A fusion approach that confines ions with electric fields, the subject of PURSUE Release 06 record DOW-UAP-D125, a 72-page Defense Intelligence Reference Document of 10 March 2010 (DIRDs), the one paper whose release title reads AAWSA rather than AAWSAP.
The paper credits the concept to Philo Farnsworth in 1955 and a revival by R. W. Bussard in the late 1990s, whose company it calls the largest power-oriented project in the field, and it says the approach still receives no Department of Energy funding. It is one of the few approaches that could burn aneutronic hydrogen-boron fuel, but present devices, it says, are four to five orders of magnitude below breakeven for that fuel. Its uses so far are small neutron sources, one company having run sealed units on ore belts in Germany; a satellite thruster is presented as near term, and space propulsion and power as quite far term. It closes on a proposed twelve-gun device predicted to reach breakeven conditions, and on the need to find funding sources with the will to proceed.
The two papers on Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion treat the same approach and Bussard’s work on it without citing this one.
Connections
DIRDs · PURSUE · Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion · Department of Energy · Positron Propulsion