Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Alex Pollard]

The slashdot discussion has some interesting contributions. I have no idea how reliable they are.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552533

Russians tried it way back and failed. Every time they though they were close, boom, energy lost and no reaction. The plasma with wiggle and break. It does NOT work.

From his diagrams, the device is much too simplistic to work. Russians used a similar setup. Plasma does not interact with just the outside, it interacts with itself. And that’s the problem that existed since the 60s.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552955

I am sure there are ways to stabilise the PF plasma, if enough efforts is put in, similar to the case of tokamak. I understand that somewhere in Russia they are building, or perhap built already, a very large PF device. Nothing seem to be exciting back in US.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23549241

Plasma focus technology has been around since the 60s (see the works of Mather and Filipov). They make cute neutron and x-ray sources, but not much more practical for fusion power production than these “bubble fusion” designs. I believe there’s still a lot to be learned from the plasma focus, and I’m glad that someone is willing to pay for further research. And if we get p-B11 fusion working, that would be a great step forward too.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552411

the problem is that it takes a beam-cold target approach. It is difficult to reach the temperatures necessary to achieve a significant fusion burn in this way. The plasma cannot be considered thermonuclear, as the neutron distribution is not isotropic – this was one of the bones we had with Mr. Lerner’s conclusions, as I recall. There are still a lot of questions about confinement as well. The plasma constrained by its own magnetic fields, so it fits in this sort of odd category between inertial and magnetic confinement. In terms of pulsed fusion, to me the Z-pinch method holds a bit more promise, as we understand a great deal more about how x-rays contribute to confinement and burn.