Free Republic

The lost nuclear fusion reactor design? Guest Blogger / 3 hours ago March 31, 2015 Robert Bussard, one of the giants of the field, claimed to his dying day he had cracked the problemAbove: a homemade version of the Polywell nuclear fusion reactorGuest essay by Eric WorrallNot many people have heard of Robert Bussard, but he was one of the giants of nuclear fusion research. But if an engineering solution for viable small, household size nuclear fusion reactors is ever discovered, they will almost certainly be largely based on Bussard’s work.Bussard’s focus was on a field of Nuclear fusion research...

Dr. Robert Bussard’s EMC2 Corp. with the U.S. Navy using recovery act funding working on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) nuclear fusion based on the theory and prior work of Dr. Bussard has issued a very brief report. The plan is to determine if the experimental plasma scaling agrees with the theoretical models. The U.S. Navy funding is directed to conducting tests on “Wiffle-Ball” plasma scaling law on plasma heating and confinement by EMC2. The firm has burned $3,216,826 of an authorized $7,855,504 and has surpassed 50% completion of the work. As of September 30, 2011, the WB-8 device has generated...

The boys at Talk Polywell have uncovered the details of the WB-8 contract [pdf]. Those details can give us some insight into how WB-7 has gone. From the looks of things - rather well. The current effort will build on what has been completed under these previous contracts as well as requirements to provide the Navy with data for potential applications of AGEE with a delivered item, wiffleball 8 (WB8) and options for a modified wiffleball 8 (WB8.1) and modified ion gun. The objective of this procurement is validation of the basic physics of the AGEE concept as well as...

Working on a shoestring budget, researchers have found no reason why a low-cost approach to nuclear fusion won't work. .... For decades, scientists have been trying to figure out how to harness the power of the nuclear reaction that sets the sun ablaze. Fusion involves smashing the nuclei of lighter elements together to produce heavier elements, plus an excess burst of energy. The sun turns hydrogen into helium. Thermonuclear bombs do something similar with different isotopes of hydrogen. .... The mainstream approaches to commercial fusion would involve heating up plasma inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic bottle known as a tokamak, or...