There is an easy, practical way to do fusion.

It’s not some wild new way. It involves imploding a deuterium-tritium capsule within a hohlraum: just like the US National Ignition Facility, but at far lower cost, and with higher ignition power available if needed.

The difference is that instead of heating the hohlraum with lasers, charged pellets fired at high speed are used. This also is not a brand new idea. But it was sidelined because it appeared that either the pellets must be fired inefficiently fast, or else mutual repulsion would prevent them from converging to a sufficiently tight focus.

The breakthrough is realising that, using COTS-available equipment (COTS stands for Commercial Off The Shelf: stuff you can easily buy) it is possible, in fact easy, to provide individual tracking and guidance to every one of many thousands of pellets fired consecutively. This opens up options never before considered.

- The pellets can be fired down a long standoff pipe, starting some distance from the fusion site

- The accelerator can fire a long burst of pellets, each at slightly greater speed than the preceding one. Pellets fired over a period of milliseconds catch up together to arrive within a span of nanoseconds. An accelerator of modest power and cost can provide an ignition pulse which peaks at a huge energy input rate, a million times greater than the accelerator power.

- The pellets are progressively discharged en route, as ever-finer course corrections are applied: they do not repel each other at convergence.

- Detonation can take place within a sacrificial tube completely surrounded by flowing lithium, productively catching all neutrons emitted to breed tritium, for a closed fuel cycle.

The method is called Guided Impact Fusion. For more detail download the 6-page management summary:

Guided Impact Fusion – Summary

and the full paper:

Guided Impact Fusion – Paper

Because the fusion itself is absolutely standard, the details can be checked by anyone with high school physics and access to Google. While the above documents may be freely downloaded, the method is covered by a PCT patent filing with base priority date of 2010, which was published internationally last year and will shortly be entering the national phase. Please contact me for further details if you have an interest in development.

A Kindle book, Fusion Is Easy, will be available soon. As polishing it has rightly taken second place to getting the idea itself progressed, I will not commit to a launch date – watch this space!