3 ms·
You can. That's what a Farnsworth fusor does (there are other related designs, but that's the original, and the kind you can build in your garage). But for com
by gliese1337 10y ago
You can. That's what a Farnsworth fusor does (there are other related designs, but that's the original, and the kind you can build in your garage).
But for complicated reasons, it just isn't efficient enough to actually produce net power output. Of course, neither is any other design right now, but magnetic confinement appears to be the more promising path forward.
- mrfusion 10y agoThanks for the explanation. I looked up some of those designs. Now I'm really puzzled why no one has tried a more naive approach. I'm picturing a hollow metal sphere with a high positive charge with positive ions inside of it. Wouldn't it push them all together and with a high enough charge get them hot enough to fuse?
- tedsanders 10y agoCounterintuitively, this setup would have zero force inside the sphere. It turns out that being closer to charge on one side of the sphere is always exactly balanced out by the more distant side's greater total charge.