We'll have to see what the loss scaling with B looks like in WB-8. Bussard suggested loss scaling looked like B^.25 (and radius squared). It will need to at least vaguely resemble that in order to be as economic as proponents hope.
Here's the IEC 2010 conference which has some papers on...
OK, I bit the bullet and dug around till I found his statements:
...
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?p=5071&highlight=#5071
I've been following this as closely as anyone since Bussard's Tech Talk. The lack of information is extremely frustrating. I would love to see raw...
It has quite a bit to do with the current work, as it's the same sponsors that gagged Bussard. I don't know why you would expect them to gag Bussard and not Nebel.
I don't have a link, but I think he has said it, either on T-P or to Alan Boyle (check some of his earliest posts). Bussard has stated he could not publish for the same reason. Tom Ligon (who worked with Bussard) has also supported this.
If they fund an eight-figure reactor, we can make...
Well, it's DOD not DOE. He is under a gag order. Someone over at T-P even put together a FOIA request, which was denied.
WB-7 did validate WB-6 results, according to Rick. Here's what's ahead:
CLIN 0001 - 30 Apr 2010 (= plasma wiffleball 8 ) - Completion of device build.
CLIN 0002 -...
Oops, thanks should be 2010 of course.
Best case scenario is 2015. Most likely they would try a D-D first, but if WB-8 is promising enough and there's enough interest simultaneous D-D/p-B-11 projects aren't impossible.
ITER is likely to work, but it's going to take decades and barring...
B^4*R^3 power scaling is pretty standard. You would expect a high-beta device to be smaller... if it works. The question is the loss scaling.
The problem in IEC has always been confinement. Does the wiffle-ball effect in Polywells lead to workable loss scaling? WB-8 will probably shed...
Bussard dying was inconvenient, too. He was planning to publish something in 2008/2009 iirc.
It is quite frustratiing to know there is experimental data out there we can't access.
It's hard to say how much of is going to remain proprietary. If it works, of course, it could be both a...
mheslep:
Sadly, no. There is a nondisclosure agreement. We only know the Navy reviewed it and funded the next step, which costs about $12M.
We did manage to dig up the contract for WB-8. There are some details about the equipment but no WB-7 results have been released afaik...
FYI, having reviewed the WB-7 results, they are now building WB-8 with .8T magnets. My rough calc is it wil be expected to produce at least 8W of fusion (that's the power gain if it has the same radius as WB-7 (which produced 2 milliwatts with .1T magnets) with B^4*r*3 scaling).
FWIW, that was raised at T-P as well. Nebel's answer was:
Anyways, to answer the OP: the reason fusion power is taking so long is that no one has a design that is economically viable. Even with some optimistic assumptions, ITER/DEMO's plant power density is way too low to compete with...
Oops, sorry, copied the PF abbreviation.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/12/1136887.aspx?p=1
As to POPS, not sure where that stands at the moment. IIRC the original POPS paper stated 10^4 compression was possible, and I'm not sure what the referenced limit worked out to...