We have finally got it together to now test boron based fuels. Welcome to the years of effort to make small gains. Yet folks, this is the fusion system that will generate pure power takeoff making it ideal to power starships.
We have already surpassed best results in the tungsten ased design.
We will gwt it working, and then working continously and then simply pumping out the huge amounts of power necessary for a gravity ship to warp the plasma background to reach a percentage of lightspeed while inducing thrust at one g..
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Another Record Yield -Understanding Our Progress
Just six weeks after announcing multi-shot records for fusion yield from our FF-2B, we achieved a new single-shot record on June 23, with a yield of 0.26 J on shot 4. While only a small increase over the 0.25 J achieved back in 2016, the new record confirms the rapid recent increase in fusion yields over the past year, as shown in Figure 1.
“But it took you 9 years to go up only a few percent,” worry some or our investors ”How can you get to net energy at that pace?” This concern, while understandable, involves a fundamental misunderstanding of how research progresses. Any research project, no matter how successful, does not resemble an elevator rising steadily from floor to floor. If you know exactly how to get to the next step then, by definition, it’s not research.
Research is much more like climbing a mountain – where you don’t have a detailed map. As anyone who has climbed even the best-travelled mountain trails knows, they very rarely just go up and up. The shortest path to the summit involves climbing over many ridge lines on the way up, so you may spend almost as much time walking downward as upward. In research, without a detailed map you in addition may often take a wrong path for a while before correcting course. So, getting to a local summit may involve finding out that it is not the tallest summit that you are looking for, but gives you a clearer view of that summit – across several intervening valleys.
This has been the pattern in our fusion project. We knew back in 2016 when we achieved our earlier records that the tungsten electrodes we were then using were not the final answer that we needed. The tungsten ions, with their 74 electric charges, did help heat the plasma to our record temperatures, but the tungsten oxide coating on the electrodes made for rapid erosion and irregular compression. We knew we had to come off the peak and move to a new mountain – beryllium electrodes.
Unfortunately, at the same time we made changes in our switch design which turned out to be a wrong turn – a part that should have been Teflon was made of ceramic. Finding out our mistake and replacing the old single switches with the improved dual switches (two switches per capacitor) took us from 2019 all the way to 2023. But in the process we increased the peak current in the machine by 50%.
Fig. 1. Our recent progress over the last 10 months can be summed up by comparing the yield of our deuterium shots (left) with the yield of only the “cleaned anode” deuterium shots (right). Hills and valleys don’t represent random variation, but a pattern of testing hypotheses with different conditions in the process of finding problems and solving them.
Similarly, perfecting the beryllium anode design took until late 2024, with major delays for actually fabricating the anodes with one of only a few companies capable of doing this work.
In the meantime, we uncovered two new problems. We discovered that our plasma filaments carried too little current to contain the hottest ions. We needed to redesign the cathode to make fewer, but more energetic, filaments. Then we found that the higher gas densities we needed for high yield were too difficult to break down (to convert to a plasma at the start of the pulse.) We needed new cleaning techniques and preionization processes to improve breakdown. We’ve made a lot of progress on this, but we are still improving now.
Once we mitigated or solved all these problems, we started in fall of 2024 to rapidly climb out of the yield valley to the next ridgelines – optimized beryllium electrodes, and then burning our final hydrogen boron fuel.
So, as in a mountain hike, people should judge our progress not by how high we are above the last ridgeline, but how rapidly we are climbing now toward the summit, which in our case is net energy. (Figure 1).
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