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is 1 over r^ 2 goes like 1 over r^2 density squared goes like 1 / r 4th this means if you can get a spherical convergence going almost all the fusion will take place in a little bitty region in the center called the core and we were not the first to understand that in 1924 Irving Langir and Katherine blahett working in the east coast wrote a paper on currents limited by space charge differences in concentric flows and spheres in 1959 Elar Tuck and Watson at most Alamos published a classic paper on inertial electrostatic confinement of a plasma. And what they talk about is putting a screen grid, a spherical grid, like two civs back to back inside a sphere and biasing that civ to a positive potential so that electrons from out here would be attracted through the screen would go inside and would make >> So I it's crazy. I already know so much now that I know where this is going. Like here's the problem right away. So you say, okay, you need to create a negative potential. You just need to create a negative, right? Because if you make a negative, the positive ions will go to it. If you're really simplifying it, you say, "Okay, well, just do the Thomas Thompson Brown effect." TT Brown, right guys? Asymmetric capacitors. Same idea. Asymmetric capacitors. Our asymmetric capacitor causes lift. This is the same idea as one side is negatively charged. So, the positively charged side is lifting towards the negatively charged side. We're using that same concept, but now we're saying instead make it happen in the middle. Okay, you would say, okay, well, build build just build a a capaci build an asymmetric capacitor, but instead make it radial and make it towards the middle with the negative point. The only way to create the negative potential you're trying to create on the inside is by having the plasma create the magnetic field that you need, the electromagnetic field that you need on the middle, which therefore now limits your options to using geometry, getting the geometry to cause it to do it itself. And therefore, what we're doing here, here you go. >> Negative potential well because the electrons would slow down. The kinetic energy would be transformed into potential energy of a potential well. And you could then drop ions into it at the edge. The ions would fall down and recirculate back and forth, back and forth like marbles in a well. And if they collided and didn't make a fusion, they didn't get lost like a tokamac. They would go right back up the well and give their energy back to the well. So you could make a fusion machine that way. The only trouble with it is they had a grid and you have to have in the case of electrons about 100,000 transits of electrons before you will get a fusion out of the ion population you will put in. And no grid is that transparent. The best grids that Hers and Farnsworth could ever build were about 95 to 90% transparent. And if you have a high a high interception rate on the grid, all the energy you put into the electron acceleration goes into the grid. And the part energy is lost and the grid melts. It doesn't work. You can't get there to the grid. Hers and Farnsworth followed Farnsworth who invented raster scan television and Bob Hers who was a posttock uh student worked for Farnsworth Fort Indiana in 1967 wrote a classic paper here where they actually built a machine that inverted the Elmerto Watson potential. They had a grid that was biased negatively so they accelerated the ions directly and that way they could get by the electron interception problem and replaced it with a problem of ion interception because the ions had to go through several thousand times and they could never get a research factor bigger than about seven to 10. But this little machine that they built, which Hers still has on his desk in Alexandria, Virginia, actually ran at 10 to the 10th fusions per second on BT, which was then and now is still a world record for such a device for that. >> You can tell just listening to this, you can just tell how much work and research these guys have done, right? And like you don't see like this level of dedication to your craft and science anymore. You know, this is why the Neil Degrass Tyson's could you imagine like Bill Nye the Science Guy something like this? No way. Not in a million years. This is where people should really been take whatever this guy tells me. I'm ready to believe. He could tell me literally anything and I'd probably be really ready to believe it. But in this case, he comes armed with the facts, armed with math, evidence, science, reason, >> particular machine. But he did it with ion guns that were facing each other. So in a way, he had two guns that were spherically focused in a very carefully designed machine that Farnsworth designed. He was a brilliant designer and and tested it. Uh the total gain of the system was about 10 to the minus 6, meaning the power output versus the power in. And that was because of the grid loss problem and the problem other secondary problems of collisionality of the walls. There are two therefore two ways to do this. One we call ion acceleration and electron. Ion acceleration is what Hersh Farnsworth did. And there's the grid that kills them. And and this is the Elmore Chuck Watson concept with the grids removed. Well, we did the invention we made was very simple. It's elementary when you look at it to throw the grids away. Replace them with a magnetic field. Magnetic fields do not contain neutral plasmas worth of darn. And that's the tote. But they will contain electrons by themselves very easily because electrons don't weigh anything. >> There it was. Boom. Boom. Throw the grid away. Replace it with the magnetic field. The magnetic field will contain the electron because the electrons don't weigh anything. The ions are much heavier than the electrons. So it will not contain the ions, but it will contain the electrons. Boom. Boom. Boom. So we said we need to use the best of magneto inertial confusion uh confinement fusion and inertial electrostatic confinement fusion. When you think of electrostatic just think of like electro static electricity positive and minus charge. If we use a magnetic field the electrons are too light. They will be trapped by the magnetic field. when they get trapped in the magnetic field. Now you've got more negative electric potent electron potentials, negative uh potential here in this region. And I have a good idea of how we could do that. We create the cusps and we create a magnetic mirror. Take a duteron atom 3,600 times heavier than a an electron. So it's easy to contain electrons in magnetic fields or there wouldn't be a variant associates up here building high power tubes. U the point is if you do that you have no grid collisions. You've replaced that problem with the problem of how fast do electrons transport themselves across the magnetic fields to hit the walls of the magnets which now become the magnetized grids. And you have a system which fundamentally you should keep open so that there can be recirculation. And what you do is you produce the Elmore Tuck Watson and negative potential well and then you drop ions into it at the edge. The ions see that well and they recirculate. >> And did you hear the other thing he just said right there? He said you want it to be open. You want to let the plasmas go flying out. Stop trying to confine the plasmas. He's like, it's okay to have this whiffle ball configuration, too, so that the the plasma can leak out because the plasma is going to leak out. It's going to be trapped by the magnetic fields. It's going to leak out and it's going to form a bubble based on the magnetic fields and it's going to come and it's going to flow back into the middle again. And now you've created this system where it's just plasma flowing in and the fusion is happening in the middle and it's relatively stable and only requires a little bit of input to keep it going. >> Central virtual anode because if you put a lot of ions in it will push the anode up in the center as the ions collide. These devices are almost neutral. The the departure from neutrality required to make a 100 kilovolt well is only one part of a million when you're at a density of 10 12 per cubic centimeter. It's so so small that we found that the current computer codes and computers available to us to analyze the problem of incapable of analyzing it because of numerical noise in the particle and cell calculations by a factor of about a thousand. The basic problem of this kind of fusion we have this quasi sphere is to make a quasy spherical field. We can't tolerate this mirror loss with the equator that Livermore spent the time and money on or other people not just Livermore. We have to have a magnetic field that has only point cusps. Think about that. If you put two coils together and you make a north pole, north pole and have an equator, you have this huge loss of equator line cuff. There's no way around that unless the topology of the configuration is correct. There's only one configuration that works and that's the one we patented. It's a configuration which is a polyhedrin where the coils are all on the edges of the polyhedrin. And the polyhedrin has to have the property that there are even number of faces around every vertex. So the alternate faces are north, south, north, south, north, south. If you look at the cube which constitutes the normal piconic cusp, it only has three faces around every vertex and you have that line cusp problem and that's the only thing you could find to solve. And that the solution was to make a system that it's quasy spherical. There's no magnetic monopole. So you have to do it from the surface. So it's a bunch of cusps sticking out like that. And there no line cusps. So you have only point causes and we trap energetic electrons in that and form the negative potential well and drop the ions in. And they're focused at this one over r squ and they oscillate across the core. I mentioned it acts like a spherical colliding beam machine and the fuel gas input at the potential well edge is just nothing more than putting in neutral atoms and letting the incoming injected electrons ionize them at the edge. >> He's saying we're building this thing and it's acting like a little particle accelerator in the middle here because you've created this negative potential well and now you've got this plasma flowing all around it but it keeps coming back towards the middle and all the electrons keep being trapped. So you have a negative potential in the middle and everything keeps coming back around and this will create a spherical plasma this configuration. A spherical plasma configuration. Yep. This is definitely and he says it requires geometry. There's only one geometry we can make it to work because you need to control or you need to let the plasma leak out the areas that it wants to leak out. Why? The reason is the plasma damages the equipment. It can damage the magnets. It can heat up the magnets. In a lot of the cases, you need the superconducting magnets to be very cold. You do not want the plasma to touch anything. You don't want there to be walls. This is a big part of it. The plasma can't touch anything. So, you need the geometry and the configuration to be very specific. The problem with this, the doughut people, the doughut plasma noobs, is that they their plasma is going to touch the walls. It's unavoidable. It's unavoidable. The plasma is going to touch the walls. You should have never made your plasma like a donut. Do you see a lot of stars out there that are shaped like donuts? I don't. We're just dropping truth bombs. Teaching the secrets of fusion tonight. Hope everyone's having a happy new year. >> of the fuel. The neutrals gives you a low energy electron and a low energy ion. The ions fall into the well. The low energy electrons are heated by the incoming fast electrons very rapidly, microcond time scales, and become part of the circulating system. Go ahead. I just showed this really quickly. There we go. Uh this you've seen the only other thing I wanted to show you was this Maxwellian distribution problem. This is a a local thermodynamic equilibrium uh Maxwellian magnetic system. Here's the density distribution in the Maxwellian. Most of the energy is right here. You're sitting in a room where the temperature is what is it 78 or something and all the particles are about 78. But way out here four or five times out are a lot of particles in the room that are much higher temperature than that. You don't feel them because they're not very many. And if you're in a system that has this potential, what we're describing, all the particles at the bottom are at one energy. If you have a 100 kilovolt well and you're dropping the nine at the bottom, they're all 100 kilovolts. They're not spread about. And the problem is in that these mix systems, the fusion reaction cross-section, which goes up with energy like that, only causes these little guys to make fusion. And all the rest of the particles are losses. >> Wait, wait, wait, wait. I think I I think I just figured something else out. this whole thing about equilibrium versus non-equilibrium. I'm finally getting my grasp on why it's significant and I think he just explained it right there in your imagine your soup of plasma. The problem with the equilibrium situation is your particles are all of different energy levels. Yes, this one over here is a high energy but this one over here is relatively low energy. So the problem here is that the only the number of particles in this distribution that are going to be ready for fusion is a tiny tiny fraction. And then you need those to collide also. So the probability of all this happening is good luck man. Good luck. This is like this is like trying to think say that like evolution happened without there being a divine creator. Oo, we're getting religious. We're getting political here. Uh, right. Where it's like, oh, it just accidentally, you know, like a monkey humped, you know, another monkey and then humans came out, right? So, there had to be some other thing going on. We needed to throw another recipe, some other ingredient to the recipe of fusion. The reason why the non-equilibrium part is so important is that you are now I think this what he explained here is that you are controlling the temp you're keeping all these I assume it's the ions at a specific temperature so that they are ready for fusion ready to go and why this is creepy to me is that okay we are controlling the temperature so that we have a bunch of our soup is never going to get mixed into the final recipe. It's just there to help out. But we're going to have the soup that is ready to go that we're recirculating back towards the center center core that we want to create fusion for us because we want to maximize the probability of our fusion. So, we need we need all this stuff to be ready to go at the fusion temperature level. If I were to imagine what this is going to look like in a thermal camera, your non-equilibrium fusion, your plasma, there's going to be a huge stable hot spot. Why? Because that's what a non-equilibrium plasma is made to do. The point of the non-equilibrium plasma is a bunch of the particles are the exact same temperature. They're in an excited state at a higher temperature, ready to go. And what do we see when we look at the orbs in the MH370 video? But we see this heat signature. This look at that heat signature in there. Look at how stable that heat signature is in that orb. I pulled up the video here and you can see that there's clearly this blue almost the same temperature as the background, but you can still see there's a field that's spherical, but you can see a green little orange slice in the plasma orb. And I would contend that that is your non-equilibrium plasma because the temperatures there like how that part of the plasma is per all ex uniform temperature perfectly exactly the same. In an equilibrium plasma you should not see any heat signatures like that. In an equilibrium plasma should all be the same temperature. In a non-equilibrium plasma, you can start to see shapes of temperature like that. Okay, there you go. It helps when you make actual videos you can show people of real plasma orbs that are fusion reactors that are teleporting planes away because then you can understand the content a lot better. We're so we're kind of at an advantage in that in that perspective. >> 160 kilovolts. Uhuh. Now, if you drop a Z equ= 5 boron into 100 kilovolt well at the bottom of the well, it has 500 kilovolts because it has a charge of five falling down the well. So I don't have to put 560 kilovolts into a system to make that one work. >> Yeah, we're going to skip ahead a little bit. Just a couple minutes. >> The ion fusion power just two points people saw in mirror what are called mirror machines. I showed you the picture of a five or eight to play with in ion flow control. The magnetic confinement of electrons in crit is critical to ensure that we have what's called cusp scaling. I've told you about point cusps. Point cusp are the things that people saw in mirror what are called mirror machines. I showed you a picture where the particles came in and mirrored and reflected. The reflection coefficient in a mirror machine, a low density machine like that is varies as one over the strength of the B field. That's not good enough. If you can somehow put so many electrons in there that you make the pressure balance equal between electron kinetic pressure and magnetic field pressure at the outside. B^ square over 8 pi is the magnetic pressure and NE is the kinetic pressure. If you can make those two things equal, you can't make them you can't make the kinetic pressure greater because it will blow through the field. It's like blowing up a balloon too much. He's talking He's talking about beta. He's talking about beta, right? That's what he's talking about here. He's talking about the pressure. Anytime I hear them talking about the pressure of the plasma pressure compared to the magnetic field strength, they're usually talking about beta. And he's saying you have to get it to one. If you can make them equal, then you can push the magnetic field out. As you push the magnetic field out, the scaling ceases to be a mirror scaling and becomes what's called cusp confinement scaling. And it scales as one over the square of the magnetic field. And if we can do that, what it amounts to is we're making coloss holes through which the electrons go out smaller and smaller and smaller the harder we drive it with the electron injection up to the point where we inject too many electrons and it begins to open up the cust holes. And those equations are all understood now. Uh and the question was, can we do that? We called it the whiffle ball effect because as you know the child's toy, the little plastic toy with the holes in it, if you put a marble inside it and shook it like that, sooner or later the marble inside would fall out of hole. It would find a hole. The smaller you make the holes, the longer it takes the marble to get out. That's exactly what we're trying to do. The other problem in electron confinement is magnetic insulation of the walls. All the structures that are out there, the containers for the coils, the things that hold the coils together, the metal parts, we have to keep them from being able to be seen directly by electrons without magnetic insulation. And that's turned out to be the devil in the details, which we finally resolved a year ago. The key issues are these two things. Could we make whipple ball scaling work? He did just mention I'll say quickly he did mention basically that there was metamaterial requirements that were needed because the magnets have to be a very specific material. They have to be able to, you know, remain superconducting at certain temperature, critical temperature, etc.