EMC2 Fusion doesn’t have tens of millions of venture capital to play with — but it does have a $7.9 million Navy contract to test a plasma technology known as inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, also known as Polywell fusion. The idea is to accelerate positively charged ions in an electrical cage to such an extent that they occasionally spark a fusion reaction, releasing energy and neutrons. The concept was pioneered by the late physicist Robert Bussard, and carried forward by the EMC2 Fusion team in Santa Fe, N.M.
Some of the leading team members went on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory to work on EMC2. Rick Nebel, the Los Alamos engineer who led the company since Bussard’s death in 2007, retired from the company last November. Taking his place as acting chief executive officer is Jaeyoung Park. The 41-year-old physicist says he’s given up his position at Los Alamos to focus fully on EMC2.
“We had a lot of milestones to meet in the last six months or so,” Park told me today. “It’s been pretty hectic.”
I just want it noted that I’ve been one of the few who has supported the wiffle ball inertial confinement concept from the start. Not only is this approach less costly than the typical laser-magnetic “jar” approach championed by the elites, it is less dangerous and more portable, meaning a Polywell device could be set up in a remote area much, much easier than the “conventional” type of fusion reactor.
To quote Glen Reynolds… “Faster, please.”
3 users commented in " Polywell fusion update "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI support trying anything new, especially if it looks like it might take us away from the current generation of dinosaurs in fusion research.
I am somewhat curious, however, about how they are overcoming the coulomb collission loss problem in a reactor that (looks like?) it depends on a non-maxwellian velocity distribution in the central plasma to fuse. (Maybe they’ve found a way to contain a maxwellian plasma).
Fusion is, by necessity, a collisional process, and no matter what isotopes you are fusing, the fusion cross section is orders of magnitude smaller than the coulomb collision cross section.
ASEI, my days of calculating energy beam densities and angular deflection of coulomb collisions are way way behind me now, so I have to depend on the “layman’s explanations” that the Polywell team has provided in the past. My understanding is that the polywell approach increases the temperature of the collision area to levels where the coulomb and fusion cross sections are not nearly as far apart as they are at lower temperatures. Also there is some belief by the polywell team that the lower angle deflections don’t lose much energy and are recycled through the process by the electromagnetic field where they get many many chances to fuse. The hope is that between the recycling and the higher temperatures there are enough fusion events to generate more energy than is put in.
Now, I completely agree that your question has long been one of the, if not THE, primary concern about the potential of polywell fusion.
Apparently Brussard was a good enough talker that the Navy is willing to gamble on it.
I’m not a physics geek, so I can’t comment on the coulomb loss efficiency. But I do know that our world needs a ‘black swan’ in energy technology, or we are going to witness the twilight of Enlightenment and the re-birth of simple and crude societal forms as held sway in Europe in the final centuries of the first millennium. Can’t help but wonder if neo-Sharia and the Taliban and the Revolutionary Guard in Iran are on the front lines of such a trend, a trend already under way perhaps.
All of the other black swans of cold fusion have crashed, e.g. Pons-Fleischman in the late 80s. But if the Navy is interested, and stays interested . . . If, as you say, the polywell is less dangerous and more portable than magnetic bottle or laser-induced hot fusion (and hopefully less dangerous and more portable than good old nuclear fission), and if it ramps up to significant EROI levels, then of course the polywell will make sense to the Navy, given their need to operate capital ships and subs in extremely remote areas for long periods.
If the Navy were to stick with it and develop this technology to the point where it works on an aircraft carrier, it would be a short leap (hopefully) to make the polywell work for civilian power generation. Dare I then dream that by mid-century, after I’m long gone, the western nations would finally be able to tell the sheiks in the Middle East that we no longer need their greasy black fluids (and dirty deals for it)? And CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere will start to decline? And more important, the western nations and the world overall will once again experience renewed economic growth significantly exceeding the population growth rate? And most important, our governments and institutions will have the time, money and energy once more to promote civilization and protect freedom?
C’mon Navy, stick with it. Keep that polywell black swan flying. Or in this case, perhaps it’s a navy blue swan!
Leave A Reply