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.

Comments

first post! FE@R 0ur B1G g@y N1Gger C0ckz!

[capninsano]

yeah!

Of Plasmaks and Prizes

[Baldrson]

Back when the cold fusion brouhaha hit, I ran across an intriguing idea of achieving p-B11 (p=proteum=Hydrogen-1 and B11 =Boron-11) fusion using artificial ball lightning, called the Plasmak. No adequate explanation of ball-lightning has yet been concocted resuling in reproducible free-floating plasmoids, and the guy (Paul Koloc) doing the work seemed to have a somewhat plausible idea. (And he did have background with the Spheromak group at the University of Maryland.) Most importantly there were actual photographs of these plasmoids floating in the open air without continuous power input! So I looked into it seriously for a while. During this time I also ran across others who were looking into a variety of p-B11 technologies including one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, Robert W. Bussard with his resurrection of Philo Farnsworth's inertial electrostatic confinement device sometimes called the Farnsworth Fusor.

Given:

1. all the foment in the air.
2. the fact that the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
3. I had been working on getting NASA out of the launch service business via grassroots legislation.

...as the, then, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce (that had been successful in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, requiring NASA to buy commercial launch services whenever possible) I decided to go around to the various fusion contenders and come up with a set of about 10 milestones they all agreed would be worthy of prize awards, and came up with some legislation that would have awarded a series of $100M prizes, each for acheivement of one of those milestones.

This was 1992.

I never got very far with this legislation myself but about 3 years later, Bussard decided to submit this legislation -- with a kicker: He blew the lid off the early history of the Tokamak program in a letter sent to all the Congressmen and laboratories responsible for fusion technology wherein he said this:

The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.

Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.

Five years later, after working with Koloc and recovering the original images, I discovered that the photographs of the Plasmak plasmoids were almost certainly an artifact of the way CCD arrays shift their images out: The plasma discharge is time symmetric which, combined with the shifting of the image out of the CCD array, produced the illusion of a prolate spheroid. The discharge was so bright it overcame the CCD mask and exposed the image as the image was being shifted out of the array.

This was highly disappointing to but it, along with Bussard's disclosure, shows how deceptive these things can be and why a prize system is superior to providing government funding for polit

Re:Of Plasmaks and Prizes

[Baldrson]

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.

Congressman Packard

[Baldrson]

Congressman Packard did. There have been a few others. :)

And Robert Bussard...

[Baldrson]

People who lie and breath for a living are generally considered oxygen theives, not workers.

I suppose the fact that he was the only Republican candidate to win on a write-in vote in recent history doesn't cut him any slack with guys like you since he's guilty by association with a pariah like me.

But then there's always Robert Bussard, who gave my organization credit for the legislation he submitted to Congress along with his expose letter. Oops.. there again, we can, with great aplomb circularly reason our way out of this by virtue of the fact that he is guilty by association with me.

In fact that arguement can apply to anyone who claimed I accomplished anything real. :)