Looks like Dr. Robert Bussard, (yes, the inventor of the Bussard ramjet) has taken the Farnsworth fusor reactor and scaled it up.
Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really) - Google VideoMakes me wish I could win the lottery - he estimates it'd take about $2 mil for the proof of concept, and $200 mil to develop a 100MW generator.ABSTRACT This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.
Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now.
Even doubling that cost, it'd be a bargain. Low-cost fusion. Wonder what Georgia Power would be willing to spend to get options on a half-dozen of these?
J.
Comments (3)
I first heard about that a bit last year from M. Simon at Power and Control and that leads to Fusor.net where the view of tabletop demonstration of the polywell concept is taking fruition. Fusion that one can demonstrate on a tabletop rig is something straight out of science-fiction. I am not up on the electrostatic confinement idea, but the basics are well understood. Dr. Boussard *is* Mr. Fusion and has withstood the harshest critics on the planet with oodles of spare time to go through his outlooks: science fiction fans. But even *he* realized that when he sat down and looked at the basic equations that he had made for fusion in 1960 that there was *another way* to do it.
Now if only there was a way to invest in the prototype experiment... it wouldn't be much but taking part in opening up fusion like that would be a radical alteration of our ideas on power generation and distribution. And if, as I suspect, that electrostatic confinement is scalable at the *small end*... then there will be a true revolution in how we approach machines needing power. Big power plants will always be needed for industrial work, no two ways about it. The more compact it can get, the more it can be distributed and used.
Now we need some breakthroughs on time travel... and a DeLorean.
Posted by ajacksonian | June 6, 2007 8:45 AM
Posted on June 6, 2007 08:45
AJacksonian - you said...
Now if only there was a way to invest in the prototype experiment... it wouldn't be much but taking part in opening up fusion like that would be a radical alteration of our ideas on power generation and distribution.
Here ya go.
http://www.nmcf.org/?page_id=135
And they take PayPal. Think I'll pass them a few bucks, also.
J.
Posted by JLawson | June 7, 2007 12:09 AM
Posted on June 7, 2007 00:09
Finally! Was looking for something like that a couple of months back... can't give much, but every dollar counts!
Posted by ajacksonian | June 7, 2007 8:31 PM
Posted on June 7, 2007 20:31