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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 10 March 2010, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It surveys the basics, experimental status, theory and possible uses of inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion, with emphasis on work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It covers neutron sources, explosives detection and space propulsion. It ends by proposing a 12-gun hydrogen plasma experiment meant to show breakeven conditions for p-11B fuel.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/10/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion, a relatively unconventional fusion concept that uses electric fields rather than the more established magnetic or laser-based approaches to confine ions, and it reviews both the underlying physics and the experimental work associated with the concept. The report emphasizes that IEC may have nearer-term value as a compact neutron, proton, or x-ray source and as a platform for studying experimental fusion approaches, while also presenting more ambitious possibilities such as aneutronic power generation and propulsion applications. At the same time, it makes clear that the concept remained far from practical fusion power, with experimental devices operating several orders of magnitude below breakeven and with major unresolved issues involving confinement, losses, grid damage, and scale-up. Overall, the document treats IEC as a technically interesting but still highly speculative path toward fusion energy, while suggesting that its more limited spin-off applications were more plausible in the near term than its long-range power generation or propulsion applications.
UNCLASSIFIED/ fFOA OFFl&ilAL W&& 8PtLY 2.7 T. Takamatsu, T. Kyunai, S. Ogawa, K. Masuda, H. Toku, and K. Yoshikawa, "A Magnetron Discharge Ion Source for an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion Device" 7th U.S. -Japan IEC Workshop , Los Alamos National Laboratory, NM, March 14-16, (2005). 2.8 G. R. Piefer, J. F. Santarius, R. P. Ashley, G.L. Kulcinski "Progress in the Development of a 3He Ion Source for IEC Fusion", 7th U.S. -Japan IEC Workshop, Los Alamos National Laboratory,, NM, March 14-16, (2005). Section III. Other Geometries A un iq ue feature of the IEC is the ability to vary its geometry to adapt to a number of important near term and future applications. Here we consider cylindrical IEC geometries, the IEC Jet extraction geometry, dipole assisted, and magnetically-coupled IEC unit which add flexibility for use in some power applications. Other important configurations, which are quasi-spherical, include the magnetic assisted HEPS (Polywell) configuration, the Penning trap IEC, and the POPS oscillating IEC. These concepts are discussed briefly elsewhere in this report so will not be included here. CYLINDRICAL IECS The prime alternate geometry studied for IECs is cylindrical. While originally developed at the UIUC, the configuration has spread to other labs including the University of Wisconsin, Kyoto University, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The objective is to obtain a dense core region extending along the axis of the cylinder. This is especially important for neutron sources since it offers a very long source that can be used for broad area coverage of large objects such as container boxes. Other conventional sources would require multiple "ganged" sources to do the same. A downside however, is the high power input required for such configurations. Thus the advantage of source length must be weighed against the alternative of moving a smaller point source over the surface of interest. It is not clear that the cylinder is useful for scaling to a power reactor. It can be viewed as a 2-D version of the spherical unit. As such, the beam convergence (compression) is limited to lower values, hence lower core denslties (an important effect for beam -beam fusion desired for power reactors, but less so for beam-background reactions used in most current neutron sources). Two types of cylindrical sources (References 3.1 - 3.5), shown schematically in Figure 3.1, have been studied - a gridded type which is essentially the spherical unit converted into a cylinder, and a quite different hollow cathode design. The gridded design was a natural variation of the original Farnsworth device and was first studied experimentally in the 1970s by T. Dolan at the UIUC who used laser diagnostics with a noble gas discharge to study density-temperature and species profiles. The hollow cathode design was later proposed by G. Miley as an attempt to retain the long axial reaction region but do away with grids. UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOA 8FFl&i1Ak W&& 8Ptllf 21
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 72 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.