I have been checking out YouTube on nuclear hoaxes and I have found the entire talk that Suppes gave at the Lift conference (Geneva, Switzerland). While the ‘open source part’ of the talk, concerning blog, community, start-ups, on-line help, etc. was fine, the ‘science part’ was just preposterous (nothing against him, looks like a nice chap)!
One thing rang a bell: in a couple of slides he shows deuterium-deuterium fusion and the fusion products of the transmutation are tritium (2 neutrons, 1 proton) and a single proton with energy 14.1 MeV (?). This is patently wrong!
Even Wikipedia gives the details of these reactions and the energy he quotes is the NEUTRON energy in the deuterium+tritium reaction. Now I guess that the way off-the-mark guy doesn’t posses or produce tritium in his garage…
The other possibility is that he makes (well he -would like- to make) a 1 MeV tritium on one side and get a 3 MeV proton on the other side, but this also brings complications.
Whatever he means, the slides are wrong.
In any case I’ve checked the reaction rates for DT at the (VERY) low energies attainable with the polywell and, surprise, the damned-low cross-section is much less than 10^(-30) barns. That means that the mean free path (the length that a particle travels before a collision occurs) of the deuterons at 800000 K and 1/10 Pa (1 millionth of an atmosphere) is just enormous (almost the distance to the Proxima Centauri star!).
At the end, he is, somewhat in cooperation with the host/presenter, suggesting that he has (Bussard had) plans for building a scaled up version for 2 Million bucks!
I would not invest my money, nor public money, in a guy who doesn’t even know the elementary physics is talking about. It would be a complete FAILURE, a word that, together with ‘DIDN’T WORK AT ALL’, he keeps repeating several times during his talk (Freud?).