Living in the future

[maradydd]

An enterprising open-source hacker who goes by the moniker Famulus, using polywell plasma confinement, has achieved desktop-scale nuclear fusion.

There are some really lovely photos of plasmas and lab equipment on the blog, and all the STL files for the polywell itself, plus Ruby source code for running the thing, are available on github. Go to.

ETA: That's fusion full stop, not "a sustained fusion reaction producing more energy than is consumed by plasma containment". I'd wager my left temporal lobe that he's running at a net energy loss. However, polywell confinement is one of the more promising technologies out there for net-gain fusion; interested parties should check out the work that EMC2 Fusion is doing.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I was wondering that myself, with a sidebar of "Is this an actual physical experiment, or are they simulating it on a computer?"

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Cf. my reply to graydon below. I'm pretty sure this is an actual physical experiment.