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Looking Back

Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2012 10:10 am
by Richard Hull
I well remember, and can go back and view now ancient postings by myself and others, where we attempted to explain exactly how the fusor worked as an "electrostatically accelerated, spherically focused, deuteron collider". All in a neat little easy to comprehend package with a pretty bow on it. We folded our hands and went to work doing fusion, and were successful.

Embarrassingly, we missed the mark on the theory by a million miles even though we do indeed accelerate deuterons and there is also some spherical focus and we do collide deuterons and do produce real fusion.

We, now, after 14 years, are far more informed, humbled and the best of us realize that the fusor fuses pretty much thermally through a whole bunch of methodologies that we have no real control over other than to announce we have setup a probabalisitically favorable environment on the very cheap, as fusion reactors go.

We are quite able now to review to a much finer degree, the theoretical musings of others due to a far more critical and jaundiced eye. We certainly demand to see real fusion from a claimant's theoretical machinations and, if we should ever see such evidence, we are also prepared to look critically at the efficiency and costs of the claimants device as relates to our own quite successful fusion efforts.

I know that if I saw a cheaper, easier to assemble device that did fusion and it was proven to me in a manner I would accept, then the fusor, for me, would be a distant memory and this site would shift gears to the newer, better and cheaper device in a heartbeat. We might even accept an acceptable doubling in cost and complexity if we got an easy order of magnitude improvement. Of course, this has not happened yet in the D-D fusion quest that we can actually undertake.

So, the above is why we can comment, after a fashion, on theoretical machinations offered up here. We have seen and recognise a number of the pitfalls in doing fusion and realize that we have seen no all inclusive, simply explained method of doing fusion that is within the grasp of amateurs and, for some of us, even the professionals.

Richard Hull