Comment Re:I'm impressed. (Score 2) 56
LOLZ, TAE.
In 1992 the main guy behind the idea, Norman Rostoker, published the concept of using two storage rings to do colliding beam fusion. It's been known since the 1950s that this is not possible. A couple of people have tried to figure it out over the years, most notably Bogdan Maglich in the 70s, but as soon as you do detailed design you can show that it simply doesn't work. The idea was ignored.
In 1997 he published a new design in Science using an FRC, a plasma configuration, as a replacement for the storage ring. The next year he applied to the NRL for funding. The application shows a machine the size of a stationary diesel and a guy in a naval outfit (the one with the neckerchief!) operating it. It was handed to two guys at NRL for peer review. By lunch, they had found a dozen reasons it could not *possibly* work, so they knocked off for food and wrote it up. The proposal was so ridiculous that one of the two reviewers stated to me that they began to question his mental state.
Not to be stymied, Rostoker then published the design in IEEE claiming they would have a break-even reactor in 3 years and a commercial demo unit in 5. This immediately resulted in several letters describing several reasons why it could not possibly work. In the 25+ years since that, the company has continued to claim breakeven and demo any year now, where "any" varies from 3 to 5. To date, after *over 25 years of effort*, they have not managed to get it working as well as Scyla I from 1958 even when operating on D, and are perhaps five orders of magnitude from break-even on that fuel, meaning they are about 9 to 10 orders of magnitude away from the pB they still claim will be any day now. The project is so delayed that Rostoker died a decade ago and the zombie project keeps going.
And people keep giving them money!
Science publication: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.278.5342.1419
IEEE publication: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/822414
Naval Labs review: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA356110.pdf
List of claims of fusion any day now: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/28/voodoo-fusion-energy/