Saturday, June 14, 2008

Fusion reactors

While the era of cold fusion in a plastic bucket in your basement is over, it appears that relatively low-budget work is proceeding in a promising manner.

Low budget is a relative term, but can be impressively affordable.

While the Polywell WB-7 looks to be about 2 feet cubic, plus the vacuun chamber, ion injectors, and associated support equipment, it also seems that if one of these units were to be scaled up to something beyond a laboratory curiosity, it would be rather too large for your basement, never mind the engine bay of your DeLorean.

Bummer.

3 comments:

M. Simon said...

Thanks for the link!

The field needs a lot more work and the cost of entry is surprisingly low.

A few thousand dollars of scrounged eqpt of about $50K everything brand new off the shelf.

Dave said...

Heh, depends on your basement.

You might be able to build a breakeven Polywell for around $50M (I think breakeven is around radius = .7m, based on the roughly r^7 scaling). That's compared to no less than a billion for a comparable tokamak.

Billll said...

Depends on the basement indeed. You haven't seen my basement. I bet I could do that for $25M using available spare parts. If it won't fit in a Delorean, maybe in the bed of my pickup?