Talk-Polywell.org

ladajo wrote:Amazing that Canada can support small scale fusion, but we can't. Pitiful.

That is not quite true. Last year there was the ARPA-E Alpha funding viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5556.
The US support for fusion is much larger in total than that of Canada, which should not be forgotten. Of course the majority of the US funding goes to NIF and ITER and its supporting research.

This is my point. We are pouring a ton of cash into ITER, something that has no path to be commercially viable. We should redirect some of that cash to small scale work.

crowberry wrote:

ladajo wrote:Amazing that Canada can support small scale fusion, but we can't. Pitiful.

That is not quite true. Last year there was the ARPA-E Alpha funding viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5556.
The US support for fusion is much larger in total than that of Canada, which should not be forgotten. Of course the majority of the US funding goes to NIF and ITER and its supporting research.

Compared to the budget of Canada the US is spending peanuts.

Apples and potatoes.

Michael Delage will speak at the 22nd Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE 2016) http://tofe2016.ans.org/conference with the title The Scientist Entrepeneur. This is the link to the abstract of the talk:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By6yWf ... ef=2&pli=1

I think it's great my country is spending the money, and General Fusion's approach just might work. The thing is, Polywell has at least as good a chance, and is the far and away more elegant design. I just can't see the General Fusion approach having any practical aerospace application.

What's important in my point of view is that just one company breaks the wall and proves that fusion is indeed a viable process with actual technology.
Once that is done there will be a plethora of investors willing to fund different approaches to fusion for different applications.

Giorgio wrote:What's important in my point of view is that just one company breaks the wall and proves that fusion is indeed a viable process with actual technology.
Once that is done there will be a plethora of investors willing to fund different approaches to fusion for different applications.

Maybe General Fusion will be allowed to succeed because it's merely competitive with existing technology. If it was super efficient it would never be allowed.

And it remains that General Fusion faces significant stability issues that they don't even know about yet.
Out of the horses, my bet remains on EMC2. I have seen nothing yet that would dissuade me.

Ladajo,
EMC2's money issues have to be solved and to date those seem as intransigent as GF's physics issues.

Yup. If it was easy we would all be doing it.

EMC2 is not done yet. I would love to write a book about the journey.

General Fusion is my least favorite out of the private "contenders".
I wished EMC2 had sufficient funding. They would be a strong contender. But without funding, even the best concept is not going to go anywhere, quite unfortunately

GF is certainly an interesting approach, but I suspect they will face turbulence problems of similar magnitude to tokomaks.

Actually, as I understand it, the problem GF has at the moment is achieving adiabatic plasma compression. Plasma stability and progress towards compression has been made, but the idea is that temperature needs to go up with plasma compression and that is not tracking what is needed. That is the last I heard. Plasma is tricky and unpredictable stuff.

TriAlpha is the best bet at this point in the horse race as they have the team, the results, and the money. All three are needed.