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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.
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 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