Reply To: Boron availability

[willit]

the birdcage is not empty at all. It should be full of ions whose electrons have been stripped away. noting that the result is a hot plasma gas which in turn has even more rarefied particles. as the birdcage collapses it should trap those ions and have enough crushing force to overcome the repulsive force of the ions themselves. this can be done with electrostatic confinement as demonstrated by Farnsworth and Brussard experiments. there is even a utube demo of the boyscout plasma device. so we can see that the repulsive force of the ions can be overcome. this device ” plasma focus” is novel in that it is directing the fused ions at insane speeds into a decelerator by which power is generated at that point. kind of a solid state generator. it does not rely on heating water to steam to run turbines to turn shafts to run generators to produce power and add another form of pollution . “thermal pollution.”
In the evolution of any machine scaling of components often creates new challenges. even Brussard had difficulties getting the successes that he did. several ah-ha moments and Epiphanies later it seems that they are working on some exciting science.
Focus Fusion deserves the same commitment as the science is there and the approach simplistic as can be. smaller parts and lower power input requirements will make it less expensive to build and make it easier to get to the break even point. getting lean on input power requires smaller power supplies, smaller conductors, which is less expensive to get . we will only know how lean the we can get once we know how big the plasmoid must be to hold enough fuel to get out an appreciable amount of energy to 1 repeat the process and harvest the excess energy. in other words drive it until you break something , make it better then repeat. it all takes time, money, thought, talent, understanding,drive,ambition. without them any project is lost.