no steam turbines necessary, or even desired. IIRC, if/when a working Polywell is built that can generate net power, it will produce DC and be able to dump it into the grid directly. Thus, you don't need water pipes going near a very highly charged electrostatic core. There's no hydrogen involved in the process; Bussard suggested using boron-11 as a fuel (and hoo boy, there's a
lot of boron available, and this design doesn't use very much while it's running).
Cooling is another matter entirely, but since that's "just" an engineering issue, it's doable, just very complex. Dr. Nebel and Tom Ligon have both said that they might as well build a full-size reactor, so it's pretty obvious they're happy with the experimental results so far and are confident their numbers work. Bussard himself was so certain he made a fairly blanket statement (paraphrasing here) "eventually, someone will build it, and it will work, and that will be the end of the oil era".
An interesting note is that Bussard was certainly in a position to know what may and may not function as advertised- he was Assistant Director of of the Controlled Thermonuclear Reactor Division at the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1970s, and helped to found the Tokamak project in the first place. Additionally, from the wiki on the man,
"In June 1995, Bussard claimed in a letter to all fusion laboratories, as well as to key members of the US Congress, that he and the other founders of the program supported the Tokamak not out of conviction that it was the best technical approach but rather as a vehicle for generating political support, thereby allowing them to pursue "all the hopeful new things the mainline labs would not try".
I wonder what those "other programs" were... :think: :D
edit: you can learn a lot more by going to the
Talk-Polywell discussion boards and reading about it from experts. Much of those discussions are very complex and technical, but they are always happy to explain themselves in layman's terms, and they're always happy to know that word is getting around regarding their project.
If the Polywell functions the way it's supposed to, it will accomplish what decades of funding other approaches has not, and the era of human oil dependency will come to a rather abrupt end.