WB-6 Fusion Experiment Concludes

[TestDrive]

Interesting article over at MSNBC's COSMICLOG - FUSION WE CAN BELIEVE IN?

Working on a shoestring budget, researchers have found no reason why a low-cost approach to nuclear fusion won't work.

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The mainstream approaches to commercial fusion would involve heating up plasma inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic bottle known as a tokamak, or using lasers to blast tiny bits of deuterium and tritium. The former approach is being followed for the $13 billion international ITER project, and the latter would be used by multibillion-dollar experiments such as the National Ignition Facility in the U.S. or HiPER in Britain.

Then there's the $1.8 million (yes, million) project that's just been wrapped up at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in Santa Fe, N.M. The experiment, funded by the U.S. Navy, was aimed at verifying some interesting results that the late physicist Robert Bussard coaxed out of a high-voltage inertial electrostatic contraption known as WB-6. (The "WB" stands for Wiffle Ball, which describes the shape of the device and its magnetic field.)

[NachtRitter]

Interesting... this month's Popular Science also had an article of a small company (General Fusion) in British Columbia researching low cost fusion... A good read.