Fusion Quest Goes Forward

Emc2 Fusion’s Richard Nebel can’t say yet whether his team’s garage-shop plasma experiment will lead to cheap, abundant fusion power. But he can say that after months of tweaking, the WB-7 device “runs like a top” – and he’s hoping to get definitive answers about a technology that has tantalized grass-roots fusion fans for years.

With $1.8 million in backing from the U.S. Navy, Nebel and a handful of other researchers have been following up on studies conducted by the late physicist Robert Bussard before his death last October – studies that Bussard said promised a breakthrough in fusion energy.
Nebel, who is on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory, picked up Bussard’s mantle at Emc2 Fusion Development Corp. in Santa Fe, N.M., and is trying to duplicate the results that were reported from the last machine Bussard built. The WB-6 device supposedly worked by setting up a high-voltage electrical field that was configured in just the right way to get ions slamming into each other, creating a fusion-fueled plasma.

Unfortunately, WB-6 was destroyed during one of its last scheduled test runs in 2005, and Bussard was never able to build another device. Fortunately, Nebel’s five-person team has succeeded in building a new, improved device on a shoestring budget.

“We’re kind of a combination of high tech and Home Depot, because a lot of this stuff we make ourselves,” Nebel told me today. “We’re operating out of a glorified garage, but it’s appropriate for what we’re doing.”

The Emc2 team has been ramping up its tests over the past few months, with the aim of using WB-7 to verify Bussard’s WB-6 results. Today, Nebel said he’s confident that the answers will be forthcoming, one way or the other.

“We’re fully operational and we’re getting data,” Nebel said. “The machine runs like a top. You can just sit there and take data all afternoon.”

So was Bussard correct? Will it be worth putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a larger-scale demonstration project, to show that Bussard’s Polywell concept could be a viable route to fusion power?

Cosmic Log, MSNBC