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>> MALIK: My name is Michael S. Malik. Itís my pleasure to bring Dr. Robert Bussard here
to give a talk on Alternative Fusion Energy. Dr. Bussard is a PhD from Princeton. Heís
currently functioning as cofounder and director of Energy Matter Conversion Company. Heís
a former assistant director to the US Atomic Energy Commission and has held prominent positions
at Los Alamos National Labs, Oakridge Labs and TRW Systems among some other places. So
heís here to talk about his--his ideas and some of the results that theyíve recently
been able to make public so--also this talk is going to be posted at Google Videos so
please refrain from asking any confidential questions during the Q and A session. Please
welcome DR. Bussard. >> BUSSARD: Thank you Michael, Iím very pleased
to be here to see all of you interested in something that if it works would really help
us a lot on this planet. The--as I was telling Noah Garlic earlier, I started out in engineering
R&D business 57 years ago. In the space right, we have [INDISTINCT] and rockets in space
were the thing that moved me. And thatís what caused me to get into project technology
developments which lead me down this one trail to this fusion program. What Iím going to
tell you about today is listed on this slide that youíve surely all read by now. Iím
going to talk about what is nuclear fusion, how is it different from fission and where
does it go and what are itís problems and what we did in our small company. We actually
named it Energy Matter Conversion Corporation because we like the fact that Einstein had
invented it and its E=mc squared and we have a registered trademark. What we learned--what
we learned from our work and the general conclusions, and then at the last; why are we doing this,
what is it good for? Itís not just scientific entertainment, itís not trying to--weíre
not doing it to make money, weíre doing for a particular goal which will turn out to make
a lot of money and how to get there. What the next steps have to be, the end of the
trail--thanks. Okay, we have to turn it. Iím making an assumption which is maybe wrong
but--that a lot of you are not familiar with the details of fission and fusion energy and
because youíre in the IT business, but that maybe wrong and I apologize to those of you
who [INDISTINCT] boring. But fusion, fusion is in fact the energy that powers everything
in the universe. Itís the energy that makes solar energy. Every photon that falls on the
ground comes down from the Sun, from the fusion reaction. Fission is one having at them that
are basically nearly unstable splits into two radioactive atoms. And fusion is when
two light atoms merge into something in its place. Fission has the property that every
fission process makes a radioactive isotope that is very hazardous and dangerous and gives
us Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and [INDISTINCT] radio isotopes we canít control. Energy is
released when the light nuclei are fused because the fusion--the major intermediate product
does become a fission product. But at fission, itís primarily into other light atoms that
are more radioactive. The ultimate deals are fusing hydrogen nuclei together and thatís
what runs in the sun. Other common elements, light elements can do that and it includes
Lithium bond Helium isotopes. Some other reactions are radiation free and others are not. I just
want to show you the energy levels. We all know about chemistry fire, hydrogen and oxygen
burning makes H2O and it gives you about 10 units of energy measured in electron volts.
If you take Deuterium and Tritium, the two heaviest isotopes of hydrogen and cause them
to make the Helium or the neutron, you get 17.6 million units of energy. Thatís why
fusion energy is so exciting. It gives us remarkable bombs and other exciting things.
Fission from the left are three stages. If you have a heavy unstable--nearly unstable
nucleus and add a neutron to it, it will start that nucleus oscillating. The energy of binding
energy as a neutron will cause the inner nucleus to oscillate and eventually it will break
up. Break into two parts and give more neutrons and then start at the beginning until one
of these neutrons that goes around and can start the chain again. Thatís the fission
chain reaction giving you two radioactive isotopes. Another part is what gives us Hiroshima,
Nagasaki and all the excitement of the world. Fusion is a different thing. This is the Deuterium-Tritium
reaction giving it a Helium or the neutron. The others are similar. The one weíre most
interested in is this one, because itís very odd. Itís Boron-11, which has a charge of
five nucleus, and a proton, a hydrogen nucleus. If you add the two together, the binding energy
makes an excited stage, carbon-12. Carbon-12 is one of then most stable nucleon in then
universe, but when itís excited by the binding energy of the--of the fusion process, itís
unstable and it decays to a beryllium-8 and a helium-4. The beryllium-8, very shortly
ten to the -13 seconds later decays into two more helium-4s. So this process is unique.
Itís the only nuclear energy releasing process in the whole world that releases fusion energy
as 3 helium atoms and no neutrons. No radiation, itís radiation free, which means if you build
a machine that runs on that, and you turn it off, you can go sit on it. There can be
no Three Mile Islands and no Chernobyl. Itís difficult to do, but these are the favored
isotopes to use, protons, deuterons and tritons. And as I mentioned, this gives us the nearly
twenty million units of energy. And the intrinsic energy gained from DT, which is what the world
is chasing, is about 2000: 1. But of course the means that the world are--probably work
that way. The neutron-free reaction here gives us 8.7 million units of energy, and we can
re-burn the helium-3 deuterons when they fuse, split into 2 channels, a triton which is radioactive
and a hydrogen nucleus, and a helium-3 and a neutron. That helium-3 can be cycled back
to the exhaust system you have to have on the system and re-burn with another deuteron
to make more energy, so you get about 10.2 million units of energy. The D+T gives you
this [INDISTINCT] result where most of the energyís carried by a fourteen and the other
neutron. And the reason people look at D+T, I apologize for this graph, but this is a
cross-section. A cross-section is a measure of the probability of a fusion reaction happening
when you try to bring 2 particles of--of similar charge together as a function of the energy
of the particle. The higher you make the energy, the easier it is for the particles to overcome
the Coulomb repulsion between the 2 charges and the closer you get them--you have to get
them within about 1.3 firmes of a distance before the nuclear forces will grab them and
make fusion. And D+T has a probability curve like this. It goes way up here, than energy
with about forty two of those. The PB11 system unfortunately in this particular target frame,
teaks at around 560 teravolts. Very much higher, very much harder to do and impossible to do
in any system that has a Maxwellian distribution of particles, where all the particles are
mixed in their own permanent and [INDISTINCT] equilibrium. Because most of the particles
that make fusion are not at that energy, thatís the tail of the Maxwellian distribution and
most of the particles have been--Maxwellian system are at much lower energy, incapable
of making fusion but very capable of making whatís called Bremsstrahlung radiation from
electrons and didnít oscillating [INDISTINCT] in the system. The original physics--the physicists
in the original program back in the middle 1950s remember their high school physics very
well. And they said, ìHow are we going to contain neutral plasmas in thermodynamic equilibrium?î
and they remember the right hand rule, you know if you had a current flowing this way,
and a charged particle going this way, the force on the particle is your right angles
to those two. The force on the magnetic field is not a restoring force. It doesnít restore
the particle from the direction itís going. Itís always at a right angle, the Right-Hand
Rule. So they said you canít contain particles without a field because theyíll run straight
into the walls, so weíll put a magnetic field together and all the particles will gyrate
on them and this is going to trap them. So all manner of configurations were devised
to trap them with magnetic coils, they tried to bottle up the ends where the particle would
all go out. And so solenoidal magnets, and custom magnets, and reflection and mirror
magnets at the corners. Cuts--this is what [INDISTINCT] spent two billion dollars on
to--impossible to attain because it has a point cast, north pole, south , north pole,
north pole and south pole is the equator and the loss is out these equatorial line cuffs
will kill you. And so the physicists, of which I was one, said letís close the--close off
the solenoid and make--close the magnetic tails never end. Another particle to stay
here and circulate around and around, but thereís a physics reason why you canít just
so that. You have to have a Poloidal pressure, circumferential [INDISTINCT]. So they invented
the tokamak. Laurentia, from the Soviet Union invented it. I often thought he invented it
and gave it to us to make sure we never got there. And thatís what we have now. And the
tokamak--let me explain something. Thatís the ITER tokomak, thirty meters across, a
hundred and fif--ten feet tall, thatís a normal PWR. This is about the size of the
machines we hope to build. And the reason that these machines--these mixed magnetic
confinement machine which no one can find in the local thermodynamic equilibrium are
so big is very simple. Itís that picture I showed you of the magnetic field and the--in
two. For all the particles to gyrate and they stay there very happily. So long as they never
collide with each other. The moment two of them, collide the guiding center for that
collision jumps to a driver iridium. So every collision causes those particles to jump towards
the wall. Itís a random work process, but it turns out it takes more than a thousand
collisions, scattering collisions in DT before you get a fusion reaction. That means you
have a thousand [INDISTINCT] center jumpings to go through before you have the probability
of a fusion reaction. Itís a random work process of the distances thatís squared into
thousand times than twice [INDISTINCT]. And that makes these machines have dimensions
across the [INDISTINCT] regions that are measured in two, three, four, five meters. You cant
beat physics, the physics is it has to be right based. Further more, the DT reaction
makes this 14 MeV neutron. The 14 MeV neutron is very, very energetic and it has to be disposed
of and you have to find some way to create the Trillium that youíre burning because
itís not a natural isotope. Itía a 12 year half-life beta decay. And you created by capturing
the neutron in the blanket out here, among the lithium. The neutron is captured in the
Lithium-6 with 7x-Trillium. Itís what we use for the bomb and the Trilithium-6. And
you have hundreds of tons of molten lithium sitting around this giant plasma container.
And outside that you have the super conducting magnets that you have to have the high fields.
And this whole thing is an enormously expensive proposition which even some of its proponents
say ìthey donít think it might ever be economic but itís really good signs.î Yes, no, the
problem that we have seen--solved is that everything that theyíre doing is highly radioactive,
itís expensive, itís measured in tens and Billions of Dollars that project that theyíd
run out of cost. But later itís 12 Billion and the program of the next 25 or 30 years,
itís another 30 Billion. The United States has already spent 18 Billion Dollar tracing
this tokamak dragon. And the elect--initial electrostatic stuff comes in at the order
of Tens to Hundreds of Millions. There is no end in sight that we see in the tokamak
world. Giant machines and no predictability, itís all empirical. One of my friends Dr.
Nicholas Krall consulted to us probably one of the top three theorists in the world said
some years ago, we spent 15 Billion Dollars studying tokamaks and what we know about them
is theyíre no damn good. But fusion works. All you have to do is go outside in the daytime
or go outside at night and look up. There are Billions of fusion reactors. Every star
is a fusion reaction, every sun coming up. And not one of them is [INDISTINCT]. And theyíre
all held together by a funny force thatís not a right hand rule force. Itís a--itís
a central force field. A force field derivable from the central potential. It always points
to the center no matter what the particle promotion is. Itís always pulling it to the
center. So the Sun and the stars run on fusion binders and form [INDISTINCT] together make
a--make a--itís helium atom have to--you have some adverse beta decay going on. And
the only other force we know thatís like that is--that is a--the live charged directly
or mas--master right and [INDISTINCT] one of them two of R squared or E--1E2/ER squared
is the electric force. And [INDISTINCT] selecting fuel force on charged particles, the Coulomb
force. Charged particles of opposite sign attract from direct forces and charged particles
that--above like sign repel. So what we have to do is find a way to take electric fields--next
slide. Thatís all right--electric fields and makes them accelerate the particles you
want to collide toward each other. How can you do that? You canít do that with any assurance
if you just take the plain power of electrode and do it. But other people a long time ago
said ìyou can do it in the sphere, you can make a sphere of an electric field, you can
make these particles come to a focus towards the center.î But the 1/R squared convergence
fusion powers goes as the square of the density of the particles times the cross section times
the velocity of the particles times the volume over which that acts. Nth squared sigma V
volume. Density in these machines, because it converges as 1/R squared goes like 1/R
squared. Density squared goes like 1/R in the fourth. This means if you can get a spherical
convergence going, almost all the fusion will take place in the little bitty region in the
center, called the core. We were not the first to understand that. In 1924, Irving Langmuir
and Katharine Blodgett, working in the East Coast, wrote a paper on Current Limited by
Space Chargeî differences in concentric flows in spheres. In 1959, Elmore, Tuck and Watson
at Los Alamos, published a classic paper on Inertial Electrostatic confinement of Plasma.
It was a talked about--it was putting a screen grid, a spherical grid like 2 sivs back to
back inside a sphere and by itís [INDISTINCT] sealed to a positive potential so that electrons
from out here would be attracted through the screen, would go inside and would make a negative
potential well because the electrons would slow down. Their kinetic energy would be transformed
into potential energy of a potential well, and you could then drop irons into it at the
edge, it then would fall down and re-circulate back, forth, back and forth. Like marbles
in a well and if they collided and didnít make a fusion, they didnít like a tokomak,
they would go right back up the well and give their energy back to the wells. So you make
a fusion machine that way. The only trouble with this is they had a grid. And you have
to have, in the case of electrons, about a hundred thousand transfers of electrons before
you will get a fusion out of the ion population you will put in. And no grid is that transparent.
The best grids that Hirsch and Farnsworth could ever build were about ninety-five or
ninety percent transparent. And if you have a high turn--a high interception rate on the
grid, all the energy you put into the electron acceleration goes into the grid. And the parked
energy is lost and the grid melts, it doesnít work, you canít get there, the grid. Hirsch
and Farnsworth followed Farnsworthís [INDISTINCT] television. And Bob Hirsch was post doc student,
worked for Farnsworth, probably in the end of 1967, wrote a classic paper here where
they actually built a machine that inverted the Elmore-Tuck-Watson potential. They had
a grid that was biased negatively so they accelerated the ions directly, in that way
they could get by the electron interception problem and replace it with the problem of
ion interception because the ions had to go through several thousand times and they could
never get a result factor bigger than about 7 to ten. But this little machine that they
built which Hirsch still has on his desk in Alexandria, Virginia, actually ran ten to
the tenth fusions per second on DT, which was then and now, still a world record for
such a device for that particular machine. But he did it with ion guns that were facing
each other. So in a way, he had two guns that were centrally focused in a very carefully
designed machine, the Farnsworth design. He was a brilliant designer and tested it. The
total gain of the system was about ten to the -6, meaning the power output versus the
power in. And that was because of the grid loss problem. And the other secondary problems
of collision of the walls. There are two--therefore two ways to do this. One we call ion acceleration
and electron. Ion acceleration, what Hirsch and Farnsworth did and thereís the grid that
kills them and this is the Elmore-Tuck-Watson concept with the grids removed. And what we
did--conventionally made was very simple. Itís elementary when you look at it. Just
throw the grids away, replace them with a magnetic field. Magnetic fields do not contain
neutral plasmas worth a darn and thatís the tokamak problem but they will contain electrons
by themselves very easily because electrons donít weigh anything. The deuteron atom is
three thousand six hundred times heavier than a--an electron. So itís easy to contain electrons
in magnetic fields where there wouldnít be a variant of associates up here building high-powered
tubes. These, point is if you do that, you have no grid collisions. If you replace that
problem, with the problem of how fast your electrons transport themselves across the
magnetic fields to hit the walls of the magnets which now become the magnetized grid. And
you have a system which fundamentally you should keep open so the second grid restarts
the [INDISTINCT]. And what you do is you produce the Elmore-Tuck-Watson negative potential
well and then you drop ions into it at the edge. The ions see that well and they re-circulate.
Iíve shown here a central virtual landlord because if you put a lot of ions in, it will
push the anode up in the center as the ions collide. This device is sort of almost neutral
for the other. Departure from neutrality required to make a hundred kilovolt well is only one
part in the million, when you are at a density of ten to the twelfth per cubic centimeter.
Itís so small, theyíll be found at the current computer codes in computers available to us
to analyze the problem weíre incapable of analyzing it because a nuclear noise and the
particle, your self calculations. About a factor of about a thousand. The basic problem
is kind do huge, we have this quasi-sphere--is to make a quasi-spherical field. We canít
tolerate this mirror loss with the equator that Livermore spent the time and money on
for other people, not just Livermore. We have to have a magnetic field that has only point
cusps. Think about that. Keep it too close together and you make North Pole North Pole
and have at the equator, you have this huge loss equator line--line cusps. There is no
way around that hell, unless the topology of the configuration is correct. Thereís
only one configuration that works. And thatís the one we path, itís a configuration which
is a polyhedron were the coils are all on the edges of polyhedron and the polyhedron
has to have good property but there are an even number of faces around every vertex.
So the alternate faces are north south, north south, north south. If you look at the cube
which constitute the normal iconic cusps, it only has three faces around every vertex
and you have that line cause problems. And thatís the only thing we could find softly
and that solution which to make a system thatís quasi-spherical, thereís no magnetic monopole
so you have to do it from the surface. So itís a--itís a bunch of cusps I think like.
And there are no line cusps either, so you have only point cusps losses. And we trap
and feed energetic electrons and that in form of negative potential will only drop the ions
in and their focus, it is 1/R squared and they oscillate across the ìcoreî as I mentioned.
It acts like a spherical colliding-beam machine and the fuel gas input at the potential well
edge is just nothing more than putting in neutral atoms and letting the incoming ejected
electrons ionize them at the edge. The ionization of--of the fuel--the neutrals gives you a
low energy electron and a lower low energy ion. The ions fall into the well, the lower
energy electrons are heated by the incoming fast electrons very rapidly, microsecond time-scales,
and become part of a circulating system. Go ahead. Iíll just show this really quickly.
There we go. This youíre seeing, the only thing I wanted to show you was this Maxwellian
distribution problem. This is a--a local thermodynamic equilibrium, you know, Maxwellian magnetic
system. Here is the density distribution. In the Maxwellian, most of the energy is right
here. Youíre sitting in a room with the temperatures--what is it? 78 or something and all the particles
are about 78. But way out here, four, five times out are a lot of particles in the room
that are at a much higher temperature than that. You donít feel them because theyíre
not very many. And if youíre in a system that has its potential where about weíre,
describing all the particles at the bottom are at one energy. You have a hundred kilovolt
well and you dropped in and ion at the bottom. Theyíre all a hundred kilovolts, theyíre
not spread about. And the problem is in that these mix systems, the fusion reaction cross-section
which goes up with energy like that only causes these little guys to make fusion. And all
the rest of the particles are loses. And what that--hence, two going toward is in the case--Iím
sorry to do more details like this but this is cross-section versus energy. You may remember
the pB11 peaked at 560 kilovolts. Uh-uh, not if you drop [INDISTINCT] of five boron into
a hundred kilovolt well, at the bottom of the well, it has 500 kilovolts because it
has a charge of 5 falling down the well. So I donít have to put 560 kilovolts into a
system to make that one work. The ion fusion power, just two points. By doing it this way,
we actually decouple the two problems. But one--the big loss problem is the electron
loss is to drive the well. Generation of fusion power has almost nothing to do with that.
How--however many ions I drop into the system, thatís what makes the fusion. But I donít
have a well unless I take a picture of the electrons. But the problem is, to understand
how the electrons drive power is lost or controlled and see how many ions we can put in to still
make fusion. It turns out thatís you donít study some particles, solve codes in movies
and all kinds of interesting computer things that if you have no ions at all, an you inject
electrons, you make a deep well, it will be very sharp at the edge or flattened. Then
you start injecting ions and the well would begin to smooth out because the ions will
go in. if you inject more and more ions, you will finally get a well that is basically
curved and very flat at the center which you wonít have enough density to make fusion.
You need to put more ions in that so thatís--at the center itís not quali--itís quasi-neutral
but itís slightly ion rich. And then you begin you begin to develop a little central
virtual angle. If you put still more ions with the fixed electronic current, the virtual
anode gets higher and higher and higher until it finally blows the well up and the ray in
between flatness and broad is about 58: 1. So itís not a control problem in the sense
that itís micro you know, millions of a control thing. It factors at five or eight to play
with an ion flow control. The magnetic confinement of electrons in--currently is critical to
ensure that we have whatís called cusp scaling. Iíve told you about point cusps. Point cusps
are the things that people saw in mirror--what are called mirror machines. I showed you a
picture of where the particles came in and mirrored it and reflected it. The reflection
coefficient in the mirror machine, a low density machine like that is--varies as 1/strength
of the [INDISTINCT] field. Thatís not good enough. If you can somehow put so many electrons
in there, that you make the pressure balance equal between electron kinetic pressure and
magnetic field pressure at the outside, B squared/8 Piís the magnetic pressure, and
NE is the kinetic pressure. If you can make those two things equal, you can make--you
can make the kinetic pressure rear because it will blow through the fields, like blowing
up a balloon too much. If you can make tem equal, then you can push the magnetic field
out. As you push the magnetic field out, the scaling seizes to be a mirror scaling and
becomes whatís called cusp confinement scaling. And it scales as 1/the square of the magnetic
field. And if we can do that, what it amounts to is weíre making loss holes through which
the electrons go out smaller and smaller and smaller, the harder we drive it with the electron
injection up to the point where we inject too many electrons and then we can still open
up cusp holes and those equations are all understood now. And the question was, ìcan
we do that?î. We call it the wiffle ball effect because as you know, the childís toy,
the little plastic toy with the holes in it. If you put a marble inside it, and shook it
like that, sooner or later the marble inside would fall out a hole. It would find a hole.
The smaller you make the holes, the longer it takes the marble to get out. Thatís exactly
what weíre trying to do. The other problem in electron confinement is magnetic insulation
of the walls, all those structures that are out there, the containers with the coils,
the things that hold the coils together in the middle part. We have to keep them from
being able to be seen directly by electrons without magnetic insulation. And thatís turned
out to be the devil in the details which we finally resolved a year ago with the achievements
of these two things. Could we make wiffle ball scaling work and could we understand
the [INDISTINCT] transport? We had done both of those in the last twelve years. The approach
is low tech engineering compared to the monstrosities of these huge machines. I once used to call
them super conducting cathedrals. Theyíre very much like the middle-ages. They--what
it turns out is that that curios simple concept, quasi-spherical fields and all that, has enormously
complicated and wonderfully exciting physics and--all through it. Why? Because itís non-local
thermodynamic equilibrium, itís a completely dynamic system with opposing counterflows
of two different charges. The density changed from the outside to the inside can be ten
to the fourth or ten to the fifth. And thereís a time dependence when you start it up. Itís
an unbelievably complicated problem made more complicated by the fact that every charged
particle interacts with every other charged particle. Itís not like the neutrons in a
fission chain which only see you when you get within the range of nuclear forces. Every
charged particle--because Maxwell interacts with them all. And a computer calculation
to do this, once possessed a minute by Bruce Kaplan to do one or up, start to finish time
dependent calculation on one of these machines would take a thousand hours in the Krei. And
this is not useful. The R&D device to build a small and fixed and quick and cheap--quick
and cheap cannot compare to my budget, but quick and cheap compared to what the eighteen
billion dollars weíve spent. And itís straightforward testing of critical physics. These are all
classical physics machines and thatís one of our problems in trying to find people to
hire. Nobodyís trained in gaseous electronics anymore. Nobodyís trained in gyrotrons and
thyratrons. And you canít find people who do the work of Langmuir in their ë20s and
ë30s. And thatís what we need. We drew a picture, this is very old. This is fifteen
years old, of what such a thing might look like. Itís got the wrong kind of coils, we
should never box coils like that, we now know. But this is a truncated cube. Itís a cube
with corners cut off and there are coils here and they all go in the right direction. It
just gives you a general idea of the type. And of course, being a good physicist, what
you do today is you patent it. So we filed patents in ë85 and issued in ë89 and another
one in ë92 which we can pass over that one. And having filed a patent on it, because nobody
seems to have patented this configuration which we saw it was the only one that would
work to get rid of the grids. Itís [INDISTINCT] we canít get a program to see if this is
a good idea and will work. With--the idea was to get a program that could produce practical
nuclear fusion at a reasonable size which would yield useful energy without radiation
hazards. That seemed like a perfectly sensible goal that we should have pursued, but it didnít
fit the model of the main programs simply because itís too cheap to click. This is--I
show this chart only because itís one of the real practical engineering issues. Itís
physics in it but itís really an engineering problem, arc-breakdown. In practical experiments,
what kills us is its arcing. Arcing occurs no matter what. This is a current pi curve
for plain-parallel electrodes for hydrogen. The point of this curve--and not that I choose
any particular number on it--the breakdown voltage because we have to be very careful
with the impression, the distance we have and the test set ups--never mind the machines--the
test set ups that kill us. If the product for the two is too big, our breakdown occurs
in hundreds of volts. Weíre trying to run these things at 10-20 thousand kilovolts or
ten--yeah, 10 to 20 thousand volts and of course for plain-parallel electrodes its one
thing if you have--if you have sharp points and corners and bolts and one thing and another,
the breakdown occurs more easily. This is an engineering problem not a physics problem.
Oh, good, now I want to show you some pictures of some of the devices we built. Might just
say we started--no thereís a slide first Iím sorry. Thereís a view graph. Yes, now,
can we go off--there? Yeah. Here we are. That was the second thing. When--the first thing
we built was a small open polyhedral coil that we ran at a few hundred volts just to
show that the scaling would work. We did that--we took the program to not to get DOE--because
I came from the DOE [INDISTINCT] and I knew that was hopeless. No, itís not, not a pejorative
comment itís the program with the DOE which we had treated was this monstrous money machine
that still goes today. And the people tend to protect their rice bowls and its how human
nature is. And I knew they would never want anything that would threaten those rice bowls.
And in fact I went to Bob Hirsch who worked with Farnsworth who was then a research director
of ARCO and I asked him Bobby I said ìwhat do you think we should do?î he said ìdo
not go into AC. Do not go to her and DoE because theyíll never support it and theyíll kill
it. Take it with the DoD.î So we did. We took to the Strategic Defense Office. Where
[INDISTINCT] and he was an astrophysicist with the technical director. He understood
immediately like, he said itís a great idea, weíll fund it and furthered it through the
Defense Nuclear Agency and then later on he was funded through DARPA. This was an early
DARPA program in 1989 but we built a product machine, it was 197 meters across, it had
columns like that picture that I showed you. Wrong design in retrospect it had--it had
all these big metal faces out here that were not magnetically insulated and we didnít
know enough not to do that. In fact the paper we wrote on the experiments here and published
in ë94 erroneously tells you that the electrons got lost in the guns coming into the machine,
they did not. They got lost after they got into the machine when they hit these metal
walls that were not magnetically insulated, you can say. Whatís trivially obvious, and
it even knows it means can tell them just to see that would happened but it wasnít
[INDISTINCT]. And that was the DARPA Program. After that we tended to abandon--we abandoned
that closed box configuration and we set out and tried a little bitty machine, five centimeter
radius and this was made of solid state magnets. So it did not have the complete magnetic fields,
it had line--line cusps around here. You can see the electron burns where the particles
had come out and went into the machine. We did that just to test the idea of the polyhedral
configuration. And the next slide--yeah that was the second on we built. This was called
WB2. WB2 is 10 centimeters in radius and look at it. Itís a beautiful machine but itís
not sealed. These are all air cooled magnets and theyíre uncool because thereís no way
to cool anything at this size and scale. And so we had all the problem about gas from the
instillation on the coils, it chromed up the vacuum system. And all the coils are touching.
Thatís how you held it together, you welded them right there. Failed mistake in retrospect
but thatís what we did and we ran it, and the next picture show you [INDISTINCT]. Thatís
what happened when we ran it in 1994 September-October 94. We actually achieved the wiffle ball which
was the whole point. We achieved the [INDISTINCT] one condition but at very low energy because
the drive systems were very low energy. When we cascaded in the middle, it brought the
energy way down but it wasnít wiffle ball. We ran all these test on the air because Maxwell
doesnít care if itís fusion on air or whatever it is air or argon. And here you can see the
high density in the core and you can see the particles coming out through the cusps that
theyíve made. They turned around to other cusps. This was done September 1994, the first
test like this, and we thought my God whatís happened? We got a rough we donít want. A
month later in October 13th we went in again and finally realized we produced the wiffle
ball machine that was a great and wonderful thing. It took us a month to understand what
we were doing. Meanwhile, I gave talk at a meeting in Pittsburgh by the Navy. Requesting
house and the American nuclear society of advanced technology for the 21st century.
On this program, before we had really understood we had a the waffle ball, and the talk was
barely successful because the [INDISTINCT] wanted us to give it as a talk at their annual
meeting in Washington. And then I turned to our contract monitor and said, ìWhat should
we do? Shall we accept this invitation?î he said, ìNo. Now that you got this thing
working, no more talks, donít go to any more physics conferences. Donít write any papers,
just lay quiet. Just do your work and donít publish.î So for eleven years, we had an
embargo in publishing. Thatís why itís difficult to talk about it because thereís so much
stuff. We have hundreds of technical documents. The next slide it was WB3 which was the larger
version of WB2. And it was built only by budget limitations. We didnít really have anyway
to do anything bigger. We were running out of money and this is another machine which
has flat coils--square coil containers. You ever see a magnetic field that makes squares?
No. All of them are curved and so these coils inherently had huge areas of metal where the
magnetic fields produced by the coils themselves would run into the metal. As soon as the electron
gets on that field mine, itís lost. Letís go to the next one. That was WB4, the next
one we built. And it too, was connected at the corners and it too had square coil boxes
in retrospect bad. Not good, and this we call dog houses that connected them because this
was a cooled machine and had square copper tubing with water cooling inside a tuner piece
so I--we can get the 3 kilojoules with this, and the room had steady state because eventually
we want all the machines to run steady state. But theyíre suffering from the same basic
flaw. That it had square box coils and field mines that ran into metal, and dog houses
and welds at the corners where you could not avoid having the ions run into the middle.
Next slide. That was WB4, put into the test tank. We had a Faraday cage put around it.
These are some of our people who were working on it. We had to insulate all the supports
because everything that was at the wrong potential would attract electrons and ruin the power
balance and the things that weíve been trying to measure. Next slide. That was it running
at one point and I showed this because we tried every conceivable potential configuration
to get this thing to go to high beta. We could not succeed with the power supplies we had
in the lab. We only had about a hundred kilowatts. And it turned out--we knew we needed a lot
more. We didnít have the time, money and SDG needed and have the power supply. So we
ran it--we tried putting this thing into very high positive potential and everything else
it ran. Including the emitters. Emitters came in from the side of it. And what happened
was, we trapped electrons and you can see they beautifully came out the corner just
like that WB2 picture. And ninety five percent of the current went straight to the coils,
to the walls and to the cage. Ninety five percent saw the walls and the cage as an attractor
for electron. They went back to their original birth, they would not work. We canít do it
that way. Next slide. Weíve tried also ACR. We wanted to ionized neutrals. Find a way
to control neutron ionization because if you canít keep the neutral population down, it
will flood the core and make the well go away. And so we tried, whatís called electron cyclotron
resonance oscillation. You put microwaves at 2.4-.5 gigahertz into this thing and theyíre
tiny. If thereís an eight hundred and sixty or something like that Gauss line surface,
at that line, that resonates EB/MC, it resonates with the microwaves and you can ionize the
neutrals very quickly in that situation. And we did this. This was ionizing inside the
machine. And the next slide shows us testing out and ionizing it outside and we proved
that we could indeed ionize using magnetron radiation from a microwave oven at ninety
nine dollars sum of the oven. We took the power, took the tube--tube and the power supplies
out and four-way rectified the power supplies, drove it that way. And that was fine. The
problem with it is that in later tests we found that--Iíll show you the machine which
we did that Iím talking about. Next slide. That was--to a lady whose the president of
the company. Sheís smiling because sheís--we wouldnít have a company if she hadnít been
there. She took care of all the administrative garbage, if you pardon me for saying that.
The leases and the insurance policies and the constant Government audits from the DCAA,
not only do we have to live with the IRS like you guys do, we have to live with all the
Government audits. And so we had a huge administrative log, we had 6400 pages of paper in a twelve
year program. Thirty five percent of the funds of the program went into administrative reporting
and documentation stuff. Itís not like a private industry where you can control it.
And sheís happy because we have just run W--give me the next one, we have just run
WB4 for the last time and we ran it finally knowing we hadnít enough power. We ran into
a big capacitor bank with four hundred kilojoules storage. We ran it for a few milliseconds,
a fraction of the millisecond pulse output. We finally got enough current and everything
to drive it properly even with all those wells and corners. It took several thousand amps
to get it there which was way too much, but we actually got actually fusion out of it.
The DV fusion of 10 kilo volts and that was historic moment it actually--we did it four
times the last week of December of 2003 which oddly enough the first time it worked was
December 17th, 2003, which happened to be the exact 100th anniversary of the Wright
brotherís first flight at Kitty Hawk. And one of the people who work for this was Lauren
Wright Jamison who great uncle was [INDISTINCT] Wilbert who knows. But anyway in December
24th, Christmas Eve day weíve ran for the last time and weíre very happy because it
was the first time weíve ever had a really true high powered polywell--poly hydral system
that produce fusion. Next slide. And then lead us, because time and budget limits to
the next machine than WB5. This was going to be a bigger machine. We thought we would
try to beat the arching problem by using a superior magnetic insulation all over the
machine not like that first one which had those link plates and see if we couldnít
raise the pressure at which the potential well would still survive. And we built this
with closed corners even though we knew that you really had to have re-circulating machine.
And we built it, the WB5. You could see this thing and here are all these are closed but
still at the corners and at the scenes there are places that are not proper. The next slide.
Weíll come back to this machine. In the end we learn that wasnít the way to go and Iíll
show you in a little while why. And so, we built a machine finally in great haste. We
were running out of money. Our budget had stopped into fiscal. In 2006, we were saved
by Admiral Cowen and ONR who give us an fusion to carry us through a calendar 2005 and we
were going to run out of money and had to start terminating staff and closing down our
labs which we would have done to do in April but then certainly came the survival money.
And we realized in about May the WB5 was never going to work for reasons I shouldnít have
had at this point in talk. And said, ìWe have to have this machine, it has no metal
services available to the electrons and it has to be re-circulating and all the coil
containers have to become formal to the shape of the magnetic fields they produce.î So
we very quickly design and very quickly built this device which has circular toroidal coils
that have space at the corners. The key is the spacing. The original pattern was based
on the idea that you have coils of zero dimensions, brilliant physics idea. But the minute you
make a finite coil thickness and try to put them together, the current carries that are
in one side make coils in the fields that intercept the other side. You canít have
those coils touching because field lines will run into the metal the minute you have a finite
size coil, which we all do. So, we had to space the coils so that they did not touch
or there was a place for the magnetic fields to go out between the coils and the spacing
has to be in certain number of gyro radii and itís too much to go into the--but we
built this. With this kind of thing and the connectors, of course, are the only problem
left but they had some magnetic insulation too because we connected the coils fromó-we
connected the conductors from coil to coil through those. So, there was a little local
magnetic field in those spaces. And this we built very hastily in July and August of 2005
and we ran it in August and September and early October to get ready for one data. And
then we run it on November. Could I have the next slide? Thatís the coil system. Go ahead
to the next slide. And thatís how I looked finally, when they went in tank and then go
ahead. And that was it in the tank. It was really, really lovely machine. I think thatís
the last--is that the last? Oh, no. Go skip from W--that was WB6. Okay. WB6 work. It works
like a champ. It did everything we had imagined that we should have done the begging and it
proves that the--that we had all missed the obvious for 15 years. And none of our consultants,
none of our review panels, none of our opponents, none of us, none of me, none on my staff saw
these--these obvious facts. And we finally saw them in 2005 and built that machine. And
when we ran it at a 12 kilo volt drive and 10 kilo volt well depth, it produced a pulse
of DD fusion to 10 kilo volts, which is a very long energy. That was about one times
ten to the ninth fusions per second. Thatís a hundred thousand times or more higher than
the usual forms that were ever achieved in any experiment they every did. Itís a world
record. It was only a short time. It was about a quarter of a millisecond. Doesnít sound
like much on my watch but in several thousand electron transient time in the system. So
in the point of view with the electrons, they used to have mistake. They didnít know any
better. They live in a different time scale. Theyíre moving it ten to the ninth centimeters
per second, so. Next slide. And in the process of this program, Iíve skipped over this but
we build a very simple thing--several very simple things called MPG, Magnetic Polyhedral
Grid. We wanted to try to see if we couldnít get somewhere with the scaling business by
using water cool cooper tubing in the single term coil. We could only run this in 2000
amps because of the cooling limits or we could turn water into steam. We couldnít drive
it any harder. But the trouble is with only a single turn, the ampere turns and coils
are so small, we can only get about seventy to a hundred gals out of these things. So,
the [INDISTINCT] fuels were really small. But never the less we would right over run
this with a 30 kilo volt drive in a 2700 volt deep well and it made fusion but the fusions
were limited by the fact that we didnít have enough current and couldnít hold enough density
with those raw fields. We could only get a ball in the center about 4 to 5 centimeters
going and it was producing about one times ten to the fifth fusions per second steady
state. But it did prove the polyhedral principle again. The next one. No we were--thatís it
in the tank. Go ahead. And the last odd thing we did was building a very strange device
which we called PZLX. Itís a single turn copper coil. It doesnít look like a turn
at all itís hued out of the copper block but itís polyhedral configuration inside
this metal container to take care of the stresses. The coil--coils command and turn around to
make the polyhedral coil. And we did that with a solid copper block, very thick in order
to try to put huge currents and get gigantic field in this thing because we were concerned
that people were saying, ìWell, these fields are unstable.î Or not equilibrium stable
and dynamically but they are. And thatís what we did. We ran this pulse at 200,000
Amps, pulse for three milliseconds of capacity bank. And what we did, we had a passion arching.
Passion arching would break it down to 300 volts. So, we drive it with the next turn
electron in meter, arch break down the stuff inside. As we turn the magnetic field on in
sub millisecond time scales from the capacitor bank where as we turn the current on [INDISTINCT]
and then it would grab the ions when the--when the field got high enough that the ions gyro
radius were smaller than cavity size, it would capture the ions and you do 80 [INDISTINCT]
compression to ions. We canó-we can compress these ions, very heavily up to 35 kilo gals
and we did this about a 150 times over period of the year and field were stable as rock.
Why? Because same HD theory is correct. If you have a field thatís convex towards the
plasma at all points, itís always stable. Itís only when itís concave towards the
plasma that itís unstable and all these polyhedral fields are convex towards the plasma. And
we got neutrons and fusions out of this thing and agreed with 80 [INDISTINCT] snow plug--codes
and theories that we had, that were perfectly correct. Is there anymore? I donít think
so. >> Thereís [INDISTINCT]
>> BUSSARD: Oh, yeah. Like I said, thatís the machine in the drive tank. You can just
go through this quickly. Thatís another one. This is the drive system we had. Thatís the
capacity [INDISTINCT] back there. The tank itb wasnít--go head. Thatís more of the
same. Those are just part of our lab. One of guys, this is the power supplies. The electronic
lab. Go ahead. And here was gray--a big gray vacuum tank we use for some testing. You just
cycle through it Michael. This is aó-where am I? This is the side of the vac--main vacuum
tank in the pumping system. No, no, this not. Letís see. Iím too close. I canít see this.
This is battery bank. We have 240 RV batteries to drive the--drive the coils so we could
put out a several thousand amps and control over IGPT controller, so we could have all
these control. Go ahead. And this is a--this is a power supply and we [INDISTINCT] power.
Go ahead. This is a water tank. We have de-ionized water in all that stuff to keep it cool because
the coils will heat the water. Go ahead. This is a 12 bank capacitor arrangement thatís
stored 400 kilo joules and 50 volts and we had, you know, mark lines and things. These
are--these are some hot hypertonic high voltage power supply that we used to drive the electron
emitters but they were limited to like five amps at 15 kilo volts and two and half amps
at 30. Letís see. Next one. Now, this is the controller for all the unnamed. Vacuum
pump or the--turbo molecular pumps we had in the main vacuum tank. Thereís six of them.
Go ahead. This is a control point. Go head. Next one. That is the great tank and can we
have two more? Just go ahead Michael. Thatís--this is small vacuum tank in which we did the WB2
testing vacuum that [INDISTINCT] for generally a long time before. Go ahead. Thatís more
of the water system--thatís a big tank. Weíll see it again. Thatís the main tank. It was
two meters by three and a half meters. It would go down to 10 to the minus lengths torr.
Itís a really pretty good vacuum system. So, it was handy built in the--thatís a small
great tank, go again, thatís just more of the same with an [INDISTINCT] active turbo
pumps here. Next. CP again. Next. Oh well, this is calculations. Skip through this one.
Go ahead. Okay. Yeah. Now, I wanted to show you something about WB5, the--that big box
with the green coils. It is not open and re-circulated. This is the potential well as a function of
the density of the starting neutral gas in the system that was used in that original
DARPA program with the great big 190 centimeter black thing. We found that if the starting
pressure was--the density was above somewhere between tenth and one times tenth to the eighth
per cubic centimeters, then this was a pulse, and we have run this thing pulse, 25 millisecond
pulse. While the potential well, which was originally set up, would die right here. It
would start to die and why would it die? Because the pulse would create ions out of the neutrons,
and the ions immediately would see the well it was forming and the ions would rush in
and flood the well and make a central virtual anode and blow the well up. Couldnít be--couldnít
be stopped because we didnít have steady state control. Why didnít we have steady
state control? Budget, money, it was a DARPA program, $50,000,000 and the director changed
four months after it started, so we donít do fusion in DARPA. So, we killed all the--your
money. So, we can never actually build what we started out to build. But this is what
happened. It died at this density. The next chart shows us what happened when we built
WB5. Hereís the DARPA thing. Here is a function of pressure. And here is what happened in
WB5. We actually managed to move the pressure, the starting pressure in which it died up
a factor of a thousand. We said ìOh boy, weíre winning, weíre going to get there.î
Where do we need to go? We need to go to pressure approximately 100 times higher to get to densities
of ions high enough to make useful fusions in the middle when they [INDISTINCT]. We were
a hundred times too low. We were not ten to the eighth or ten to the fifth times too low.
So, all we needed to do, we said was, ìPut a hundred times more current in it.î [INDISTINCT]
we got the capacitor back. We can put a hundred times more current in for short while. So,
we did. But weíve done some electrostatic code calculations to show magnetic--electrostatic
potential lines and the next one was even more compelling. This shows us where the electrons
went. And lo and behold, where did they go? They went to the corners, to the seams where
there wasnít any magnetic field. Sure enough, the magnetic fields produced by the coils
insulated the surfaces beautifully. Thatís where we got that factor of a thousand. But
as the fields turned around, you know, from the corner they went straight into the walls
and thatís a rare attraction for the electrons to get lost. And so we put a hundred times
more current and it began to factor two in pressure. We said, ìThis is obvious, this
is the obvious point that we all miss, itís trivial.î Of course you canít have anything
that does that. You have to have a machine that doesnít do that. So, thatís what caused
us to build--no, donít do that--the WB6, where we didnít.
>> MALE: I think you dropped something. >> BUSSARD: Oh, okay. Thatís okay. Caused
us to build WB6 which had contour coils and spacing and had no magnetic fields running
into the middle. And sure enough, thatís what weíve got. We got neutrons out of here
and then we counter three because itís a pulse system. The neutron counters are sitting
several meters away from the device. We have two sets of neutron counters and the neutron
encounters count one click at a time and itís four pi radiation. So, if you have a pulse,
you got a lot of area to cover, and you have so much--such a big box for the neutrons.
And we got three counts. And that turns out to be about four times ten to theóif I could
read it, Iíd tell you what those are. But it came out over the pulse width because the
pulse width is only about a quarter of a millisecond. Cameóit came out to be--to be ten to the
ninth fusions per second. We didnít know that. We just--Iíll just tell you a little
history of WB6. When we built it, we built it very hastily. We built it as quickly and
cheaply as we could, considering that it was coils and it was hard to build and itís hard
to build a circuit of coils in the lab where you winding on yourself. You donít have any
money and youíre running out of time and money. We had to close the lab down on the
1st of November. It was already November 2nd or 3rd when we fully started to do these tests.
We had to close it by year-end calendar 2005 because budget was gone and we were running
these tests on the 9th and 10th of November. The problem was that we had run the machine
quite a lot before at lower voltages and higher densities to study beta [INDISTINCT] one condition,
when we can get the beta [INDISTINCT] one by running it on a high current, low voltage
power supply. Weíve run it, probably, 50 or 100 times to get data for the transport
equations. So, all that time every time you turn the coil on, the magnetic force is in
the wires tend to push them apart move them. And they had been moved a lot in [INDISTINCT]
those test. So, we ran it on the 9th and the 10th of November four times and four times
we got these results with fusion rituals. And on the 11th of November, we tried to run
it once again and the coils had moves--this is much higher voltage to dry--the coils had
moved sufficiently. There were these coils that were covered with normal varnish type
insulation. And they had, somehow, worn through at one corner that it shorted at the feed
through and the battery bank discharged to the coils and blow the machine apart. That
was the 11th of November and that was already 11 days passed destruct down time with for
the lab. And the following Monday--it was a Friday. The following Monday we started
to [INDISTINCT]. Nobody had time to reduce the data. They [INDISTINCT] the data start
on the computer and it wasnít till early December that we reduce the data and look
at it and we said ìOh, my God look what weíve got. Weíve got, uh--we got something that
beat her.î She [INDISTINCT] by 100,000. It works we didnít know that for month. It was
like WB--WB2 and the whistle ball. And once we knew that, that was, whew, like, what you--nobody
seemed to care. So, we closed the lab down and put all the equipment together and ladies
of the president of the company, so why donít we save the equipment. But we canít save
it. We have a $1,000,000 worth of navy equipments sitting there on that lab and all that stuff.
She said ìWhere would you find a company locally that can take this equipment and we
can transfer to it as a DOD contractor?î And I happen to know a man who was running
a company like that not 10 minutes away from us. And I called Jim Benson, maybe you know
him. He runs a company calls Space Dab. Space dab does the engines for spaceship one. Itís
hanging in your--in your lunch room here and there are a lot of companies. Jim Benson is
known for 30 years. Very bright guy and his absolutely intent upon making this happen
for space flight. My original goal too because it makes space engines, Iíve been trying
all capabilities, if it works. And so I thought together with Jim Bensonand the experience
that he has, that we transfer a $1,000,000 worth of navy equipment to him. All that vacuum
stuff and all the pumps and all the power supplies in the lab. And he hired our three
best lab people. So, the lab still exist, just that we donít have it. He has it. I
donít care let him do it. Heís got a bunch of good guys and he would like to pursue that
program. Next slide. Oh, no this is--oh, yeah one of the things in--on the outline said
ìIíll tell you all the things weíve learned.î I wonít tell you all the things weíve learned.
Itís too much. Itís 11 years but thereís a paper that I submitted and will probably
would be publish later next a conference in Spain early in October, International Astronomical
Congress, 1500 to 150 nations and I published to put this paper into the Congress because
I wanted to, for the first time in 11 years, put a summary out and print. This is what
we did and what weíve learned and what itís about. So, there is paper available. if anybody
wants it, that describes it all. Itís not a very good physics paper because it doesnít
contain all the equations. It doesnít commute all the theory and the models but it talks
about it all and it gives a lot of references and I--you can probably get that somewhere.
I donít know where. Because our point is itís out in public for the first time and
11 years. Yeah, I guess you know, this would be one of my codes?
>> [INDISTINCT] yeah. >> Whatever.
>> [INDISTINCT] >> Oh, okay well, I canít help but letís
see. We have codes--Iíll just say we have codes to show power balances in these things
and power balance is powering gain itís function of the size of the machine and all origins
of the size of the machine. Iíll just skip ahead. We have a lot of graphs we could show
you. Donít tell them we are out of time, so I just skip all that but we could assure
you we do have lots of codes--computer codes of various country. It runs from magnet design
for potential industry distributions and lots of equation modeling and, uh, one thing and
another. Weíve also looked at for [INDISTINCT] up here in Palo Alto some years ago. We looked
at machines that would make utilities feel happy. And we think this is the best one the
DT catalyzed by the union treaty called the Catae makes a neutron it captured in the blanket
to make more steam and it minimizes radiation hazard. It has the advantage that it makes
a processed steam--this is not pB11 clean this is DD making things it look like PWR
neutrons but it--it makes PWR stay. So, you could build a machine like that and put it
in a blank--put it in a container like that and then take that particular container and
put it in the central part of a--of a [INDISTINCT] central part of the power plant where you
have a number of them lined up in the row and then thatís the reactor building. The
rest of this plant is normal plant; steam generator--same steam turbines and generators
and cooling towers, and this is the way you can retrofit existing fossil fuel-fired plants.
You come and sit down next door, build a little reactor building and tie it into the existing
steam lines and donít trouble the guys with the old tanks. Leave them there. But now you
can turn the real tanks off and run the thing on. The steam it comes from the DD fusion
system and is no different than a PWR system in the sense that the neutrons it produces,
except when you turn it off, there isnít any radioisotope product to decay and kill
you. We did most of our work for the Navy, somehow. And what we found for the Navy, we
can make system or power systems like that. In the long run, the Navyís interested in
PB11. The Navy wants to convert the whole fleet to electric ships, and this is the way
to make an electric ship that is nuclear but has no radiation unlike the U--the submarine,
and itís relatively simple engineering. Commercial viability is going six to 10 years from the
time we prove the first named demo plant and the cost as we estimated today is $150,000,000
to $200,000,000. This was a chart from 1994. And the Navy system looks like that. Itís
actually--forget this is a homopolar motor driving a propeller, but the power plant is
here. It is 14-foot diameter PB11 [INDISTINCT] converters, inverters and capacitors banks
that fits in the power bay of a early [INDISTINCT] destroyer and it would run as long as the
electrical systems held up, as long as Westinghouse can make the standoffs for the 100--for the
two megavolt output. Now, I want to talk about why are we doing all these? Who cares? Well,
are we doing it for fun, or for the Navy, for the DOD? We are one contract company,
sole source/proprietary without any competing--we never compete for a contract. Weíve been
sole source contracts from the beginning. Weíve only had one contract, which is of
course why weíve done the [INDISTINCT] but if we can make it work, you can stop the greenhouse
effect, you can make power plants with no off gases. No atmospheric smog, you can stop
acid rain, stop all thermal pollution, you can build a DT system. It will burn up nuclear
waste. We did a study of that in ë93. We showed a DT burning system can make so many
neutrons that you can burn up the nuclear waste from 20 power plants, and studies take
time, and make power at the same time sell it and change the storage time from 4,000
and 9,000 years down to 40 and 90 years, which is more attractive. So, itís an inexhaustible
source. Hydrogen is everywhere. Deuterium is everywhere. Deuterium is one part in 6,000
in every glass of water you drink. Small scale, a little constant [INDISTINCT] electric fusion
plants make--one of the interesting things they can do is make really cheap ethanol.
We went to Vulcan-Cincinnati, an ethanol plant builder, and Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula
division [INDISTINCT] and asked them, what about putting an anhydrous ethanol plant on
the barge run by these guys, and they said yes. A 50,000 ton barge can produce 6,000
tons a day of anhydrous ethanol. If you put it in Brazil and you run a 30-mile square
of cane field which is two crops a year, and because you donít have to use the pith and
husk is [INDISTINCT], for a fuel, you can--you can ferment the pith as well as the juice,
and the husk, you can take off with a Canadian process called the tubular process and make
wood products out of it and get some income from it. And you can get anhydrous ethanol
at 25 to 30 cents a gallon net cost. And thatís not bad. But the big oil companies might not
like it unless you gave them a license to do it for themselves. And this means that
all the Third World countries in the tropical belt or you can get two crops of your cane
can become oil producers--very interesting. And where you have nuclear waste, fresh water,
you can certainly make practical space flight. In that 11 years we were embargoed from writing
papers and the Navy allowed us to write papers and what you could do with this if you had
it. So, we wrote these are eight papers on how you can make rocket propulsions and space
flight practical if you have this thing. Theyíre all in print. It brings global economic stability,
and thatís really the main driver. Cheap, clean power made readily available. Makes
fixed energy prices; we donít have the OPEC up and down game. Low value cane in Third
World countries becomes a high value export product and all the Third World nations can
become economically viable provided you set up the business arrangements in the right
way, so that the people who are building the plants and making the alcohol are forced to
pay some portion of the profits back to the Third World countries from which they are
taking the cane. You can make a profitable industrialization possible in Third World
countries because they will have money. And thatís the whole name of the game. Destroys
the world market for gasoline and eliminates the oil cartel. And while the oil states suffer
income losses, what theyíre really--now, what they really need is food. And how do
you get food in many of those states? You need water to irrigate, to make agriculture.
But these plants can make desalination plants so cheap that you can afford to make food.
You can make desalination plants to run at 120th of the cost of what of what the Saudis
now pay for desalinated water. And that allows you to do agriculture. And if you can do that,
you ought to be able to stabilize the Middle East back on its feet. Never mind ideology.
Money talk, you know. Well, the oil lord should vanish and so on. The Third World becomes
fiscally responsive. >> Itíd be useful if we can ask questions
for a while and we could [INDISTINCT] >> BUSSARD: Yeah. Is this the last one? No,
thereís one more chart. May I do one more, chart? Oh, is there two? No, itís--thereís
two more. The end-use market price of all these energy products that this machine can
replace, which will be a 40-year replacement time, is $5,000 billion a year as estimated
by the Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1990s into year 2000, $5,000 trillion a year. If you
do this by building a machine, doing the R&D and leasing, everybody in the world to build
these things, we could have built them, lease everybody; GEC, UK, Korea, Africa, [INDISTINCT]
lease them all over the world. Lease them and charge them a royalty fee of 2% gross.
What you will generate is $100 billion a year of profit. Thatís a business. Itís the biggest
business in the world. What we need next, we know the design scaling, itís a four to
five-year program. The design scaling, actually I donít have a chart. I do have a chart,
but donít bother with it. The design scaling, weíve learned is very odd on this machine.
The power goes as that seventh--power output goes as the seventh power of the radius; seventh.
And you make it bigger, the power up but suddenly goes--the gain goes as the fifth power of
the radius. That means that there is no point in building something half-sized. It isnít
going to get you anywhere, itís down by two over seven. So you might as well go to the
next step, build the full power demo. How big is one and a half to two meters radius
for DD, two to two and half for PB11. It doesnít get any bigger. It doesnít become aircraft
carrier size. Itís that size. We were always working at 1/8th to 1/10th of the size. But
we can learn all the physics there. It took us a long time. It was very cheap. We had
five to 10 people working for 12 years. But we learned all those physics. Doubling the
size wonít give us any new Physics, not until we get to the full power size. So thatís
the next logical step, and thatís going to cost us--it will cost about $200 million.
I mean, where thereís a lot of engineering problems. The Physics problems are gone. The
engineering problems are the things that we have to do. You have to get man-hunting or
A-team or somebody to come in and do the instrumentation and control. We need to have somebody come
in and do fuel gas control feed system, that [INDISTINCT] most they can upscale. We have
to do a lot of engineering things which we know how to do. But engineering costs more
than Physics, factor to 10. In the first year, we want to do two more machines like WB6 having
enormously high-level review power for the more senior people in the United States. All
of whom are probably over 70 because theyíre the only ones who know enough to know what
the hell weíre talking about, and have a demo program planned. And then the second,
third and fourth years, develop and build the machine and build and test the demo plant.
We can do that in something like five years. Is that it? Thatís it. And thatís what weíre
trying to do. We need $200 million. We all need it, Iím not going to do it. Iíll be
an adviser. For Jim Benson and this company, maybe Google. This is the most exciting program
I know in the world or I wouldnít be working on it. I think thatís why you guys are all
here, because you have an exciting company and youíre doing exciting new things. This
is something that can change the world completely. Itís like the shift from wood to coal, coal
to oil, oil to nuclear in France at any rate. And this is something thatís even more profound
than that because it affects every single energy program on the planet once it gets
going. This is not an attempt to kill oil companies. Itís an attempt to change the
way people live and way politics work and the way energy is available to humankind and
the way nations that have nothing now can have something. And we thought that was a
pretty good objective and we still do, and I will tell you the reason I began publishing
after the embargo is gone, because they donít pay us anymore, is because Iím intent that
this program shall be done, and that we canít do it in United States of America, somewhere
it will be done. It will be done in Hefei, northeast of Beijing or it will be done in
India or it will be done in Brazil or Argentina or Spain or Italy. It will be on somewhere
around Valenzuela. We can put enough cheap steam down the Orinoco fields to get that
oil out at low--less than $30 a barrel. And they have seven times the reserves of the
Saudis. We may not like Sabah but itís got a lot of oil. And we have a way to go. Somebody
out there will do it if we donít. And I think itís a shame if we donít. I came here because
who knows, your Google mentality says maybe you guys will do it. Thank you. Iím sorry
I took so long. You have a query--we should have questions and answers, if I can give
any. I guess the--yes? >> [INDISTINCT] microscopic and nano-structured
nanomaterials have negative index for refraction of microwave. I wonder if those aesthetic
design options will let aesthetic define them. >> The question is this, the metastatic materials
which have strange indices of refraction, will that give us any hope in magnetic confinement
business. I donít think so. And the reason has nothing to do with their properties. I
think that theyíre just in another world that we donít--we donít interact with. Everything
we are doing is enormously high in magnetic fields and itís an environment thatís totally
hostile, itís very high energy particles that are in the case of PB11 up to 200 kilovolts,
and huge surface damage from impacts. And so I donít see how these solid state machines--these
solid state devices have any particular role to fit in this machine. They might have some
use in external control systems but not in the device itself. That may be a bad answer
but thatís the only one I can--I know. Yes? >> [INDISTINCT]
>> No. Oh, here. Where? >> Yes. If I were personally able to write
a check to finance, I would. But first, because the WB-6 was destroyed and thereís no working
prototype that actually--that demonstrate that [INDISTINCT] taking place in engineering
and ask you to rebuild WB-6, what would that take?
>> Thatís the best chart. Now, thatís first--the first year of the five-year program.
>> I know. Whatís in the first [INDISTINCT] >> No, no, no. It wasnít clear. Itís called
WB-7 and WB-8 right here. Its first year will be two small test machines which are called
WB-7 and 8 that are like WB-6 but not because theyíre not circular coils which are not
optimum. They will be actually coils that follow the polyhedral configuration but they
will be carefully spaced, and we expect them to work three to five times better than WB-6.
One of them will be a truncated cube and one of them will be a truncated dodecahedron.
And those are two machines that we will do to do just exactly what you ask. We will do
WB-6 improved 50 times more so that we can hammer that data down so that the senior review
panel will have something to look at. >> But thereís a risk?
>> Yes. It will be there. And I wouldnít--I wouldnít convene that senior review panel
without having that data to say, ìLook, here it is.î Nobody want to do. [INDISTINCT] the
first year just to do thatís $2 million, but if youíre going to go on to the full
program, which you should do, you mentally program it for five so you can get some run
up on the main program. It can hire good people if youíre on a one-year program. But thatís
key, absolutely key. Yes? >> [INDISTINCT] are going to be accomplishing
more? >> Iím hoping and trying to get through writing
a very long paper, about 120 pages, with all mathematics and if not all of it, so. And
I donít know what to do with it. We have this much paper. This paper and also is not
available on the Internet. Itís in the proceedings of the International Astronomical Congress
held in Valencia in early October. Itís supposed to be on the Internet. But if he canít find
it... >> I think theyíre not out yet.
>> I have it. I suppose you could write me and Iíll send you a copy.
>> That would be fantastic. >> Well, itís PDF and itís summary on the...
>> Thereís actually a copy [INDISTINCT] >> Yes?
>> In steady state, how do you actually extract the helium nuclei from the cork.
>> If you also--I can talk about that. When you do PB11, you get three helium nuclei.
One of them is at a fixed energy of 3.46 and maybe and the other two are averaged 2.4 something.
And theyíre averaged because they barely make the decays as moving so theyíve earn
the [INDISTINCT] 100 kilovolts and a couple of MeV. That helium you have to take the energy
out by having grids external to the machine, electrically biased grids. So the helium nuclei
charge up against the grids and when they run out of energy they would hit that next
grid. Okay? When they hit the grid, they become neutral because theyíre neutralized by the
electron. And then you have to have an exhaust pumping system that pumps all the external
gas out all the time anyway because you canít afford to lose all your fuel. You canít afford
to lose the Boron and Hydrogen, so you have an exhaust system in which you would then
have to have separation processes to separate up the helium from the protons and from the
boron. And weíve done a study of that for Los Alamos. We have a whole paper on it and
we were looking at centrifuges and electromagnetic separation prodigy and one thing and another.
And itís perfectly straight-forward because these are all light elements where the mass
differences are really quite sizable. And if theyíre not [INDISTINCT] and sizable like
T and helium-3, they chronologically condense at different temperatures. So, itís a really
straight-forward to do that. You take the trash out that away. You take the energy of
the helium fusion products out like this. Itís like a giant battery. They didnít come
out in it. Yeah. >> So, other than that, in engineering challenge
[INDISTINCT] youíre getting funded, is this the deal or are there any other times?
>> BUSSARD: Not that I know. I really donít. I mean, engineering is not [INDISTINCT] you
just donít do that. You have to have really good people Westinghouse and GE and Raytheon
and a lot of good people come in to help you to do all the engineering of that heavy stuff.
You want to do a 200 kilovolt standoffs, I donít do that. You have to be funded Westinghouse
to do that. But we have 800 kilovolts and megavolt transmission lines running across
the country. So, people do know how to talk about those things anyway. The impediment
has always been money. Weíve told the Navy and the DOD since 1989 that the cost of this
program in todayís dollars is $200 million. Weíve have it in report after report after
report and they knew that, and they knew that from the beginning and so we canít do that.
Why canít you do that? Because if we do that--Iíll tell you the story, if you do that, it becomes
visible to the staffers on Capitol Hill. Itís a big enough budget item that people see it.
Once it becomes visible to the Capitol Hill staffers, everybody in Capitol Hill knows
that this is what the Navy is doing, the DOE will see it. The DOE will say, no, you canít
do that. We have the charter to do fusion. And thatís the end of the program. Because
they will co-opt it and shut the Navy down, so the Navy had fund us at a low level, below
the radar stream of politics. And thatís exactly what happened and its nature, its
life. And there we are, the funding has always been way too small. We had to staff between
five and ten people doing this whole thing for 12 years. Microwave ovens, I mean, weíve--we
actually--we actually learned all the physics slowly but we learned it all. And the engineering
problems, of course, are way beyond those budgets. We couldnít even run the machines
in steady state; we had to go to these cap banks. We all need the small size in cap banks
makes the experiments very difficult because you donít have time, you canít go cooling.
You canít control the gas flow. We had seven millisecond pulse gas input so we couldnít
turn them off in time. Itís very hard. Itís much easier to build a big machine since you
can control the problem. And we need--not we, I donít need it but whoever does this
needs a lot of help. And Chinese are very strict and probably do it a very straight-forward.
Question? >> You said that a lot of the people are [INDISTINCT]
in some of these area are over 70 years old. That seems like a problem. [INDISTINCT]
>> BUSSARD: Yes. The question is, that I made a--I made a sort of jocular remark that the
review panel would probably be people over 70 years old, I donít know if thatís true.
I actually have some people in their 30s on it because I know some very bright guys. The
problem is, is that engineering schools, the nuclear engineering and physics--related physics,
really donít train people in this field anymore and they havenít for 20 or 25 years because
itís an archaic field that doesnít fit modern technology. Weíve all gone to silicon. Weíve
all gone to microchips and weíve all gone to solid state devices and there are very
few people who make giant four-foot high-power--high-power tubes. It is not like the days of Lanier and
Tesla and those guys. This is really back in that world. And itís not that anybodyís
able, itís just that there wasnít any market for people like that. So, the people who lived
through it--Iíll give you one example of one of the people Iíd like on that review
committee, his name is Bob Simons. He was Head of Research at Varian for years and then
he was head of Electron--Litton Electron Devices here in San Carlos. And heís been following
this field and working in it for 35 years. Heís 86 years old but his smart as a tack.
I mean, he comes from another world. And thereís nobody trained in schools that you can turn
to. I happen to know some good people at Sandia, Los Alamos and--really bright guys who I would
turn to, to put on this panel because they think outside the conventional magnetic confinement
box and thatís the problem. The box has become so big and so well-funded, it supports thousands
of people and hundreds of labs all over the world. Everybody for decades has been thinking
about Maxwellian Equilibrium Plasma and itís very hard to break that mindset. If you live
in that box and your income comes from doing research in that box, how do you ever break
out of it? Well, I know of a few people who do. I know a man [INDISTINCT] who I would
bring in as the director of research from England, because heís appalled at what his
doing. But heís working on jet which is being studied there for 24 years now. Itís a very
difficult problem but itís a real problem. And I even discussed this with Bob Hirsch,
who was still in Alexandria, as where we would find people and how do we find people who
are credible. Well, I can find a lot of people over 65 who are really credible, who have
been brilliant engineers in their lifetimes and who have a national and international
stature who I would trust. And I donít own these guys. Theyíre just friends of mine,
and we donít lie to each other. And they would tell me what they really think, and
thatís what I want. I want the brightest guys I know to be there to tell me what they
really think. Should we go ahead or should we say, ìNo itís too big of a risk and why
bother?î I donít think thatís going to be their answer. Yes?
>> How would you entirely clear all your plans for funding? Were you in--were you trying
to move towards selected Private Corporation or get government transfer?
>> Weíve given up on the government in the sense that I find no one in the government
whoís at this point remotely interested in doing it. And anybody in the government--the
government you see is staffed largely by people who donít have a physics background. And
the staff is--many of them donít really, and this is just--as the chart said, itís
very complex and archaic physics and this is not at fault, itís just the way things
are. The government, it will always turn to its government labs for an assessment. The
government labs will say, ìNo good, absolutely no good.î I have been through that for so
many years, itís beyond belief. These are my labs. I used to be an assistant director
of Los Alamos and in the AEC. And I know these guys, I mean, theyíre all my friends but
theyíre going to all say, ìNo,î except for a handful of guys I know on those labs
who think outside the box and those are the good guys. I put some of those young guys
and depend. Yes? >> This maybe sound a little bit [INDISTINCT]
given that a lot of this had--was developed through experimentation but what about the
possibilities of being able to use computer simulations to advance some of the state of
art here? >> If--I passed over that much too quickly.
We have been doing computer simulations of these since 1989, starting with Bruce Goplen
at Mission Research with the Magic Code which is the particle and cell code from which we
could make beautiful movies of these little particles moving in and out and going through
numerics in Albuquerque with Jack Watchers who used to work on the program. And these
numerics is a sub-contract to doing more particle and cell calculations, but halfway through
their contract, they said, ìWe give up.î We canít calculate this problem. The problem
is how do you do a calculation of the magnetic field being expanded under--toward the beta
equal 1 condition, but pressure balance condition in the transient way, with all these Maxwellian
interconnection and when you are only one part of a million away from equal--from quasi-neutral--from
neutrality. So, we canít--we canít cut the gridding fine enough, you get rid of the numerical
noise in the calculation down to the one part in a million. And so to get it that fine,
the gridding has to be so great that the machines will take eons to run. We have nothing that
will work. So he quit in the middle of his contract. Itís--we have a lot of numerical
simulation capability that electrostatic code that I just told you with the particles going
to the laws, that was a code developed by an ex-[INDISTINCT] guy in Albuquerque. We
had--weíve had it modified to some degree and itís a brilliant code. Itís wonderful.
It was originally designed for particle B accelerators. But that code only works in
the collision of its regime. Itís only for collision with particles. But the minute we
get beyond a few hundreds nanoseconds, we have collisions. If we donít have collisions,
we donít have expansion to the B field. So, itís only the start of condition that the
code can help us with. Numerical simulation is great but it has horrifying moments because
of the nature of the physics of the problem. And we will use it everywhere we can. We can
get bigger machines or parallel process because that was the original game at DARPA. They
have five parallel processors working directly on the system. Itís going to be about an
$8 million effort. We never had the money. Itís the--itís--weíre waiting for it. Now
you ask about financing, we have no plans for finance. Iíve given up, as I say, in
the government. Not that the government was bad itís just with the way the budgets are.
And why do we run out of money? Because the fiscal year ë06 budget on the Defense Department
was cut [INDISTINCT] navy R&D was cut 26% of fiscal year ë06 because we have to fight
road bombs in Iraq. And navy budget cut off 26%, cut an entire line item out of the navy.
Advanced energy development, all gone. We were under that line item. So we had no money
coming in FYO6 and Admiral Cohen saved us just long enough to get those results. And
thereís no way in the current budget situation in Iraq business and the current administration
to get anybody interested in anything except 700-mile fences in Iraq wars and one thing
and another. And I donít--thatís what it is and thereís no way that DOE will ever
support it or not until itís running in China because of--itís a threat. Itís a threat
to this, you know, $2 million a day [INDISTINCT] and everybody is pounding down the road toward
[INDISTINCT] to be able to build [INDISTINCT] friends. And this is the next big thing for
the next 30 years. They cannot do research on new terms on it. I donít see government
doing it anywhere in any western nation. Thatís why I limit the overseas nations to those
people who are not partners in the Tokamak Program. But there are enough of them in an
average of 40 million a year that could be done by a lot of different countries and they
probably will be if we donít do it. Now, Iím--do I have a plan for private money?
No, Iím here by accident because Noah called me one day and said, ìWhy donít you come
to Google and give a talk?î Well, I havenít think--I know something about Google and its
people and stockholders and I think itís got an interesting outlook and you have a
very exciting point of view and very exciting way of doing things here that I havenít seen
in a long time, and you have a lot of money and thereís any serious interest in changing
the world on a long time scale, itís not going to return anything in two years. This
may be a place that should pay some attention to this. Obviously, we need an angel. There
are a lot of people in this country who have multibillion dollars who could fund this at
lunch time. And I have no intension spending my life running around talking to them all,
Iím too tired. No. And if somebody--if somebody wants to do it, theyíll figure it out. And
if they donít, itíll be in print, it will be everywhere around the world and Iíll give
it away. We have the patents on it. Somebody will pick it up somewhere. China is a participant
and yet theyíre three percent. So they donít want to be thought to be not members of the
community. But China has [INDISTINCT] buildings and very interesting Tokamaks and the kind
that we were looking at 20 years ago, quite apart committer that will be entered to the
punch. And I think that we have a lot of--a lot of people elsewhere in the world who donít
have the same kind of mental constraints that we have in this country. And for all I know,
thatís what will happen. I would prefer to do it in United States with people like you
who have vision in go powering or excited about things, and so with Jim Benson. We would
like see SpaceDev and Bensonís Space Company take this thing over and maybe work jointly
with whoever else partners with it and go over the space engines. My--as I told no.
When I was seven years old, my objective in life was to fly to Mars. It still is. And
these machines can do it because theyíll make space engines a thousand times better
than anything else--single stage to Mars in four weeks, HTLL to leave with $25 kilogram,
76 days to type in one of the moons of Saturn. Itís a very remarkable engine. I wish I had
a plan. I could tell you what the plan would be. Going to all the foundations and all the
multi-billionaires, the, you know, the people who SpaceX and all those Elon Musk and Jim
Basels and those people but, you know, itís too tiring. I mean, Iím tired in that sense.
So, Iím talking to people. And the problem is the fusion communities are so old and so
in trenched they always run against them. And the immediate question you always get
when you talk to people who are not personally themselves are--do not personally themselves
understands the curiosities of the physics and why it really will work? Even though you
can tell them to believe or they believe you because they know you. And you know you donít
lie to them or they say, ìWell, it sounds good but I have to have it vetted by somebodyî
and they donít know where to go to vet. And the first question you always get is, ìHow
come if itís so good the United States government isnít doing it?î Thatís the first question.
Iíve got that question in France and other nations. Thatís some--unreasonable. The answer
is very long and tedious and it sounds like sour grapes. But it really isnít. Itís just
reality. In a private world, in the world of private industry where people donít think
like government, they can understand that. If you do what you do because itís right
and it will work and you try it. Itís what you do here, I think. Question? Yeah.
>> Is there anybody else try to [INDISTINCT] you as far as [INDISTINCT]
>> No. We just published it for the first time in October. We have--the only other people
working in the field that I know of are at University of Illinois, George Miley, whoís
working in Hirsch-Farnsworth regime with the--with grids and Jerry Kosinski at Centurions up
at the University of Wisconsin where they have been working on Hirsch-Farnsworth machines
for a long time also. Theyíre all stuck with the gridding systems. Nobodyís trying to
do the magnetic confinement thing possibly because we held all the patents on it. But
that wasnít stopping them from doing research. But I know George for 30 years and Iíve known
all these guys for 30 years. Theyíre good guys. They just took a different path. They
wanted to see if they could make Hirsch better. They havenít been able to. And thereís a
group in Japan doing something similar, Hirsch-Farnsworth machines, thereís a man in Germany named
John Sved whose building semi-cylindrical systems to make neutron sources from measuring
paper thickness and paper mills but thatís not fusion power, thatís making a diagnostic
instrument out of--itís quite well [INDISTINCT] PFL well loggers run on deep--accelerated
the [INDISTINCT] targets and make pulse neutrons to go out into the oil fields and scatter
back depending on hydrocarbon contents. And I know nobody was doing this. Thatís part
of the problem in the review committee that thereís no group people to turn to who have
been working on it. Except people who work on it 25 and 30 years ago. So?
>> Why not to chose [INDISTINCT] about custom physics [INDISTINCT]
>> Well, partly because Iím a fellow of the International Academy of Astronautics and
probably because Iím a space flight enthusiast and probably because the meeting thatís being
held at the time which fitted my time schedule to submit a paper. I was going to go to Valencia
and give the paper but my certain medical limitations on what I can do is a--letting
me go. I just sent the paper in and the people have it there. My--I hope to publish a much
larger paper in a general like fusion technology but I havenít written it yet. Itís a daunting
task Iíll tell you to try to--try to figure out how to convince 11 years of work and about
a hundred internal technical reports. Theyíll be given--we documented all these in reports
to the government. We have huge numbers of report. Trying to condense all that into a
paper, I mean, I donít know. And who is going to review it?
>> Weíre coming up on--well, actually weíre a little past 3: 30. So, I think were going
to close things down but anybody who wants to talk, please come up and chat. Well, Dr.
Bussard will also be dining at Google this evening. So, if anybody would like to join
us, just come up and thank you for coming. >> BUSSARD: Well, thank you.