Reply To: Environmental Awareness

[emmetb]

Milemaster wrote: Surely shooting a tiny Decaborane pellets into the plasmoid will avoid some premature heating problems producing inertial confinement. Y always thought of having a resonant focusing of the x-rays bouncing from a cylindrical shaped chamber to the plasmoid zone as a way both to transfer wasted energy into the reaction an condensing the gas to increase density in the proper region. Other ideas like the magnetic confinement could be developed.

I see this is your first post, so welcome to the forum! 🙂

I didn’t explain properly in the previous post. Let me give it another go. When listening to people who are skeptical about the DPF approach to fusion, most often i heard the argument that a DPF cannot produce useful amounts of power before the problems with heating and erosion of the electrodes will stop us from scaling up the reaction far enough to reach break even.

Now whether or not this is true remains to be seen of course. LPPX is testing this. Even if it turns out that DPF fusion does not scale well enough to make it practical, going to these high magnetic fields and heavy ions like LPPX is doing with their FoFu machine is for sure interesting. Especially it might demonstrate the quantum magnetic field effect kicking in. That would be really great because it would show that it is possible to reduce Brehmsstrahlung, preventing premature cooling of the plasmoid, in principle enabling aneutronic, Pb11 fusion, the holy grail of fusion.

So that’s all very interesting but while we wait for the real scientists to work their magic, we layman like to speculate in order to entertain ourselves (it’s not like we have anything else to do 😉 )

The post was not about the phase that comes after the formation of the plasmoid where the actual fusion occurs, it was about the phase leading up to the formation of the plasmoid where we are discharging the capacitor bank across the electrodes to get the reaction started. In particular i was thinking about potential ways to get rid of the problems with heating and erosion of the electrodes. I guess a pre-requisite to do that would be to produce a similarly large current in a small volume without discharging across metal electrodes.

An explosively pumped flux compression generator can produce such large currents by compressing a circular conductor inside a containing magnetic field. But of course it’s not very practical to set of a high explosive for each pulse. Or is it? In another tentative fusion proposal, which is inertial confinement fusion, people are actually contemplating doing pretty much that: setting of a tiny hydrogen bomb for each pulse.

So why not put the three things together: fusion by collapsing plasmoids, flux compression to generate the starting pinch, and inertial confinement to achieve the flux compression. That’s why i started rambling about these coil-pellets: a tiny ring of boron, embedded in a pellet of ablation material.

I imagine the reaction would then go as follows. Just like for normal inertial fusion you would shoot the pellet into the reaction vessel. Then the lasers would hit the mantle of ablation material creating an inward shockwave that compresses the pellet. Unlike normal inertial confinement fusion the vessel would additionally be surrounded by a solenoid to generate the required magnetic flux, and unlike normal inertial confinement fusion the shockwave need not be *so* powerful as to fuse the material inside, it need only be strong enough to sufficiently compress the conducting ring inside the pellet. (As a fortunate side effect the conductivity of the boron will improve with the increase of pressure and temperature.) The compression should cause a sudden magnetic flux change inducing a large current. Then we should get a pinch, kink, plasmoid, fusion, ion-beam etc. etc. It’s all pure speculation really… but it would sure increase awesomeness if it were possible 😉