In Hot Pursuit of Fusion (or Folly)

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Here in a dry California valley, outside a small town, a cathedral of light is to be dedicated on Friday. Like the cathedrals of antiquity, it is built on an unrivaled scale with unmatched technology, and it embodies a scientific doctrine that, if confirmed, might lift civilization to new heights.

“Bringing Star Power to Earth” reads a giant banner that was recently unfurled across a building the size of a football stadium.

The $3.5 billion site is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of creating tiny stars that would inaugurate an era of bold science and cheap energy, and NIF is meant to kindle that blaze.

In theory, the facility’s 192 lasers — made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers — will fire as one to pulverize a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/science/26fusi.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

He of the Polywell. On leave from Los Alamos National Labs, Nebel and Co. are attempting to produce a viable fusion reactor for a tiny fraction of the cost reported here.

The idea is the brainchild of the late Dr. Robert Busssard, formerly of the Atomic Energy Commission. His idea uses electrostatic containment in a magnetic field 'cage'. They've already accomplished fusion of helium as a test fuel, and they've received Navy funding to continue the project.

The Polywell design is inexpensive and quite small. If they succeed- and Bussard was certain his power output and power gain scaling laws were correct- it will signal the end of the fossil fuel era.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

When I heard this theory from an Italian astronomer things seemed to make more sense. It explains why the sun is cooler the further you look into it. Why a coronal mass ejection reveals a cooler surface, why the photosphere is only 6000k, why the sun holds together.


Think of that toy with 5 steal balls suspended. Swing one stealie into the other and it instantly stops (cold) and that energy travels through the other stealies and the energy is ejected at the end (surface).