Reply To: Investment risk

[Ivy Matt]

It’s been a long time coming, but this is very good news. I would compare it to LPP demonstrating plasmoid formation in the DPF and that most of the fusion occurs within the plasmoid. There are some other unsettled questions about the Polywell, but it’s possible many of them have already been answered and will be the subject of further papers. I’m interested to see if EMC2 exercised the option to experiment with hydrogen-boron fuel. I suspect they haven’t got around to it yet, but who knows? Note that the present set of experiments was not intended to produce net gain from fusion. EMC2 estimates that a 100 MW Polywell fusion reactor will require $200 million to design, build, and test. Whether they will obtain that funding through the US Navy or use their published paper(s) to seek investor funding (or both) remains to be seen.

Jaeyoung Park is giving a seminar at the UC Irvine Department of Physics & Astronomy at 10:45 AM on June 12th.