Fusion

A Fusion Update, A Tech Stuff Special

Posted on by jccarlton

Here’s an interesting piece from Time magazine:
http://time.com/4013745/fusion-engine-before-2020/

The funny thing is that getting fusion isn’t really that hard. The Farnsworth Fusor which almost guarantees that you get some fusion neutrons  isn’t that hard to fabricate.

http://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/

Kids as young as 13 have built fusors and frankly I think that they are a good way to learn about vacuum, useful even if you don’t get useful energy out of your gadget. And they are cool.

http://www.fusor.net/

I’ve posted before about fusion energy before. Especially about Robert Bussard’s polywell. Not perhaps as much as I should have.  Especially about the polywell. I became interested in the polywell  when I watched this talk from Robert Bussard back in 2007.

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The lost nuclear fusion reactor design?

Posted on by jccarlton

The Polywell isn’t “lost.” Just not handled right. Some of us are working to change that.

Watts Up With That?

Robert Bussard, one of the giants of the field, claimed to his dying day he had cracked the problem

Homemade_fusion_reactor[1]Above: a homemade “fusor” similar to the Polywell nuclear fusion reactor

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Not many people have heard of Robert Bussard, but he was one of the giants of nuclear fusion research. But if an engineering solution for viable small, household size nuclear fusion reactors is ever discovered, they will almost certainly be largely based on Bussard’s work.

Bussard’s focus was on a field of Nuclear fusion research known as electrostatic confinement. Unlike the better known magnetic bottle reactors, such as the $20 billion ITER project, electrostatic confinement can be applied to fusion plasmas which are the size of a small glass fish tank.

Electrostatic confinement has been well known since the 1930s. Small electrostatic nuclear fusion devices are sold commercially – as neutron sources. A small…

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