A Tiny Little Bit Of Polywell News

Simon already covered this in his usual concise fashion, but I’d just like to add a few more verbose and wandering thoughts.

The more I think about this sparse, even cryptic update, the better I feel about it. 

the WB-8 device operates as designed and it is generating positive results

Assuming “positive results” doesn’t just mean they ionized something (sorry, a little physics humor there) the implication is that the loss scaling looks something like the B^.25 * R^2 Bussard envisioned (B is the magnet strength, .8T in WB-8 (eight times the prior WB-6/7 machines), and R is radius, which we at TalkPolywell believe to be something around .3 meters, or about twice that of WB-6/7).  There were a lot of good reasons to question whether losses would actually scale this way, not least of which was the simple fact that most fusion schemes run into problems as they try to scale devices up (the fastest loss mechanism dominates, so if a different loss mechanism is faster at a larger radius your scaling model will be invalid).

Also of note — based on some past comments from Rick and the fact a couple people at T-P saw liquid nitrogen tanks outside the EMC2 shop, I think it’s likely WB-8 is steady-state.  That means rather than just blowing out the cusps every time and only getting a quarter-millisecond of operation at desired beta=1 conditions, they may be operating there for seconds or minutes at a time, which would give them thousands of times more data.

Given the original contract schedule, I’d keep an eye out over the next year for the presence or absence of solicitations that envision WB-8.1 or a 100MW demo reactor being built. That may be the only indication of how “positive” the WB-8 results really were we ever see.

If the project ends with WB-8, the scaling probably did not look as good as hoped (or, possibly the money wasn’t there, but even with trillion-dollar budget cuts on the table in the present environment (oil prices, etc) I’d like to think a promising fusion tech would not be abandoned). If we see WB-8.1 but no reactor, the results are probably marginal. A demo reactor contract speaks for itself, of course.

All in all, much reason for good cheer.