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

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Polywell containment has been around for a while now; the Department of Defense started funding research into it in 1983, and according to the wikipedia article I linked, in 2005 Robert Bussard's research team achieved 10⁹ fusion events per second. The Navy appears to be impressed with their results, given that they're continuing to fund the research to the tune of several million dollars a year; apparently the granting of this funding is based on peer-reviewed results, so there's that.

It looks to me like Famulus is aiming to reproduce Bussard's results with the WB-6 design, which seems like a reasonable way of going about it.

[graydon.livejournal.com]

I'm aware that fusion is an achievable state (I follow ITER progress to some extent, seemingly alone among most nerds) and did read the wikipedia page. I guess I just find myself overwhelmed any time someone starts giving the sales pitch on their uniquely-probable break-even fusion system. The LLNL thing, for example ... I dunno. I guess it's just a hazard of the territory. Energy systems are full of snake oil salesmen at every level, it's so hard to tell who's even working in good faith. Solar, fuel cells, bioethanol, all are like this; why should fusion be any different?