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Focus Fusion On Google Tech Talks
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Oct 27, 2007 04:15 PM
from the sounds-good-on-paper dept.
from the sounds-good-on-paper dept.
Henning Burdack writes "Eric Lerner talks on Google Tech Talks about Focus Fusion, which would be a much cheaper and more feasible technology as a fusion energy source than any other current approach, based upon the dense plasma focus device. The technology will use hydrogen-boron fusion with direct induction of ion energy and photovoltaic conversion of x-ray emission, obviating the need of a steam-cycle and thus resulting in higher efficiencies. High temperatures of 1 billion Kelvin (100 keV) have been reached years ago. It only needs $2 million in funding and two years of research for a proof of concept, and maybe four more years for a prototype with positive energy output. In contrast to other fusion efforts it utilizes the natural instabilities of plasma instead of fighting them. Focus Fusion has been discussed on Slashdot before, and a patent application is also available, going a bit more into detail."
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Alternative to Tokamak Fusion Reactor 266 comments
Sterling D. Allan writes to tell us OpenSourceEnergy is reporting on a "far more feasible and profoundly less expensive approach to hot fusion". Inventor Eric Lerner's focus fusion process uses hydrogen and boron to combine into helium which gives off tremendous energy with a very small material requirement. Lerner's project apparently only requires a few million in capital investment which is a far cry from the $10 billion being spent on the Tokamak fusion project.
Submission: Focus Fusion on Google Tech Talks by Anonymous Coward
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ewsnow writes "The Focus Fusion Society reports that the scientists and engineers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics have finally built an operational Dense Plasma Focus device. While still at less than half power, they were able to achieve a pinch on their device. The small company that Eric Lerner started recently gathered enough funding to start a two-year study on the validity of his theory regarding fusion-inducing plasmoids. If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes. In contrast to the billions of dollars spent on Tokamak fusion (think ITER), LPP is conducting their research on a budget around a million dollars. Yet, if it works, it will provide nuclear fusion with much simpler equipment and much less cost. Eric Lerner and Focus Fusion have been discussed on Slashdot before."
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Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Now here he is introducing a project that requires millions of dollars in funding.
Ok, I'm a bit cynical, but this does look like a possible conflict of interest to me.
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Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Informative)
By itself no, however his wiki entry [wikipedia.org] create strong suspicion of crackpottery:
-graduate without completing a degree
-author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
-denial of quasar as blackholes
-life-long political activist
Parent
Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW he was banned for reverting libellous material and attempts to imply that things like joining a political organisation make him untrustworthy (well, I suppose he was technically a politician, so maybe he was) and for bigging himself up too persistently - the latter only proves he's a self-righteous arse - so often a problem for scientists.
> author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
No he's not, the cosmology theory is by a nobel prize winning cosmologist. He wrote a book to publicise the theory.
> denial of quasar as blackholes
There is no evidence that they are black holes. They a big and dense. It is not known whether or not they have a large mass behind an event horizon entirely separated from the rest of the universe - we merely have no popular theory to establish that they are not black holes but that doesn't make them so. Assertions that they are and must be black holes and that alternative theories makes you a "DENIER" is far more crackpottish.
> life-long political activist
What does that have to do with his theories on the use of established fundamental quantum limits on bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation for sustaining plasma energy in a DPF plasmoid?
Yes, lets all stop doing science... Damn that science.
Parent
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Another telltale (Score:2)
Low enough that someone might come up with the amount and a "hey, what if it works?...". If he had asked for $2 billion, the financiers would insist on a very tightly controlled cash management. $2 million is low enough that he might be left controlling the purse strings.
If a proof of concept can be done with $2 million, then he should do first a basic prototype in his hobby shop. After all, people have built Farnsworth fusors [wikipedia.org] for decades, and still no one would claim the
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Seems like if that was bullshit someone would call him on it, rather than invite him over for a Google tech t
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Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Cheap energy on the other hand, is the next best thing to curing cancer & not as many organizations are setup asking for money to research it yet.
Ok, but (Score:2)
Personally, I am starting to think that he is getting a bit of a bum rap on this. It makes me wonder what is true on wiki. While I like that wiki is taking time to check things, perhaps, it is time for wiki to have subject matter experts do the rev
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which says ( for those who don't RTFA )
Notice: Elerner is banned from editing this article. The user specified has been banned by the Arbitration committee from editing this article indefinitely. The user is not prevented from discussing or proposing changes on this talk page. Posted by Thatcher131 03:01, 3 December 2006 (UTC) for the Arbitration committee. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience.
The bolding is mine.
Gawd!!! I must be bored today. I'm replying to an AC!
Another Company... (Score:2)
Google for "Tri-Alpha Energy"
Re:Another Company... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO anyone interested in investing in this guy who is not a university or reserch institute should be extremely careful. Like put a radio ankle bracelet on him careful.
Parent
So far not so crazy (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about this guy's background, but so far (still watching) he hasn't said anything crazy that signifies obvious crack-pottery. There's been o zero-point energy nonsense, and he's using standard terminology to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone with a little background in the subject. The new bit seems to be clever use of plasma instability to get the energy density required to initiate fusion. I'm not a plasma physicist (just particle physics), so I can't critically evaluate the details of the method. So far I'd believe this is plausible, but I don't know enough to be willing to give this guy any money.
And for gosh-sakes, fix the article summary. keV = kilo electron volts, not Kelvin!
So many ACs (Score:3, Funny)
Is that you, Eric?
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However the percentage of nice people vs egregiously annoying people among good scientists probably correlates well with the population at large, so it's important to discriminate
More of a research device (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, this guy is probably guilty of exactly what he accuses the rest of the fusion community of - he's fixated on his idea. He apparently won funding from the navy [slashdot.org], so there's a chance his group could prove me wrong, and I hope that they do, but I doubt it.
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Informative)
Pretending that this is a non issue without backing up with some calculations/data is bad science. Especially when there is quite a lot of analysis indicating that at best they get around 3-5% of the power out as they put in (real devices less than 0.001% or worse). Thus without some high efficiency (>>90%) power recirculation method they can't work as a power production device.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Interesting)
And Bussard had responded directly to that issue:
Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion cross-section is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and "cold") anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14).
In layman's terms, the Polywell design fuses ions faster than they maxwellianize, thanks to the ratio of time in core to time in edge. The full high level paper from Bussard can be found here [askmar.com].
You only need to maintain the non-maxwellian distribution long enough for the ions to fuse before they maxwellianize. Thermalization in the outer edge dominates the coulomb interactions from the core more than the collisions dominate the fusion rates. Those are the conditions that allow fusion to occur faster than maxwellianization. No magic, no violation of physics, just a beneficial design that Rider and Nevins both overlooked in their assumptions.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT [mit.edu] and University of Wisconsin-Madison [wisc.edu].
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway I have read all the stuff I could find on his device and other ES confinment devices. I think the paper you want to ref is:
"The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion", Bussard, Robert W.,57th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2006).
This and all other "publications" of his do not explain anything. They just assert that some fact is correct, often in the face of other facts. No math, no explanation on other experiments, no justifications at all. Example in the above he claims the following: "giving DD fusions at over 100,000x higher output (at 1E9 fus/sec) than all prior similar work at comparable drive conditions (Ref. 3)." yet normal commercial neutron source fusors get 1e9 events per second wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and 1e8 are achieved at lower voltages and don't need high B fields, and also where are the error bars? Then there are scaling laws which are simply not backed up. In fact with everything I have read it appears that its made up.
And for the ions to fuse faster than they thermalise would require some black magic in terms of plasma density and thermodynamics and charge distributions, or he thought everyones data on fusion reaction cross sections is completely wrong (and thats arguing against a lot of experimental data from a lot of different places). And I'm assuming D T reactions. P B are 1000's of times worse.
You can't do physics without some theroy to back you up. You can't answer critics that use theroy that has shown to be a good model in similar situations without justifying why the model is not good in your case. Bussards work does not have or do that. Plain and simple.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Electrostatic fusion is viewed as a black horse, but if you have a good paper on it, it will get published. We want to believe that it can be done. But you must back up your position and at least address known issues with proper exploration of the appropriate models. Just claiming your right and they are wrong is not science.
Parent
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What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding.
I've watched the video once and skipped through a second time now...I don't see where you got this from. Can you provide a time reference?
Also, as far as crack-pottery goes, is there anything statement from him that isn't true, or grounded in real science? In the comments here today I see a few "...sounds fishy to me..." type statements but no one points to anything
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For the crackpot-esque funding claims, just look for his claims about the DOE "defending their rice bowl." If you had any idea how the funding process works you'd know that the decisions of who to give a grant to aren't directed primarily by a bunch of territorial bureaucrats, it's made by scientists, his fellow peers who would actually be able to measure the merits of what he is proposing better than anyone. Fra
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The "defending their rice bowl" comment and the Navy funding was Bussard, but the comments about "he", "him" and "his" don't indicate that the comments are about anybody but the topic of the slashdot article - ie, Lerner.
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This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Of course fifty years ago we didn't know about the time cube so it's no wonder it didn't work...
(haven't read TFA, so don't really have an opinion on focus fusion anyway)
Good comprehensive video... (Score:4, Interesting)
In a proper and decent world, men like Robert Bussard would be heroes to our children, and household names that have high schools named after them... his concept of a fusion ramjet, the Bussard Ramjet, from Known Space and other places... is still the only realistically viable idea for intersteller travel...
IANANP... would love someone who is to break this video and it's ideas down... would it work?
peace
Re:Good comprehensive video... (Score:5, Informative)
Briefly there are two problems:
1. ordinary hydrogen is very hard to fuse. Even at the centre of the sun the average proton takes about 10^10 years to fuse.
Since the comrpressed interstellar gas is streaming through your ship at roughly lightspeed, even if "pinch" in your magnetic fields is 1km long, you have to get a decent proportion of it to fuse in 3 microseconds, so you need to achieve, in your pinch, temperature and density far far higher than at the centre of the sun. This seems difficult at best.
2. the interstellar medium (we now know) is best thought of as more like a froth than a uniform gas. Supernova shocks and other upsets clear "bubbles" and after a while almost all the gas ends up packed into relatively thin "bubble walls". Incoveniently, the Sun is sitting in the middle of a bubble several light-years across, so the interstellar gas is a very very thin round here.
Steve
Parent
word to the wise (Score:3, Insightful)
One factor of many: plasmas are prone to a host of instabilities, and 'stability' usually involves tradeoffs between one type of instability and another. So when somebody tells you "my plasma is stable", it should set off warning bells. The honest man will tell you the limits of stability.
As Artsimovich put it so eloquently in 1961, "Initial belief that the doors to the desired region would open smoothly at the first powerful pressure exerted by the creative energy of physicists has proved as unfounded as the sinner's hope of entering Paradise without passing through Purgatory. We do not know how long we will be in Purgatory."
We got into the Space Age by way of the Cold War, but what will push us into the Fusion Age?
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Here we go again. (Score:5, Informative)
Now, the issue with fusion using fuels with higher atomic number than hydrogen is that the plasma will contain much more electrons, and this dramatically increases the amount of energy lost as bremsstrahlung when the electrons collide with the nuclei (the increased mass of the nuclei also plays a part ). Direct conversion of X-rays could theoretically help alleviate this as it would allow you to feed the lost energy back into the plasma, problem is, photo-voltaics have nowhere close to 100% efficiency.
Aneutronic fusion has advantages. You don't have to worry about neutron damage to the reactor vessel. However, when you look a bit closer at it, this isn't such a large advantage after all, because the neutrons are actually quite useful in that they deposit the energy over a quite large volume when they are being absorbed, reducing the stress caused by heating in the device. If it wasn't for the neutrons you would see most of the heat deposited in a comparably thin layer of the plasma-facing compounds. The counter for this is that aneutronic fusion releases the energy as charged particles, potentially allowing for directly converting the energy into electricity.
Basically, what this whole thing boils down to, is if you are able to achieve sufficiently good direct-conversion efficiency to counteract the increased X-ray losses due to the higher atomic numbers associated with aneutronic fusion. This is why you often see claims of breakthroughs in aneutronic fusion together with claims of either a non-maxwellian velocity distribution or some other remarkable way to reduce X-ray losses. A plasma with a maxwellian velocity distribution cannot sustain aneutronic fusion without being either very large and dense (to re-capture the X-rays) or by somehow capturing the lost X-rays after they leave the plasma and feeding the energy back into it.
For a non-maxwellian velocity distribution your problem is that even at optimal energies a collision is much more likely to scatter the ions than it is to cause fusion, and restoring the non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require energy (no, you don't get to violate the second law of thermodynamics I'm afraid ). For capturing X-rays your problem is to achieve a good enough conversion efficiency to make up for the dramatically increased X-ray losses.
With the exception of a few unconfirmed claims, nobody has been able to resolve the above problems (thou Bussard was quite vocal about his polywell device ) and this is pretty much why modern fusion power research uses D-T fusion. It gives the highest amount of energy for the lowest temperature and X-ray losses, at a maxwellian velocity distribution.
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Not true. My above post highlighted problems with using high Z number ions because the large quantity of electrons, and relatively low fusion energy gain, makes it difficult to overcome the energy losses. For D-T fusion however ( and possibly D-D fusion ) , the fusion energy is both every high, and can occur at ( relatively speaking ) lower temperatures. As
The tritium economy (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this a legitimat
A cluster (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like a Ford product (Score:3, Funny)
exploding batteries (Score:2)
Prototype Images online ... (Score:2)
(It would a lot funnier without this: [safercar.gov])
Focus Fusion vs Polywell???? (Score:2)
Big Science effect (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea whether there's any chance focus fusion could work. But I do believe it has probably been a terrible mistake to have put all our eggs in the tokamak basket for all these years. When you don't know how to solve a problem, it's critical to keep exploring alternative approaches, especially if they're radically different. I would love to see substantially more funding for focus fusion, electrostatic confinement fusion, sonofusion, and even good old Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion. The total would still be small compared to tokamak funding -- and who knows, maybe one of them would work out, or maybe we would learn something that turned out to be useful in the tokamak.
While there certainly are crackpots out there, I think we're too quick to dismiss ideas outside the mainstream, too eager to congratulate ourselves for knowing the truth already when we clearly don't know all of it. We need to cultivate more humility in the face of the mystery of the unknown.
Exactly why this wont work. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Indeed. Unfortunately Dr Bussard has passed away recently. However the project has funding again, and
apparently they are builing a new prototype, WB7.
There's a discussion site at http://www.talk-polywell.org/ [talk-polywell.org] .
Mike.
Ah yes; Amazing is it not (Score:2)
Yes, when ppl and companies come along claiming to do something at a fraction of the price, you KNOW they must be fleecing. BTW,
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If it's that rare, wouldn't it have been overkill to use twenty-mule teams to haul borax out of the desert?
Without bothering to look it up, it seems like global consumption of a fusion fuel wouldn't be more than a couple of thousand tons per year. Boron compounds are a commodity that's currently consumed on the scale of a million tons per year.