Reply To: Military Effects

[Lerner]

First, to be clear, I think all the members of our present team are absolutely first-rate. The problem is there are too few of them. It is simply impossible to combine in four people (on-site) all the skills and knowledge needed for this project. I don’t really see this as comparable to the problems of the tokamak effort.
Two other factors make for getting slower problem-solving. First, because pulsed power fusion technologies have been so underfunded, the number of people with specialized knowledge is very small. Asymmetric asked about our long re-design of the switch. I would be willing to bet that there are not even 10 people in the US who have designed switches capable of handling 250 kA with 10 ns jitter. That is what we had to do. So you can’t just go out and hire someone to consult with.
Second, a lot of the knowledge in the field is not published. That is why people sometimes refer to pulsed power as a “black art.” Researchers don’t put the fine details of switches and technique in their papers because they feel it is dull. That stuff is supposed to go into manuals. But pulsed power research groups don’t have the money to pay someone with long experience to sit down and write a manual. For example, through word of mouth, we found out the best way to stop the arcing was using indium. But you will not find that in the literature on pulsed power. So there is a good deal of re-inventing the wheel. Again, more money would help.
That is not the same as throwing money at physics problems that people pointed out as roadblocks decades ago.
With DT fusion, there is no imaginable route to a power source that is cheaper than all existing ones, because the power conversion can’t be any cheaper and the neutrons inevitably lead to the necessity for low power density and very large machines. Fusion with pB11 is, no doubt, very difficult, but there are no built–in roadblocks to cheap energy. Maybe we will find one, but right now we don’t know of any. So the logical place to throw money is where lack of funding is the obvious bottleneck, not where physics problems are the roadbolck.