I'm curious about the power scalability of the polywell. I've read that the power output scales to the 7th power of its size or something to that effect. And that a gigawatt reactor could take up as little space as 10 meters across. I don't really understand the math to find this out on my own. Where do we start with? How does a detection of 9 neutrons with such and such size reactor mean that one a few times bigger can output the same energy as a single commercial fission reactor? Could I have and equation please
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
I've been following the focus fusion crowd too and their claims are not nearly as profound saying their hopes are for reactors the size of garages that produce 10 or 20 megawatts of electricity. That's fantastic if true even still. But gigawatts and beyond well that could be useful for rocketry. Maybe even electric booster rockets. But seriously just one or two gigawatts isn't even close to the power output of one saturn V F-1 booster engine which:
"Through 10 Fuel suction lines, 1350 gallons (about 4ton) of RP-1 are supplied to the F1 engine per 1 second in flight"
[url - http://apollomaniacs.web.infoseek.co.jp ... v_s1ce.htm
1350 gallons of kerosene per second! Each gallon of kerosene contains about 142,200,000 joules of energy and each second a single f-1 engine gobbles down 53.33 megawatt hours worth of chemical energy.
If Bussard was right, how big of a reactor would be needed to compete with that kind of energy output? Are electric booster rockets pure unadulterated fantasy that could never ever happen? - /url]