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Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded
pln2bz writes "Eric Lerner, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, has received $600k in funding, and a promise of phased payments of $10 million if scientific feasibility can be demonstrated to productize Lerner's focus fusion energy production device. Unlike the Tokamak, focus fusion does not require the plasma to be stable, does not produce significant amounts of dangerous radiation, directly injects electrons into the power grid without the need for turbines and would only cost around $300k to manufacture a generator. Lerner's inspiration for the technology is based upon an interpretation for astrophysical Herbig-Haro jets that agrees with the Electric Universe explanation."
It looks like the tech talk is slashdotted, but if memory serves (and I'm not a physicist, so my understanding is fuzzy at best) the idea is that the device (which has some resemblance to a large spark plug) sits in a chamber of has a large electrical current applied and exploits a sequence of unstable states to produce a small ball of plasma where the fusion takes place. The reaction produces X-rays and a directed stream of charged particles. The X-rays are collected by a sort of multilayer onion-like solar panel that converts them to electricity, and the charged particles also get converted directly to electricity. The device can be relatively simple since there's no need for steam turbines. A steady stream of electricity can be produced by repeating the reaction over and over, and storing the output in big capacitors (and part of the resulting energy is used to initiate the next pulse).
Has the electric universe theory made any headway in offering a viable alternative to currently accepted cosmology? Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking.
Nope... as far as I've been able to tell, the electric universe "theory" is still purely in the realm of pseudoscience, being touted by various internet quacks. Of course, many of its proponents also believe that the empirical scientific method is some sort of outdated relic of a bygone era, so I'm not really sure what sort of standard they should be judged by. I'm actually really curious about where CMEF, the organization which gave Eric Lerner the $600 million in funding, got its money from. Their website doesn't seem to have that info, although it looks like they're trying to raise private funds via the interweb.
the p+B11 reaction [the one described here] forms 3 He nuclei [p+B11=C12 which splits into 3 He4] all the products are charged opening up an extra route of power generation that isn't solely thermal to electrical conversion however the reaction produces about half the energy per reaction of deuterium/tritium reaction and much higher energies to cause significant fusion.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Your astroid field would be made of Baryonic matter. The current expectation is dark matter is non-baryonic. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon#Baryonic_matter
So dark matter actually does not interact with the photon field.
Dark matter and cosmic inflation may prove to be incorrect theories but to say they're illogical demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of these two theories.
The argument for dark matter, in its simpliest form, states that owing to the gravitational effects we observe in the universe there must be a lot of matter we can't measure. There's nothing "magical" about that.
When I was doing my physics degree the big question was: Is dark matter WIMPS or MACHOs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or MAssive Compact Halo Objects). You're talking about MACHOs. Even if we can't see these objects, we do know where they must be, so if it was asteroid fields or dead stars of little black holes we can calculate how much light they would absorb and see the larger ones as they passed in front of stars, even if we couldn't see them individually. There have been many studies looking for them, but no evidence has been found. WIMPS have pretty much won that one. We've not seen any WIMPs either, but MACHOs are well understood so we know exactly what to look for so if it was them we'd expect to have seen the evidence.
All this is assuming dark matter really exists. I'm still still not wholly convinced. Basically all our long-distance measurements of gravity give the wrong answer. Even our longest distance solar-system probes (the Pinoeers) give the wrong answer, though that data isn't really good enough to be wholly convincing. Are all these answers wrong because there is hidden hidden matter (and energy, woo hoo!), or is GR just not a good enough approximation at those scales? Eric Lerner thinks it's all about plasmas.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Interestingly, the theories that might make this work have very little do to with the electric universe. Eric Lerner was doing some theoretical work looking in more detail at some aspects of cosmological plasma and got some inspiration from it - but we're talking about two separate things.
:/
Unfortunately Eric Lerner keeps bringing the cosmological plasma thing up, he somehow got it into his head that associating his current work with that will make him more credible
Dark mater is an experimental observation. It's not a theory, it's an observation. There are various theories of what dark matter is, or for that matter of what other possibilities might explain the observations, but dark matter itself is an observation that needs to be explained by a theory; it's not a theory.
Cosmic inflation is a theoretical concept which looks like it could explain some observations. It's not accepted as any kind of a confirmed theory yet, but it is well accepted as a candidate for a theory that might, with some additional experimental confirmation, become a reasonable model.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Actually it probably won't. JET did, but ITER is just an engineering prototype and proof of concept. It is intended to test the technologies to make a fusion power plant work and be maintainable. The physics is done already.
From what I gather, the physics ain't done for ITER. ITER's another test bed for the physics, to attempt to show that breakeven can be achieved for a tokamak, and be done in a fairly continuous fashion. The plan was, if ITER was successful, to attempt to build a prototype power plant. After that, in, maybe another 30 years, they might build a real power plant.
The thing is, with a useful plant lifetime measured in months, due to neutron damage, the utilities have already said it's not economical and they don't want anything to do with it.
It produced plasma stable structures which were then compressed. If was de-funded before it could be proven ( or disproven ).
Disclaimer: I worked on it.
Please don't confuse Creationism and ID. Creationism is a spiritual belief. ID is a collection of "scientific evidence" invented to "prove" Creationism, and is therefore neither religion or science.
It is really interesting to know that someone is willing to buy in to Lerner's plan. The rest of plasma physics community world are going to be thrilled by this development. Lately, exciting news concerning discharge based plasma technology are coming rapidly. At Sandia, the refurbised Z machine is up and running, Sandia is teaming up with the Russian to develop some next generation pulse generator using LTD technologies. The Plasma Focus guys in Warsaw are busy in some ICTP Trieste's initiatives on Plasma Focus, even in Singapore and Malaysia, there is a computational symposium on Plasma Focus being held. Not forgetting the Chillean group and also some remnants research groups scattered all over Europe. Definitely, things are not going to be the same. It is also feel good to know that people are looking for alternatives other than the gigantic ITER.
My wording in the earlier post was a bit strong, I suppose. I compared a mature technology and approach to fusion to one that hasn't really been verified. There just hasn't been much stock put into the plasma focus approach in some time. US and international attention has been focused on magnetic confinement and laser or x-ray inertial confinement. It's been about four years since I've looked at the dense plasma focus as a fusion device, but as I recall the problem is that it takes a beam-cold target approach. It is difficult to reach the temperatures necessary to achieve a significant fusion burn in this way. The plasma cannot be considered thermonuclear, as the neutron distribution is not isotropic - this was one of the bones we had with Mr. Lerner's conclusions, as I recall. There are still a lot of questions about confinement as well. The plasma constrained by its own magnetic fields, so it fits in this sort of odd category between inertial and magnetic confinement. In terms of pulsed fusion, to me the Z-pinch method holds a bit more promise, as we understand a great deal more about how x-rays contribute to confinement and burn. This isn't to say the plasma focus can't achieve fusion - because it certainly is capable of that, and it can be done cheaply, it's just that the work to show that it can scale up has never been completed.
Eric Lerner is described in Wikipedia as "a popular science writer, independent plasma researcher and an advocate of plasma cosmology" - IOW, not actually a scientist, although he may well be knowledgeable; he has a BA in physics.
However, what really makes me think twice about this is the claim that they achieve fusion without any radioactive by-products, "only harmless Helium gas". How does one produce such a precise result in an environment that is "several billion degrees"? At that temperature the atoms will move about a bit, to say the least, and we are not even talking about pure deuterium; there will be highly energetic collisions all over the place, and a large amount of particle radiation will be produced, as far as I can see, and the reactor casing is bound to become radioactive.
This has all the hallmarks of a bogus project that has succceeded in milking some funding out of some gullible soul - in this case CMEF, a Swedish startup.
Once you get the suspicion that this is yet another bogus project, you begin to see signs all over the place: superficially it looks as if they have got some government grant in the US, that Eric Lerner is a scientist, and that the company is some well-established research-company (a search for "Lawrenceville Plasma Physics" on Wikipedia redirects to the article about "Eric Lerner") - IOW, the announcement is deceptive; if this was real, they wouldn't need to deceive.
And then of course there is the claim that "electrons are injected directly into the powergrid" based on some cosmological phenomenon, that is not yet well understood scientifically. In a Superman comic, perhaps, but not in real life. This is simply a flight of fantasy, unbound by the boring, mundane routine of real scientific research.
Besides, what dope thinks fusion causes dangerous radiation to begin with?
Are you saying you have a realistic design that doesn't?
sudo ergo sum
[snip]
How can it be, that modern, supposedly educated, "mainstream" cosmologists ignore the much powerful force of electricity in the operation of the universe? How can it be that modern cosmology tries to explain the operation of the entire universe by the operation of the weakest force of nature? Yeah, those silly scientists, what a bunch of dummies!
Oh wait, right... since EM is the strongest long-range force, and the universe is ~13 billion years old, all free charges would have already neutralized _because_ the force is so strong. It's so much stronger than gravity, in fact, that it would have neutralized as soon as it cooled off enough for atoms to form, and gravity would be unable to stop it.
Maury
http://www.mhall119.com
Even if we re-estimate the size, the shape of the rotation curve (how fast things are moving relative vs distance from galactic centre) is still wrong, if we assume most of the stuff is visible (emits or absorbs light). Irrespective of our estimates of the size and distance of galaxies, the observed rotation curve means one of: a) GR is wrong. b) There's a hell of a lot of stuff we can't see (a lot more than we can see) and it's distributed differently (in a halo around galaxies). c) Forces other than gravity play a much larger part than current consensus theories suggest. The shape of galactic rotation curves was the original evidence for dark matter.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
No-one has yet observed any dark matter, so it is just still a theory.
They haven't? Weird, because I'm pretty sure the Bullet Cluster is pretty damn close to direct observation of dark matter. Heck, in the wake of the BC results, even the MOND folks have had to admit that there must be at least *some* dark matter out there.
Bussard's Polywell approach is pretty promising, and is being funded by the Navy at the moment under a contract that finishes up in August. There's lots of discussion of the concept here:
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
There's some talk that an attempt to build a Polywell reactor similar in power to ITER might be funded if current experiments go well. It would cost about 1/100th of what ITER would.
Except that the US Army didn't invest millions of dollars in any such thing. What it did invest maybe thousands of dollars in was a brainstorming session on variety of possible chemical weapons. What they got were essentially the meeting minutes of that brainstorming session. That document indicates that, among other things, a chemical aphrodisiac was considered.
Nowhere is it even remotely suggested that a "gay bomb" was seriously considered for development, approved for funding, or even prototyped on spec.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
"In particular Bussard claimed that the monoenergetic velocity distribution in the plasma was periodically restored without input of energy."
Ion upscattering was addressed pretty conclusively by Chacon here:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PHPAEN000007000011004547000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
"In spherical Penning fusion devices, a spherical cloud of electrons, confined in a Penning-like trap, creates the ion-confining electrostatic well. Fusion energy gains for these systems have been calculated in optimistic conditions (i.e., spherically uniform electrostatic well, no collisional ion-electron interactions, single ion species) using a bounce-averaged Fokkerâ"Planck (BAFP) model. Results show that steady-state distributions in which the Maxwellian ion population is dominant correspond to lowest ion recirculation powers (and hence highest fusion energy gains). It is also shown that realistic parabolic-like wells result in better energy gains than square wells, particularly at large well depths (>100 kV). Operating regimes with fusion power to ion input power ratios (Q-value) >100 have been identified."
Here was Bussard's take:
"Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion crosssection is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and âoecoldâoe) anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14). Both populations operate in non-LTE modes throughout their lifetime in the system. This is an inherent feature of these centrally-convergent, ion-focussing, driven, dynamic systems, and one not found (or even possible) in conventional magnetic confinement fusion devices."
You don't necessarily need to add energy to reorder a system, if reordering puts things back to their lowest energies. Consider some balls lined up at the bottom of a V-shaped well. You disorder them, they bounce around in the V but reorder at the bottom of the well again because that's their lowest energy point. It required energy to disorder them, but no additional energy was added to reorder them.
It's an observational fact that most reptiles today (birds excepted) don't have terribly good hearing, and often augment their hearing by laying their skulls along the ground. The physics are analogous to the oft-seen techniques of placing your ear to a railway line to try to hear a train coming from some distance away, or putting a screwdriver to the valve gear of a pump as a crude stethoscope. So, it is thought that primitive reptiles, including the ancestors of mammals, dinosaurs (including birds), snakes, lizards, turtles and other modern reptiles, all listened to the outside world with their skulls laying on the ground. As jaw structures changed in some animals, this freed-up some lower-jaw bones to continue their hearing function separate from their tooth-support function. And that is how mammals ended up with what are (developmentally) jaw bones or gill arches in their ears.
But then again, since ears and pretty much every other skull bone not involved in the braincase are developmentally gill structures, is it any surprise to find jaw bones (gill structures) intimately associated with other gill structures.
(I'm sure you know much of this already, but letting the lies of creationists go unchallenged is one way of letting them continue to pollute the minds of otherwise intelligent people.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Oh please. Scientists DO NOT ignore the electrical force. How can you say that? Scientists are not some cabal dedicated to preserving sacred theories, if anything, each scientist wants to make a name for himself, and if they can overturn prior theories, they will be remembered for all time. But they have to prove themselves, and bluster and bullshit won't cut it.
As for your question regarding electromagnetism, I'm astounded by your ignorance. Does a magnetic field affect neutral particles? No? Even though gravity does? Impossible, right? I mean, matter is matter, and it has to be effected by all four forces, right? Photons 'feel' all four forces, right?
No. You have an incredibly poor understanding of basic physics, and any skepticism you have regarding current physics theories could easily be cleared up with some basic college level courses.
Electric Universe proponents are not a bunch of brave rebels fighting against the evil "government funded" scientific oligarchy. They are nut cases who do not understand basic physics, and therefore can not even argue against it correctly.
Scientists do not deny that electrical fields are important in cosmology, rather, they understand them much better than EU idiots. Scientists do deny the basic, and incredibly moronic premise of EU theory, namely that stars are electromagnetic rather than nuclear phenomenon.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
That's the cosmic microwave background radiation that they're trying to explain, not the structure of the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropy. A "dense fog" doesn't cut it.
Friends! Help! A guinea pig tricked me!