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Bussard Update

Posted by Karl on Tuesday January 15, @01:14PM
from the dept.
I'm continuing to keep tabs on the investigation of Robert Bussard's inertial electrostatic confinement fusion system. The latest news comes courtesy of Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log over at MSNBC: the WB7 device has been constructed, and they've started work.

The lead researcher is Richard Nebel from Los Alamos. He told Boyle that the experiment is proceeding as expected:

EMC2 Fusion has built an upgraded model of Bussard's last experimental plasma containment device, which was known as WB-6. (The WB stands for Wiffle Ball, a whimsical reference to the structure of the device.) "We got first plasma yesterday," Nebel said - but he and his colleagues in Santa Fe, N.M., still have a long way to get the WB-7 experiment up to the power levels Bussard was working with.
"We're not out trying to make a big splash on any of this stuff at this point," Nebel said. But 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. The initial analysis showed that Bussard's data on energy yields were consistent with expectations, Nebel said.

This is more than a little interesting. There have been a lot of objections to Bussard's design on theoretical grounds, but as I understand it, one of its features is that is expected to behave the same at high power as at low power. This is why Bussard claimed that the next step after WB-7 should be to build a full-scale power producing reactor: because they wouldn't learn anything new with intermediate-sized machines.

That WB-7 is performing "consistent with expectations" at low power levels means that, barring any completely unexpected physical effects, it should perform the same under full power. If it does, then there's every reason to believe a full-size reactor would also work.

Of course, I'm being an armchair general here. The experiment has to be seen through, and anything could happen. I'm definitely keeping my fingers crossed, though.

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