Fusor Forums

Oh boy! P+B11 yet again! Real soon now.

The whole thing is limited only by the amount of power fed to the machine. Well......Ain't that true for the fusor, the tokamak, Sphereomak, Stellarator, etc.

They are not claiming they have done any P+B11 fusion! (note this carefully in the report)...Instead they are talking about just creating a stable plasma for 5 milliseconds with zero fusion. But!.......With more power in yet a larger model they hope to be able to actually do fusion. Same old saw

Nothing quite like a carefully worded press release telling you they are just like everyone else......"we're making progress of sorts"...."We are getting there"........"We are on the cusp"........"send money"

Richard Hull

At least they are using a similar NBI Technology as the Tokamak at EPFL: "Budker Institute"!
Attached you see the Technology used at the EPFL (with the BUDKER Label) - and the TriAlpha NBIs can be seen on the video.

This Tri Alpha news blurb is a step forward for them, and the future looks bright- for spending money at least. They seem to have reasonable funding lined up from private investors. The scaling has improved, but I have little idea of how much further they need to go. Needing 10 times more heating to reach even D-T fusion temperatures suggests they may be reaching a few thousand eV. This is about 10 times higher than what I had recently thought they were reaching, so that is good, but confidence in the scaling predictions are not available. Confinement times are also better. Again, I have little idea of the necessary times. It would be interesting to know their current predictions based on their tests that were limited by the available power duration inputs. Are they capacitor limited like other high input approaches? If 5 ms confinement times of heated plasma was achieved by their limited test equipment, how much longer was the plasma confinement predicted to be with the current setup - 5.1 ms, or 10 ms, or 100 ms...? What is needed, 100 ms or 100 seconds...?


One might make the argument that increasing the power input capacity in terms of intensity may move towards scaling that provides useful predictions. But if the current machine is providing confinement time up to or potentially beyond the available input power time limits, then upgrading the power supply duration capacity alone may also provide further refinement of their actual progress towards a goal. I suppose the internally held formula and models may suggest that 5 ms is long enough for this energy level , but that is totally unknown to outsiders.

One glaring omission is the density parameters. Confinement time and temperature are only meaningful when the third component of the triple product triad is included.

Dan Tibbets