Over at Atomic Insights, Rod Adams points us to a newly-issued US patent for an alleged "fusion device".  There are heaps of problems with it (gigawatt outputs? coming mostly as hot neutrons? holy neutron activation and radiation poisoning, Batman!) but a few examples will suffice.

These jerks made the PDF as difficult as possible to process, starting with saving it as a series of page images rather than text which can be searched and copied.  That's just one of the ways it emits the aroma of snake oil.  Page 5:

Each conical structure 200, opposing each other in pairs, may have smoothly curved apex sections 201, and/or include assemblies of electrified grids 202 and toroidal magnetic coils 203.

Toroid coils confine their magnetic fields inside the minor radius.  They have next to no magnetic field outside the minor radius.  I could see a solenoid coil but toroids would simply be useless for influencing a plasma outside the toroid coil itself, and that includes the space between these so-called "fusors".  This looks like fusion word salad.

In order to heat the plasma core 75 at the extreme temperatures that fusion requires, the electrically charged dynamic fusors 200, 230 generate high electromagnetic radiation by virtue of their accelerating spin.

Word salad.  The mass of plasma is negligible compared to the mass of tungsten-based electrodes.  The one thing I could see as a possibility is the use of mechanical twisting of a magnetic field around a diamagnetic plasma to induce currents and consequent heating, but that would require solenoid coils rather than toroidal coils.

In order to hold an electric charge of at least one Coulomb

One coulomb is an enormous amount of electric charge.  Supercapacitors store multiple coulombs by way of equally enormous amounts of surface area of their virtual "plates", which are made of things like activated carbon.  In a small device with discrete plates and capacitance measured in picofarads, storing a coulomb would require voltages in the billions of volts.  That's in excess of the breakdown voltage of any available material and would immediately arc over.  There are equally enormous energies involved.  One coulomb in a gigavolt capacitor stores 5e8 joules, about 139 kWh.  Forget fusion, if you can handle that you've got a killer battery.  IOW, ain't gonna happen.

My impression is that this is going to be revealed shortly as Sokal Hoax III, an epic troll of both the Green energy believers and the USPTO.  I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that this "inventor" doesn't even exist.

  ¶ 10/13/2019 10:10:00 AM