The following is from December 2008. NOTE: Kera is now titled Shattered Home.
Okay, this is the first of what may end up being several geeky comments about technology used in my science fiction writing. Don't worry, this won't take long.
In my SF novel Kera, humans have achieved stable, controlled nuclear fusion for the production of electricity. The particular method used is sometimes called Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC), also called polywell in a bit more complex and efficient form. Basically, IEC is a couple of very porous concentric spherical shells that can have opposed static electrical charges applied to them. You then inject your two fusion reactants, and they bounce in and out of the center of the shells many, many times until the reactants fuse together, giving off energy. Do this long enough, and under the right conditions, and you can produce a net energy gain without needing massive and massively expensive machines.
There are several different possible reactant pairs, but one of the neatest is a proton (p) and a boron 11 (B11) atom. When these two get together, the only things given off are helium nuclei at high energy. Now helium nuclei have a double positive charge. What that means is the proton/boron 11 reaction is essentially directly producing electricity (slow down and "catch" the nuclei and you get current) with no other harmful products such as neutrons or radioactive particles. This is really cool! And it's a real reaction, and the IEC fusion method is a real possibility. In fact, IEC fusion is already being done by even high school students for science projects. The latter do not produce anything near net energy, but they do produce real nuclear fusion, with plenty of neutrons given off using non- p/B11 reactants.
Dr. Robert Bussard (recently passed away) has done a lot of work in this area and invented the polywell device. It's continuing, with the current experimental reactor being called WB7 for wiffle ball 7. (I love the name and image!) WB8 may be enough of a scaling up to produce net energy. I know, I know, fusion is always around the corner -- well, if turning the corner takes 30 years. So far, however, this *much* less expensive and complicated approach has produced results pretty much in line with what Dr. Bussard predicted. A nice solution for a few of our major problems could be around the corner.:-)
If you're interested in learning more, visit these sites:
http://www.fusor.net
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/
http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/Clean_Nuclear_Fusion/The_Polywell.html
Spencer
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