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Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

I've got my own novel fusion reactor design that really needs to be tested.

What do you do when you have an idea that could change the world? I wish I could drop it, but I can't. It haunts me with it's elegance and simplicity, and has defied all of my attempts to find flaws in the theory.

I'm trying to move forward on my own. I'm not comfortable selling a promise. I have no guarantee that my device will work, but I have no reason to believe that it won't.

It's great that all this money is being thrown at fusion recently, but that's almost the easy part.

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My gut feeling is that if you don't already know anyone you could talk to about this—which is the likely result of being an expert in the field, studying at a high level and interacting with other such experts—your design probably isn't going to work better than what's already out there, and even if it did, you wouldn't have the credibility with the field to get them to listen to you without years of work building relationships and trust.

I'm not going to try to claim that it's impossible to self-train in nuclear physics to the degree necessary to come up with a novel fusion reactor design that's a) viable, and b) genuinely novel, but it's going to be so vastly less likely than the various alternatives that, as the sibling commenter notes, even if you've already got 100% of the knowledge and understanding required to do this and you're 100% right, your best bet is almost certainly to get into a PhD program in this field, and publish this as your dissertation.

It's not that I'm trying to come up with a novel design, I already have.

I've spoken with many plasma physicists about the idea. Some actually look at it without dismissing it. The ones that understand it all say that it's either beyond their expertise, or that it needs more study, but so far nobody else seems to want to study it.

Where does that leave me? Building it myself without much outside help. I've simulated it to my satisfaction, I've been issued a patent on it, and I'm currently buying parts to build a prototype.

It's honestly a bit of a curse. I wish someone would really help me put a nail in its coffin, but as long as it has a possibility of working I have to be the advocate for it. The cost to humanity of losing a viable fusion reactor are too high for me to give up on it.

My gut feeling is that NOBODY has a reactor that really works yet. Many of these efforts might be in the same boat I am, but keep up a better exterior.

As they used to say, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", well my current feeling is that tokamaks are the IBM of fusion. They're a crutch for people who are after easy money working on something safe.

Honestly, I don't think that changes the answer much. If your design were the subject of a peer-reviewed paper in respected journals, that would be much more likely to get it attention in the scientific community than what you've done thus far.

That's the kind of step that starts to make it possible for other people—beyond those you can easily personally contact—to go over your design, understand the theory behind it, and either believe it will work (and thus possibly help move it toward prototype stage), or believe it will not (and likely tell you why, with sources).

I don't claim to know much about nuclear fusion, or the people who work on it, but my impression is that they tend more toward the academic side of things than the industrial. If that's the case, peer-reviewed scientific papers laying out what you've got and why you think it'll work are, IMO, much more likely to get their interest than a random person reaching out to them with a design (even if that design does seem sound) or a patent.

Either way, best of luck. I certainly agree that if you do have a viable alternative design, getting it out there is one of the more important endeavors of the day.

Thank you. I do agree that peer review must be done, but it's almost too simple.

None of the parts of my proposed prototype are very interesting or controversial. I'm not using extreme magnetic fields, or exotic materials or new physics. Nothing about the device requires more than highschool physics and geometry to understand.

With a new arrangement, this novel solution to contain and collide ions falls out.

It's a gedanken that just needs to be built because the basic idea is less involved than some homework I've had.

Here's the main idea in the style of a highschool homework assignment:

Draw a point on a piece of paper. How many unique circles you can draw that pass through that point?

Each of those circles represents the cyclotron trajectory of a single deuterium ion in my device.

There's basically nothing to write about until an experiment is built.

I need some "marketing neutrons" as Michel Laberge of General Fusion put it (https://youtu.be/2m9kC1yRnLQ?t=639).

Well, how about you do a PhD and publish a paper?

Maybe I will if that's what it takes.

Our society has serious problems when it allows a single person to be a bottleneck on something like this.

A better society might allocate some existing resources to evaluate new ideas in parallel in case these ideas are actually, truly valuable.

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