Fusion catches fire—Polywell tidbit

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/03/31/1872580.aspx

Fusion catches fire

Posted: Tuesday, March 31, 2009 6:46 PM by Alan Boyle

All of a sudden, nuclear fusion is becoming an energy buzzword instead of an http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Research-Review/Magazine/1997/story2.html">energy joke: One route to fusion is being hailed as having the potential to become a http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15friedman.html">"holy cow game-changer," another mainstream method is getting a http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/munger/2009/03/good_news_for_iter_1.html">multimillion-dollar boost, and a dark-horse candidate is stealthily moving forward as well. Heck, even cold fusion is http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/03/23/cold-fusion-at-20-hope-springs-eternal.aspx">back in the game.

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Polywell fusion

If fusion is a hallucination, the wildest part of the vision would have to be the project that Nebel and his colleagues are working on at http://www.emc2fusion.org/">EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in New Mexico. They're following up on preliminary indications that a relatively low-budget, high-voltage gizmo known as a Polywell fusion device could produce more energy than it consumes - that is, if the gizmo is scaled up to the appropriate size.

Late last year, Nebel's team sent a report about their experiments to their funders at the U.S. Navy. The results were http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/12/16/1718741.aspx">encouraging enough that the Navy is providing the money for follow-up work through the end of this year.

Nebel told me the interim funding was meant to "keep us alive until they figure out what they want to do." Although he was reluctant to go into the details, progress reports posted on the http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=10">Talk-Polywell discussion forum and the http://deanesmay.com/2009/02/10/polywell-fusion-update-progress-and-hope/">Dean's World blog indicate that the device's design is being tweaked to improve its performance.

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[Canuckistanian]

1. Well, here's hoping

I'm a little nervous about the US Navy as the sponsor, but theoretically, fusion has always been a possibility.

Glad to see it's generating interest.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. The Navy is a natural customer

They've got http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion">nasty dirty fission reactors powering large vessels. How much would they like to have a tiny, tidy fusion reactor instead?

[phantom power]

3. Fusion: is it a dark horse, or a holy cow?