>> 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.
