Bussard Fusion Funding

This is welcome news. My misgivings regarding what was now obviously the initial tranche a few months back was based on the size problem. While we all know that the funding for tokomaks is out of control by its very nature it is also obvious that a too small budget makes it impossible for a principal scientist to easily dedicate full time to this project.

That is all behind us now, and this update gives us a sense of how long it may all take. Observe that a commercial product is plausible in five years. This must be progress compared to the Tokomak which has absorbed my lifetime and massive wealth without anything that could be misconstrued as success.

Both this technology and the focus fusion technology work up well in simulation and initial testing. Now we will try over the next few months to get them all over the hump. Both proponents believe it should work, but all know that it can easily fall short if some minor effect becomes dominant as has happened in fusion work before.

I want them both to work. They may even support separate applications before we are done.

I also note that an allusion is made to space travel and that surely means the use of ion impulse engines to get things going. The Bussard device is going to be a large power plant at the least in order to be viable, but a small increase in size will permit an energy output increase that will be cubic at the least.

I am much more encouraged by the focus fusion system which is tailor made for space craft. One can readily envisage a power train with that source that is naturally compact. It would simplify matters immensely if such a craft gulped air in the lower atmosphere or particles in space and in either case imparted ionizing energy and electromagnetic acceleration sufficient to produce the necessary trust. It cannot be that simple, but you get the idea. If it could be, then flying into space will be as safe and as boring as a trip to a major US city.

I am also encouraged by the prospect that this technology can be proved out inside of twenty four months. I wish we could have found a way to do that to Tokomak. Of course we still find ourselves holding a teaser in our hands. Welcome to the mining business. Sometimes, as in the mining business, success is made, not so much discovered.

September 12, 2009

IEC / Bussard Fusion has gotten $8 million in Funding

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/iec-bussard-fusion-has-gotten-8-million.html
M Simon at iecfusiontech reports that IEC (inertial electrostatic) fusion has gotten $8 million in funding. IEC Fusion is one of the most promising routes to commercial nuclear fusion and a possible solution to all of our energy problems. If it works we will be able to develop over thousand times our current level of energy, cheap, clean energy and have easy access to space.

This is in a list of Department of Defence contracts listed at Global Security.

Energy Matter Conversion Corp., (EMC2)*, Santa Fe, N.M., is being awarded a $7,855,504 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for research, analysis, development, and testing in support of the Plan Plasma Fusion (Polywell) Project. Efforts under this Recovery Act award will validate the basic physics of the plasma fusion (polywell) concept, as well as provide the Navy with data for potential applications of polywell fusion. Work will be performed in Santa Fe, N.M., and is expected to be completed in April 2011.

Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured pursuant to FAR 6.302-1. The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake, Calif., is the contracting activity (N68936-09-C-0125).

This site has an interview of Dr Richard Nebel who is leading the IEC/Bussard Fusion project.Dr. Nebel commented: I believe we will know the answer for the Polywell [commercial nuclear fusion viability] in ~ 1.5-2 years. I haven't looked at MSimons design, but I know he has a lot of good ideas. We'll probably take a closer look at D-D reactors over the next 2 years.

From the Interview: The project that we hope to have out within the next six years will probably be a demo, which won't have the attendant secondary equipment necessary for electricity generation. Hopefully the demo will demonstrate everything that is needed to put a full-scale working plant into commercial production. So if the concept works we could have a commercial plant operating as early as 2020.

18-24 months : Verification if this approach is commercially viable [boom or bust for Polywell]

6 years: a full-scale demo of IEC fusion

By 2020: A first commercial IEC Fusion plant, with an estimated cost of 2-5 cents per kilowatt hour.

We've looked at the side reaction [ 11B-4He -> 14N + n, 11B + p -> 11C+n, etc) that will produce neutrons,] and it is down 8 orders of magnitude from the P-B11 reaction. The reason for this is that the alpha particles are not well confined and leave the system very rapidly. The alpha-B11 reaction is the dominant side reaction. Note: This was a computational analysis.

This work is very important because we could have commercial fusion in as little as 5 years if the work is successful.

Success would also transform space travel. (40 to 1000 times cheaper to get into space)

WB-6 (the previous prototype) had 2.5 billion fusions per second

The initial analysis showed that Bussard's data on energy yields were consistent with expectations, Nebel said.

He said he's hoping to find out by this spring whether or not Bussard's concept is worth pursuing with a larger demonstration project.

"We don't know for sure whether all that's right," he said, "but it'd be horrible for Mother Nature to give you what you expect to see, and have it all be bogus."

Introduction to IEC fusion

This is paraphrasing from the Tom Ligon description.

IEC fusion uses magnets to contain an electron cloud in the center. It is a variation on the electron gun and vacuum tube in television technology. Then they inject the fuel (deuterium or lithium, boron) as positive ions. The positive ions get attracted to the high negative charge at a speed sufficient for fusion.

Speed and electron volt charge can be converted over to temperature. The electrons hitting the TV screen can be converted from electron volts to 200 million degrees.

The old problem was that if you had a physical grid in the center then you could not get higher than 98% efficiency because ions would collide with the grid.

UPDATE: The problem with grids is that the very best you can do is 2% electron losses (the 98% limit). With those kinds of losses net power is impossible. Losses have to get below 1 part in 100,000 or less to get net power. (99.999% efficiency) [thanks to M Simon for the clarification]

Bussard system uses magnets on the outside to contain the electrons and have the electrons go around and around 100,000 times before being lost outside the magnetic field.

The fuel either comes in as ions from an ion gun or it comes in without a charge and some of it is ionized by collisions with the madly spinning electrons. The fuel is affected by the same forces as the electrons but a little differently because it is going much slower. About 64 times slower in the case of Deuterium fuel (a hydrogen with one neutron). Now these positively charged Deuterium ions are attracted to the virtual electrode (the electron cloud) in the center of the machine. So they come rushing in. If they come rushing in fast enough and hit each other just about dead on they join together and make a He3 nucleus (two protons and a neutron) and give off a high energy neutron.

Ions that miss will go rushing through the center and then head for one of the grids. When the voltage field they traveled through equals the energy they had at the center of the machine the ions have given up their energy to the grids (which repel the ions), they then go heading back to the center of the machine where they have another chance at hitting another ion at high enough speed and close enough to cause a fusion.

Details of the polywell fusion reactor. (Polywell fusion and Inertial Electrostatic Confinement fusion are the same thing).

Easy low cost and very low radiation fusion

Previous bussard fusion update

UPDATE: A prediction on how this might play out if it is successful.

Oil prices can fluctuate for a lot of reasons. There is currently a $20-30 premium because of fear of more middle east conflict. The peak oil fears might also be adding $5-10 to the price per barrel. So any immediate hit to prices would be from changing the psychology around oil prices not from actual shifts in the economics of supply and demand. The supply and demand would get impacted over one to two decades. Once the full scale system is proved out then there would be a rush to build them.

I think if the prototypes pan out this spring, most people will not believe it. So I do not think the working prototypes should effect price more than $1-2 per barrel if anything. The working full scale system (in 3-8 years) $5-15 from a psychological shift. Maybe $20 with the optimism.

Just as the thermoelectrics have actual released products (car seat warmers) but most people do not believe that the better thermoelectrics in the labs are on the way starting within 5 years. However, it will take time for the thermoelectrics to be deployed.

The promise of highly successful first two prototypes WB7 and then WB8 should definitely green light the full scale positive power system. That would still take 5 years (maybe 2-3 if people got excited and accelerated development and effort with promising results and might take 8 years or more if there are unforeseen problems.)

From the descriptions it is clear that the IEC fusion devices are far simpler than the ITER tokomak fusion devices. It is also simpler than nuclear fission reactors. So success would mean faster transformation, but it would still take five to ten years for big infrastructure impact to the point that oil would start to be significantly displaced. Plus it would first hit coal for electricity. Unlike current fission reactors which take 4-6 years to build, these IEC fusion reactors might be buildable in 1-3 years. There is still the issue of licensing and regulatory approvals. It is not clear what that licensing/regulatory process would be but it should be shorter than nuclear fission licensing as the IEC fusion is easier to shutoff and does not have nuclear fuel or waste.

The full scale IEC fusion reactors would be about 4 meters in radius and weigh about 14 tons and generate 1GW and 8 meters for about 128GW. Power will be 5-20 times cheaper.

Bussard Polywell Fusion Funded

The news is that the Bussard polywell fusion device is now attracting a major ( for it ) tranche of funding. This must also be an indicator that every possible fusion energy strategy is now getting a fair hearing and real support. The polywell pioneered by the late Dr Bussard had over a twenty year time span never received more than a pittance and that perhaps two or three times. The sheer weight of time ate up any available capital.

This report tells us that Bussard is sorely missed. It also tells us that scaling is difficult, although I am not sure that having a larger device makes things easier or harder or just with more variation emerging.

We now have several fusion programs modestly funded, including work on cold fusion. We are going to be having news on fusion work streaming out over the next twelve months. This is a radical departure from past practice for the physics that has obviously denigrated small budget attempts.

This is welcome news, as is the sudden burst of interest emerging around cold fusion. The lack of neutrons had killed that approach more surely than any other issue. The polywell is a simple device that needs to be tested over several size configurations in order to perfect the theory itself. That then could lead to an efficiency breakthrough.

In other words it is the type of program that you feed two million plus and fresh talents every year to progressively advance the knowledge. Past work has consisted of perhaps two such rounds stretched out over twenty years. I hate when that happens. I have a drawer full of such projects mostly mundane but needing just that.

I can see the navy been very keen on this technology working. In retrospect they are even the best partner. After all they have a natural heat sink available to dispose of surplus energy.

April 16, 2009

Inertial Electrostatic (Bussard) Fusion Gets $2 million in Funding

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/inertial-electrostatic-bussard-fusion.html

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn2nwQUIWuyixoyHQZ-ElD4k23aXe6iT04yGaqbUY7aABRv3Eaw57Jq8RDpFNVFMGwNaIBqWLSSMbcGcJAU1S_tYsmMx4ggnQXmHhlbcw7V4LwBEG1-XDEMr3nd0cJIcHPo-1IdNKMEpfD/s1600-h/wellfields.jpg


Department of Defense (DoD) released its EXPENDITURE PLAN for the projects to be funded with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ($7.4 billion) and $2 million of it is going to fund Inertial Electrostatic Fusion. [H/T IECfusiontech.blogspot.com

There is a pdf of the plan. On pdf page 166 there is a small item under the heading Domestic Energy Supply/Distribution. It is as follows:

Plasma Fusion (Polywell) Demonstrate fusion plasma confinement system for shore and shipboard applications; Joint OSD/USN project. 2.0 [million]

Introduction to Bussard Fusion

This site has covered IEC (Bussard) Fusion many times. Bottom line is that it is one of the most promising technologies for achieving cheap, clean and non-controversial energy within ten years. Success would alter energy production, the world economy, propulsion of ships and other vehicles and enable inexpensive access to space.

IEC fusion uses magnets to contain an electron cloud in the center. It is a variation on the electron gun and vacuum tube in television technology. Then they inject the fuel (deuterium or lithium, boron) as positive ions. The positive ions get attracted to the high negative charge at a speed sufficient for fusion. Speed and electron volt charge can be converted over to temperature. The electrons hitting the TV screen can be converted from electron volts to 200 million degrees.

The old problem was that if you had a physical grid in the center then you could not get higher than 98% efficiency because ions would collide with the grid. The problem with grids is that the very best you can do is 2% electron losses (the 98% limit). With those kinds of losses net power is impossible. Losses have to get below 1 part in 100,000 or less to get net power. (99.999% efficiency)

Bussard system uses magnets on the outside to contain the electrons and have the electrons go around and around 100,000 times before being lost outside the magnetic field.

The fuel either comes in as ions from an ion gun or it comes in without a charge and some of it is ionized by collisions with the madly spinning electrons. The fuel is affected by the same forces as the electrons but a little differently because it is going much slower. About 64 times slower in the case of Deuterium fuel (a hydrogen with one neutron). Now these positively charged Deuterium ions are attracted to the virtual electrode (the electron cloud) in the center of the machine. So they come rushing in. If they come rushing in fast enough and hit each other just about dead on they join together and make a He3 nucleus (two protons and a neutron) and give off a high energy neutron.

Ions that miss will go rushing through the center and then head for one of the grids. When the voltage field they traveled through equals the energy they had at the center of the machine the ions have given up their energy to the grids (which repel the ions), they then go heading back to the center of the machine where they have another chance at hitting another ion at high enough speed and close enough to cause a fusion.

Discussion Board Technical Details From IEC Fusion Research Lead Dr Nebel

Some technical comments from Dr Nebel

A few comments on scaling laws….

To a certain extent we are in the same boat as everyone else as far as the previous experiments go since Dr. Bussard’s health was not good when we started this program and he died before we had a chance to discuss the previous work in any detail. Consequently, we have had to use our own judgement as to what we believe from the earlier experiments and what we think may be questionable. Here’s how we look at it: 1. We don’t rely on any scaling results from small devices. The reason for this is that these devices tend to be dominated by surface effects (such as outgassing) and it’s difficult to control the densities in the machines. This is generally true for most plasma devices, not just Polywells.

2. Densities for devices prior to the WB-7 were surmised by measuring the total light output with a PMT and assuming that the maximum occurred when beta= 1. We’re not convinced that this is reliable. Consequently, we have done density interferometry on the WB-7. We chose this diagnostic for the WB-7 because we knew through previous experience that we could get it operational in a few months (unlike Thomson scattering which by our experience takes more than a man-year of effort and requires a laser which was outside of our budget) and density is always the major issue with electrostatic confinement. This is particularly true for Polywells which should operate in the quasi-neutral limit where Debye lengths are smaller than the device size.

3. As discussed by several people earlier, power output for a constant beta device should scale like B**4*R**3. All fusion machines scale this way at constant beta. Input power scales like the losses. This is easy to derive for the wiffleball, and I’ll leave that as an “exercise to the reader”. This is the benchmark that we compare the data to.

4. As for Mr. Tibbet’s questions relating to alpha ash, these devices are non-ignited (i.e. very little alpha heating) since the alpha particles leave very quickly through the cusps. If you want to determine if the alphas hit the coils, the relevant parameter is roughly the comparison of the alpha Larmor radius to the width of the confining magnetic field layer. I’ll leave that as an “exercise to the reader” as well.


Loss fraction = (summation (pi*rl**2))/(4*pi*R**2) where rl is the electron gyroradius and R is the coil radius. The summation is a summation over each of the point cusps. If you calculate rl from one of the coil faces, then there are "effectively" ~ 10 point cusps (fields are larger in the corners than the faces). The factor that your observed confinement exceeds this model is then lumped together as the cusp recycle factor.

The other model is to look at mirror motion along field lines. For this model you look at loss cones and assume that the electrons effectively scatter every time they pass through the field null region. This model describes the confinement which was observed on the DTI machine in the late 80s.

I don't know how to predict cross-field diffusion on these devices. The gradient scale lengths of the magnetic fields are smaller than the larmor radii and the electrostatic fields should give rise to large shear flows. On top of that, the geometry is 3-D.


The mirror model is a bit of a handwaving model that I believe Nick Krall came up with. The mirror ratio is calculated from the field where the electron Larmor radius is on the order of the device size. Any smaller field than that will not have adiabatic motion. If particles enter the field null region, it is assumed that they effectively scatter. I believe that Dave Anderson at LLNL did a fair amount of particle tracing calculations for FRMs in the late 70s, and not surprisingly saw jumps in the adiabatic invariants when moving through field null regions. I presume similar behavior was observed on FRC simulations. Anyway, it's a ballpark model.

My other comment was related to electrons trapped in the wiffleball. Over most of their orbit there is little or no magnetic field (i.e. Larmor radius bigger than the device size) with the electrons turning when they hit the barrier magnetic field. The electron behavior is stochastic since there are no invariants. We don't have any direct measure of the internal magnetic fields, but we do know the density and have a pretty good idea what the electron energy is. High beta discharges should expel the magnetic field. The vacuum fields should be in a mirror regime (as was the DTI device) while the wiffleball fields should transition to better confinement. There is about 3 orders of magnitude difference in the predicted confinement times so it's pretty easy to see which regime the device operates in (unless, of course, the cusp recycle is truly enormous).

As you suggest, Bohm diffusion is kind of a catch-all for any kind of confinement you don't understand. We hope we don't end up there, and so far we're OK.


If you are interested in pumps, the specifications for ITER can be found at:

http://www.iter.org/a/index_nav_4.htm . If I am reading this correctly, the pumping power is about 60,000 liters/second. This is ~ 30 times more than the WB-7. It doesn't take a lot of power. Our system takes ~ 500 watts of power. ITER probably requires 10-20 kW.