Polywell Fusion Update: To WB-100 or Not To WB-100
Alan Boyle updates us on the Nebel team’s Polywell fusion efforts:
Researchers have finished the first phase of an unorthodox, low-cost nuclear fusion experiment that has generated a megawatt’s worth of buzz on the Internet – and they are now waiting for a verdict from their federal funders on whether to proceed to the next phase.
The “next phase” would be a 100MW net power reactor dubbed WB-100 by those of us discussing the concept at Talk-Polywell. The proposed reactor would probably use superconducting magnets around 5 Tesla strong, cooled in concentric pipes by water, liquid nitrogen, and liquid helium; initial efforts would likely fuse deuterium and/or tritium, while more advanced versions might fuse boron-11 with hydrogen in a reaction that produces very little harmful radiation and in which much of the energy produced can be converted directly to electricity. The cost to develop WB-100 is around $200M, the effort would take about five years, and if it works as hoped it would not only solve humanity’s energy needs for the next few hundred millennia but could also be such an inexpensive power source that it renders fossil fuel power plants obsolete and ushers in a new age of cheap energy.
Of course, it may not work at all, or considerably less well than hoped. The peer review is now ongoing to evaluate the results of the WB-7 experiments and judge whether funding the attempt is worthwhile. Nebel has mentioned the team has detailed reactor designs, but it’s still an open question whether they will ever be more than lines on paper:
When I talked with Nebel last week, he would say only that his team has “a plan to go forward.” It’s up to the review panel and the funders to give the go-ahead, however. “We don’t know whether that’s going to happen or not,” he told me.
Stay tuned.
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