Joe Khachan on polywell progress in Australia

Thu, 22 May 2008 11:05:48 +1000

... we discussed the Bussard Polywell. I asked if Joe thought Rick Nebel was in the business of making religious icons. That is, the WB-7 offer represents a finance raising activity by EMC2. That Nebel and crew have decided to market polywells to capitalise on other people's religious belief about polywell; the customers will get an icon, rather than a device which delivers results. I realise this is a jaundiced view of someone I have no personal knowledge of, but such a question should perhaps be asked if only to have an answer to the question.

Joe says that Rick Nebel is not that kind of guy. But Joe is also a sensible person. He does not desire a sales pitch. He wants numbers and graphs, indicating the device does what it says. He said that before he could commit to getting behind this idea he'd need to see some evidence that the device does produce confinement like it's said to do. He said it would be worth a plane ticket to Santa Fe with a microwave interferometer in a suitcase just to do the measurements and see the results - and then make a decision based on hard facts.

I asked what the "next step" would be, considering that a polywell would take up a large amount of space and consume a lot of man-hours and funds and Australia needs a way to ease into the polywell world. Joe suggested a "Penning trap" as a means to confine electrons. Measurements can be done on the trap which will provide some answers about the possibility of confining electrons using an electric / magnetic field. This research could function as the basis for future explorations of IEC. This represents Joe's personal roadmap, to answer the question - does IEC actually "confine" a non-neutral plasma?

Asked about research funding. Joe was quite uncertain about fusion getting funding in Australia. I suggested industry co-funding, he was neutral (I think he had not considered the possibility). I suggested that about 40 - 50k industry funding for the first year (with a match from ARC "Linking" funding) would do a lot for his general feelings of happiness, and he agreed. He suggested this could be used to fund the right technical officer full time for a year or two, to build a Penning trap which would go a long way to answer some questions about electron confinement.

Asked about the Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO) site in Sutherland (about 45 minutes by car from USyd) - Joe thought there would be no IEC intellectual reserve at that site, and that he would need to plan time at the site, rather than running down the stairs to his lab when he had time (as he presently does). A move to facilities at ANSTO could not be research on the hop. It would be a full time job, and Joe has a permanent position at USyd presently. This would be a move from certainty of income to something a lot less certain. My feeling is that this would work best if Joe were seconded from USyd to an outside organisation, that has a well developed infrastructure and support service and income structure, with facilities at ANSTO.

Advised Joe about approximate dimensions of WB-7 - 1.5m vacuum chamber, 200mm coils, no cooling, about two fires per day. He said this was not a trivial device, and would require serious investment in pumps, floor space, and general budget. He said that he could understand that such a device would very reasonably cost 500k - 1M if it included the chamber, the pumps, the power supplies and the detectors.

This is the second in a series of three articles on IEC fusion research in Australia. The next article will focus on a roadmap for future research ...

Australian Fusion - an interview with Dr. Joe Khachan

Sat, 17 May 2008 19:46:40 +1000

I arranged for a meeting with Dr. Joe Khachan after hearing of his work on the Talk-Polywell forum. Joe is the sole fusion plasma physicist remaining working at the University of Sydney's Physics Department, the others having retired in the past few years. He has two laboratories and an office and supervises four PhD students in research projects dealing with aspects of "inertial electrostatic confinement" (or IEC) fusion. He kindly allowed me to speak with him on relatively short notice and gave me both a tour of his facilities, and a heads up on the state of IEC fusion in Australia and the world.

His facilities are both modest and impressive. With a relatively low budget, he has managed to devise a good number of research avenues within the fusion arena. His most recent paper dealt with a current aspect of fusion energy research - the development of an ion rocket engine which uses tiny amounts of fuel and produces reliable thrust for long periods of time.

Joe spoke about his ion engine with some pride. "We measured the speed of the ions coming out of the engine, and they were moving at around half a percent of the speed of light. That is really cranking ... the exhaust coming out of the space shuttle engines moves at around 4 kilometres a second, whereas this ion engine pushes stuff out at over a thousand kilometres a second. And no, that's not a misprint. The faster the exhaust velocity, the less fuel you need to get the required thrust. And this is just what you need for the small rocket engines needed to keep weather satellites pointed at the right part of the earth to take their measurements. This ion engine will produce very efficient thrust with very low fuel usage - and that's a key requirement for satellites and spacecraft which need to maintain their position or attitude for weeks to months at a time."

The vacuum chamber he used for this research was obtained from a retiring professor at the University of New South Wales, and the vacuum pumps and spectroscope were leftovers from previous research. The monitoring instruments were bought with a $3000 grant from the Australian Defence Science Technology Organisation, and are some of the devices he has been able to acquire with recent budget allowances.

Fusion research is often seen as the domain of massive multi-government collaborations, due in large part to the ITER project currently being constructed in the south of France, with a budget of over 9 billion US dollars. Joe rejects the attitude that only huge budgets can accomplish anything. "There is a lot of research still waiting to be done that can be accomplished with relatively tiny budgets compared to ITER. The tokamak system that forms the heart of ITER is just one way to generate power from fusion. It's big and expensive and there is a lot of engineering to be worked out ... and it may become economical to produce energy this way some day. But it may be that other systems will beat ITER to the economic break-even point, and it's those systems which we are investigating."

Joe has recently begun looking at the Polywell, a system originally conceived by Philo Farnsworth (the inventor of the scanning tube which brought TV to the world) and developed by Robert Bussard (the assistant director of the American Atomic Energy Commission in the 1970s) until Bussard's death late last year. Polywell research is now being pursued in the United States by a team led by Dr. Richard Nebel, formerly of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"The great thing about IEC fusion is that an ounce of experiment is still worth a ton of theory. There are all kinds of ideas out there which might bring home the bacon, but until they're tested, nobody knows. And Australia has a chance to get in on this research, because - unlike ITER - it's doable with budgets we can afford, and we have skills and talents homegrown that we can use to get answers ... and perhaps most importantly, this is one place where experiments are the only good way to provide real answers. There are heaps of computer models out there, but they all depend on theoretical ideas. The people who do the experiments will have the real answers."

But the road ahead has some pitfalls. In Australia, research into fusion has traditionally not received the funding it would overseas, despite the fact that Sir Mark Oliphant, an Australian working with Ernest Rutherford, is credited with discovering the first fusion reaction. The University of Sydney ran a tokamak fusion device in the early days of fusion research (a small version of ITER) but this was dismantled in the 1990s to make way for other research into thin film deposition. Joe also has responsibilities as the Head of First Year students, which leaves him with less time to devote to pure research and applying for grants. Despite this, he remains cautiously optimistic about future trends in fusion research in Australia.

"I think we have a legacy of serious fusion research in Australia which in recent years has been overshadowed by things which make short term, quick profit results. But as our traditional energy supplies become scarcer, we are all looking for real answers to what our society needs to maintain itself. Fusion energy would solve an awful lot of problems for our civilisation while avoiding many of the issues that plague nuclear energy, or biofuels, or hydro power.

"Right now we are sitting on an inflexion point, a place in time where our civilisation has to change some of the basic ways we do things. We're not all the way there yet - we still have time to do the research that can provide us with the energy that we will need for the future. Maybe we need a shift in thinking, to put a little more into long term goals. We're in a place where the long-term players who are willing to invest for ten years could perhaps get interested, and come out of it very much ahead of the pack.

"It would be possible to get a polywell running for less than a million dollars, a pulse device to verify the physics and get the fusion science worked out. On the way we'd get patents on all kinds of things. After that it would be an engineering task to bring it on line in the way coal plants currently run. That would take longer. As a country, we'd get benefits. Not just economic, or prestige. But perhaps we'd be able to look at each other and think - hey we did it here, we don't have to buy all our stuff from China. We made our own power here. That's what I hope for in fusion research. That we can make it happen right here."

Fusion articles

Joe Khachan on polywell progress in Australia

Australian Fusion - an interview with Dr. Joe Khachan