html : "5 points for each word in all capital letters (except for those with defective keyboards)." heh.

I'd think that even with rumored support by some in congress, it's still politically fragile. So it's better to not blab too much and give the process a safe space to develop in due course.

What about recirculation? The electrons come straight back in.

I thought you want to have the electrons spend most of their time in the wiffleball. If there's too much leakage, even with recirculation, the ions are going to go somewhere other than towards the middle.

They probably want to check on http://www.fusor.net/