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We're also not the professionals that keep telling us it's 30 years away

with a certain amount of funding. Without the funding, the researchers have said it will never happen.

http://focusfusion.org/index.p...

Unfortunately, fusion research has been laughably underfunded since that quote (which I can't seem to find on the internet, but someone has it I am sure).

... research instead, there would probably be plenty of material resource on the planet by now (or soon) for all to live like in the USA. Instead the USA spent that money to try to secure oil profits for a few and other various similar things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

But with a global economy of around US$80 Trillion annually, there is plenty to go around to invest in fusion and cheap solar and a variety of other research to create new resources of all sorts (energy, material, informational, social, spiritual, ecological, biological, etc.). Fusion research is really not that expensive compared to the possible benefits (although it makes sense to hedge bets with funding more solar research too and so on). As a chart here suggest, communications reinvests about 25% of domestic sales into R&D, and software 15%, while energy invests only 0.3%. No wonder we have energy issues if we fail to invest in R&D in it relative to the magnitude of the need. This is a marketplace failure, because most of the revenues are related to fossil fuels, but probably everyone knows the future of energy production will involve some other form (fusion, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal) and so current fossil fuel businesses have no emotional incentive to invest in these radical alternatives to coal, oil, and natural gas.
http://focusfusion.org/index.p...

As Julian Simon said, the human imagination is the ultimate resource:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

But, imaginative people still need some form of life support to grow and have time to do stuff, and lab equipment is (not yet) free.

Of course, AIs will no doubt get more imaginative over time, too...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Mainstream economics assumes things such as that demand for goods and services is infinite and that most humans will always be able to command wages for participation in the workforce. If demand for products and services is not infinite (as in diminishing and eventually negative returns on having more stuff), then eventually a few workers could supply all the demand through technological amplification. Or, even if demand was infinite, if most humans can't compete with AIs and robots, then "humans need not apply", which would wreck the underpinning assumption of mainstream economics that the right to consume for those without substantial financial capital is linked with receiving wages from a job.

I first saw the HBR article mentioned at "e-cat world", a site that discusses the potential of cheap energy from cold fusion:
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...

Cheap energy from some sort of hot or cold fusion may also have some of the same effects on the economy, because often energy can substitute for human labor. For example, there is little need for humans to handle materials for recycling when you can break down trash into a plasma and use a mass-spectrometer-like system to separate it into constitute elements, as James P. Hogan suggested in "Voyage from Yesteryear" (a 1982 sci-fi book that discusses the clash of a scarcity-oriented cultural world view with an abundance-oriented one).
http://www.jamesphogan.com/boo...

Such a process could also eliminate most of the mining industry. Better designs, better materials, the accumulation of physical infrastructure, and the emergence of voluntary social networks (including discussion sites like Slashdot) also can displace a lot of paid labor in the exchange economy. So, there are multiple converging trends towards socioeconomic upheaval if (sane) human wants are somewhat limit

...

Not necessarily. The most viable fusion approach does not produce neutrons as a product of the reaction. In addition, they don't need to contain and stabilize the plasma which is the bane of most fusion programs. They intend to leverage the inherent instability of plasma to produce 200 small reactions or pulses per second. They won't need steam generators since most of the energy is released in the form of an ion beam.

"Viable" roughly means "practical", the first step for something to be practical is to be able to do it. Did you read page you linked to? It admits that "Humanity hasn't figured out how to harness it yet." Actually that is a half-truth. We haven't learned how to harness convention tritum+deuterium fusion yet. But we at least can demonstrate it in a laboratory. With aneutronic thermonuclear fusion can't do it at all under any circumstances!

This isn't in a class with fairies, unicorns and pixie dust since it is based on physical principles, but it is in the same class as those elevators that take us to the Moon.

We are better off restricting energy plans to technologies that we know can be implemented this century.

...fusion will produce waste due to the high neutron flux.

Not necessarily. The most viable fusion approach does not produce neutrons as a product of the reaction. In addition, they don't need to contain and stabilize the plasma which is the bane of most fusion programs. They intend to leverage the inherent instability of plasma to produce 200 small reactions or pulses per second. They won't need steam generators since most of the energy is released in the form of an ion beam.

What I've heard from fusion researchers is that the budgets have been drastically cut over the years. When they were predicting it within twenty years when I was a kid, they assumed a certain level of funding. Some have said that research is on schedule, if you measure by research money rather than years. In any case, the researchers certainly aren't getting all the money they need.

The reference to "too much $$$ on war-making & Fusion R&D" makes little sense, considering the relative magnitudes. One might as well refer to "too much water used in Lake Superior and my backyard pool". According to this, defense and such spending is 19% of the budget, while scientific and medical research as a whole is 2%. From this, current federal fusion research money is about $400M, which is more than three orders of magnitude smaller than the military budget. To put it another way, transferring 1% of the defense budget to fusion research would increase the latter by about a factor of 15. The second reference said that money spent on fusion for 57 years was about the same as what we spent on 72 days of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Also, if we're certain that such thorium reactors could be made to work effectively, producing all necessary energy cleanly, spending on it is not research. We're talking engineering. If there's any research involved, your second paragraph is at best uncertain. If it were this easy, somebody (not necessarily in the US) would probably have done it, probably India. I'm not arguing against putting serious resources into alternative reactor designs, but focusing only on one project seems way counterproductive. Some people don't want to spend Federal money on research while we've still got needy [white] kids. We've got lots of money if we want to spend it, and I'd like to keep pressing forward on many fronts.

I see you have absolutely no understanding of how science works, or have any understanding of the current state of research into fusion power, if you suggest that we could have had it already based on the money spent so far.

Opportunity cost is invisible. But the fusion research community didn't do much with the opportunities they had.

If we'd have spent two orders of magnitude more money on it over the past 40 years then that's still less than a year's expenditure on oil surveying by a single oil company.

I don't get what you think oil companies earn here. Just by the US (not counting the considerable expenditures by the rest of the world), fusion research has spent over $20 billion (not adjusted for inflation). Do you seriously think that a single oil company can casually burn $2 trillion on just looking for oil? That's probably enough money to completely replace a good portion of the current oil infrastructure globally.

I find it amusing that the link above contains more of the same rationalizations about fusion research as I read here. If only we had a few more zeroes of money to spend, we'd be doing all sorts of awesome stuff. It misses the key question. What has been done with the money spent on fusion currently to justify increasing that budget?

Squandering money on fusion research is no different than squandering it on any other source. Scientific research should be no more immune to the ethics of spending other peoples' money.

So, given how you're clearly an expert on these sorts of things, how much should we be spending on cryogenic coal cracking as a way to extend our useful fossil fuel lifetime?

Not a cent. Coal mining companies have plenty of incentive to do that research on their own.

I'm not personally guilty since I'm not in the US or a US citizen or involved in the NIF project, but I suspect that mbkennel's answer contains a clue to why there isn't a lot of cooperation on the laser fusion projects. The results will be useful if and when it is time to build new hydrogen bombs. The main reason why the US and China have nukes is so that they can point them at one another and at Russia, which could be an obstacle when it comes to cooperation.

USA, China, EU and Russia are all partners in the ITER project which is the most ambitious mainstream fusion project aimed at a commercially viable reactor design for the grid. The really sad part is that the US and other leading industrial countries have only spent proverbial pennies on fusion research over the years. The US has spent a mere 30 billion in total according to this source http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful. We're probably not going to find out if fusion is viable in our lifetimes.

I'm afraid we're looking at lots and lots of 'clean' coal, a good deal of fracking and other unconventional natural gas, lots of solar panels, some wind turbines and maybe a tiny bit of fission for the next 50 years or so. (Unless someone comes up with a really good fission reactor design. That could change everything.)

Not all of them are glorified kettle boilers.

This one : Focus Fusion has a reactor design that has a combination of magnetically decelerating helium ions and gamma-photovoltaic collection as the primary energy collection modes.

And a design reactor size that is more on the order of magnitude of "shipping container" than "aircraft carrier".

It's perhaps more ambitious (in terms of the physics) than ITER - but I think it's probably less ambitious in terms of general engineering problems, like how to breed enough tritium, etc.

Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion apparently does just that and also had no ( or very low ) neutron emission.

Site is http://focusfusion.org/ and his hour-long Google TechTalk from 2007 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4w_dzSvVaM

Focus Fusion Society http://focusfusion.org/ is posting research on their project to do aneutronic e.g. Proton Boron (pB11) fusion. The concept sounds great, and as an engineer several parts of their design such as direct extraction of electric power are elegant. Is this credible research or pie-in-the-sky? I have not seen much mention in mainstream fusion research.

When the proton hits the boron-11 nucleus they fuse giving an excited (that bit's important) carbon-12, which in very short order (sorry, the exact time escapes me) splits into a helium nucleus and a beryllium-8 nucleus, which in turn splits into another two helium nuclei. So what you have in effect is a fusion-fission reaction but the fission part isn't usually mentioned - something to do with OMG nuke! types, perhaps?

However, I suppose it is true that all of the energy is coming from fusion, as 12C -> 4He + 4He + 4He is exothermic. (The reverse reaction is an energy source for stars under some circumstances.)

Actually, the triple-alpha process, which produces carbon in some stars is closer to this:

He + He -> Be

Be + He -> C

I expect that the probability of a 3-body collision between 3 helium nuclei is so vanishingly small as to be insignificant, but hopefully someone who knows this subject well can fill in that particular blank.

As for why the carbon that gets produced doesn't immediately decay like the one made in a p+B11 fusion reactor, I couldn't say as IANANP (just an interested layman) but I imagine it's something to do with that business of being in an excited state I touched upon earlier.

P.S. A dictionary isn't a good place to start learning about nuclear physics; try an encyclopaedia instead. In fact, here is a good article, which was the second result Google gave when I searched for p+B11. To address your issue with particles: yes, more atoms come out than go in, but the number of nucleons remains the same.

Are you sure p-B11 fusion isn’t fission?

http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/are_you_sure_pb11_fusion_isnt_fission/

The original poster was suggesting we could make meaningful quantities of He using a fusor, which requires more energy in than is produced by the resultant fusion. By showing the amount of energy produced by the fusion, and knowing we need more than that to produce the fusion, I hoped to make clear that a table top fusor was not going to solve the He shortage.

Ah, finally someone I can ask. Hope you don't mind.

1. What's your verdict on focus fusion? http://focusfusion.org/
2. What do DT and DD stand for?

Despite it's earlier mention in the thread, I have to take the opportunity to point out that Focus Fusion involves a reactor design that extracts power from the reaction via 2 routes ;

• Direct induction of current by a stream of helium ions
• Gamma-voltaic collector

Both of which are very much more direct than steam generation. I believe the reaction has plenty of waste heat which could be used industrially as well.

On the subject of fusion power, the researchers at Focus Fusion seem to be doing a great job as well.

There is... in theory.

A reactor design using a dense plasma focus is supposed to have two products from which you can directly get electricity, a stream of high velocity helium ions (you get the energy out of them by electrobraking them), and X-rays (the team concerned has a sort of gamma-photovoltaic-cell design consisting of many metal foil layers).

The team has an aggressive timetable... so at least we'll know in less than 30 years whether it's going to work...

I find this incredibly sad. Aren't there any better, new ideas in fusion research to invest money and time into for experimental purposes?

How about Focus Fusion?

Some of the major differences with this technique is that it doesn't produce neutrons as a by-product (which makes it much cleaner - no deadly neutron radiation requiring expensive shielding and disposal), and it produces electricity directly from the reaction, rather than the traditional method of producing heat for steam for a turbine generator.

So what's your opinion of Dense Plasma Focus Fusion then?

Mainline: The information in this post is not correct.

The correct link to Eric Lerner's company is http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ . The page referred in this post is an old copy of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics' site. Why it landed on http://photoman.bizland.com/ I do not know, and I suspect there is no relationship between those two sites.

Actually CMEF was not able to collect the required USD 600000, only a fraction could be transfered. Eric Lerner is therefore still looking for further investors.

But an unnamed private investor invested USD 200000 for a simulation project. See http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?pr=Investors and http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php/site/article/large_scale_computer_simulation_work_initiated/

But it's nice to see it discussed here again. ;-)

Cheers,

Henning

http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php may work as well as or better than inertial electrostatic confinement.

Billion Degree Breakthrough at Texas A&M
In May of 2001, Experiments at Texas A&M University confirmed predictions from Lerner theory that energies above 100 keV (equivalent to 1.1 billion degrees) can be achieved with the plasma focus. This was a big step taken towards environmentally safe, cheap, and unlimited energy.

I wonder if there's anything to this approach to fusion.

The Focus Fusion Society proposed it in 2004:
http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php/site/article/ x_prize/

Unfortunately, the X-Prize Foundation response in 2006 was less than encouraging:
http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php/forums/viewth read/10/

Here's what I wrote about it:
http://thinkorthwim.com/2006/11/22/why-google-shou ld-go-nuclear/

The Focus Fusion Society proposed it in 2004:
http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php/site/article/ x_prize/

Unfortunately, the X-Prize Foundation response in 2006 was less than encouraging:
http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php/forums/viewth read/10/

Here's what I wrote about it:
http://thinkorthwim.com/2006/11/22/why-google-shou ld-go-nuclear/

The theory makes sense. They are building an electrostatic machine, but using magnetic fields to make the charged particles miss the electrically charged grid. I think they are at about the same point focus fusion is. They have done an experiment that agrees with their calculations at a lower energy than would be required to generate power. Their scaling laws require that their machine be larger than a DPF so they will need 150-200 million dollars to do the proof of concept experiment at full energy.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned focus fusion yet. It's a method of controlling the fusion plasma by twisting filaments of it back in on themselves at a single focal point and actually has a very efficient direct electricity feedback that relies on inducing a current to slow particles as they exit the reaction. This is where we should be spending our money on research. Tokamak reactors are just far too inefficient to be of much use.

Why cheaper methods aren't explored. Compared to ITER monster these are cheap as dirt to do research so even if there is only slight possibility of success, it may be worth invest a small percentage of ITER funds. Who is afraid of it ?

So let's fund it for... say 100 million dollars. That's a tiny fraction of the US budget, and if it pays off... woo-hoo... but again, don't disconnect from APS just yet.

I agree wholeheartedly... All I was pointing out is that even with their healthy skepticism, and overall negative final conclusion, there now seems to be optimism whereas before there was ridicule. That's a huge step forward for the advancement of this technology if it is determined to be viable.

Using the excerpt you posted: Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented.

Even here, they are all optimistic, and found the evidence somewhat convincing. In fact NONE of the reviewers stated that they were completely unconvinced. All but one was "somewhat convinced" and one was "convinced." Two thirds of them said that the evidence was not conclusive, and one third either thought it was conclusive or did not given to state an opinion, or stake their reputation, one way or the other on it. Given the overall convincing nature(in their own words) of the data, although not conclusive, one third would seem to be leaning towards a confirmation of the data.

Scientists (good ones anyway) have to maintain a healthy level of skepticism, especially when dealing with new physical phenomenon, whether applied or theoretical. What you see above is as close to a "looks promising" as these guys will ever get before the phenomenon is confirmed outright.

At any rate, I just find it interesting. I don't know that it will ever come to fruition or not, and it wouldn't bother me if it didn't. I don't think the excess heat can be easily put to use without enough loss as to make it nominal anyway. Unless of course it's improved dramatically.

What is promising however are other forms of "bench top fusion" that are happening. Hot fusion is much more promising. Check out focus fusion.

There are lots of technologies that are more promising than cold fusion. Betavoltaic cells are incredibly cool. They will never be mass market, but could easily be set up to power the grid, with no waste. In fact, they can use the waste to make the cells. To me that's pretty beneficial. No more hydrocarbon fuel dependence from the grid, and it would be environmentally beneficial in the aspect that it would cause us to clean up a bit in order to make it work.

Well GE evidently doesn't think Eric's a crackpot:

Vincent Page , a technology officer at GE, has given a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research, which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion . 1.) Prometheus II http://www.neoteric-research.org/ , 2.) Field Revered Configuration, and 3.) Focus Fusion http://www.focusfusion.org/about.html

He quotes costs and time to development as ten million, and years verses the decades projected for ITER and other Big science efforts.

The learning curve is so steep now, and with the resources of the online community, I'm sure we can rally greater support to solve this paramount problem of our time. I hold no truck with those who argue that big business or government are suppressing these technologies. It is only our complacency and comfort that blind us from pushing our leaders toward clean energy.

for larger plant sizes
Time to small-scale Cost to achieve net if the small-scale
Concept Description net energy production energy production energy concept works
Koloc Spherical Plasma 10 years $25 million 80%
Field Reversed Configuration 8 years $75 million 60%
Plasma Focus 6 years $18 million 80%
Desirable Fusion Reactor Qualities
  Research & development is also needed in
the area of computing power.
  Many fusion researchers of necessity still
use MHD theory to validate their designs.
  MHD theory assumes perfect diamagnetism
and perfect conductance.
  These qualities may not always exist in the
real world, particularly during continuous operation.
  More computing power is needed to allow use of a more realistic validation theory
such as the Vlasov equations.
  ORNL is in the process of adding some impressive computing power.
  Researchers now need to develop more realistic validation methods up to the
limits of the available computing power.
  Governments need to fund these efforts.

Erich Knight

Vincent Page , a technology officer at GE, has given a presentation at the 05 6th symposium on current trends in international fusion research, which high lights the need to fully fund three different approaches to P-B11 fusion . 1.) Prometheus II http://www.neoteric-research.org/ , 2.) Field Revered Configuration, and 3.) Focus Fusion http://www.focusfusion.org/about.html He quotes costs and time to development as ten million, and years verses the decades projected for ITER and other Big science efforts. The learning curve is so steep now, and with the resources of the online community, I'm sure we can rally greater support to solve this paramount problem of our time. I hold no truck with those who argue that big business or government are suppressing these technologies. It is only our complacency and comfort that blind us from pushing our leaders toward clean energy. for larger plant sizes Time to small-scale Cost to achieve net if the small-scale Concept Description net energy production energy production energy concept works Koloc Spherical Plasma 10 years $25 million 80% Field Reversed Configuration 8 years $75 million 60% Plasma Focus 6 years $18 million 80% Desirable Fusion Reactor Qualities Research & development is also needed in the area of computing power. Many fusion researchers of necessity still use MHD theory to validate their designs. MHD theory assumes perfect diamagnetism and perfect conductance. These qualities may not always exist in the real world, particularly during continuous operation. More computing power is needed to allow use of a more realistic validation theory such as the Vlasov equations. ORNL is in the process of adding some impressive computing power. Researchers now need to develop more realistic validation methods up to the limits of the available computing power. Governments need to fund these efforts.

This is the second article posted from "Open Source Energy". It is nothing but junk science.

STOP POSTING THIS CRAP.

This isn't news - or anything it's just junk science written up by people who manage to take other people's money and waste it in the name "science".

For those among you (including me) who have never heard about focus fusion, here is a link: focus fusion.
It is not cold fusion, but one of the many alternatives to the tokamak. Although a tokamak is still seen als the best candidate for a earthly fusion reactor.
Oh, nobody happens to have a job opening in plasmaresearch for a newly graduate?

For more information see: http://focusfusion.org/

You don't need to extract heat to extract energy... check out Focus Fusion.

Focus Fusion tries an alternative approach...

It would be nice if anybody could provide some sound evidence that this is a legitimate organisation - and that their claim of achieving a 2 billion Kelvin burn is sensible.

Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.

Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?

If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built?
Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up ...

If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).

Or, a wholly different approach --

I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.

Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?

Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.

The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:

http://www.focusfusion.org/energy2.html

Huh?

There's no fundamental correspondence between the fuel used and the method used to contain it -- only that different fuels have different ignition temperatures. The magnetic-confinement methods currently being explored have difficulty getting up there in the temperature/pressure range, so they're restricted to the tritium-deuterim reaction, which is the easiest to get going (but spews lost of nasty high-energy neutrons).

But there's nothing about an alternative fuel that suddenly makes electrostatic a possibility. Electrostatic methods (e.g. Hierch-Farnsworth or "focus fusion" are theoretically able to achieve much higher temperatures than magnetic confinement, and so can accomodate other fuels (as well as deuterium-tritium). I don't know the specifics of the He3 reaction, but from what I've seen it's the hydrogen-boron reaction that has the most promise, as it doesn't have any high-energy neutrons as products, and so is quite clean. And I think boron is a bit easier to come by than He3. :)

- Doug

First, fission isn't an end-all-be-all. Fusion is creeping closer to practicality every day and even if you have to do fission, it's not like focus fusion is very dangerous.

Graphite doesn't burn in a helium atmosphere. As far as I know, nothing does, for burning in a conventional sense. If a pebble is chipped or cracked, it's cycled out of the reactor and dumped in the waste bin to be reprocessed or vitrified (baked into a glass brick).

Helium coolant also has the advantage of not becoming radioactive; a coolant leak translates into little more than a release of hot (expensive) air, and becomes less likely -- supercritical water is insanely corrosive compared to helium; it won't be nearly so hard on pipes.

For generating the plasma, Focus Fusion looks like a real possibility. Could even be light enough to carry onboard for power and backup propulsion.

We dont need cold fusion or tomahak fusion. We already have cheap safe hot fusion, but without the need of massive ammounts of equipment. See Focus Fusion http://www.focusfusion.org/

I agree, even starvation (which another poster mentioned) can often (in part) be attributed to lack of energy, for example local overuse of wood contributing to drought or desertification.

Still, research into energy sources probably wont get much help from prizes given out afterwards: either they're already funded by governments or (usually oil) companies, or they lack enough present funding like this interesting fusion project: http://www.focusfusion.org/home.html - disregard the horrible site design, and if there's a VC out there why not have a closer look? If it's successful you'll make Paul Allen green with envy ;)

Such projects or other more established ones might benefit a lot more from "fasttracking" than a prize by getting more funds and brainpower. Then again with all the research going on it might not help at all: do we want to try a broad approach or hedge our bets on a few? Choosing is very hard. Most governments in America, Europe, Asia and Oceania are giving pretty big incentives for energy research as it is. Some big examples are the US hydrogen focus, Chinas pebble reactors (the South African Republic is also looking at this, so Africa is in too), and the Australian solar tower (european technology), and there are lots and lots of smaller projects almost everywhere.

A similar principle is used by Focus fusion reactors. It is basically a reverse particle accelerator.

"A focus fusion reactor would produce electricity very differently. The energy from fusion reactions is released mainly in the form of a high energy pulsed beam of helium nuclei. Since the nuclei are electrically charged, this beam is already an electric current. All that is needed is to capture this electric energy into an electric circuit. This can be done by allowing the pulsed beam to generate electric currents in a series of coils as it passes through them. This is much the same way that a transformer works, stepping electric power down from the high voltage of a transmission line to the low voltage used in homes and factories. It is also like a particle accelerator run in reverse. Such an electrical transformation can be highly efficient, probably around 70%."

Deuterium is not radioactive.

We should be moving to technology like this in the near future. Get familiar with it, send links to your friends... Stop the established energy complex from supressing technologies like this.

What the heck is Focus fusion? Aha, it's a crazy astronomer and his computer-scientist friend.

Indeed. Despitethe vacuous blurb on the Fusion Focus people page, Eric Lerner appears to be rather a failure as an astronomer. Looking at his list of refereed journals on ADS, it seems he has only a single paper in a front-runner astrophysics journal (The Astrophysical Journal). The remaining publications are in journals like Astrophysics & Space Science -- often referred to as the 'Sargasso Journal', since it's where old papers go to die.

I'm not impressed in the slightest, and see nothing which might persuade me to consider Eric Lerner -- or the AC who referenced him -- as anything more than another free-energy loon. And his perm is fucking criminal.

What the heck is Focus fusion? Aha, it's a crazy astronomer and his computer-scientist friend.

Indeed. Despitethe vacuous blurb on the Fusion Focus people page, Eric Lerner appears to be rather a failure as an astronomer. Looking at his list of refereed journals on ADS, it seems he has only a single paper in a front-runner astrophysics journal (The Astrophysical Journal). The remaining publications are in journals like Astrophysics & Space Science -- often referred to as the 'Sargasso Journal', since it's where old papers go to die.

I'm not impressed in the slightest, and see nothing which might persuade me to consider Eric Lerner -- or the AC who referenced him -- as anything more than another free-energy loon. And his perm is fucking criminal.

Maybe it's the cry of conspiricy with no follow-up? The circa 1996 Focus Fusion Society website certainly doesn't help either.

The only clear way to do this is via Focus Fusion, which means one is working with the natural instabilities of Plasma rather than attempting to straightjacket them with massive Magnetic Fields. Nothing more really needs to be said about Focus Fusion from me so I'll just paste what they're saying here:

Focus fusion is the only known method that can achieve hydrogen-boron fusion. It also has other advantages over tokamak based deuterium-tritium fusion reactors. Focus fusion reactors will be much less expensive for the same amount of power. Tokamak reactors generate electricity by boiling water for a steam powered generator (high energy neutrons provide the heat.) This is the same method that coal power plants use. The only difference is the heat source. In a coal power plant the steam generator is the most expensive part of the plant so replacing the heat source will not result in a lot of savings. Also, this method of generating electricity is limited by the fundamental efficiency limits of heat engines. Focus fusion reactors do not require a heat engine. They generate electricity directly. After all, electricity is just moving charged particles. The particle decelerators in a focus fusion reactor merely transfer the electricity of charged particle beams into a wire. This process does not face the efficiency limits of heat engines.

A focus fusion reactor should be able to economically generate power in quantities as small as 20MW from a power plant the size of a two car garage. This means they will be useful for powering individual villages in the third world where regional electricity grids are not as well developed. And in developed nations focus fusion power can be generated near where it will be used to reduce transmission losses and can be owned by the communities it serves to reduce dependence on speculative energy markets.

If there are any financiers out there who have the backbone to do what is right in this world and do what is right for mankind, I urge you to fund this research to banish forever the specter of Fossil Fuel shortages and associated ecological damage and begin a new era in Human History.

There has been much progress with the plasma focus fairly recently. Taken from the Focus Fusion website:

In recently completed test experiments, the researchers were able to achieve temperatures that reached up to two billion degrees in some shots of the plasma focus device, well surpassing previous records of 520 million degrees achieved by the commonly used tokamak device. The much larger and more expensive tokamak has been cornerstone of the US fusion program for 25 years.

The plasma focus functions in a fundamentally different way from other fusion devices. Tokamaks and most other fusion devices use powerful magnets to attempt to stabilize the plasma - the extremely hot, electrically conducting gas in which the fusion reactions occur. This task has been likened to lifting gelatin with rubber bands. Instead, the plasma focus takes advantage of the natural instabilities of the plasma, so that the plasma's own magnetic fields compress it and heat it. "The plasma focus works with the plasma, not against it," says Lerner.

Perhaps someone with the foresight to see the best path for future power generation can fund this research fully and cease our pseudo problems concerning concerns about future energy sources. The solution is apparent.