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Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon May 26, 2008 04:53 PM
from the race-for-the-power-finish-line dept.
from the race-for-the-power-finish-line dept.
pln2bz writes "Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, has received $600k in funding, and a promise of phased payments of $10 million if scientific feasibility can be demonstrated to productize Lerner's focus fusion energy production device. Unlike the Tokamak, focus fusion does not require the plasma to be stable, does not produce significant amounts of dangerous radiation, directly injects electrons into the power grid without the need for turbines and would only cost around $300k to manufacture a generator. Lerner's inspiration for the technology is based upon an interpretation for astrophysical Herbig-Haro jets that agrees with the Electric Universe explanation."
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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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Electric universe (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Interesting)
In terms of the matter at hand, does he have a PhD.? It's somewhat odd to refer to a scientist who has one without the title, and even more odd to have a device as significant as this without one. Of course, that assumes that it actually could be made to work in a reliable, safe, cost effective manner. It's definitely not there yet.
I really wish that I could take another view of this, but in a time where ID can be entertained by anybody as scientific when even at the most basic level it's problematic(As somebody else pointed out elsewhere an intelligent being would not design something as complicated as a person, complexity is just not the sign of a well designed anything), I'd be naive to believe otherwise.
That being said, there is also a lot of truly amazing work being done, unfortunately a lot of the most interesting, and potentially most useful, is being stymied for political, religious or social reasons.
Parent
Re:Electric universe is wackier than string theory (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way -- has anyone else looked up CMEF, his source of funding? Right on the front page, a big pitch for cash:
The Company is privately offering 1,000,000 shares
Centre for Environmental and Energy Resources Sweden AB is raising funds, for demonstrate the scientific feasibility of Hydrogen-Boron fusion and production of net energy by selling shares. Please contact the company at arnold@cmef.eu to discuss investing.
Support a better future
You can help yourself, your country and future generations by supporting us (CMEF). You can assist us by sending a monetary donation. Any assistance you are able to provide will be appreciated. For more information click here
I'd be willing to wager that they don't have the $10m, and might not even have the $600k yet. In fact, their whole website is about how wonderful Focus Fusion and Lerner's work is. So, I mean, acting like you got a grant as though it's some sort of vindication of your technology when it's from what's virtually a fansite isn't exactly fair. It's just some Focus Fusion fans trying to raise money to fund it.
I'll just make a quick observation that the "Tree Power" guy [engadget.com] managed to get funding, too.
Parent
Re:Electric universe is wackier than string theory (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately I've yet to see a single person dismiss the Electric Universe who was also familiar with it. From one of their main sites [thunderbolts.info]:
As author and EU theorist Wal Thornhill points out:
"If Arp and others are right and the Big Bang is dead, what does the Cosmic Microwave Background signify? The simplest answer, from the highly successful field of plasma cosmology, is that it represents the natural microwave radiation from electric current filaments in interstellar plasma local to the Sun. Radio astronomers have mapped the interstellar hydrogen filaments by using longer wavelength receivers. The dense thicket formed by those filaments produces a perfect fog of microwave radiation - as if we were located inside a microwave oven. Instead of the Cosmic Microwave Background, it is the Interstellar Microwave Background. That makes sense of the fact that the CMB is too smooth to account for the lumpiness of galaxies and galactic clusters in the universe."
Another mention of the subject is here [thunderbolts.info] and several more here with some reading [holoscience.com]. These took me about 30 seconds to find with a Google search for "+electric-universe +cosmic-microwave". So how hard have you worked to understand something before dismissing it or forming an opinion of it? Skepticism doesn't mean you don't even look into something because you dislike how it sounds or you can't see how the mainstream could be wrong.
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Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Electric universe (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Informative)
The argument for dark matter, in its simpliest form, states that owing to the gravitational effects we observe in the universe there must be a lot of matter we can't measure. There's nothing "magical" about that.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:4, Informative)
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Cosmic inflation is a theoretical concept which looks like it could explain some observations. It's not accepted as any kind of a confirmed theory yet, but it is well accepted as a candidate for a theory that might, with some additional experimental confirmation, become a reasonable model.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:4, Insightful)
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Dark Matter is one possible explanation (simply put: well, the matter must be there, we just can't see it).
No-one has yet observed any dark matter, so it is just still a theory.
There are other explanations, including 'Gravity doesn't scale like we thought it did'.
In my opinion, Dark Matter will turn out to be the Luminiferous Ether of the 20th Century.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Informative)
So dark matter actually does not interact with the photon field.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Informative)
All this is assuming dark matter really exists. I'm still still not wholly convinced. Basically all our long-distance measurements of gravity give the wrong answer. Even our longest distance solar-system probes (the Pinoeers) give the wrong answer, though that data isn't really good enough to be wholly convincing. Are all these answers wrong because there is hidden hidden matter (and energy, woo hoo!), or is GR just not a good enough approximation at those scales? Eric Lerner thinks it's all about plasmas.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Insightful)
And really, what's with all the cynicism?
At worst, someone else's government wasted some taxpayer dollars on science instead of market distorting business subsidies. At best, we have a revolutionary new source of electricity. Somewhere in the middle is the most likely possibility, namely that some bit of research turns out to be useful and can be applied elsewhere.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern pharma research has done to try to bring useful conclusions off of witch doctors' remedies -- so even if you're going to an MD, you might be getting a (modern, refined, tested, proven) version of something which once was an old wives' tale. Is that an argument for going to an "alternative" physician rather than the MD? Absolutely not! But it is an argument that such alternative approaches may have value, if only as a way of finding interesting things to use an input for the more modern R&D apparatus.
So -- it's useful for experiments based on bad theory to take place, as their results may lead to refinements in good theory.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the comments to this article (particularly this one [slashdot.org] make me believe this guy might not know what he's doing.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, the gay bomb was a good use of our tax money. Not just good... I'd go so far as to call it fabulous.
But seriously, I disagree with the logic here: justifying an idiotic use of money (crazy-ass fringe science research into fusion) by pointing to a more idiotic use of money (gay bombs). It's like arguing, "I'm gonna burn twenty-dollar bills. Why? Because it's far less wasteful than burning hundred-dollar bills."
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Funny)
In related news, $750,000 has been awarded to Gene Ray to create a source of renewable energy based on his "Time Cube" concept, and $1.5 million for research into improved fission reactor designs has been awarded to Ludwig Hansen, a.k.a. Archimedes Plutonium.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The big bang is "magical thinking too" (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure what you mean by hard evidence, but um.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation [wikipedia.org] seems to work for most people.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately Eric Lerner keeps bringing the cosmological plasma thing up, he somehow got it into his head that associating his current work with that will make him more credible
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the theories that we're opposed to, it's the approach. You're more than welcome to suggest that the entire universe was the result of God's Gargantuan Fart, and that interstellar space is composed of His Holy Flatulence through which electromagnetic waves propagate. I might think you're being silly, but I won't be offended by your theory. What I WOULD be offended by is your attempt to pervert the scientific method in order to try and "prove" your theory.
Another example: I'm not offended by creationists who use scripture to dispute evolution. If they want to believe some ancient manuscript instead of modern science, that's their call. But I AM offended when they pretend to disprove evolution by misquoting and misrepresenting the research of others, or by presenting their own asinine assumptions as if they were scientifically verifiable facts.
Parent
Re:Electric universe (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest you take some remedial English classes, my friend, since your reading comprehension is atrocious. I quite clearly stated that you are welcome to question evolution. You conveniently ignored that, and went on construct a straw man and complain about everyone picking on you for daring to question the establishment. Poor you.
You didn't, by any chance, have anything to do with that abortion of a film "Expelled", did you?
No, just silly. I don't think kids are "Neanderthal ooga-booga sun worshippers" for believing that the presents under the Christmas tree were left by a fat man in a red suit who climbed down the chimney, so why would I accuse you of any such thing?
Then you agree with the premise of my comment, and I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. As I said - you're more than welcome to espouse whatever ideas you want - just don't pretend to be using science to prove them when you're clearly relying on faith.
Parent
Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, the chances of me getting a backer for my "buttered toast and cat" turbine are much improved. Fantastic.
Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you don't purchase ITER and fund 4150 independent projects instead.
IANAPP, but my experience with science in general is that you're better off funding many, many projects to the proof-of-concept phase than funding one proof-of-concept project that we're absolutely sure will eventually cost ~$100B to make actually generating power. That way, we learn a huge amount about plasma physics and can make educated decisions about which projects to fund to completion.
The problem is, right now we know that tokomaks sort of work, but aren't really feasible for power generation. We have *no idea* if all those other systems could be feasible with more work.
Parent
Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it probably won't. JET did, but ITER is just an engineering prototype and proof of concept. It is intended to test the technologies to make a fusion power plant work and be maintainable. The physics is done already.
> However, the work described in this story has a 0% chance of working
Actually it has a pretty reasonable chance. Nobody has been able to perform an analysis using previous theories to show that current physical understanding says it won't work. In part because Eric Lerner has been the first person to care enough about certain aspects of plasma behaviour to actually produce quantitative models.
Parent
Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Exactly the right approach. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell [wikipedia.org]
Both Lerner's and Bussard's approach are not exactly proven, but they seem believable enough that investing a few millions (as opposed to billions in Tokamak research) seems worthwile.
Parent
New page 1 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New page 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Is he being paid to design a hip-hop web presence, or a fusion design type?
Parent
Developmental Stages. (Score:5, Funny)
summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
not really new but it's interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Re:not really new but it's interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a couple videos of talks they gave on the subject.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606 [google.com]
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760 [google.com]
Parent
Good technology, bad researcher (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good technology, bad researcher (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to hear that the experts are wrong, the solution is simple, revolutionary and cheap, and a downtrodden underdog is about to reveal it to the world.
Unfortunately, when the problem really is hard, the only way you can move into the latter category is to, uh, be creative with your evidence.
Parent
Re:Good technology, bad researcher (Score:5, Interesting)
From his diagrams, the device is much too simplistic to work. Russians used a similar setup. Plasma does not interact with just the outside, it interacts with itself. And that's the problem that existed since the 60s.
Tokamak researchers finally overcame this problem and a milliard of similar ones. The 60s vision of fusion of naive, to say the least. Current view is much more realistic, but general public is stuck in the 60s.
Anyway, someone lost 600k, at least, for nothing. Not only will he not get power generation, he will not even break even with raw energy.
Parent
Ford Focus Fusion (Score:5, Funny)
If they'd wanted credibility, they shoulda gone for something like the Yaris Matrix or maybe the Fit Element.
Logical fallacy of investment (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and slash dot will give them front page publicity.
Let's not forget the others... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Fast ignition:
ICF is unlikely to ever deliver excess power after conversion efficiencies. NIF uses ~400 MJ to produce ~40 MJ out. Sign me up!
Fast ignition appears to reduce the required input power by about one order of magnitude. Progress in laser diodes appears to offer another. All of a sudden things look very interesting in the ICF world.
2) Magnetized Target Fusion
ICF has high-density (10 times lead -- consider that it started as hydrogen gas) and super-short confinement times. The problem is getting the density. Magnetic approaches have low density (almost vacuum) and long confinement times. The problem is getting the confinement time.
But what about the middle ground between the two? We already know how to confine for "some" time, and compress things "ok". It turns out there's an extremely interesting area of practical design in that grey area between the two extremes, in the performance area we had 20 years ago. MTF attacks that area in an interesting way.
3) Polywell
Let's give Bussard the props the guy deserves. I don't know if the Polywell is any better positioned for success than focus fusion, and I have funny feelings in my gut about all magnetic approaches, but if this guy says it's going to work I'm willing to cut him a whole lot of slack.
Maury
Another project that died for a lack of $200K (Score:5, Informative)
It produced plasma stable structures which were then compressed. If was de-funded before it could be proven ( or disproven ).
Disclaimer: I worked on it.
Re:This seems far more interesting. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
a)This is true for ANY fusion scheme using the p-B reaction in a mono energetic velocity distribution. Even in a head on collision the chance for scattering is so much higher than the chance of fusion that restoring the monoenergetic distribution will require more energy.
b)This does NOT assume that the plasma is quasi-neutral, isotropic or anything like that. The conclusion follows directly from the ratio between the fusion cross section, the scattering cross section and the laws of thermodynamics.
c)It doesn't apply to thermal plasmas since they are at maximum entropy for their temperature. This is why it doesn't apply to Tokamaks, hydrogen bombs, or the Sun.
Bussard and his followers used to respond to this criticism by claiming whoever had come up with it had ignored some of the features of his design, or that they didn't properly understand it or some other similar claim. In reality it doesn't depend on his design. If the second law of thermodynamics is correct, and if the cross section for fusion is much smaller than the cross section for simple scattering ( and it is , even at resonance energies ) then maintaining a non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require more energy than p-B fusion produces.
Parent
Re:Think critically (Score:4, Insightful)
* Enormous amounts of money handed to favoured engineering contractors
* No viable product
* No discernible progress
Oh wait, you can't say any of those things about the dense plasma focus. Nowhere close to the billions that have been poured into tokamaks, it's a viable product on it's own (as a portable bright X-Ray source), and despite the apparent handicaps of a slightly kooky project leader and miniscule funding, their numbers look just as good, if not better, than ITER.
Kekulé was inspired to discover the structure of benzene by a dream about a snake biting its own tail. It doesn't make his discovery any less valid.
Given the number of questions you are asking that have answers (however biased they may be) in that Google Tech Talk, you probably haven't watched it. Why don't you (and any other people thinking of spouting off) do the man the courtesy of hearing him out?
Or are you "not actually a scientist"? A cornerstone of the scientific method is trying to prove yourself wrong.
Parent