A novel approach to Nuclear Fusion

Take Donald Trump for instance, 'on paper he looks very competent with education to back it up… and with solid work to back it up,.. until you see what kind of person he really is. A thief.

His (or should I say ‘them/they’) integrity is a Zero."

I'm sure that the ‘follow the science’ groups never knew you existed.

Oh look, another ‘Anonymous source’ coming out from the shadows with juicy information….

Ya, it’s been proven how false and unreliable those are.

Yes it looks very promising...this approach seems more practical....

...but then I noticed this...

I like the overall strategy, but fail to see how the electricity is produced. Is it just the bucking of the confinement field that gives the electrical potential?

What is done with the excess heat?

But I like the idea of going from nuc reaction straight to electrical production.

I always liked the idea of an antimatter reactor. The only products are monopole gamma emissions. If one containment sphere favored the negative monopole absorption and another favored the positive monopole absorption, we might produced very high DC potential between the confinement spheres. Even configure that potential to regulate the reactor feed rate. A regulated DC supply.

It's been proven many times on Star Trek that confinement fields are unreliable & subject to collapse at random times.

I live near Everett WA (hometown of Helion, near Redmond WA where this was said to have been recorded) and have never heard of them. Are they looking for investment money? For a never seen before technology? Pushed by some guy with an accent (A common means to evoke interest in videos)? Who is this YouTube salesman? Is he a reporter? Is he employed by Helion? Who is David Kirtley? (OK, He is real http://www.helionenergy.com/)

Huge capacitors... Holy crap might millions of amps being discharged be dangerous? Charge / discharge cycles?

More power to them, but maybe don't send them money.

..."Helion Energy received $7 million in funding from NASA, the United States Department of Energy and the Department of Defense,^[30] followed by $1.5 million from the private sector in August 2014, through the seed accelerators Y Combinator and Mithril Capital Management.^[31] Investors include Y Combinator. In September 2020, the company was valued at 1.25 billion dollars.^[2] Mithril Capital Management, and Capricorn Investment Group.^[32][33] As of late 2021, investment totaled 77.8M.^[34] In November 2021, Helion received $0.5 billion in Series E funding, with an additional $1.7 billion of commitments tied to specific milestones.^[35] The funding was mainly led by Sam Altman.^{[36] "....}

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy

Thanks Solar! Still wonder why Helion doesn't break the news here...

Everyone and his dog is trying to achieve a sustainable and commercial fusion reactor: we only hear about them when they get a degree of success.

My nephew happened to do some work for this place:

https://firstlightfusion.com/media/fusion

Like you, I was surprised I'd never heard of them.

The first sentence says it all to me. I'll wait until the miniature reactors are available; they would be useful.

This does look promising. This is so promising it might be too good to be true. Let's hope this does eventually become productive.

I like the idea of a relatively low energy, LINAC ion collider. Containing the colliding plasma balls (donuts?) in a magnetic field to increase fusion collisions intrigues me. It is also the very point of my cautionary skepticism. Magnetic confinement typically limits charged particles into a controlled orbit, it doesn't make them stop moving. Making a batch of charged subatomic particles stationary for even a brief interval of time doesn't seem right to me. This might be nothing more than a simplifying interpretation error by the reporter or myself.

I would've liked to have seen any telemetry devices around the reaction region to support the results presented. A full blown STAR detector around the reaction region would dwarf the entire system and would certainly contain multiple superfluous devices. Nonetheless measured data showing how much material did remain in the reaction region and how much just passed through would have been nice.

Here is some more information...

It’s interesting enough, what if you only have 1/2 the machine, and you’re accelerating the plasma at 300 kms… I wonder what the mass of that plasma field is during the process.

That is an interesting thought. Would it rate as a kinetic weapon? Or an energy weapon? I sure wouldn't want to be anywhere near the business end of it.

Well, I was going to say weapons or weaponize, but there are members here that are either hyper-sensitive, or who want to have certain people to stay strictly on topic what they fail to understand is that with technology, it has to go and address the fringes and possibilities. It’s collect brain storming, for the member I’m currently dealing with off topic doesn’t or refuses to understand and try’s to use rules of conduit to shut me down as a defense.

Now, as a layman, I can only speculate, when the plasma is compressed, ok… when the plasma, leaves the magnetic controlled environment, the compression is no longer contained, so… does it loses energy (as in heat) as it expands???,.. where does that energy go?

Along with this what about the speed of the plasma as it leaves the chamber at 300 kms, how much mass is the plasma, is anything stored from momentum. How is it, or rate of it is dispersed if that’s what it does…

It’s just that one is dealing with so much spreed and temperatures…. It’s mostly a thought experiment of what if….

Because this way above my understanding. And I’m just simplifying it to get my thoughts across which you picked up on right away.

yes I agree with you, I wouldn’t want to be around the working end of this,…. speculation.

Editing time ran out… for me to expand and correct some wording.

when I asked where the does that energy go, I really meant, how does that effect the plasma’s ‘potential’? energy.

It seems to me the release of the compressed plasma upon leaving the magnetic confined tube would expand rapidly experiencing an adiabatic reaction rapidly cooling, something like a compressed water cannon with the plasma dissipating into a spray of vapor...these are extremely short bursts....

Yes, speculating it would be a flash, and high heat. Again… speculating, It would even flash the humity the air…

but, how would that affect the velocity. Should the velocity also transferred into the ‘flash’ ?

or will it keep traveling? So to speak.

Well speculating that the most damage from any explosion is usually the shock wave, any directional enhancement would need to be considered...if you were engineering it as a weapon, you would probably want to focus the shock wave as much as you could...of course at close range it would probably vaporize anything in its path...

https://www.military.com/video/ammunition-and-explosives/explosives/shockwave-captured-on-high-speed/763995636001

Skip to 2:00

Here is a well-educated rebuttal to this fusion approach. He explains some of my reservations about this approach. Particularly the claim that Field Reverse Conversion is a closely guarded, novel approach. This approach has been experimented with since the '60s. Helion could be guarding solutions to this approach they recently found but this is far from a novel approach. That is not the only problem he highlights in the video, have a look.

We need this sort of basic research and creativity, but this appears to be in the early stages of research/discovery, thus decades in the future before being practical. I'll await their printed report and then a peer review of the whole operation.

Meantime, I'll stay with Generation IV fast reactors, which may be pretty much ready except for politics.