Slashdot Mirror
Alternative to Tokamak Fusion Reactor
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.
Isn't he the guy that wrote the book, "The Big Bang Never Happened"?
Peace and love, y'all
If it is so simple and cost effective why do we not have it now if not yesterday.
From TFA:
... hmmm ... coffee ... coffee-makers ... *Mister* Coffee ...
"The Dense Plasma Focus device is roughly the size of a coffee can."
Size of a *coffee* can
MR. FUSION!
Yes! FINALLY!
See you space cowboy
Cheap, no long term radiation, efficient direct to electricity, sounds like everything we've ever dreamed of...
And yet... not assasinated by the oil industry...
So it must not actually work. Q.E.D.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
For more information see: http://focusfusion.org/
"Purports to be a far more feasible and profoundly less expensive approach to hot fusion, in contrast to what the international project (ITER) in France is pursuing." I'm not a native speaker, but the first sentence in the linked article seems to be missing a subject. And I'll stay the hell away from so-called "scientists" who cannot write correct sentences.
Sounds like something Mr. Burns would say.
End transmission.
Why does slashdot give time to cranks who purport to have achieve something revolutionary, but really have no idea what they're talking about?
I want one of these in my car so I can suck the exhaust fumes and talk like Mickey Mouse.
Too bad NASA's funding funding for him dried up. What do they know about physics, any way?
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Hahaha ROFLOL!
-- Cheers!
I recall when Cold Fusion was actually considered a possibility for essentially limitless clean energy that a bunch of environmentalist clowns arrived on the scene proclaiming that cheap clean energy would be the worst thing that could possibly happen. That, my Gawd, with cheap clean energy we would just end up with more people using up even more of the planet even faster. While my memory may have faded over time, a prominent name I believe was at the forefront of these claims at the time was Jeremy Rifkin.
I certainly expect their reappearance any time now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What would those be then? From reading TFA it looks like a clean and efficient power source. He wouldn't think of sticking these in a neighbourhood if there was a risk to it.
And it looks like it can be built as long as there's no "political" objection.
home
Why does this guy keep going to governments for funding? They have too many interests pulling them all over. Wouldn't it be better to strike a deal with an energy company? Go talk to Shell, or Exxon. This technology might take 30 years to create easily deployable power plant modules. That's about the time that we'll be down to sucking fumes out of the ground in reallyremotistan. Whatever company has a solid piece of energy technology under their belt when that time comes will win.
I can't imagine losing a couple mil towards this guy to either prove or disprove the tech would put a dent in any company's bottom line. Make a contract where if he screws up he spends the rest of his life scrubbing oil tar out of supertanker holds.
He's probably crazy. But there's a slim chance he might be right.
by Sterling D. Allan
Open Source Energy News -- Exclusive Interview
I suppose occasionally major scientific advances are announced in press releases, but since 99.999% of the time it's somebody jumping the gun, I think I'll let it go.
I do find it interesting that the article describes him as an "inventor" rather than a "physicist". Somehow when proposing a radically different model of the universe, the former always rings of "I was puttering around and I found something I didn't understand, therefore it must be both correct and completely novel."
None of this is proof that he's wrong, but the crank-o-meter is pushing towards the red zone. Which is too bad, because apparently he's an extremely smart man with a lot of valid research to his name.
Some simple checks can prevent this sillyness from perpetuating. Bob Park's "What's New" column http://www.bobpark.org/ is an amusing and up to date reference for this kind of thing. Here is what he has to say about the "Integrity Research Institute" (the name alone should have raised a red flag): http://www.searchum.umd.edu/search?q=%22integrity+ research+institute%22&site=&btnG=Search+UM&output= xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&ie=UTF-8&client= UMCP&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=UMCP
Some researchers are actually persecuted. They receive no funding. They are ostracized from the research community. Later, they are proved right. On the other hand, there is an even bigger community of nut cases and frauds. I have no way to tell which this guy is.
Experiments have been done and results have been obtained. Until someone can adequately explain those results then they are worthy of research.
Cold fusion is an example of something where there are some results that people have found worth researching. It's not like cold fusion will actually happen or that the process in tfa will actually produce economical power; that's not the important part. The process is worth studying until we can explain what's happening.
For all of the fundamental engeneering problems of hot fusion? I really doubt it.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Wouldn't this be some sort of test to verify if slashdotter are not yet complete m/b-orons?
If so, from the previous (funny) comments, we seem to be passing it with brilliant colors.
Man.../ 03/0039235&tid=232&tid=126&tid=14
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/ 26/1158233&tid=232&tid=14
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Their method of heating the plasma to temperatures hot enough for fusion seems to be by using particles accelerated by magnetic reconnection. (hmm.. that wiki needs love)
Magnetic reconnection in traditional fusion reactors is seen as a bad thing because it shoots particles in unpredictable directions that often can't be contained by the confining magnetic fields. So it results in a loss of plasma density and also eventually puts small holes in the sides of the reactor.
If these particles are that energetic it seems to make sense that they could be used to heat the plasma if they could be controlled. No idea if they are energetic enough to be used alone though.
That magnetic reconnection thingy is also what causes the northern lights.
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?
They use hydrogen and boron, but where do you get hydrogen... you can use eletricity or get it from fossile fuels, but I don't see this problem being mentioned anywhere in the article. If you take the energy needed for producing hydrogen, I wonder if the reaction really breaks even.
If the output is anywhere near what they are promising, then i would think that this should be a problem, but I still can't help myself and wonder...
The last time I checked there was vacuum between us and the sun and we still get a good deal of its energy, what about a couple of inches of distance. Can any physics major explain? Thanks.
"OpenSourceEnergy?"
Don't tell me Companies like Microsoft and IBM have had a monopoly on power... well, yay, to the Open-Source Energy people. Make Energy Free!
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
Here is a picture of the guy: http://elementy.ru/images/news/eric_lerner.jpg
Mine is Good
Um, that's an awefully negative statement without any actual reason. Do you have any actual Informative (moderators, you suck) information that can tell me that this technology will fail? From the article it sounds like the next big thing after hydrocarbons, hell, I would love to see it either to be a proven success or failure. If it succeeds, well then HOLY SHIT! If not, oh well.
But to say some dumb post that says it's a dumb idea and gets moderated to informative? Sigh, it's slashdot.
Oz
Indeed. Although, in related news, no white-haired crazy-eyed crackpot's have come out of the woodwork with a "flux capacitor". Although the British Government have been losing a fair amount of plutonium recently. However, fingers point to the blatant incompetence of BNFL Sellafield workers, rather than Libyan terrorists.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
"For 3He-3He, p-6Li and p-11B the Bremsstrahlung losses appear to make a fusion reactor using these fuels impossible."
Dear Venture Capitalists,
I have a plan for a fusion reactor, called (let's say) the fotoforce fusor. Not only does it produce free energy from hydrogen and (let's say) manganese, but if you stand within 3 meters of it, it will also cure you of cancer and (let's say) baldness too. I'm sure you were thinking about giving five million dollars (5M$) to the focus fusor project, but since my fusor can be built using only a coffee can and a ball of twine, you should invest in me for the amazing price of a paltry 2 million dollars (2M$). I may have nothing to show for it in 10 years, but you'll get the same nothing as the focus fusor for one-fiftieth of the price of ITER. You shouldn't think twice.
Sincerely,
Dr. James Medubi, Ph.D.
University of Lagos
The correct response to this article is,
v let?prog=normal&id=APCPCS000406000001000216000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes/
R L&_udi=B6TVM-3WN77X7-19&_coverDate=06%2F17%2F1996& _alid=331683658&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_ cdi=5538&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version= 1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=fad383390465b806fd1 b90abff541fee/
(a) yes, H-B fusion (aneutronic) is possible, but...
(b) it requires very high temperatures, and suffers from a variety of energy loss mechanisms which make getting usable energy from it difficult. This is similar to when I was in grad-school, and everyone was whispering about Muon-catalyzed fusion, which turned out to be impractical for energy extraction as well.
IANA(N/P)P (i am not a nuclear/plasma physicist), but the papers I skimmed suggest that you could use this method, mixed with a conventional Deuterium/tritium mixture, to get cleaner fusion and better burn rates. Of course, not being a physicist, it's possible that the journals I found the citations in are the physics equivalent of Journal of Pointless Chemistry.
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleU
Probable Translation: Another backyard inventor who can read enough of the literature to be encouraged, but not enough to admit the drawbacks.
Secondary Translation: I canna' change the laws of physics, Captain.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I agree, this guy is not a crank. Cranks are ignorant and stubborn or sometimes just plain crazy. This guy seems like a different breed. "Inventor" claims to have designed small, cheap fusion reactor, gets money from investors or governments, doesn't produce anything, and then moves on to the next scam^H^H^H^Hinvention. It's the new perpetual motion machine.
Big bang&co, i.e. early universe cosmology, and fusion stuff like now proposed dont share that many similarities.
How big are the odds that there guys is better than anybody else in 2 not very much connected fields?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The chemical energy needed to break the bonds between H atoms and O atoms in H20 pales in comparison to the nuclear energy gained by combining a proton (H nucleus) with the boron nucleus.
the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
I just attended a talk on Tokamaks and ITER by one of the major guys working at a Tokamak on the west coast somewhere. It really gave me a lot of interesting information -- namely, that they hold a lot of promise. The US recently rejoined ITER, an international collaberation between China, Russia, Japan, the EU, France, and (I hear) soon India.
The goal of ITER is to construct a large Tokamak, and after that, a demonstration of the use of the technology in a commercially attractive power plant. I questioned the guy during the talk and was surprised to learn that there don't appear to be any huge theoretical leaps required for this to work.
IIRC, in 2003 ITER was named by some major government list as the #1 priority of 28 for energy research for the future.
So, what I have learned: Tokamaks are getting really good, and they hold a lot of promise in the next number of years. Interesting note: the efficiency, roughly the ratio of power out to power in, scales with size. That's why they're building the ITER tokemak to be monstrously huge.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
Next you're going to tell me that SAT does not stand for Saturday Afternoon Test.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
sounds like one more possible invention like so many more that were better alternatives to their counter-parts
Wow Baldrson this must only be what, the 500th time you've posted this nothing letter here as being something that "blows the doors off" the government's past projects in fusion energy? Goodness, are you perhaps hoping to get a better response here this time than you did when you posted nearly the exact same nuttery to the hyper-racist "Stormfront.org" where you apparently tried to tie the "inhibition of pioneering culture in the US" to..... wait for it.... yep THE JEWS!? Hat's off to you! You truly are a first rate interweb whackjob!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
As a scientist I'm dismayed by the number of people who always believe in science conspiracies (like here where he says the only reason he didn't get funding was the tokomak). It's hard to decide how useful this method really is from the article as it's not a science article, but I have some doubts.
What people need to realize about science like this is that if he can make this work he will be lauded and made very rich. Although science does make mistakes, occasionally supporting wrong theories and such, overall it progresses by natural selection (and those who are correct get high end jobs because of it). I would love to disprove dark matter or dark energy because that would make me really well known. But yet I read about how the entire field of astronomy is so stuck on it that they won't look at other possibilities (but we do and they don't work with what we know).
If this guy is correct he should be able to convince most other scientists in his field (which he hasn't been able to do). This isn't always due to science (some people can't communicate and sometime politics plays a role) but generally it is.
I wonder how many theories have been posted on slashdot now that are just like this. Slashdot has been around long enough that someone could go back and look at the current state of these theories. How many are still, "waiting for that big moment" even after they go some funding. More importantly, I think slashdot should make more of an effort to put up articles when they show something has been disproved (like that article a few weeks ago arguing against dark matter in galaxies which used the wrong gravitational potential). Somebody with a science background should at least edit the original slashdot post so that people could get a better background before deciding that the future of energy production is safe.
The neat thing is that the reaction ejects beta radiation (electrons) in all directions, but ejects the alpha particles with the plasma in one direction. The actual fusion generator is the size of a refrigerator, with the coffee can near one end. The larger device captures the beta radiation with a shell around the reactor and has a target at the other end to collect the alpha radiation. The result - fusion reaction produces current directly! The next refinement *decelerates* the speeding alpha particles through a magnetic field, converting their kinetic energy to electricity before it heats up the target. That is the "reverse particle accelerator" aspect. Beta radiation ejected in the same direction as the alpha beam is "lost" and becomes heat at the target. Future refinements will make the alpha beam as narrow as possible so as to minimize the number of beta particles it takes with it.
After the proof of concept, engineering challenges include materials to collect beta radiation without becoming dangerously radioactive, materials to collect alpha radiation (hopefully low speed after magnetic decceleration) without becoming dangerously radioactive, and shielding to stop the occasional neutrons (from impurities, and the random nature of nuclear reactions). Will also need to store energy to "crack the magnetic whip" to drive the reaction, and meter precise amounts of ionized fuel. I'm not convinced that too much fuel won't be dangerous.
For a start, this is on opensourceenergy.org, which also hosts a number of articles on electromagnetic over-unity devices, i.e. the 'free energy' crowd. Not good company to keep if you want to be taken seriously.
In addition, Eric Lerner is a believer in the plasma universe theory; he wrote a book on the matter called 'the Big Bang Never Happened', which apparently makes him popular with the evolution-denier crowd. Again, questionable associations.
He's also criticised the peer-review scientific process, calling it open to fraud. Just unfortunate that peer-review has not been kind to his own research, I imagine.
I'm no physicist, but it seems his process passes a short, extremely high current from a coffee-can sized copper electrode through a low-pressure hydrogen-boron mix.
The current's magnetic field forms a small hot ball of plasma, a plasmoid, (without external magnets) and when the current's magnetic field collapses it induces an electric field that heats the plasmoid so much, it ignites fusion reactions that create more electrons & ions, which can be converted back into electricity via an advanced transformer that converts an ion stream to electricity.
So basically, pass an electric current though low-density hydrogen-boron in a coffee can, and you get spontaneous fusion - so much so, you get over-unity? Somehow, it strikes me as a little too easy to be true.
Shockingly enough, Lerner has yet to demonstrate over-unity, but that's because the government is so in bed with the oil-companies, they won't give him any money. NASA gave him some money, looked at his results, and dropped him.
I won't call him a junk-scientist, but I think I'd like to see some peer-reviewed and repeated evidence of his results before I lend his theories much credence.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I'm not smart enough to explain it, but I can give you some examples that show it's not totally insane. The inside of a CRT is something like 100,000F. But it doesn't melt the glass and then 3 nanoseconds later the faces of everyone watching it.
Next you're going to tell me that SAT does not stand for Saturday Afternoon Test.
He would be right to tell you that. SAT stands for Silly Admissions Tax.
Described the way it is, it sort of makes sense. But so does John Titor. That fact that he is being dis'd by NASA doesn't mean much - they are famous for bureacratic bungling and this wouldn't be any different. Neither does it surprise me that he hasn't received any funding. The world economy couldn't easy handle such a paradigm shift. That doesn't mean that Exxon, BP, Shell, and various governments don't have departments to do research into these types of developments. It is to their great benefit to do so, even if they don't tell the public what they discover.
I admit I'm ignorant at this level of physics. I've also learned that even friends of mine who know much more about it than I do, are too easy to judge someone as a crackpot, or portray them as a misunderstood genius, because of various personal reasons.
If there were some micro-capitalization scheme for this, I might buy in. If I could get a share of this invention for $20, I'd risk it. The chances of success are better than a lottery ticket.
FTA "Imagine! At the flip of a switch, going from room temperature (or from the temperature of boiling water in the case of the liquid decaborane fuel), all the way up to a billion degrees, and then up to 6 billion degrees, all in a fraction of a second; then with another flip of the switch, when you are done, going back down to ambient temperature. And in the interim, you have produced excess energy from fusion -- safely, cleanly."
A Billion Degrees! Are you kidding me. Alright, lets use the good old First Law of thermo. Now remember a Tokamak Fusion reactor reaches temperatures of 100 Million degrees C. Now I haven't crunched numbers but its obvious that the energy needed to raise the temperature of Hydrogen to 1 Billion degrees is a lot greater than the energy needed to raise the temperature to 100 Million degrees.
Another problem from the above quote is the heat transfer. Now it was difficult enough to build a Tokamak that could withstand 100 million C but the article doesn't mention how a focus fusor will survive a temperature an order of magnitude higher.
Another heat transfer issue from the quote is that apparantly they will fire this thing up for such a small fraction of a second that that the fusor can cool from 6 Billion degrees C to room temperature in no time flat. Yeah ok whatever you say. How much energy could you possibly produce in such a sort time. Not enough to breakeven I suspect. The power requirements to heat something to 1 billion degrees in less than a second must be greater than astronomical. What conductor could they possibly be using?
Well thats what this AC has to say about that. This Idea is BS
Diving into the system the way I did -- giving it the the benefit of the doubt -- and coming to conclusions deserves a bit more respect than someone sitting around behind a semi-anonymous persona and a keyboard calling "whack jobs" people who have done real work.
Seastead this.
calling "whack jobs" people who have done real work
no one ever called you a person who has done real work.
Congressman Packard did. There have been a few others. :)
Seastead this.
The inside of a CRT is something like 100,000F. But it doesn't melt the glass and then 3 nanoseconds later the faces of everyone watching it.
It's like walking on coals. Coals get red-hot at about 600 degrees Farenheit, due to black body radiation. People can walk on them, though, because human flesh is much denser. (It also helps if you do it right after the morning dew, and it's a bad idea to linger.) The coals are hot but the total amount of energy isn't that high.
It's a bit like having a very high voltage but a low amperage in a circuit. Another example of a plasma having a very high temperature but very low total energy is the temperature of interstellar space: it can be millions of degrees hot, but have a handful of atoms per cubic meter.
Dr. Bogdan Maglich came up with an interesting idea that he dubbed the Migma reactor, which involves high energy particle beams that are bent by magnetic fields to constantly loop around the center of a chamber, where they would undergo high energy collisions and enable fusion of elements at much higher temperatures than Tokamaks and related concepts. This kind of fusion can occur without neutron emission, which would be much cleaner than the radioactivity-inducing fusion reactors now under development.
m
Some URLs are at: http://www.rexresearch.com/maglich/maglich.htm,
with a good bio page on Maglich at: http://www.hienergyinc.com/company/bio_maglich.ht
A teeny bit of fact checking is in order.
The glowing praise in the article comes from the Integrity Research Institute,
which doesn't even have its own domain name: http://users.erols.com/iri/>
The web site lists three directors:
Director 1: (also President and Chairman) Dr. Thomas Valone
Physics, engineering, and teaching background
Sounds good.
Inventer of the Photonic Rejuvenation Energizing Machine and
Immunizing Electrification Radiator
what the fuck?
Director 2: Jacqueline Panting Valone
General Manager of M.A.M.S.I., a representative of several suppliers of
microwave components and subsystems to OEM, military and commercial
companies.
Could have a solid technical background.
Ms. Valone is also a strong advocate of holistic health, including
electromagnetic medicine and is responsible for the Health programs
of our Institute.
Holistic health seems respectable. I am more than my symptoms.
But "electromagnetic medicine?" Give me Maxwells Equations,
not new-agey energy-fields-surround-us.
In her spare time, she volunteered for The Hospice Program of Broward
County where she assisted patients in their transition and helped family
members cope with their loss.
Very important work. She sounds like a good person.
Ms. Valone is a doctorate candidate of Naturopathy at Trinity College of
Natural Health and is certified through the College of Natural Health
Professionals, CNHP.
Never heard of them. What does this have to do with physics?
Director 3: Wendy Nicholas
EDUCATION
2001 Johns Hopkins University Rockville, MD
* Continuing Education student in Telecommunications
May be a wonderful, capable person. Why is she on the board of directors?
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
Why do stories from the obvious crackpot, perpetual motion touting (they call it - zero point energy) uncritical website opensource energy even get posted?
nothing is real
This guy is a quack.
Here's a hint:
1. Publication-by-press-release
2. Few to none serious scientific citations
3. Brilliant technology that would change the world but for government conspiracy to keep him down
4. known nutjob that is ignored by the scientific community
We have a winner! He's a nutjob!
I'm dying to see a working commercial fusion reactor too, but let's try to keep a healthy sense of scientific skepticism.
Doesn't it make sense that government project managers would portray their technology as something that requires enormous scale and many years? They'll be retired with a fat pension by the time they are proven wrong -- if anything can be "proven" in an environment of politically volatile funding from year to year. They can always claim that they just weren't given enough money -- just like NASA does with the Shuttle disasters.
Seastead this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D3D_(fusion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_Fusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAST_Fusion
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
This machine is basically a non-cilyndrical Z pinch that is using a different reaction to create neutrons. And alas for this poor guy the neutrons are carrying away his energy. Just like in ITER he would have to capture energetic neutrons and use them to boil water (ok, ok run a steam turbine). Otherwise this machine is just a cool transformer.
If this yields results imagine the direct impact it would have o every one of us. How much would be raised if just 1 in 100 of us donated the equivelant of one month's electricity bill. Mine's over $100 a month...
Anyone got a spare web server that can be set up as a simple e-commerce site? Anyone familiar enough with setting up a 501c3 to fund his research?
This just seems like a no brainer to me.
ElR
Every page that /. links to gets visits from at least hundreds of /.ers. The bottom of
Focus Fusion poses overwhelming competition to Tokamak
has a comments section, but only six comments appear.
(||) Nehmo (||)
These types of groups only work when all of their members are out there demonstrating and mad as hell. If, for example, NRA members looked at a bill in the Senate which proposes to take away people's antitank RPGs and VX nerve gas and thought "Well, that isn't so bad. I don't use Bouncing Betty very much" the organization simply wouldn't have the same "pop." To them, anything whatsoever that infringes upon their pet issue is the end of the world. I'll bet there were a significant number of people who thought that the Brady Bill was an irrefutable sign of the Rapture, and that soon, Jesus would come down from heaven to take them away, golden harp and shotgun in hand.
Same thing with radical nutjob environmentalists (those environmentalists who ARE radical nutjobs, not to say that all environmentalists are necessarily). They won't settle for anything less than a malthusian population crash and a return to hunter-gatherer societies.
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".
Where is all of the dark matter?
... ehem ... an article of faith.
Well, we can't observe it. That's why we call it dark.
Then how do we know it exists?
Well, our cosmological model needs it to exist to make sense. Our cosmological model is very good. We know this because we can measure many aspects of the universe and our model predicts all of them.
Except the amount of matter, for which it's badly, badly off.
Well, yes. But it's the best we've got.
Well, I've got a competing theory, it's not perfect, but it doesn't require the bulk of the matter in the universe to be unobservable.
That's going to be a problem. You see, the weight of the community is behind our theory, and because it requires an acceptance of a major unobservable, unmeasurable component, it's sort of become
It's a shame there's so much automatic knee-jerk cynicism from the Slashdot crowd, and others, in regard of people who are actually out there trying to fix the planet with radical new technologies that they're sweating blood and tears to develop and research despite little or no funding, peer ridicule and threats and worse from big corporate interests.
The folks who are behind, and the subject of, initiatives like OpenSourceEnergy and American Antigravity, and ZPEnergy and perhaps most of all SEASPower deserve the bloody Nobel prize many times over, for effort, and in many cases for the results they turn up.
So folks, you've given these technologies a genuine hearing have you, investigated them yourselves, at least tried to replicate the findings of these pioneers, and turned up nothing, and are thus justified in making sarcastic and disparaging comments about them?
Or, dare I suggest it, the notion of such things perhaps undermines the safe little world you live in, where you have lots of technical knowledge about things you understand, and that understanding lies on foundations laid way back when you were a kid in grade school and on through college, and the whole house of cards supports your technical ego and world view. Pretty scary all that knowledge could be undermined eh? Easier to dismiss with a joke, a giggle, and on to the next Slashdot story.
The planet won't be saved by wind power, or nuclear, or any other current eco and guilty-conscience-friendly technology, nor by mass changes in consumer behaviour (were such things even likely). The planet can and will only be saved by radical breakthroughs that shock the scientific establishment to the core, prompt mass revisions of current redundant theories, and were invented by some guy with an open mind working against all the odds in his basement lab somewhere. And I for one intend to assist any way I can.
alexkerr@usa.net
Every so often it turns out that the cranks are right. Besides, isn't it a fun discussion that comes about from discussing the crankishness of a person?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Pretending like 40 billion dollars for a renewable, non-polluting, cheap energy source is a lot is silly. The fact is that we (America, at least) hardly put any money into fusion research. Annually we spend 13 billion dollars on oil subsidies and research, several billion on coal, but not even 1 billion on fusion power. This is one reason why fusion is alway so far off (and the other being that early predictions on how far off it was were overly optimistic). If we only diverted 3 billion from oil funding to fusion, we'd massively increase our research into fusion. As it is now we might see fusion reactors in 40 years or so, but if we spent a lot more funding on it we could probably cut that down to 20--considering the threat of global warming and other such concerns sooner is much, much better than later.
Sad to say we are a small contributor to the international fusion effort too. Hopefully the next administration will be more forward-thinking.
Between guys like this and ITER, we will have fusion power within 10-20 years.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
There have been tokamaks operating for a long time now - they just give less energy than they take. The small size is the reason for it. No safety issues have been observed with any of them.
The safety issues, military diasasters and HUGE waste of money are the hallmark of oil politics. Wars and killing are necessary to extract oil and protect oil routes. Add to this the pollution, global warming, etc. The price of oil is billion times more than the price of fusion energy and research. Not to mention that oil supplies are limited and it's only going to get worse. It is already pretty bad, but it is going to get much worse.
The choice is clear, but unfortunately we have entranched interest groups who are quite blindly weighing on the wrong side - even against the future of their own children.
I am totally going to donate money to this guy, because according to my calculations, some of the inevitable side effects will be the generation of anti-gravity and a THEREE INCH PENNIS EXTENSHION OVERNITE!!!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Eric Lerner
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Baldrson, you're a fucking idiot. Guess what? I had mod points, so I modded all of your posts Off Topic, just to bitch slap you. Go fuck yourself.
This is the second time Mr. Allan has made a self-advertizing submission, and actually had it blindly accepted, in as many weeks. Remember "Wilma the Capacitor and Particle Accelerator"?
This is Mr. Allan's personal website. If the story itself isn't enough, you can judge Mr. Allan's credibility by looking at some the other websites he's founded and administers.
This is truly shameful.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Unfortunately, scientists have had their professional lives scuttled and have even been murdered for doing far less than suggesting cheep and clean alternative energy sources. As such, I don't remain particularly hopeful about a massive public science break-through in the energy arena, but that doesn't mean we're not winning.
--I spent a week some months ago taking care of a neighbor's off-the-grid house. A big home which ran on geo-thermal energy and solar cells. It had most of the conveniences you'd expect from a modern suburban house, but all on 12 Volts DC. --Lighting and water pumping were not a problem, laptops were used instead of desktop computers, and various other appliances like radios and televisions were run with DC to AC converters. Even while feeding the needs of an active family of four, the array of chemical batteries which stored electricity from sunlight never dipped below 90% on any given day.
Cooking was done on a big gas range fed from a pair of huge propane tanks which contained enough propane to last more than a year. Water was drawn from a well. Refrigeration was the only puzzle still to be worked out, and while pondering it, the family had spent two years eating fresh foods while keeping milk and other such items in a basic camping cooler in the kitchen. --After realizing that this worked just fine, they basically concluded that they didn't really need a fridge in the first place.
Half the problem is not the power source, but the notion that we need so much of it. If we change the parameters of the problem, we can start using different solutions which have already been accepted by industry. Simple.
Despite the opposition, alternative energy is here for those who want it.
-FL
Read the article. Due to the magnitic fields the the majority of the energy is ejected axialy as ions and x-rays requiring only minimal cooling.
Indeed. However, this is not to say that ALL approaches to this type of healing are invalid. For instance, Acupuncture employs electromagnetics in order to have its effects, (effects which are well documented and undisputed). --The needles, when set to lightly rotating, create vanishingly small DC electric currents which affect the nervous system. The trick is in using micro-currents. The body certainly does not need to be bathed in high energy fields.
There is definitely snake oil out there, but writing off all alternative ideas because some of them are false makes little sense. --Nor can we expect to sit around waiting for established industry to drop alternative ways of solving problems into our laps. --Any solution which gives us more control over our lives and reduces the amount of money we give to Big Medicine is simply not going to be offered to us by Big Medicine. This is pretty obvious, but many people seem to have a difficult time grasping the details. Such are the results of effective marketing.
Every laughing cry of, "Tin-Foil-Hat," generally comes from another successfully subdued slave. --Usually somebody who eats a lot of wheat products, needlessly gets sick a couple of times each year and can be expected to be diagnosed with an expensive-to-treat ailment before they turn 60, (after they've amassed enough wealth over their working lives to pay for the treatment). That's a lot of Cash Cows.
-FL
While he might not have "mainstream" credentials comparable to what you might be used to seeing with mainstream science, you must admit that his credentials are impressive -- and brave. He is willing to go outside the box, but has a strong scientific background. Works in the patent office. Recently
s ion.htm
http://peswiki.com/energy/Directory:Thomas_Valone
He recently won back his job as a US Patent Examiner, with back pay, after a long fight.
http://users.erols.com/iri/ValonePatentOfficeDeci
The man is both smart and brave -- a combination rare in academia.
By the way, I have met Jackie, his wife, on a couple of occasions, and must say that she is one of the nicest, most genuine people I have ever met. She's in the top 1% of the bell curve when it comes to human decency. A tribute to Tom, that such a person would support him as a teammate.
-- Sterling
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
You're making the (common, and easy to make) error of confusing 'heat' and 'temperature'. The temperature in Earth orbit is on the order of a million Kelvins, but you'll notice that satellites and spacewalking astronauts don't flash into vapour instantly. That's because, while the temperature is high, there isn't much heat. Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the particles in a sample, whereas heat is the total amount of thermal energy contained in a sample. If you have a near vacuum, the particles can be moving insanely fast (high temperature), but they're so rarefied that the heat content is very low.
:)
At least, I think that's generally how it goes. Anyone feel like correcting me if I've got it wrong?
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
There are no %100 efficient machines. All create waste heat from mechanical friction, or poorly contained chemical or electric processes.
The question is how much of this "limitless, clean electricity" will be created, and how much of it will go into the atmosphere as heat. If you can pump enough heat out of these fusion reactors and the appliances they drive, CO2 induced greenhouse will become irrelevant to global warming. Even if we were to scrub the entire atmosphere clean of greenhouse gases (and stop exhaling in the process), natural atmospheric water vapor would be enough to trap the tremendous excess waste heat of all these fusion reactors. The result would be increased global warming.
A workaround could be to use infrared satellites to monitor infrared heat and report "severe abusers". Every machine could have a waste calorie quota, and if you pass it, the man comes and takes Mr. Fusion away from you.
This is a condensed view of what the informed environmentalists express - at least those with whom I have discussed this topic. I haven't heard all the "wing nut" arguments, but this concern makes sense from a planetary thermodynamics view.
Limitless energy trapped on a planetary surface is a bad thing if you want to keep your biosphere intact.
Nope, you're right. Betas are electrons or positrons. Next time, I'll check my 'pedia BEFORE I post.
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
while boron is not scarce it still is not as abundant as hydrogen so perhaps this is why other scientists have not put as much effort into it
fusion reactors. Imagine if you will a CNO reactor which would convert four Hydrogen-1 nuclei into an alpha particle. It would be interesting because you could use hydrogen from ordinary water rather than having to isolate deuterium.
Of course if we could manufacture deuterium from two protons (like stars do) we would have that one covered too.... Me thinks however that the CNO process at higher energies would be more efficient....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you had read the article, it points out that he's a physicist as well as an inventor. Occasionally, they go together. Sometimes they call that Engineering. Or research.
He's also not proposing a radically different model of the universe, and even credits astrophysical research as the basis for his approach, citing parallels between neutron star research and plasma physics. Moreover, the article has many references if you like, including sources and contact information for Mr. Lerner.
Also, it's worth noting that very nearly all major scientific advances are announced in press releases. Every day, I see news items about new discoveries in medicine, astrophysics, climatology, and psychology. The practice is so frequent that CNN.com (and probably your local newspaper as well) has a section dedicated to science and technology.
I found the ideas presented in the slashdot article a little sketchy myself, but that's why I actually read the article. It's much more detailed and worth the read.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Jesus Fucking Christ.
This is the THIRD article devoid of any real factual science from this bullshit crock of energy sciences site.(previous comment). You guys haven't even apologized for the Batmax bullshit, and now you keep posting "stories" from this site that thinks the laws of thermodynamics run on pixie dust and high hopes.
I swear, the Slashdot editors must be the ONLY IT workers on earth who do not browse Slashdot while working.
Well, I work on a tokamak and I read the major Plasma/Fusion journals on a daily basis (Physics of Plasmas, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Nuclear Fusion, Physical Review Letters, etc.). I've never come across a single peer reviewed journal article on this machine or by this author. Also, the article makes no reference to any published work. I'm going to have to doubt it until I see some published results.
This comment couldn't have been written in the seventies for several reasons. First of all, the ability to construct a superconducting field coil of the size required for ITER has only been realized in the past few years. If you look in literature, all literature referring to a possible commercial reactor have pointed towards an ITER type machine for at least the past 20 years. It was often referred to as an Engineering Test Reactor (ETR). ITER still requires a suitable energy extraction/tritium breeding system but so far as having a fusion power output greater than the auxiliary heating power, I can't see how ITER won't achieve this. Current design for operation in what is referred to as ELMy H-mode (a mode of improved confinement) has ITER producing 500 MW of fusion power with 50 MW of auxiliary heating power.
...its Erik Lensherr aka Magneto. He's got the look, the zealous faith and the ability to manipulate magnetism like no other. Depending if he's in good guy mode or bad guy mode he'll either save the world from the evil oil plutocracy by sacrificing himself or use his new fusion generator to turn us all into mutants. Somebody call the X-men.
I wonder how many theories have been posted on slashdot now that are just like this. Slashdot has been around long enough that someone could go back and look at the current state of these theories. How many are still, "waiting for that big moment" even after they go some funding.
Like BlackLight Power? And their battery?
I'm replying to some of the hundred-odd posts on this topic. If you want to determine whether something is decent science or crackpot, there are right and wrong ways to go about it. A lot of these posts appeal to authority to determine if focus fusion is decent science, analyzing who I am, or even who people who talk about focus fusion are or who is on their board of directors. That's not the way to analyze scientific work. If it were, we'd still be back debating what the church says is the correct Aristotelian interpretation of Ptolemy--and we sure would not be doing it by Internet. The right way is to look at the scientific work and ask--does it make sense, and does it follow the scientific method? Sometimes that's difficult if the work is only presented in technical journals. But in this case, our work is both available in technical form (http://www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0401126) and in layman's terms (www.focusfusion.org). Look at this work and judge for yourselves. If you're also interested in the Big Bang controversy, you can judge the layman's version at www.bigbangneverhappened.org or get more technical information from the download articles accessible there. (The July 2 cover story of New Scientist is a good introduction, too.) People on this list who call me a crackpot or less complimentary names have the simple obligation to point to some specific scientific errors that they perceive in my work. Otherwise they are not engaging in any sort of scientific debate and deserve to be ignored. A couple of basic historical facts need correcting. NASA did not cut off our funding because they were dissatisfied with our results. The whole program that was funding our work and many others, Advanced Propulsion Technologies, was zeroed out by the administration. More or less simultaneously all NASA programs that fund any form of fusion were also terminated. So this had nothing to do with our work in particular, but did indicate a general hostility towards fusion by the administration. Also, it would be wrong to describe focus fusion as that controversial among fusion scientists. (Unlike my cosmology work, which is controversial). Many fusion scientists think that this work, along with other alternative fusion approaches, deserves funding. But scientists don't make decisions on what is funded, administrators do. I've been at conferences of top fusion researchers in which practically not a single one supported the ITER project or thought that it could work. Yet that is the project that, for political reasons, gets all the funding. Finally, I want to address two technical points that seem to come up frequently. First, the safety of the focus fusion derives in part from the extremely tiny amount of fuel that is burned in each shot. The speck that is raised to several billion degrees is only a few microns to tens of microns across. So even when all the fuel, or nearly all, is burned, the yield will be only about 20 or 30 kilojoules--the energy a 100 W light bulb burns in a few minutes. It is only by pulsing the device a thousand times a second do you get 20 MW out of it. The much-cited PhD thesis from '95 that sought to prove that all advanced fuels like hydrogen-boron are impossible makes a number of assumptions that are not true in all cases. In particular, the thesis ignores the magnetic effect that decreases x-ray emission at the very high magnetic fields attainable in the plasma focus. The effect has been known for 30 years and is widely applied in the study of neutron stars, so it is also not controversial. But it greatly improves the prospects of getting net energy from hydrogen boron. Anyway, I urge every one to look at the material we present at www.focusfusion.org and judge it for yourself. Don't rely on "authority". That's not the scientific way. Eric Lerner
And I'm going to use the 2nd "Law" of Thermodynamics to explain my theory.
According to the 2nd Law, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed and transferred as heat.
If this is the case, then isn't our universe already a perpetual motion machine, contrary to the laws of thermodynamics? I mean, after all, if you can't create/destroy energy, then it has to leave us, and very slowly, but eventually, come right back to us in the form of light or radiation, or maybe even intelligent life's signals broadcast out into space that reach us. It's all a full-circle phenomenon, as far as I can tell.
Any full-time Physicists care to point out my flaws? This is an admittedly off-the-wall theory, but I'm only applying common sense to your complex laws and it's wording.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Isnt Tokamak that cute little dog from Animal Crossing that plays songs on Saturdays?
Bullshit!
Whenever you read an article talking about storing lots of energy in capacitors and involves the application of vortices, it's a pretty good indication that you're looking at something published by a crackpot. This is usually the same type of person who believes that perpetual motion *is* possible if only you could just break the 100% efficiency barrier. When an article goes on to talk about how the government doesn't want this device to work because they're protecting another industry, your bullshit spider sense has got to start tingling.
I'm not claiming that I'm an expert in fusion, but I don't believe for one second that the 'plasmoid' or whatever torroidial structure appears at the end of tube can be self-sustaining, let alone generate power.
We've got the laws of thermodynamics for a reason. Let's not forget them when faced with the temptation of limitless power.
All in all, I think Homer Simpson said it best: "you're living in a land of make believe, with elves and fairies and little frogs with funny green hats!"
Look at your writing for one. Just look at it. You're completely incapable of making a presentable case to not attack you as a person. A notoriously simple matter to present, why it's even been abriviated to a latin phrase for a couple of millenia of convience.
The fact is that crackpots, kooks and cranks with a history don't deserve to be taken seriously after they've already burned up their first few benefit of the doubt cards. At some point attacking you is a reasonable abbreviation for attacking your ideas. It saves time. In the case of the USPTO, courts and crazy bastards with perpetual energy machines money, and perhaps injury. It simply isn't unreasonable in all circumstances, not every lunatic conceals great genius. Your failures have increased the barrier for other efforts you pursue. It's the burden you bear for wasting other people's precious time. And if you are right, or there are other that bear a similar burden unjustly, it will be everyone who pays for the delay. An eventuality your personal lack of consideration, and unreasoning pride made necessary.
Your emotional pleas for us to trust you on the basis of what sounds intuitive are how humans got stuck with blood letting. You want better consideration? Change yourself so that you deserve it.
Actually, I recall the first place I ran across the scaling law favoring huge Tokamaks was in Robert Hirsch's critique of the Tokamak program published in AAAS "Science" in the mid-70s, which is why I made the comment I made. I don't recall the entire content of the article but it tried to presume the strongest case for the Tokamak at that time. The technical challenges of economically building and operating a reactor of that size are enormous. That's why when Bussard left the government program (around the same time) to work with private capital, his approach was to look for scaling laws that favored smaller, disposable devices which was obviously a good strategy from the standpoint of development costs and risk.
Seastead this.
What you're saying would make some sense if you were talking to physicists or engineers who work on fusion (or at least nuclear physics), because those people would have the expertise to judge a proposal on its scientific merits. For the rest of us, though, it's really not possible to look at it with an informed, skeptical eye and determine its validity. I'm close to completing my Ph.D. in Physics, but even I don't know enough about plasma and nuclear physics to really give a good appraisal of a new fusion technique. That is the reason people spend years in school studying night and day in order to get a Ph.D. in a very narrow specialty. I have personally read works in my area of expertise (quantum information) that look fairly reasonable on first glance but are completely wrong when you look at the details. These errors can be so subtle they would go unnoticed by almost anyone but a specialist in that particular area. Putting it in "layman's terms" may give people more of an impression that they understand it, but it doesn't do anything to actually help them understand the technical details. In fact, when you do know the technical details, reading the layman's accounts of things that appear, for example, in the New York Times it is actually harder to determine if the research is valid, because none of the technical details are clearly explained.
So what can a layperson (or even non-specialist, like me) do when confronted with claims they don't understand the technical details of? Well, they look for the opinion of someone who does know about that specific area, which is, indeed, appealing to authority and is entirely appropriate and reasonable in that case. We must ask, have people with a track record of doing good, successful science looked at this and thought it was right? In the linked article, the only person who seems to be quoted giving an "expert" opinion on it is Dr. Thomas Valone, of Integrity Research Institute. And his credentials? Well, Integrity Research Institute seems to have dubious credentials at best and again a quick search on Dr. Valone again turned up no publications in peer-reviewed physics journals (if I missed some, I'd be interested to know). (A search on the web did turn up his support for ideas such as inertial propulsion. I can say with authority that that idea is nonsense; it is completely at odds with the known laws of physics, all experimental data on record, and plain old common sense.)
Another way a non-specialist can gauge whether some research has merit according to experts in the field is to see whether it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, showing that people with technical expertise in this area feel it is at least plausible that it's correct. I didn't find a paper on your idea in any of the APS journals or on Google Scholar, so at least that quick search seems to suggest it's never been published after peer review (the arxiv is not peer-reviewed, of course). Furthermore, I didn't notice any peer-reviewed articles by you on fusion at all, which might lead one to question your own expertise in the matter.
Basically, a non-specialist can try to judge the validity of a piece of work by asking, "Does the author have a record of research in the field that has been widely recognized as successful?" and "Have other specialists in the field (with a record of widely recognized success) looked critically at this research and thought it ha
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Before you go knee-jerking, you might want to read our definition of "free energy"
g y.htm
http://www.freeenergynews.com/Directory/free_ener
It includes solar, wind, tide, or any source of energy free for the taking, acknowledging that the devices that harness these are not free, and pointing out that the object is to go for clean, affordable, reliable solutions.
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Any service that a human can perform, including prostitution, could certainly be performed by an android robot. Bipedal androids are already a reality and while they may not be human-like enough to perform as prostitutes quite yet, it is certainly feasible that they could do the dishes and drive your car and even show up for work in your place. These sort of ideas have beeen the very stuff of science fiction since at least the thirties.
So, if these things are possible, then why don't we have them performing all of our services already? Simple, they cost too much to build and they consume too much energy too quickly. Are you starting to see the tie-in to cheap energy and the service economy? There sure as hell is a link.
Furthermore, if you go back and look at the rhetoric of the Reganites who proposed this "service economy" theory they claimed that it was okay if we outsources all of our electronics manufacturing because only America would produce the software and there would be an unlimited supply of jobs in this vastly profitable new software service based economy.
Guess what? That's not what happened. What happened was there was a gold rush mentality that temporarily created a speculative bubble, but it turned out to be a pyramid game in which only the top level got paid. Same thing with Enron. Again, same players same game.
Then, as the bottom began falling out of Enron style "services" and the software market bubble --note how it all got blamed on the Net-- was collapsing all of a sudden a great distraction appeared. How uncannily convenient.
Service based economy . . . yeah whatever. There's no service that cannot be automated. None. No such thing.
Is anyone else bothered by the frequent use of the term "high-tech" in the article? Eg. converting the energy using a "high-tech transformer"? Last I checked, transformers were not really considered cutting-edge technology... I get the feeling that whenever they say "high-tech", they really mean "it hasn't been invented yet" (or even "then a miracle occurs..." :)
Wouldhavelikedtoreadyourrantonhowweshouldtrustyoub utit'ssobadastobealmostpainful.Maybeyoushouldconsi derhowitlooksbeforepostingit?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
This device won't work. The reaction parameter (mean sigma-v) for D-B fusion is far, far too low to achieve ignition at the kind of temperatures that can be reached in a discharge of the kind described (just look it up in any barn book; these data are all publicly available.) Moreover, even were a burning plasma obtainable, the device provides negligible containment time because there are no external fields (a plasma cannot contain itself via self fields by the virial theorem) so, even were a significant reaction rate available, the energy it would produce would be negligible as the burn would only proceed for a few microseconds. Even were that not the case, the kind of arcing discharge the device apparently creates is a very inefficient coupler of energy into the plasma, so a very, very high fusion reaction rate density would have to be obtainable to achieve energy breakeven in this device. Incidentally, please, Slashdot, please stop posting stories on nonsense, obviously bogus topics in science and technologies for which no results are available; please have someone who knows actual science review your articles. This is part of the reason people "don't believe in science" anymore: the reportage of it, even outside of what Slashdot would call "the mainstream press," is absolute crap focusing on whatever outrageous and stupid claims someone's making about their "new" device today (by the way, this device isn't even novel, which was, it seems, the only thing it ostensibly had to recommend it.) The article referenced is needlessly convoluted, focuses on deployment for a device that doesn't exist (and never will,) cites no results for the technology in question, and does not contain any theoretical basis explaining why this device should work when every principle of plasma engineering states otherwise. In short, this article is a smokescreen designed to lure in the stupid. Congratulations, Slashdot; you took the bait. The Plasma Engineer
Appended to story:
From: Bill Spears
To: Sterling D. Allan
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: comment please: Tokamak has serious competitor in Focus Fusion
Dear Sterling,
Sorry for the delay in replying. It takes time to give you a reasoned reply and not just shoot from the hip. It also takes time to read and understand detailed scientific reports to make sure you are not missing something. I asked Dr. Michiya Shimada, our Head of Physics Unit, to review the material and make a comment. After he and his people reviewed the background papers indicated in your article, he concluded:
"The plasma focus isn't going to be a rival of the tokamak unless there's some very strange physics nobody has seen before.
Using the plasma parameters quoted in their publication, the proton-boron fusion energy obtainable in a plasma focus discharge is estimated to be 0.6 x 10^-4 J, which is a fraction of a billionth of the electrical energy spent to create this plasma (~ 160 kJ). The point is that the plasma volume is very small (~ 6 x 10^-9 cm^3) and the discharge duration very short (~ 1 x 10^-8 s).
The dense plasma focus has been studied extensively in the early years of fusion research. They might find it interesting to compare their results with those obtained a few decades ago to see whether anything new has really been discovered here."
I hope you find that a significantly strong counter-remark to your original article to be worth publishing also this viewpoint.
Best regards,
Bill
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Also appended:
...
From: Eric Lerner
To: Sterling D. Allan
Cc:
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:32 PM
Subject: Re: ITER response: Tokamak has serious competitor in Focus Fusion
Sterling, you can post this:
Dr. Shimada did not read the papers carefully enough. His calculation is based on the plasma parameters that we actually achieved in our last experiments in 2001. We did not claim that those parameters are near breakeven. They were not even optimal for the current we achieved, because the radius of the anode (the inner electrode) on this device could not be changed
What the paper does demonstrate is that scaling laws that have both good theoretical foundations and experimental backing indicate that break-even parameters can be achieved with a somewhat higher current but a physically smaller device. With the parameters that we expect to reach in our next set of experiments, fusion yield per shot should be of the order of 5-20 KJ. No strange physics is needed. We are aiming for a 40-fold increase in plasmoid magnetic field and fusion yield (at fixed ion temperature) scales as B^4. Temperature will also be higher.
Eric Lerner
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.