Sure. But if he's claiming that it scales with 7th power of the diameter, then either he's wrong or he's building a bomb.
Ummm, you'd better read that part again. You missed that it's total power that scales as the 7th- net power output scales as the 5th. And I don't know that he maintained it scales forever. It doesn't have to, to work.
Let's think about how this thing works. It's pretty straightforward.
What you do, you make a strong potential well, and then you dump in fusible ions. When the fusible ions try to escape, they have to escape the potential well- and they can't.
How dense does the fusible medium have to be, and how strong does the potential well have to be to make it that dense, and how does that interact with size?
Hmmmnnnmm, well, you get at least a cube-law interaction with size.
So what else do you have to figure in?
Well, let's see; ideally, you can create your potential well with static electricity. So that means that you don't have to put energy in, except a certain amount for "start-up," if the machine is a perfect electron trap. Now, we all know that's not possible, but how close can we get? After all, we don't need to actually have the electrons themselves enter the reaction; we just need them there to provide the potential well. Well, electrons, they orbit- and keeping them trapped in a magnetic field sounds like the way to go for that. So what we do, is we make a magnetic trap for the electrons, and then we do everything we can to reduce the number of ways the electrons can escape from the magnetic field. For example, we make sure that the number of north poles and south poles is balanced, so that there's no way for the electrons to escape; every time they come out, there's the way back in, if they follow the field lines. And we make sure that none of the electron cloud touches the metal of the magnets; if it does, it will not only escape, but it may well burn big holes in things, starting with the magnets.
Now I don't know about you, friend, but I came out of an EE education with a lot of knowledge about electronics, but a less-than-stellar understanding of magnetics. It wasn't until I started putting the education to use in power supply design that I found out how important magnetics is. Most EEs, even today, don't know a great deal about this stuff, unless they intend on specializing in power supplies or audio speaker design. And I've talked to quite a few physicists, and most of them admit that aside from knowing how magnetism works, and where to look up the equations, they don't necessarily understand a great deal about how to apply it. And those are the two education paths I'd expect to give you the most knowledge in the field.
So a physicist trying to make a fusion machine had to spend ten or fifteen years finding out just how magnetic fields work, and how to use them to contain electrons without losing any. Big surprise. Not to me, anyway.
And here's the final piece: guess how magnetic and electric fields act in space? Ever hear of the inverse-square law?
Oh, and by the way, you DO know that fusion is probabilistic, right? That is, you can't just slam a couple atoms together and assume they're gonna fuse every time, right? You gotta be prepared to do it several times for each atom if you're gonna get anything out of it. So how do collisions at the center of the potential well, scale as the linear size of the magnets?
Gee, let's see:
1. We got square law, from the fields.
2. We maybe got two separate square laws, because it's not the magnets that contain the fusibles, it's the magnets that contain the electrons, and the field from the electrons that contains the fusibles.
3. We got cube law, because we're expanding the linear size and talking about volume.
4. We got fusion as a probability in each interaction; and what we're doing is increasing the density and the containment until that probability is high enough that we get power out of it.
So, now, that's enough to go on with; I'll tell you for free there are a couple other things in there that I haven't mentioned, and I know for sure you haven't considered (because if you had, you wouldn't be going down the path you are). Now you tell me, how precisely do you expect the power output to vary with the linear size of the magnets?
Good luck. From what I've seen so far of your physics knowledge, I expect I'll hear back from you... oh, 'long about the time hell freezes over.
Realistically, he may have a process that scales with the 7th power of linear size, but the difficulty of sustaining that process may scale with the 6th power, or the 8th. There's little reason to think that a process that can't produce any energy on a small scale will prove to be practical on a larger scale.
Oh, really? Then why build giant Tokamaks, like ITER, which you were questioning my views on below? Have you even twigged to the fact that you're talking about two square laws and a cube law, just in the simple physics of linear dimension and field variation over spatial extent? Do you perhaps think they haven't built little Tokamaks? There's a nice google for you. I bet I can find at least two small Tokamak experiments that haven't yielded any net power at all, in under thirty seconds.
I should warn you that the last person who challenged such a statement of mine won't talk to me anymore because I proved conclusively s/he was an idiot.
Now, if he actually gave us his experimental results and his equations, things would be different. But he didn't. The paper that was linked to was rubbish. Whatever the reality of the device and the experiments conducted, the paper itself was rubbish.
As a scientific paper reporting his results? Yes, you're correct. OTOH, that's not what it was written to be, was it? So I'd say this is indicting someone you disagree with, on the basis that they didn't do something they weren't trying to do. Which is not a particularly good logical procedure for figuring out whether it's plausible or not.
And it appears that he's not nearly as interested in publishing his results at this point as he is in drumming up some support for this thing. Given a choice, I'd probably choose as he has; after all, if he hits it out of the park, who the hell cares what he published? The man will be universally famous. And he hasn't got a lot of time left. Do you really want to give it to the Chinese before we have a chance to play with it?
You're mixing up fundamental and applied research, where the applied research has immediate and enormous financial return if it works out. No comparison.
No, actually,
I'm not- it was the US Congress that mixed them- and the funding for them- up. And I'm surprised you didn't spot that coming- looks like you got a blind spot.
It's not his credentials that I care about, its his results, and he hasn't shown any.
Well, neither has the Tokamak. So what the hell are we still doing THAT for?
You DID notice that one of the goals of ITER is to make net power output, right?
