But, amidst all that, there was a brief little flare, a spark, a twinkling of IEC is that you have hope, that just seemed outrageous and utterly preposterous. . Somebody credible says they have a plan for a fusion reactor that will be about 7 to 11 tons, and generate some 100 megaWatts of power. Now, That's the sort of specs that just tickles my jimmies, because it makes a whole lot of things possible that otherwise would not be. Mass desalinization, a power source for mining equipment that could be phased in over a few decades to replace the currently diesel fueled mining industry, extremely inexpensive and fairly clean power.
But then it just disappeared for a while in the background clutter. And it was relatively easy to dismiss it, because it was such a radical proposal. Everyone knows you need massive tokamaks that weight thousands of tons. The idea of a 7 ton reactor is insane, especially when the first prototypes are supposed to be half ton or 1 ton machines. That's the size of the engine on a jet. Holy smokes. So, Clearly, this has to be another crazy proposal that will die off.
Except, these are guys who have been studying the interaction of high energy particles, and reflecting or redirecting them, and they have been really, really good at that. And then, I found out that their project is related distantly to a dead old friend of mine, the inertial electrostatic confinement. Which is an interesting early branch of fusion that sort of withered, except for a few shoots, such as the work of Bussard. Yes, that Bussard, the one who came up with the bussard ramjet for interstellar travel. The Ramjet is probably a bust, but the IEC refinements he worked on? They show definite promise.
The basics of ICE are that you have a spherical arrangement of particle guns that fire off protons. There is a wire cage, with a negative charge("the well"), around the center of the sphere. When you shoot the ions out, they are attracted by the well, and gain energery. Some will miss the well and continue past it, into the center of the sphere, where they will impact and fuse. If they dont, they fall back through the well, then keep falling back in, eventually either colliding with the well or fusing in the center. OF course, the problems are that a wire mesh with a negative charge captures too many of the protons and you never get any actual power production.
Enter Bussard's PolyWell(google it). It replaces the wire mesh with a series of six supermagnetic loops with a possitive charge. They trap a series of electrons that are fired into them in a spherical clouds, creatinga "vitual" cathode, like the wire cage. Except it's made out of electrons and they are much smaller than the wire, and the chance of the ionized protons entering hitting them is tiny. But even this, it's not enough. It is still too inefficient, though it certainly has the theoretical potential to surpass most tokamaks.
Now, how does this make Lockheed's propsal cool, if these technologies don't work? Well... They got tricky. Instead of trying to create a virtual cathode like the poly well, they use a magnetic bottle to capture most of the ions in a horizontal fashion. Imagine a cylinder with the ions trapped in a relatively low energy state along the walls of the cylinder. When they reach the ends, they are reflected back in their path. Now, over a section of this cylinder, there are two coils of supermagnets, and they serve to pull the ions from the cylinder wall, into a sphere where density ensure's collision, and if they don't, then they get captured by the bottle and brought back into circulation.
The verdict IS still out on this. But it is such a wonderful bit of news, that I think it deserves to be cycled about a bit, especially in light of just how terrible everything sounds.Statistics: Posted by Bonefish — Fri Jan 13, 2017 7:34 pm
]]>