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]

Inducing fusion events actually isn't that hard. The issue for power generation is inducing lots of fusion events, all in one place, sustained over an extended period of time, without putting in more energy than you get out. A tokamak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak), for instance, can produce sustained fusion, but all the tokamaks that have ever been built need more energy to keep their plasma at sufficient temperature than the fusion reaction produces, thus aren't suitable for power generation.

Famulus' project is probably almost certainly running at a net energy loss. That's okay, though. As I said above, it looks like he's working to reproduce results from 2005 that were declassified fairly recently. Meanwhile, the team that produced those results in the first place has funding to improve their existing designs and scale them up. The math suggests that net energy gain is feasible; it'll be exciting to see whether they can pull it off in practice. I'm cautiously optimistic.