>> John Daly: Thanks, everybody, for coming. I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Jaeyoung Park
from EMC2 Corporation. Before we get going, I'd like to thank Dr. Park for taking the time to
put these slides together. He spent a lot of time doing it. I'd like to thank our former fellow
employee, John Costello, for introducing me to the concept of Polywell fusion and making me
spend long hours researching it, which has all been to my benefit. And I'd like to thank Amy
Draves and MSR for hosting the talk. You may also want to refer to the 2006 Google TechTalk,
featuring Dr. Robert Bussard, for more background. Microsoft adds value to electricity, and we
want everyone to have a cheap and plentiful supply, but the cost can be very high in terms of
environmental damage, emissions, resource consumption and access. If you're a liberal and hate
global warning, if you're conservative and want to make electricity cheap and make more money
off of it, if you're a libertarian and want to see something like a [gulp] machine finally arrive, or
if you're somewhat disgusted by the primitive practice of combusting stuff to make electricity,
Dr. Park has something for you, and for the cost of a handful of McMansions, we can make real
progress in this area. Dr. Park?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Thank you. Thank you, so let's see. I think I want to go back to the first
slide. So thank you. Thanks, John and Amy for inviting and arranging this trip. I'm excited to
be here, and I hope this will be a good talk. I was told that my timing was pretty good -impeccable -- because I think the whole city of Seattle needed a few more days to recover from
the game on Sunday, so congratulations for that, and I'm excited, and about 10 days for the Super
Bowl. So let me start with the last page first. You probably heard about these quotes on fusion
before. Fusion is the ultimate energy source, and it is 20 years away, and it will always be. My
goal today is to share that there's a hope that we can have fusion power the world in not-sodistant future. So this is a slide I first used when I was giving a talk at UCLA, and it's LA, so
everybody gets their fame for 15 minutes of fame, having shows on TV. So these are the
gentlemen. This slide reminds me of how privileged I am to follow the footsteps of these
gentlemen. Their brilliance and their ideas are what makes the Polywell an interesting
opportunity to study fusion. So, as it happens, my talk today will be more focused on these two
gentlemen here, who had direct contribution to lots of Polywell physics. Professor Harold Grad
is from NYU, and Dr. Bussard is the founder of EMC2. So here is the outline of the talk. First,
I'll start with a primer on fusion, which we'll then talk about those two quotes here a little bit,
why that makes sense, and then follow the story of Polywell fusion and a quick glimpse into the
minds of these gentlemen. After that, I'll describe what we learned at EMC2 in the past couple
of years, and this was supported by the US Navy, so we're very grateful for that, their support.
And also, I'd like to emphasize this was a team work, and I'm very excited to present our team's
result here. So thanks for those, and that's why I'm here today, and then I'll wrap up the talk
about the future, the vision that we have that we can hopefully -- in the not-so-distant future -will power the world with fusion energy. So to some of you who are not familiar with the fusion
and doesn't have a smartphone next to you, this is a one-page introduction of the fusion. Fusion
generates a usable power from the merging of two lightweight atoms, such as deuterium and
tritium, and releases a large amount of energy, based on Einstein's equation E=mc^2. It's an
incredible source of energy. If you look at it here, by fusing just two grams of deuterium and
three grams of tritium, you can generate approximately 1.7 terajoules of energy. That's
equivalent to burning about 270 barrels of oil. So it is an impressive source of energy, and there
are reasons for why fusion is called the ultimate energy source. There's abundant supply of lowcost fuel, no danger of the nuclear fission type of activity accident, no greenhouse gas emissions,
no or minimal danger for nuclear proliferation, and also, one of the benefits of fusion is there's
no radioactive fuel residues, so you generate some nuclear reactor waste if you use a particular
fuel, but those are low-level wastes, not that much different from hospital type of waste, and they
don't live long, so you don't have to worry about long-term waste depositories. So this is the
good part about fusion. So what's the hard about it? Well, just like everything else, trying to do
something great requires hard work, and fusion is no exception for that. So there is a graph here
you can think about as a probability of fusion happening. And first thing you'll notice on the axis
is, by the way, this is a conversion factor, so 10 keV here is about 100 million degrees. So you
do need to keep the fusion hot, and this has something to do with overcoming strong cooling
forces. That's not just one. If you look at this Y axis carefully, the number there is about 10 to
the minus 27, 28 square meters. What that is, fusion being a nuclear forces, it requires two
nuclei come together very, very close, about 0.1 times 10 to the minus 14 meters. Everybody's
heard about the nanotechnology. One nanometer is about 10 to the 9 meters, so the scale that is
relevant for fusion is about 100,000 times to a million times smaller than nanotechnology. So
what that results in is, typically, in Polywell, or more the conventional magnetic fusion reactor, a
single nucleus has to travel about 10,000 kilometers to generate one fusion event. That's how
unlikely the fusion happens in nature, so that's why every time you hear about the fusion, one of
the worlds you hear is Coulomb confinement. You have to design a very clever container to
contain this 100-million-degree fuel very efficiently, so they will go through fusion collision
before they escape to the world. So that's pretty tough odds, and in fact, these odds were well
known since 1940s in the physics community, and that didn't stop the people from pursuing
fusion. In fact, from what I gather these days, talking to people, they were actually more
optimistic about the chance of making fusion in the 1950s and 1960s, and here is a summary of
their effort. Obviously, it's a tough problem, so it takes some time to study it, but once they
studied it, they were making a tremendous progress about 30 years back. And culminating the
work here done in joint European tokomak that produced approximately 16 megawatts of fusion
power with an input of 24 megawatts. Here in the US, there was a Princeton work in 1995 which
produced about 12 megawatts of the fusion power, and that's the data point here. And I'd also
like to briefly mention, there's another approach for fusion. It uses a laser, and they were also
making a great deal of progress at the same period. So it is the general agreement among the
fusion scientists and most of the scientists that fusion is going to happen, sooner or later. The
real question is, how fast can you make it work, and if you make it work, whether it will be
economical and practical. So before I talk some more about some more about it -- please do.
>>: The split of the inputs, the input power, where is it going?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Oh, I will talk to you a little bit more about that, but generally, the next
machine for either will be about 100 megawatts, like 50 megawatts in, about 500 megawatts out.
>>: So what is that energy being used for? Is it containment?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Heating.
>>: It's mostly heat?
>> Jaeyoung Park: It's the heating, and containment is more like the insulation. So you heat it,
you lose the heat fast, it'll never get hot. So you have to contain it, provide a good insulation, so
it's all in the heating side of it, and that handles both confinement, because every particle you
lose, they take the energy away from it. Yes, I forgot mentioning, if you have a question, feel
free to ask, and also, I'll have some time to answer at the end of the talk, as well. So this is a
slide, I put it earlier. I'm excited to be here at Microsoft, and partly because it's been tremendous
help for the fusion community to have high-performance computing, and this is an example
about structures and details of the fusion plasma you can now simulate with the help of the
supercomputer. Well, it's a little slow, it turns out to be. To do it right, it takes about two days
of simulation to simulate about a millisecond of the real life, but nonetheless, it's a good place to
start, so if you can make a computer work faster and better, we're all ears, so thank you. So I
told you a little bit about it's getting close to the fusion. In fact, this graph here is an amazing
testament of how well, how much we made progress in understanding plasma for fusion. X-axis
here is experimental data. Y-axis here is the theory, the modeling, and the agreements are pretty
good, and based on this agreement, we are able to design a machine called ITER. ITER is not an
acronym. It's actually the Latin word called away. That will produce, scheduled to produce
more fusion power output than its input power. And that began in about 1984, 1985, and it's
between Russia -- I think at the time it's the USSR -- and America agreed to build the ITER, and
you can see the pictures of the gentlemen who signed the agreement. So this is 2015. That's
almost 30 years ago, so it has been 30 years today. So ITER is finally being built in France, and
it's actually making a pretty good, steady progress. If you look at the schematic scale,
schematics of ITER -- I don't know whether you can see. You have to look really hard, but you
can see a six-feet-tall person, and this picture gives you a sense of size, how big this device is. I
personally believe ITER will be a great scientific machine. I'm so excited about it. I would like
to see it working. On the other hand, here is a hard fact. It's going to be big, and it's going to be
a very complex machine, and unfortunately, it's taking longer and longer and more and more
expensive to build this one. So it's probably 2030 is what I heard the latest number. It may be
even more, longer, we have to wait. There's another case. I mentioned briefly about the laser
approach in fusion. This is another flagship fusion device. This one actually has been built and
operational at Livermore National Laboratory in California. The idea behind it is called laserdriven inertial fusion, that small, pellet-sized fuels are compressed, heated and ignited by lasers
to produce boost of fusion energy. NIF uses 192 power lasers and the facility is about three
football fields' size. So you kind of wonder, it's starting to make sense. Yes, we're making a lot
of progress, but it looks like we're making bigger and bigger and more complex -- as such, the
reality of fusion power looks like it's further and further away, rather than getting closer. So the
consequence of that is we are in the world that everybody wants to use more electricity or more
energy. There is a growing world economy in China, India, Africa and everywhere. There is a
need to address those energy consumptions. So for the people of the world, these are the
electricity market trends, and they're counting on coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to make up
those needs. Now, about 75% -- according to the projection by US Energy Information Agency,
by 2040, 75% of the electricity power will come from those three sources. If you look hard
enough, there's a section for the solar and wind. It's there. They're growing about 10% a year,
clear. Despite this rapid growth, they still have technology problems to solve, and this prediction
takes that into account. So you can kind of see that. It'll be great. I was actually talking to John
this morning. It'll be great personally if there is a way we can generate the electricity without
burning coal in some way. That'll be great. I mean, you may have to burn coal, but the less you
burn it, you're probably better off. So fusion can help with that if you can do it sooner rather
than later. So here's a story of Polywell fusion, and that's why I'm here, but in fact, this is a
question that started EMC2. Big and complex machines are expensive, they take a long time to
build. If you are smart and young and curious scientist at work, you sometimes have to throw
the question like this and think about it, and that's how we started EMC2. So the idea starts from
this concept called electrostatic fusion. It doesn't use magnetic fields. The basic promise of the
electrostatic fusion is you perform electrostatic wells. You form the well, potential well, ions
here, which is essentially for making fusion work. It gets contained here, gains the energy by the
time they go here, circulate, move up, go back here, go back out, and in the middle, they generate
the fusion event. By utilizing electric fields, they are guaranteed to be quite efficient in
confining and accelerating those ions, and that's been one of these reasons these concepts have
been very successful in making fusion events. The well-known version of this concept is called
Farnsworth fusor or Hirsch-Farnsworth fusor. You can kind of imagine Dr. Bussard, who started
EMC2, used to work with Dr. Hirsch at US Atomic Agency. Dr. Hirsch did his thesis and
postdoc work with Dr. Farnsworth, Philo Farnsworth, back in the 1960s. So in a way, they knew
this, and this was a good place to study it. One of the nice things about this, and I personally
built one of those myself, is now the six-foot man becomes bigger compared to the machine, and
it's a pretty neat little device. You can make lots and lots of neutrons and fusions in the system.
However, despite all the best efforts, it looks like producing net power in electrostatic will be
very challenging, and that's because electric fields are good at confining one species at the
expense of pushing out the other species. So the further electrostatic concept relevant to
Polywell which is the potential well, is great for confining ions, is really poor confining
electrons. So the electrons just fly away, hit some of these grids and get lost. So the power gain
efficiency is about one part per million, or one part per 100,000. It's very small. So about 1985,
a young scientist -- I guess back then he was young, Dr. Bussard -- came up with the idea that,
well, I'm going to insulate this grid where the electrons get lost by flowing the current in the coil,
so you can actually see it here. And that helps electrons to avoid hitting this coil, so there's a
concept called magnetic insulation. It turns out what is really original about his idea is not the
idea of insulating it, but what type of magnetic field he chose to do use to do the job, and that's
the story of Polywell. Polywell is a combination of polyhedral coil that is used to confine
electrons and potential well that is used to combine ions and provide a heating of ions, and that is
in 1985. It's a little difficult images, and if you stare at it long enough, you'll make some sense
out of it. These are the three-dimensional pictures of how the magnetic fields look like in
Polywell devices. I'll just leave it here, and then I heard that it's going to be available online or
the public forum, so you can stare at it a little more. So after spending some time, EMC started
working on it, building experiments in around early 1990s, and it turns out, forming a potential
well in a Polywell device by electron beam injection wasn't too difficult, so we have some early
success by about 1995. The potential well, you see it here, is about 7.2 kilowatts, I believe. Go
ahead.
>>: If you look at it on the left, it looks like there's streaming paths on the vertical and horizontal
axis. Is that an issue?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Oh, you mean this one here?
>>: Yes.
>> Jaeyoung Park: It's an issue. I'll talk to you a little bit. That is an issue, because that's where
your electrons are going to leak out and disappear.
>>: Why is confining electrons so important?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Because in order to create a potential well, you have to inject electrons, and
electrons give off the energy to create an electric field. So if you lose the electrons, you're not
going to form a potential well.
>>: I thought the potential well was formed by the current flowing around the rings.
>> Jaeyoung Park: No, those are the magnetic fields.
>>: Oh, okay, got it. I see.
>> Jaeyoung Park: So current will flow in here. Currents going into that create a magnetic field
shaped like that, and you shoot the electrons into these corners to create a potential well. The
more electrons you confine, the deeper this well becomes.
>>: On the last [indiscernible], you have labeled at low plasma -- not that, the slide later. Keep
going. There.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes.
>>: At low plasma density. Does that refer to the density of the injected ions, or are you
referring to the electron density?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Density of the injected ions, density of the plasma that is to be accelerated.
>>: By low do you mean that it's many fewer ions than there are electrons?
>> Jaeyoung Park: You don't need a big difference. You need about -- so what ended up being
is that approximately you need about 10 to the 7 or 10 to the 8 per CC difference between
electrons and ion concentration to create a well like this. Generally, what they see is, this was
done -- I used to have a slide here, but done at about 10 to the 9 particles per CC as they tried to
raise up the density higher to make a more fusion power output. The well disappears, and that
was attributed to electrons, even though they're putting out a few [Ms], they don't last too long.
They disappear. It comes in here, as he asked me. Along these lines, they get lost within
somewhere between 30 to about 100 nanoseconds in this type of device, meaning that they just
disappear so fast that you're consuming so much power to create a very weak potential well.
And as soon as you start trying to accelerate the ion, the well starts collapsing it, because you're
not having enough electrons in the system. So what we found it to be was, somehow, in order to
make a Polywell work, you need to have ability to contain these high-energy electrons. Not just
electrons, but high-energy electrons for very efficiently and long time. So that was the
challenges EMC took on it. Over the next 20 years, we had built several devices, WB-1 through
WB-8. I guess 2 is here, 4 is there, 6, 5 and 7 and 8. I'll show you the scale about 8, what it
looks like it. Eight is about this big. So we tried really hard, confining high-energy electrons in
these systems, and the reality is, none of these devices, all the way up to 8, succeeded, confining
high-energy electrons. So you kind of wonder, well, the idea was great, but something is not
clicking here. Either we are missing it, or we are doing something wrong, so it gives you time to
think what are we missing? So we're going to take a look, second look, into the Polywell, and
look at it differently, not just isolating those grids, but what is really going on and what you need
to do? So it's called diamagnetism and plasma. What makes a Polywell interesting is this
concept called diamagnetism. This happens in plasma because, in plasma, it's not a neutral
matter. Electrons and ions are now free to move. When they move, they generate the current.
When they generate the current, the direction of their current tries to cancel out the magnetic
field that was imposed onto them. So that's the word diamagnetism comes about. The more
plasma you have, this diamagnetic effect becomes stronger and stronger, until you can't cancel
out all your magnetic fields in the system. So what we were looking at is, with increasing
plasma pressure, the Polywell dynamics will change dramatically due to this effect. And in a
way, this is somewhat similar to the magnetic wave rotation to those inner superconducting
materials called Meissner effect, and that's the cartoon and pictures of that. You can see the
rotation on it. So that's sort of the effect, we're looking at it. Here, I'm going to define a
parameter called beta, which will be used extensively throughout the rest of the talk. It's the ratio
between plasma pressure and magnetic pressure, so more plasma for a given magnetic pressure,
you have a higher beta, and that will be an efficient use of power, because it turns out the fusion
power output goes with a beta squared and a volume. So if you want to make a small reactor,
you have to increase the beta. If you have a small beta, you have to make up for that by making
the device larger. That's the direction. And here are pictures about it. I don't know whether you
can see the line. If you look closely, there's white lines going through. That's the magnetic field.
The colors are plasma. When there's not enough plasma, even though they tried to cancel out the
magnetic field, it's not strong enough, so you can see magnetic fields penetrate into the plasma.
When you have sufficiently high plasma in the system, there is no magnetic field. All the fields
get pushed out. So in the big region here, you have a field free and plasma region. The magnetic
field gets pushed around at the edges of the boundary. Okay, if you have a hard time
understanding this, that's okay. We'll have some more slides to do it. Before I want to do that, I
want to just talk a little bit about a short history. This will help you to understand the importance
of the diamagnetism in Polywell. So this is a snapshot of the US Fusion Program in 1958. And
the stories on the next few slides are from the book from Project Sherwood, written by Marshall
Bishop, and Bishop was the program manager for the US Fusion Program in the 1950s. This is a
very good book. So the story begins with Edward Teller, in 1954. Teller is a pioneer in both
fission and fusion, and he's a very brilliant man. So when he heard about it, some of the younger
scientists at the time were working on fusion to be a power reactor. He threw out questions. He
said, well, you guys are missing something here, and it's called plasma stability. In his view,
containing the plasma with a magnetic field are kind of analogous to trying to contain the Jell-O
with a rubber band. Okay, good. What he means is Jell-O or plasma always likes to move
outward. They like to escape, they like to move outward. Magnetic field has a similar property
as a rubber band. They always like to snap back into the shortest distance possible. They don't
like to be stretched. They like to be snapped back, so I'm going to look at this quote "unstable
picture" here. So plasma here likes to go out. Magnetic field is already stretched, if you think
about it. They would rather go in to make themselves shorter. So what happens is, when the
opportunity arises, plasma will move out, magnetic fields will snap in. They'll change the
position, so they named this interchange instability. It's sort of analogous of the well-known
fluid instability called Rayleigh-Taylor instability. So they find out this configuration will be
inherently unstable. Opposite, if you have a magnetic field shape that looks like that, plasma
would like to escape a magnetic field. You say, well, that's okay, because I can make myself
shorter that way. So that boundary remains intact, and that is considered a stable configuration.
On some of the devices, you have both regions as unstable region and a stable region. And this
is a modern-day cartoon about what it looks like in a tokomak. If you look at carefully out here,
this region out here has unstable configuration. Therefore, you see less and less instability being
developed, that again, while the inside, which is stable, it's much more power. So that was the
point he made it back in 1954. It turns out, his intuition is absolutely correct, and almost all
magnetic confinement systems suffer instability, as he predicted. So what happened is back in
the late '50s, the majority of effort in fusion went into stabilizing the plasma against these types
of instability. And they succeeded to a large degree, and that's why you saw this tremendous
progress in all your slides. However, it left one lasting legacy, that higher the plasma beta,
there's always maximum beta you can have in your configuration. It turns out that maximum
beta you can have to stabilize the plasma is not very high for most systems. So ITER, it turns out
to be that number is about 0.03. I remind you, the fusion power goes as a beta squared, and that's
one of the reasons the ITER is so big. For that confinement, there is an interesting quotation I
got from that book is Howard York is the first more laboratory director at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. He learned about the effort -- back then, it goes on in Princeton University,
at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and called the device called stellarator. He said, well, because
of all the bendings and funny shape, he thinks that there would be a significant limitation on
beta, so that reduced the power output. Because you can't really have a high beta, so for a given
size, your output has to go down. He thinks that it will never be an economic interest, so he
directed it, one of the young scientists named Dick Post to work on so-called Magnetic Mirror
Fusion Program at Livermore, which later turned out to be also unstable at high beta, as well.
Well, if you look at it, laser fusion still struggles with it. It's because of the instability. In their
case, it's more the traditional Rayleigh-Taylor type hydrodynamic instability. So summary is,
fusion devices become bigger and bigger because they have to battle this instability. So if you
can control the plasma instability, you have a chance now to make a fusion device smaller and
more economically attractive. So that's the story about cusp. Cusp came to existence -- let me
just go back here quickly. I forgot mentioning it. There's a cusped geometry that starts at about
1954 and '55 at NYU. Cusp started because it is an answer by a gentleman named Jim Tuck at
Los Alamos. Hey, I want to create a system where the coils are positive in and out and out in in,
change the polarity, create a magnetic field. It looks like the picket fence along the garden,
British garden, and in the plasma, everywhere you look at it, you see a good coverage.
Therefore, it turns out to be absolutely stable against interchange instability. It's the first
magnetic system to do so. So they thought, well, this is a good idea. It turns out, when they run
the experiment, the losses, as you pointed out, through this field line, was super-fast. So it was
almost like, well, it looks stable, but there's hardly any plasma in the system, and that was a
problem, until somebody came into and thinking, well, let me think about this, and that's the
work by Harold Grad and his team at NYU. They took a rather drastic approach. In their view,
plasma diamagnetism will do something, so if you happen to have a very high-pressure plasma in
the cusp, they will then push out the magnetic field, and you have a giant area where there is no
magnetic field in the system. Because magnetic fields never disappear in nature, you will push
them and you will pile them up in this boundary. It will dramatically change those interfaces
between plasma and magnetic field regions, and when that happens, he estimated the
confinement property of the cusp will be dramatically different, and it will be a lot better. So we
ran some numbers, contemporary numbers, about six-coil cusp system with a seven tesla and
about a meter radius coil and trying to contain 100 kilovolts. That's about 1 billion degrees, if
you converted it. If you have low-beta pressure in these cases, expected confinement time is
about a microsecond. If you somehow Grad is correct, and if it's in the high-beta regime,
according to his prediction, it's about half a second, so we're looking at about 500,000 times
difference. Well, as a physicist, that's very big. That's almost like a phase transition between ice
and water. It's a completely different system. So I'm going to take a little pause and look at this
one. So back in 1985, when Bussard started working on Polywell, he knew about Grad's
prediction. He thought this would be important. So this is a quote out of one of his seminars.
The enormous flux of electrons at the center exhibits the diamagnetic effect. It excludes the
magnetic field outward. This pushes back the magnetic field outward and contracts some of the
holes where you see the particle may get lost. This is sort of the very graphical, visual
interpretation of the Grad's theory. And he named that as a WiffleBall. So Polywell is not just
creating potential well, but it utilized this concept called WiffleBall, because without forming a
WiffleBall, you don't have a means to contain those high-energy electrons efficiently. So what
happened to the Grad's? So after the Grad, his conjecture made the cusp approach promising,
and you saw that earlier, for a net power producing fusion reactor. As a result, significant
experiments were conducted in the next 20 years on about 20 different devices, and about 200
papers were published. There are two excellent review articles by Spalding and Haines, but most
of the effort on cusp stopped by 1980, because lack of progress -- cusp was a very difficult
machine experimentally, as well as some of the experimental data had cast a shadow to the cusp
confinement predictions. So why Polywell, not cusp? So now you're kind of starting to wonder
when Bussard introduced electrostatic concept onto this cusp. What he ended up doing is he's
making two changes, making significant changes, basically address two of the most challenging
issues of the cusp system, make the Polywell better. And here's a little cartoon, so this is the
electrostatic idea and that's the magnetic cusp idea at high beta. So one of the reasons effort at
cusp stopped is there's not an easy way to heat the ions to the fusion temperature. Electrostatic,
that's not a big deal. You use an electrostatic potential well to do that. You inject electrons. If
they get confined by magnetic cusp, you will form a nice potential well that will accelerate the
ions to the fusion temperature. The second part of the thing is there's a lot of debate for the next
20 years, between 1958 to about 1980. There's a lot of debate about which of the loss rate in the
cusp is correct. Is it driven by electrons, driven by ions, or more of the hybrid, by both. I think
it's still unresolved problem, by and large, but in Polywell, we bypass the problem altogether.
Because of the potential well, ions were their boundary, they're already cold. They have to climb
up the hill to pull down significantly, so if you lose them, it's not a big deal. In fact, cold ion loss
at the cusp boundary is actually smaller than the hot electron loss at the boundary, so it doesn't
matter. All you have to do is count the electron losses, not to worry about the ion loss, and that
is a very big simplification on the part of the cusp system. So that's why Polywell is a very
interesting concept, and that's what makes me excited about it, and it took a while for us to go
through all those, but we're finally here to get that. So these are the experimental work at EMC2,
so I'm going to start with some of the pictures here. That's the WB-8 device we built. Oh, sorry.
Okay, please.
>>: So it seems like the appropriate measure for electron loss is something like cross-section
through the holes as they shrink, the cross-section of the holes as they shrink, or what's the -there's a cross-section for fusion, there's a cross-section for the state.
>> Jaeyoung Park: We'll get that one maybe at the end of the talk, because that's a little bit
tricky. I'll be happy to answer that, but maybe at the end of the talk, so thanks. Any other
questions?
>>: When you say high energy loss, what kind of energies?
>> Jaeyoung Park: So in our current sort of experiment, we use about seven kilovolts. In a
fusion device, we're looking at about 50 to 100 kilovolts electrons, and those have to be
confined.
>>: [Indiscernible].
>> Jaeyoung Park: Not quite. Electrons -- well, I guess about 10%, so yes, but it's not heavily
relativistic at all. It's a small modification, but thanks. Okay, so I think that's me, and this is a
device we tested out high-beta cusp confinement system. These are the pictures. We took it
during the installation of this small device here. That's where the coils are, and you can see some
of the diagnostics called flux loop to measure the diamagnetic effect, because the WiffleBall or
the cusp confinement being a diamagnetic effect, we need to measure that, make sure it's there.
So this is an animation, so let me hope that this works. So this is experimental setup, and that's
the device we have, and you can see some of the dimensions here. So we're very much interested
in confining high-energy electrons, so we had an electron beam gun coming from the top that
puts out about seven kilovolts of electrons into the system. We use so-called plasma gun. Each
one handles about 350 megawatts of power for a short period of time. We're injecting plasma, so
we'll see from low beta to the high beta back to the low beta transition, and we're going to
monitor the electron confinement through the X-ray measurements, so that's the game plan on
that one.
>>: [Indiscernible].
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes, those are pulse for the time being. Eventually, it will be held steady
state as you move toward it. So you will do this once, and what's nice about this Polywell
concept is, if you do form high-beta confinement state, you don't have to put up that much power
to sustain it. Your power requirement to sustain goes down significantly, but for this test or
experiment, we just did it pulsed.
>>: But this scale of machine [indiscernible] the intuition would be that the most active region is
that diamond where the field has been excluded. How large would that diamond be?
>> Jaeyoung Park: We're looking at about 10 centimeters in radius.
>>: For the central area --
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes, for the central area, the whole area here.
>>: So that's a relatively large area to have no field.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes, yes. That's what it requires, and we have done some measurement to
indicate that that's what's happening.
>>: And inside that area, what's the distribution of electrons? I would imagine that they would
try to avoid each other, so it would actually be relatively hollow?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Not really. Keep in mind that, again, this case in particular, we didn't try to
produce the electrostatic potential well, so the plasma is largely neutral, and this electron beam
that was used was -- let me just give you context. So we put two of them. That's about 700
megawatts of the power injecting neutral plasma, and I have about 3M, so seven times three is
about 20 kilowatts of electron beam, so you can easily see that I need a lot more than that to start
creating a deep potential well, accelerate the bulk ions in the system. So it wasn't designed to
handle deep potential well on this one. These beams are used as a diagnostic coil to monitor
whether you can have a good confinement on those high-energy electrons. So you can read
about this later. I'm just going to flash later. The game plan for that is, we're going to start with
a bulk plasma that was injected by this gun to form a high-beta plasma in the center that'll
modify the cusp magnetic field in such a way the confinement property of the high-energy
electrons will be changed, and we're going to monitor then using X-rays.
>>: And what was the temperature [indiscernible]?
>> Jaeyoung Park: The bulk plasma we expect to be about 10 electron volts, and the electron
beams are seven kilovolts, so they're very different. So they don't interact much at all.
>>: So 10 electron volts, so it's about ->> Jaeyoung Park: About 100,000 degrees kelvin, versus seven kilovolts, which is a lot higher.
So here's a little bit more pictures of it. These are the actual devices we use to form our
injection. It's about -- it has a center gap, and about two millimeter gap. We used a
polypropylene solid target, which is about one-fifth or one-tenth of the Saran wrap thickness. So
we used less than one person. He laid it out with soft hands flatly, and we flow about 100,000
amps of current, and that generated 350 megawatts of peak power plasma injection for about
seven microseconds. And by using two beams, I think I can do this -- and it might be a little
jumpy, because we have to take pictures on simultaneous shots. It's not done in a fast shot, so
this is how the two plasmas come in, they merge, and they brought it up. Let me play it one
more time. When it's done, you can see that the plasma comes in, they form it. Because of what
limited it, it was a limited budget experiment, we didn't have that great a symmetry, but
nonetheless, in the bulk volume, you do have a very high-pressure plasma forms, and that seems
to be sufficient to actually dramatically change the confinement property of the electrons. That's
what we've seen experimental.
>>: So when you say pressure in [indiscernible]?
>> Jaeyoung Park: This case would be about 10 to 100 Pascals for this one. They're not that
high.
>>: [Indiscernible] millibars.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Something like that, probably. I might have to check the numbers on that
one.
>>: How long can you keep the plasma? How long the plasma stays?
>> Jaeyoung Park: I have a diagram, so if you wait just enough, so that's sort of the plan is when
new injector electrons do move around it, they do get lost at a low beta through those holes.
When they form a high beta, ideally, this loss would be a lot smaller, so they'll stay more, and
that concentration of high-energy electrons will be measured by X-ray diagnostics. To give you
a perspective, this seven kilovolt electrons for this small device, they move very fast. It only
takes seven nanoseconds for them to move one end to the other. On average, at low beta, we
expect them to last about 45 nanoseconds, hardly no time. They just disappear. What we are
hoping to see is, by making a transition to high beta, we'd like to see them stay in the cusp
approximately 400 times longer. So if you look at the X-ray signal, it's like no signal, neutral
signal, then back to no signal when it disappears. That's what you want to see it. You have to
see so clearly, with your naked eyes, basically. So that was a goal. So here's a movie. It does
have an interesting sound effect.
>>: Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
>>: Whoa.
>> Jaeyoung Park: We have some young scientists that works there. I think that was his view of
it. I'm going to turn it on again. So what it is, we count them. At about zero, we shoot those fast
injectors. They make a very bright plasma. We keep the diagnostic going throughout the whole
time and make sure that we see them, how the X-ray signal changes as a function of the time
throughout the process. So I'm going to just show it once, and obviously, safety is very
important, and I was told that I can't really look at it directly, so we put the mirror there, so you
will see the reflected light from the mirror.
>>: Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
>>: Whoa.
>> Jaeyoung Park: That's what you see. It's not spectacular as a result of it, but one of us
thought it's safer that way, so nobody got hurt. Everybody's happy. So it was about 2013, late
October, we finally make this thing work. It's called WiffleBall, and that was the pictures of the
plasma with about 700 megawatts of injection power to start it and form high-pressure plasma in
the middle. So this is one of the first data. I think that day, we took two datas, looks about the
same. I decided to call it a day, just because I was pretty excited about it. So these were the case
when we have electron beam turns on here. At T equals about 40 microseconds -- it is a
microsecond in the X domain, and we monitor it, there's really no X-ray. Obviously, there's
confinement of the electrons are poor and there's no plasma to make an X-ray with it. At T
equals zero, we inject about 200 -- this blue here is about half of the power. It's about 250 for
that channel, I think if you combine it. The other one is higher, so that's about 700 megawatts.
You inject it. You can see them move into it. You can see the density shows up here. What you
want to pay attention to is this delta B. That's the major of the diamagnetic field, at the location
that we put those diagnostics. We see that it peaks out. Just shortly after it peaks out, you can
start seeing the X-ray signal start rising up. And then, after -- and it rises gradually for a period
of time. At some point, it crashes down, and we really liked this signal, and I'll tell you why.
First of all, we weren't really trying to sustain this high-beta regime, so when we studied in a
vacuum to a high beta, we expect it'll decay away, and you can see some of the line emission.
The plasma is getting cold, and you're starting to lose plasma. So high-beta regime exists about
five microsecond period in this set of experiment. What you want to see is, initially,
confinement of the electron is poor, so you want the X-ray signal to go up gradually, as the
confinement gets better, because all of a sudden, you turn up the switch -- all of a sudden, all the
losses have disappeared, but there wasn't much electrons at that point in time, so you're building
up gradually. When you lose them, all of them have to go out all at once. You can't expect them
to go out slowly, because all of a sudden, all the good confinement is gone, so now they have to
disappear in about 45 nanoseconds, and that crash there is about the resolution of our
instruments. That's about a microsecond, so you can see why this signal was so pretty. And you
can see how big a jump, you notice it. Later, we also noticed there's interference from the
impurity that is being melted into the system in those discharge, and we find out that's not
something to worry about it, so we're fairly confident that that's not the case. A few days later,
we convene and we continue to do experiments. So one of the things we do is we vary the
power, so black here is 200 megawatts, 350, 450 and 700 megawatts -- 200 megawatts is not
bad. It's a significant power, but it hardly makes any dent at all in your X-ray signal, and even
350, it's not that much. You might see a little blip there. It's only when you have sufficient
power, you see dramatic change in your X-ray signal. Again, the shape is a more triangle shape,
rather than a square shape, which is what we expect to see. We'd done that by keeping the power
the constant. We then varied the magnetic fields. First of all, we want to make sure that this is a
magnetic effect. At B equals zero, there's a black, and there's really no structure. Some of this is
related to impurity, and obviously there's no diamagnetic signal. No magnetic field, there's no
reason for the plasma to produce diamagnetic effect. When you have just about the right balance
in red, you see giant signals, and that's when you see it. When you turn up this blue, which is a
weak magnetic field, you have this case that plasma is overpowering the magnetic field. When
the beta is bigger than one, in general, you cannot expect to have a plasma confinement, so
everything gets sloshed around it, and that's what you see as well. So this phenomenon, you can
only see it when there's a decent balance between pressure from the plasma and a magnetic field.
So that made us feel pretty good about it. This one day, we shoot six shots, so every time we
send it, we open the chamber up, send two people, take it out. There's one person with good
hands, manually that out, so it's not a very easy-to-control experience, and you've seen that if you
watch it, there's sparks flowing, and it's somewhat of uncontrolled experiment. These are the six
consecutive shots we did it that day, and you can see that distinctive features are all there, and it
all has those particular shapes. Later on, you have lots of variation. It depends on how much
metal you take it out. But those are much later time, and they don't have such a rapid crash or
change in time, which makes us believe that, yes, this looks like the real, and that's what we are
seeing. Just estimated how long a confinement time we're measuring it. One thing you don't
want to do is you measure a signal with a large number to the small number, where you have a
lot of errors. That will arbitrarily create a big numbers, especially if you divide it by zero. That's
not fun. What we did is we looked at how fast this rises, and you can solve some of the equation,
and that time is about twice as long as your confinement time, so we got about 2.5 microseconds.
If you remember it, expected confinement time of these fast electrons, when there's not enough
plasma pressure, is about 45 nanoseconds. That's about 50 times more. That's why you see
dramatic changes. You don't even have to measure it. Your eye just sees it. There's a big jump
in X-ray signal. So obviously, as much as we're excited about it, there's a lot to learn about it,
and these are the physics issues. We will hammer it out. We need to tackle this. We need to
learn more about them, if you make progress in Polywell, so that's what we're going to be doing.
Nonetheless, this experiment was very satisfying. Considering it took us a long time, it's
particularly satisfying. The X-ray measurement clearly showed that you can enhance the
electron confinement and high-beta cusp, that WiffleBall effect. We finally got it. The results
validated one of the key conjectures made by Grad and his team back in the 1950s, and that's a
big deal. Now we can move forward, to complete the proof of principle of the Polywell fusion
machine. So you can read about details of experiment, and the paper should be being reviewed
now. Hopefully, it'll get published soon, in a scientific journal, as well. So what ended up being
is in order for the Polywell to work properly, we actually need two concepts to work at the same
time. We are able to do this electrostatic fusion by forming a potential well, and that's when you
get to see a lot of neutron data. We had a very hard time dealing with this high-beta cusp
WiffleBall effect, but we've finally done it in 2013. That was a big step for us. What we really
need to do is do two of these things now. We have two pillars of the Polywell. We have to do
both of them at the same time. That needs to be done, and that's something that we'd like to do
it. Before we talk about more the near-term plan, I want to turn your attention to where do we go
from there, and this is actually interesting. What if Grad's estimate on how fast you lose those
plasma in the cusp is valid? What if Bussard's idea of using electron beam to accelerate the ion
during the WiffleBall phase of those high-beta cusps works well, say, about 50% efficiency.
Because if you look at our numbers, we're getting seven-kilovolt type of potential with about
eight kilovolts beam injection, so 50% looks quite achievable. The question then becomes, can
we make a net power producing Polywell fusion machine, and what does it look like? You want
to know where you want to go first, eventually, and that's the idea behind this. So we did some
exercises on it, and that's sort of the cartoon. And this one is meant to be the scientific machine.
Designing a fusion reactor is very time consuming, and I didn't quite want to do that, but what
you did is with the [indiscernible] calculation, you can estimate how big this system has to be.
So what we learned is it's about -- if you have a coil, size about two-meter radius, you have about
five tesla, with about 80-kilovolt beam injection, you get about 98 atmospheric pressure, plasma
pressure, in your system. That's pretty dense.
>>: [Indiscernible] that's 100,000 times more than you were talking about a moment ago for the
smaller machine.
>> Jaeyoung Park: I know, so just one second. We'll get there. Anyway, I have to know -beauty of physics is, once your underlying equation is valid, there's no real limit about -- you can
take a baby step. You can take a big step, as well, but nonetheless, you do have to validate it.
But what I want to do is, if this machine looks far from attractive, then what's the point?
Because you have to validate it. Assuming those predictions have some validity in it, you need
to know where my endgame is. If my endgame is interesting, I'll spend time on it. If my
endgame looks deeply -- it's not hopeful, then we should spend our energy on something else, so
that wasn't meant to be this exercise. We get about 1.1 gigawatts of the power, assuming about
50% energy efficiency, if you use a DT fuel, and you need about 185 megawatts to continuously
heat it up. It's not an easy machine to build, I agree. However, this is not that bad. Current
engineering and technology is there. If you put your resources and your mind and have your
team, you can do this in a few years. Maybe not cheap. It'll probably cost a few hundred
millions of dollars, but you can nonetheless do this at a relatively short timeframe. And I'm
going to show one quick animation movie. What's also nice about Polywell is, it's almost like a
little cartoon, you get to see it. It's a relatively easy machine to assemble and also maintain, if
you want to play with it. In fact, we've done some of those during the WB -- the high beta cost
test system, so if you need to assemble it or need to replace it, you pick it up, and you just drop it
and open the hat of the can. It's a relatively simple machine to build and maintain. It's very
attractive, engineering wise. At some point, yes, I love to do science, but then I have to appeal to
the bean counter, that whatever I wanted to do, there is an endgame that is attractive. So thanks
for the question. You're very, very correct. That's where we are. We want to be about there, so
exactly 100,000 times. In terms of confinement time scale, that's what we have to do. These are
the parameters that the machine that I showed you, these are the parameters where we eventually
need to go to make a net power machine. What we have is we have an equation that was
derived. We don't know -- qualitatively, Grad conjecture, there is a validity in his conjecture.
As soon as you form high beta, it does improve high-energy electron confinement dramatically.
There's no doubt about it. The question is, how well does it really improve? Is this line correct?
Are you going to be porous, so you're not going to get this? Instead, you get this? Clearly, in
those cases, you will never be able to build a net fusion power machine. Can we find a way to
overcome and do even better? I don't know yet. So one of the realistic things is, in the next
three years from now, we would like to test it out, what's going on. Validate this equation,
understand it, and if you can generate the data points here, we're going to take about factor up
here to about 100 to 1,000 jumps here, to a few milliseconds. If an equation fits at about a factor
of 100 or 1,000, you're starting to get comfortable. You can start extrapolating toward that. In
fact, that was the approach made by the ITER design. That's what we do it in fusion. You do
check all your results, you do the best job, but sooner or later, you have to make a jump, and the
power of physics is, it doesn't change. It's there, and you can start looking beyond that.
>>: It's not only you want to [indiscernible] in the plasma. It's also the pressure.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Oh, yeah, everything will go up. So two kilogauss is not a strong field. You
have to be about five tesla.
>>: I was [indiscernible].
>> Jaeyoung Park: Kilogauss -- 10 kilogauss is one tesla, so if you look at it here, in a Polywell
machine, you have equal plasma pressure and magnetic pressure, so you can kind of calculate
that, because it's meant to be a beta equal one machine, meaning you are using your magnetic
field as best as you can.
>>: What units do you reach the maximum magnetic field that you can? Because 10 -- magnetic
fields that are used today is not very strong. I remember a [indiscernible] of this size cannot
create.
>> Jaeyoung Park: No, actually, you can create about 12 tesla of a field, about this big size.
>>: But you use very small ->> Jaeyoung Park: Eventually, this is not going to be small either, so five tesla is doable. It's not
going to be chap, but it's doable.
>>: My question is why you use so big a magnetic field.
>> Jaeyoung Park: That's a good point. One of the reasons is -- how do I say it? We had a
magnetic power supply, it has a certain limitation. For the system, you need enough magnetic
field to make the whole plasma system a magnetically interesting system. So we could do about
one, two, three kilogauss, but we couldn't do much more than, say, five kilogauss. Two
kilogauss is where we took a lot of data. When we dropped the magnetic field, plasma seemed to
overpower it. If you increase the magnetic field, we probably have to increase our injector quite
a bit. The idea was, eventually, if you have time and energy, we use more than two. But
because you like to have a symmetry, and if you've seen some of the earlier movies, symmetry
was quite poor, with just two. Fortunately, it worked with two, we see enough strong signal, so
there is really no need to add it more than two, but the real plan is making 350 megawatts, if you
have two more, we could have gotten double the power, so we could increase the magnetic field
accordingly. But since we got the result, with such -- even though the symmetry was poor, we're
just happy to say, well, that's good enough for now.
>>: And this increasing magnetic field can be achieved in this system. You need to make it big
so it's actually isolated.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes, so better the magnetic field, eventually better, but your pressure you're
handling also will go up. Yes. So that's sort of where we plan to be. We have a pretty good idea
about what we'd like to do in the next three years. This phase will be very important. We need
to address these areas. We have to sustain the plasma at about five milliseconds. That's about,
again, a factor of a few hundred from where we are, but marching toward it. It's about halfway
point we need to go. We'd like to demonstrate about 10 kilovolts potential -- the acceleration of
the ions, and also verify the heat scaling is quantitatively correct. Or we need to know if it's not - we need to know how off we are. Are we off by a factor of two or are we off by a factor of
100? Obviously, if you're off by a factor of 100, it's not going to work as a fusion reactor. We
need to know that. If it's off by a factor of two, that's easy to make up. So that's sort of the plan
we have it. We're almost there, so that's actually pretty good in time. So this is what I see it. It
still has a path, but we now see a path to make fusion power work with the Polywell in not 20, 30
years from now, but sooner than that, if it works. It'll be great to address those needs for the
energy. Right now, we're using about 21 trillion kilowatt hours. That's worldwide number. It
grows about 2.2%. Over the years, by 2040, we're looking at almost 40 terawatt hours. We're
spending about $150 billion a year just to build the new power plants to meet those demands and
replace some of the old ones. That's what we are planning to do. If somehow fusion works and
generates power economically and sustainably, you can now address the issue that maybe I don't
have to use as much coal. But also, you can start thinking big and dream about it, where you
want to be, using this new source of energy. One of the areas will be, obviously, electric cars.
That'll be great. The estimation is about 5 to 7 trillion terawatt hours will power about 1 billion
cars, mostly passenger cars here, that is now being driven on the road today in the world. Maybe
not in Seattle, but in California, where I live, the water problem is very severe. If you can
address it, thanks to the technology developed using membrane, now the desalination doesn't
look that far. You need about 2.6 trillion kilowatt hours, which is about 10% of currently what
we use. That'll help to provide about 20% of the water needs that we are facing now, so you can
start thinking about having a real available, reliable source of energy that is economical and has a
minimal impact to the environment. You do have a chance to change the world in a much better
way, so that's what we're envisioning it. So I'm going to summarize it. Hopefully, we
[indiscernible] that fusion is the ultimate energy source, but the fusion research has been and still
is a very challenging endeavor. Please do work on the computer. That would be great. I do
applaud you, but there are reasons to be optimistic at present, especially with all the progress in
fusion research and technologies being developed during the past decades. Computers are
getting better, pulse power systems better, beam drivers getting better. Everywhere you look
around it, it's a remarkable period of time. You can be pessimistic, or you can be optimistic. I
see actually an exciting future lies ahead of us. And recent breakthroughs in high-beta cusp will
hopefully catalyze our effort to create the validation of the Polywell fusion concept in the next
three years. And hopefully, I'll be back here in about three years to give you some of the update
on it. If proven, Polywell technology will offer a low-cost and rapid development path to power
the word economically and sustainably. And the reason I'm confident and I'm excited about it is
these are the unique advantages of the Polywell that is inherent in its design. It is inherently a
stable system. Plasma stability comes from those shapes and it's one of the first stable magnetic
field systems. We invented it. It is important for the economical and reliable reactor. High-beta
cusp is also important because not only it provides confinement. It can make the size of the
reactor small, because it's a high-beta system. And then use of electron beam driver, it's kind of
interesting. I was talking to John earlier. It's Farnsworth that is credited as inventor of
television, and he used electron beams to raster, to make a picture. Well, back here, we're going
to use electron beam to drive the fusion reaction. It turns out, among the available technologies
to meet the plasma to the fusion temperature, electron beams, if it works, are probably the most
efficient technology we have currently. So I'm very excited about it, and thank you for your
time.
>> John Daly: All right. Everybody made it past lunch. I see there's questions. There's a
question online from Eugene, and Eugene is asking, are kinetic instabilities of any concern here?
After all, we have very hot beam electrons and relatively cold background plasma. Such
distributions tend to generate kinetic instabilities, right?
>> Jaeyoung Park: That would be the case. Yes, we do see the possibility of the kinetic
instability being at play. Generally, as we know, kinetic instability will create more like the
small-scale turbulence and loss of your confinement, but not a catastrophic. And the nice thing
about Polywell is, we start with a relatively compact system. We have room to make it bigger to
compensate some of the leaky nature of the kinetic instability, which is not catastrophic. They're
more the nuisance in our view. So yes, we are aware of it, and that's something we need to
address during the next phase of the research. And I think there is a question about -- could you
repeat the question? I kind of -- there was a question about some of the scaling. That's a good
point.
>> John Daly: Yes, it seems like there's a nondimensional constant lurking in there. Like, what
is it? The scaling, there's scaling of escaped cross-section for the electrons and then fusion crosssection and then something with the number of ions, electrons. What's going on there, right?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Let's see. Number of ions are related to how dense is your plasma in a given
volume, so that's okay. Escape hole or the loss rate of the electrons, you can kind of drive it as a
diffusion process, and this is the heuristic of the process. We don't know all the details about it,
but we can recover Grad's result by looking at if there's a diffusion process of those electrons and
if their time between the two processes is about the time they cross the field, and their
territoristic time is [indiscernible] radius, because that's the only scale you will have. There's no
magnetic field here. All the magnetic fields are there. You can recover Grad's loss rate from the
simple diffusion equation within general [liquid] agreement, so that's why we are looking at it.
Clearly, there is some need to understand better. We also expect some sort of plasma flow, as
well, there. So it's something we still don't have everything right. What we saw experimental,
which is the nice thing about being an experimentalist, is you make a measurement. Do I see
more electrons being piled up in the center? And that's what we saw, so we now go back, and
let's do some more and let's generate the data to understand what exactly is causing the loss of
the electrons to decrease such a significant manner. As far as the cross-section, that's like when
you have lots of plasma, they kind of move around it, and occasionally, fusion cross-section,
they hit it. And when they hit it, you can have a fusion, but that's a very unlikely event, so you
have to keep them aligned. In a Polywell, the general number you bounce around it is about 10
million times to 100 million times, and then they'll go through one fusion collision. Please.
>>: You didn't mention it, so I don't know if it's still a factor, but online, there was some
discussion of the ions not having ultimate distribution and this being kind of a loophole in the
Lawson criterion. But you mentioned here confinement times of milliseconds or even seconds.
It seems impossible that you could confine that long and not have a classical thermal distribution.
>> Jaeyoung Park: In our submission, ions are supposed to have a thermal distribution, but keep
in mind that ->>: But you're expecting this to achieve a conventional Lawson criterion.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes, yes.
>>: Okay, good.
>> Jaeyoung Park: It should be sufficient enough, and that's why, when they look at the cusp,
even back in the 1950s, they were comfortable they can do it. And this one is an improved
version of this, so yes. If we see something nonthermal effect, and that's actually the bit of it --
let me take it back. Thermal versus nonthermal is a bit of a misnomer, because what's happening
is, in the Hamiltonian, electric field [indiscernible] comes directly to your energy [thermal]. So
as they move along the potential well, they could have thermal distribution, but all of them will
gain kinetic energy. That's not a thermal.
>>: [Indiscernible] your own site, so maybe your own site needs a little updating.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Which one was?
>>: The EMCC documents.
>> Jaeyoung Park: If you point it out, I'll fix it. Definitely, yes.
>>: Yes, so let's say you get all the plasma physics to work and you get sustained fusion reaction
and confinement, how are you going to cool it?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Cool?
>>: When you're producing power, you have to cool it and get the energy out to somewhere like
a turbine?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes, excellent point. Yes, so we have an engineering design, a little bit more
comprehensive than this. It probably uses a lot of off-the-shelf items, some of the more
advanced reactor turbine-drive types of system, which is probably a generation four nuclear
fission reactor. We have some designs. We know it's kind of the -- we extract what's great about
what's available in the generation four nuclear fission reactor system, and that area started to be a
little bit more confidential, so I'd like to just keep it in, but we have thought about it, and that's
something that we have to factor in. That's the reason that when I put that scaling on the
distance, I put a disclaimer that it's meant to be just scientific. The actual reactor design will be
quite different. Please.
>>: Just to elaborate on, so generating electricity, is that what you were just referring to, the
actual generation of electricity?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes.
>>: OK, so we're not going to be using steam or stuff like that?
>> Jaeyoung Park: We'll probably use a little bit more efficient than steam. There are some gascooled reactor type of concepts. It's now being developed, and so those are more efficient, so
we're looking at instead of 30% to 35% thermal efficiency, we're looking at 40% to 45% thermal
efficiency. It will be helpful, for example. A catch there, just one second, some fuel, like pB11
type of thing, which we continue to look at it, may have a potential for the direct energy
conversion. We're not giving up on those. We're just going to look at it. For now, the path that I
laid out to do -- one more. This path doesn't really depend on any of the fuel choices we make it.
We're going to understand it. Once you have filled in more data, it will give us a much more
data-based design which one we should do it. Thank you. Okay, well, I have more questions
than I -- okay, please. Go ahead.
>>: ITER was talking years ago about 1,200 seconds to get it going and keep it going that long.
You're talking about one second. How long to realistically get to a point of continuous?
>> Jaeyoung Park: It's a matter of, to me, scientifically, all the physics of plasma physics, if you
can do it in one second, you're good to go. There is about five minutes to 10 minutes, so that's
about 600 seconds to -- the 600-second type of number you need, have a thermal mass that
you're structured to reach equilibrium. That's really important for the engineering. So one of the
directions we will decide it after this phase is over, we have to make a plan. This cost is
probably $300 million, give or take, say, 20% or something. It's what we're envisioning it. If
somebody thinks your results here are spectacularly good, why don't you spend more money to
make this steady, longer per system, we'll figure out to do that. When I was looking at this,
about a second type of device, my cost estimate with a realistic number is about $300 million.
>>: And on all of that, how much energy input are we talking about maintaining?
>> Jaeyoung Park: So that's what the number here was, I think -- 185 megawatts is what I
expect.
>>: For this size.
>> Jaeyoung Park: For this size machine.
>>: But for a continuous?
>> Jaeyoung Park: It turns out, making a reactor work is a whole different ballgame. That's
something I learned in a crash course. As a scientist, I always assume that it's doable until I talk
to the real, serious reactor engineers. It was an eye opener. I trusted the [estimate], and they told
me I can do it for you, but you're going to have to deal with a different set of the criteria, and I'll
be happy to help when you can pay me. I hope that answers you, but that's doable. He was
confident that he can do it, but it'll be a different system from this. I think there was a question
there. I'm sorry.
>>: [Indiscernible].
>> Jaeyoung Park: Well, that's a very good question, so you need actually all the neutrons you
make if you want to do DT, because there's not enough tritium, so you have to breed it, so that's
one big question that we need to address it, and I'm aware of it. As I say, one of my goals for
next phase is it doesn't matter whichever fuel I use. I still need to do this to understand the
science, and I really am not that -- I am very much interested in whether this means something,
and from what I know, either an older conventional fusion program spent about $1.5 billion to $2
billion a year. They are based on the program to do DT fusion power, and there are a lot of
technologies being developed to handle neutron, use it to breed it and generate the power. I don't
mind leveraging that experience with that, if you ended up choosing DT. If I can do something
other than DT, yes, I'll definitely look at it. I just don't like to make a big projection. I'm happy
it is, I know what creation I want to use it. I want to a [indiscernible] fill the blank, and then I
have more sets of the database, I can make better predictions, so hopefully, that answers it.
>> John Daly: We do have some online questions.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Okay, please.
>>: So Aaron asks, what part of the design drives the cost most? Is it the 5T field generation
and management?
>> Jaeyoung Park: What was the? Oh, well, [this is] the management, right? You have to know
what it was -- when we run the numbers, the most expensive part of the design was turbine. At
the end of the day, you have to generate the electricity to do that. If you want to make a
gigawatt-type electricity, that's not cheap.
It turns out, what's beautiful about Polywell is, the coil system and chamber, those costs are now
far smaller than your whole system costs, the balance of [plan]. So your economics now are
going to be dominated by something else. It's like the solar power. The panels are now cheap.
Installation costs a lot more, so the cost of solar panels is starting to be kind of slowed. The drop
is straight down, because now it's not on the module cost, it's actually connecting it, insulating it
and balance of plan. And that's what you actually want to be. You want to be low enough in
your core components, the rest of the system starts being an economical factor. And then, there,
you can start looking at comparable systems or cheaper systems than some of the conventional
power plants.
>> John Daly: OK, we'll take another real question, and we'll get some more online questions.
>> Jaeyoung Park: OK.
>>: In your recent research, you kept the ions in with a plasma gun.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Yes.
>>: And the electrons and the ions coming together. But in your final one, you want to just have
electrons for the drive power. How do the ions get in?
>> Jaeyoung Park: We probably will use either pellet or gas puffing, is my plan.
>> John Daly: Okay, let's see. Another question from Eugene online. In the time you need for
effective fusion and proposed reactor, approximately five milliseconds, won't ions cool down
from colliding with background electrons?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Good question. Let me think about that. This will help me to think.
>>: Would you mind repeating that?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Go ahead.
>> John Daly: Okay, the question was, in the time needed for effective fusion in a proposed
reactor, about five milliseconds, won't ions cool down from colliding with background electrons?
>> Jaeyoung Park: The answer is generally not much. So when the ions get to the bottom,
they're very fast, so collision cross-section is very small with the electron, and usually, electron
drags are not that bad. When they go out, when they slow down, they will collide with the
electrons, and they will probably gain energy from electrons, because electrons are hot there and
ions cold. So you probably get about more or less net cancellation throughout the time, so -- and
the ions and electrons. Electrons say if it's 100 kilovolts. Electrons are 100 kilovolts here,
maybe one kilovolts. Ions are one kilovolt here, maybe 100 kilovolts there. They switch back
and forth through the field, and I think net-net, I think they'll come out about even. But that's
something we need to look at it, and it will come actually as an efficiency of how much of an
acceleration you can do it if you push toward a steady state system. So thank you -- I think
Eugene. Was it Eugene?
>> John Daly: We've got another question, from [Bob Livingston] online. You describe scaling
up to replace existing electrical grid supply. What about scaling down size and cost for a more
distributed electrical grid?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Oh, boy. Well, I was working pretty hard. I did miss the Seahawks game. I
really did. It was bad, because I was working on some of the slides. I don't think I have a good
answer for that. It's something that we should look at it continuously. One of the things is, it
will be a great problem to solve it. I would like to do it when I have more data.
>> John Daly: OK, good. Fair enough. Then I'm sure as technology progresses, somebody will
want to put it in their car, and they'll find a way to get it smaller.
>>: What would we need to see from the future experiences to make boron proton fusion usable
or doable?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Probably, the single most efficient is this whole idea that you use electron
beams to hit the ion. If you think about it, it's a very dramatic concept, because you're using
electric fields as an intermediary. There's really no direct interaction. It's a collective motion of
electrons to create a field, which then accelerates the ion. We don't know how efficient that will
be, and we're seeing that at about 80%, 90% efficiency when there's not enough plasma. But
really no data points there when you have 10 to the 13 per CC, 10 to 14 per CC of plasma. So I
just do the number 50%, and somewhere in the slide it says, if I see about 30% number, that
would be enough to go to the next phase. In order to make the pB11 work, you need the number
somewhere around 90%, just because pB11 is very difficult to do. So I'll keep a very keen eye
on it, how well I can push the numbers, and as soon as I have a confidence that numbers can be
up to 90% or higher, yes, we should look at the pB11 very carefully.
>>: [Indiscernible] use of different magnetic coil geometries like the dodecahedron. Is that
something you guys are still exploring?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Oh, yes, yes.
>>: What are the pros and cons of that? Would that configuration create more cusp lines, and
thus more linkage points?
>> Jaeyoung Park: I think generally speaking, it's a complexity of your machine of building one
to more of the spherical symmetry you can get out of it. And there is a version that you may
even be able to do two or eight. There are different versions of magnetic fields, so the word
polyhedral means not just six. There are more than six. You can do many different ways, and
we will explore those. Something that we like to do it, probably in a computer simulation, rather
than building machine after machine. So we do have simulation tools are now starting to
develop, and they actually work fairly well. I think the one on the archive side, we've done our
particle simulation and put it up there. And it's getting to the point that I'm starting to gain some
confidence that we might be able to use it, probably a year from now is my guess. By then, we
should be able to sort of answer some of those questions.
>> John Daly: I think we had a question -- do we have a question from one of the young people
here in the audience?
>>: So what was so hard?
>> Jaeyoung Park: Let's say, what is a good way to answer that?
>>: You need go down and see the lab, though, John. Every time you want to run a test shot,
you have to pump the chamber down to vacuum.
>> Jaeyoung Park: No, it's actually not hard. It's not hard. It's fun. It's very exciting. I really
enjoyed it. It's probably my own wisdom I think is probably the stumbling block, because at the
end of the day, the project moves as fast as I can be creative or smart, and oftentimes, my brain
doesn't move that fast, so that's probably the bottleneck. But yes, it's a very fun work. A lot to
be done. There's a safety aspect you need to be aware of it. You have to do it safe. No point of
killing people or getting died. It's expensive, so you need to find a way to support yourself in the
experiment. I think we spent six months to make sure there is no electrical noise coming back to
our diagnostics, because when you put 700 megawatts, you try to make a very sensitive
measurement, it's really hard. Thank god, we have a neighbor who's doing roof work in our
experiment. They don't complain about it. If we have Microsoft working next to me, they'll
probably complain all day long. So it needs some effort, but it's doable. And I'm kind of
optimistic that we will get there.
>> John Daly: If you want to see something -- the coolest thing I saw when I went down and
visited is the fact that this was being done in an office park, where you would drive by, and you'd
have no idea that someone was trying to build fusion reactors.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Can you try not to tell other people where ->> John Daly: Their neighbors probably still don't know.
>>: [Indiscernible].
>> Jaeyoung Park: We are about two miles cheaper end of the town.
>>: What was it like working with Dr. Bussard?
>> Jaeyoung Park: I only worked about six months to a year in his last year. He was very frail.
He mentioned a few things that still rings it. I think he really wanted to do something useful with
atomic power, fusion power. That's one. I guess he also had some vision, which is sort of -- we
don't emphasize too much, but some of you know, if you want to travel outside of the solar
system, you need something like the fusion engines to do that. And his background is space
physics, so he knew some of those. I guess he kind of was -- he had melanoma, so he knew his
days were numbered. But I think it will be remarkable, and in some way, power is great. It's
making money in some way. We made the pollution, but going out of the solar system will be
really cool, and it's not a corporate goal at all, but personally, that will be something I'd really
like to see. So, yes, he was into some of those, as well.
>> John Daly: Yes, let's try to wrap it up. We're getting low on time.
>>: I am curious how you get 700 megawatts even for a tiny fraction of a second? Big-ass
capacitors or ->> Jaeyoung Park: A big-ass capacitor, a tiny little ignitron. It's not even that big. We actually - I guess exceeding the specs, so we can't really get for the warranty service, but we double what
the ratings are, so if you flow that kind of power, you can get it. As a result, there's very little
control. I have a pretty good idea about how to do startup much better in a controlled manner,
but for that time, at a time, well, I was pretty bad manager, so I had a team. I told them, I want
something in three months, and that's what they come up with. It took about a year to make it
work, but I called for three months, and they told me, if you only have three months, this is all
we can do, so that's what we settled on. And thank god, it worked. So as I say, having a bad
manager always slows down the project. Thank you.
>> John Daly: All right, this has been Dr. Jaeyoung Park from EMCC. I'm John Daly. If you
want to get a hold of Dr. Park, you can just send mail to johndaily@microsoft.com, and I will
connect you. And I want to thank everybody here, and I want to thank MSR again, and I want to
thank John Costello especially for turning me onto this. Thanks for showing up, Dr. Park, and
doing such an awesome job delivering this presentation. And thank you guys for staying and
watching all of it.
>> Jaeyoung Park: Okay, thank you.