Fusion – Inertial Electrostatic Confinement

“What’s that?” you might ask. Well I did not know either a few days ago. Basically it’s a method to produce fusion.
And what exactly is fusion anyway? Well it’s the oposite of fission: “Nuclear fusion is the process by which multiple nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus.” And why is this so interesting? “It is accompanied by the release or absorption of energy depending on the masses of the nuclei involved.” (from Wikipedia: Nuclear Fusion) That’s why! To achieve this you need to get nuclei (preferably two Deuterium or one Deuterium and one Tritium) close enough to one another so they fuse. There are different ways to achieve this:

• “Gravitational Confinement” which occurs naturally throughout the universe inside of stars
• “Magnetic Confinement” is the most popular method when thinking in terms of a fusion reactors to produce energy for mankind. Plasma is trapped and confined by electromagnatic coils.
• “Inertial Confinement”, where pellets of fusion fuel are compressed to ultrahigh densities using converging laser or particle beams.
• “Explosive Confinement” which is the technology inside a fusion bomb.
• “Cold Fusion” – it’s unclear wether or not this technology actually works
• and finally “Inertial Electrostatic Confinement” (IEC)

This list is taken from Brian McDermott’s Home Page where all methods are described in detail and a lot of other information about IEC can be found.

Anyway, in IEC those nuclei are brought close together by means of an electrostatic field. The field accelerates charged particles radially inward in a spherical geometry. Nuclei might get close enough at the center of the sperical geometry to fuse. A detailed description can be found on the Wikipedia page about IEC and at fusor.net.

Recently Robert W. Bussard held a speech at Google. He has done some serious research on the topic of IEC and presented his results (watch the video here). He claims that he and his fellow scientists have developed a device that works 100.000 times better than previous experiments. The technology is very controllable so high school students have managed to build such a device. I find this very amazing.

However the big problem with this technology is the question of building efficient devices or devices that even break even. This has not been accomplished so far. On his webpage Brian McDermott has a very interesting summary including interesting numbers on that topic and gives a probably realistic estimation.

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