The folks at EMC2 just got more Navy funding. From Classical Values:
WB-8 Contract Progress
The US Navy has just published a Justification and Award for EMC2's Polywell Fusion Reactor experiment.
The highlights:
* The award is for $10 million
* WB-8.0 report to be delivered 30 March 2010
* WB-8.1 report to be delivered 30 March 2012
The WB-8.1 effort is contingent on success with WB-8.0 experiments.
What does all this mean? It is possible that there has been much more progress than was expected. You can read about the expected progress at: We Will Know In Two Years. That was published in May of 2009. The minimum time expected for results when that was published was 18 months which would have been November of 2010. Actual time from the prediction to the end of the WB-8.0 contract is 10 months. Of course this is speculative. It may be that we won't know until March of 2012. Which would make the actual time line almost three years and not two.
Very cool -- the Navy doesn't throw money at stupid ideas.
The fusion reactor works as is, it just is not generating more energy than it takes to run. To do that requires that they scale up the size of the reactor.
They now have the money to do so... Very good news!
