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Eric Lerner's Focus Fusion Device Gets Funded

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the race-for-the-power-finish-line dept.

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."

8 of 367 comments (clear)

  1. Electric universe by Verteiron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Electric universe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking. Yep. Contrasting nicely with "dark matter" and "cosmic inflation" which are mainstream science based mainly on conjecture and magical thinking.
    2. Re:Electric universe by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Last I heard it was a fringe pseudoscience based mostly on conjecture and magical thinking. The Chilean Government has put up $600,000 to see if any of that magical thinking can be applied to the real world.

      And really, what's with all the cynicism?
      At worst, someone else's government wasted some taxpayer dollars on science instead of market distorting business subsidies. At best, we have a revolutionary new source of electricity. Somewhere in the middle is the most likely possibility, namely that some bit of research turns out to be useful and can be applied elsewhere.
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  2. Exactly the right approach. by onion2k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is brilliant. $600k isn't a lot to some people, yet there's a tiny sliver of a chance that the guy is on to something. So he gets funding from a private institution who will be absolutely minted in the very unlikely circumstance that he's right. The odd $600k wouldn't even scratch the surface for more traditional avenues of research where the numbers are into the billions, so there's no real loss either.

    Plus, the chances of me getting a backer for my "buttered toast and cat" turbine are much improved. Fantastic.

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    1. Re:Exactly the right approach. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly my thought. ITER is costing US$ 9.3 billion. This costs 0.006% as much. If it is more than 0.006% as likely to work, then it's probably a good use of money.

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    2. Re:Exactly the right approach. by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Is it really enough for him to proceed on? At a big company it costs that much to keep 2 PhD's on a project for 1 year. Presumably this project would also have a large requirement for expensive hardware.

    3. Re: Exactly the right approach. by Gibbs-Duhem · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Then you don't purchase ITER and fund 4150 independent projects instead.

      IANAPP, but my experience with science in general is that you're better off funding many, many projects to the proof-of-concept phase than funding one proof-of-concept project that we're absolutely sure will eventually cost ~$100B to make actually generating power. That way, we learn a huge amount about plasma physics and can make educated decisions about which projects to fund to completion.

      The problem is, right now we know that tokomaks sort of work, but aren't really feasible for power generation. We have *no idea* if all those other systems could be feasible with more work.

  3. Logical fallacy of investment by BlueParrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As always when these discussions come up you hear a bunch of "but what if it works, the benefits would be enormous". The problem with this type of logic is of course that it can be applied to ANY claim which promises great returns, no matter how patently absurd it is. Alchemy, perpetual motion, alternative medicine, intelligent design... etc... If you just promise big enough implications for your "science" and make the explanation sound complicated enough that people don't understand it, you will always have some suckers going "Even if there is just a 0.1% chance it works, the benefits will be a quazillion dollars." This is how these crackpots get their supporters, and as usual they will yell they are being suppressed and compare themselves to Galileo, Einstein or Boltzmann when anybody from the "dogmatic scientific establishment" (i.e anybody who actually has a clue about the subject ) points out it is bullshit.

    Oh, and slash dot will give them front page publicity.