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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."
Yep, and it might be a good idea to repeat this with some other stuff that looks at least borderline credible. Bussard's "polywell" fusion device comes to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Both Lerner's and Bussard's approach are not exactly proven, but they seem believable enough that investing a few millions (as opposed to billions in Tokamak research) seems worthwile.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yeah, that's close enough. Although, personally, I think once you had one working you could make 20 of them and do a 20-to-20 connection with some high power switching (I believe diamond switches are required anyway) so the output of many units is cumulated on the input of one unit, with no capacitor bank in the way. That way you get really fast cycling of pulses.. much like a piston engine.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why not? String theorists are still around despite a complete lack of verifiable findings. At this point, after decades of study, there's still no reason to believe that there will be a way of disproving the framework. Science these days is unfortunately as much about gathering funding as it is about actual science. In that environment crazy whack jobs have a bit of an advantage by seeming brilliant.
In terms of the matter at hand, does he have a PhD.? It's somewhat odd to refer to a scientist who has one without the title, and even more odd to have a device as significant as this without one. Of course, that assumes that it actually could be made to work in a reliable, safe, cost effective manner. It's definitely not there yet.
I really wish that I could take another view of this, but in a time where ID can be entertained by anybody as scientific when even at the most basic level it's problematic(As somebody else pointed out elsewhere an intelligent being would not design something as complicated as a person, complexity is just not the sign of a well designed anything), I'd be naive to believe otherwise.
That being said, there is also a lot of truly amazing work being done, unfortunately a lot of the most interesting, and potentially most useful, is being stymied for political, religious or social reasons.
What is Slashdot's fascination with this guy? Seems like an article pops up every 3 months. As an undergraduate, I had the pleasure *cough* of working with Mr. Lerner when he came to use our plasma focus to do a p-B11 study for JPL. To get the required diborane gas, a nasty toxin, we had to evaporate decaborane, another nasty toxin. In the end, we had a mess to clean up in our chamber and an academic mess when Mr. Lerner embellished (or flatly misrepresented) the results of the experiment in publication. We had to lobby to get our names off the paper, but there's still a few copies of it floating around out there. Plasma focus technology has been around since the 60s (see the works of Mather and Filipov). They make cute neutron and x-ray sources, but not much more practical for fusion power production than these "bubble fusion" designs. I believe there's still a lot to be learned from the plasma focus, and I'm glad that someone is willing to pay for further research. And if we get p-B11 fusion working, that would be a great step forward too. But I wouldn't give this guy a nickel if his head were on fire, let alone $600,000.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Both Bussard and Lerner have ideas for H+B11 fusion. They sound a bit like crack-pots conspiracy theorists, but it would be interesting if it were viable.
Here's a couple videos of talks they gave on the subject.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760
String theory is just merely unverifiable and untestable mathematical masturbation right now. It once had some very nice theoretical properties, and now appears to have some insanely nasty theoretical disadvantages tagging along too.
By contrast, the accepted competitor to the "electric universe", big bang cosmology, is based on a wide array of observational evidence which is getting stronger and stronger through the years.
Lerner does have one key insight which is fairly intriguing.
Specifically, he has a rebuttal to the otherwise very powerful results of Todd Rider on any non-equilibrium fusion methods---which appear to
Rider's analysis did not include some particularly odd quantum-mechanical effects (very little plasma physics is ever in a QM regime) which Lerner asserts can give his method an "out" and reduce harmful energy losses.
The cosmic microwave background is as you would see from a closed universe with a period of expansion as current big bang theories say, but is also as you would see from an infinite, approximately homogeneous universe.
BTW, you can't use wikipedia for the debate between the big bang and electric cosmogonies because the debate between them is not only carried out on wikipedia itself but is carried out on almost purely religious grounds using information removal instead of competitive analysis of gathered information. If you use wikipedia for this you'll just end up believing the least scientific theory.
Some of the comments to this article (particularly this one make me believe this guy might not know what he's doing.
It's not the theories that we're opposed to, it's the approach. You're more than welcome to suggest that the entire universe was the result of God's Gargantuan Fart, and that interstellar space is composed of His Holy Flatulence through which electromagnetic waves propagate. I might think you're being silly, but I won't be offended by your theory. What I WOULD be offended by is your attempt to pervert the scientific method in order to try and "prove" your theory.
Another example: I'm not offended by creationists who use scripture to dispute evolution. If they want to believe some ancient manuscript instead of modern science, that's their call. But I AM offended when they pretend to disprove evolution by misquoting and misrepresenting the research of others, or by presenting their own asinine assumptions as if they were scientifically verifiable facts.
> ITER may have a 0% chance of producing viable fusion power, but it will very likely help us understand plasma physics.
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.
> However, the work described in this story has a 0% chance of working
Actually it has a pretty reasonable chance. Nobody has been able to perform an analysis using previous theories to show that current physical understanding says it won't work. In part because Eric Lerner has been the first person to care enough about certain aspects of plasma behaviour to actually produce quantitative models.
The tokamak could be considered a cousin to this, it's just a matter of switching around where the current and magnetic fields go.
Tokamaks put the magnetic field around the donut and try to compress the plasma containing the current in the donut tighter, never seemed common sense to me to do it that way... The more you put in it, the more the forces involved would fight each other.
I'm glad to see someone put the magnetic field in the donut, and wrap the plasma around it. You've got the natural pinch point in the hole where fusion should occur, and the more current you dump into the plasma - instead of fighting the magnetic field it should make it stronger. Thus it makes the donut tighter, etc. and should behave as a positive feedback system. At least someone's now giving it a good shot, and it shouldn't hurt to try doing it this way around.
Not sure why it'd need the boron in there... Or is the intent to have that absorb any zoomies caused by fusion so it doesn't turn radioactive?
Also if the thing works to some degree and with enough efficiency, not only could it be a power supply - the DOD might be interested in modifying it into the basis of of a directed energy weapon.
The biggest selling point of p-B11 is that it's aneutronic. But as any chemist will tell you, there's some amount of everything in everything else. You can't realistically get B11 without a little B10 mixed in, which even in the best of realistic circumstances will spew out enough neutrons to drop a human being in a few minutes. It's a lot cleaner than Deuterium-Tritium but it ain't aneutronic and when people find out, you're going to get the same "not in my backyard" public attitude that is strangling fission energy.
Before you get all up inz:
1) Fast ignition:
ICF is unlikely to ever deliver excess power after conversion efficiencies. NIF uses ~400 MJ to produce ~40 MJ out. Sign me up!
Fast ignition appears to reduce the required input power by about one order of magnitude. Progress in laser diodes appears to offer another. All of a sudden things look very interesting in the ICF world.
2) Magnetized Target Fusion
ICF has high-density (10 times lead -- consider that it started as hydrogen gas) and super-short confinement times. The problem is getting the density. Magnetic approaches have low density (almost vacuum) and long confinement times. The problem is getting the confinement time.
But what about the middle ground between the two? We already know how to confine for "some" time, and compress things "ok". It turns out there's an extremely interesting area of practical design in that grey area between the two extremes, in the performance area we had 20 years ago. MTF attacks that area in an interesting way.
3) Polywell
Let's give Bussard the props the guy deserves. I don't know if the Polywell is any better positioned for success than focus fusion, and I have funny feelings in my gut about all magnetic approaches, but if this guy says it's going to work I'm willing to cut him a whole lot of slack.
Maury
Equally bullshit. His polywell design wouldn't need any fusion if his claims were correct since it violates the second law of thermodynamics and could hence be used to build a perpetum mobile machine. In particular Bussard claimed that the monoenergetic velocity distribution in the plasma was periodically restored without input of energy. While his device was not a closed system, it can be shown that for such a phenomena to occur the device needs to lose an amount of energy related to the entropy reduction of the plasma ( a mono energetic energy distribution is the lowest entropy distribution possible ). This holds for ALL systems, not just closed ones. As an example, rather chaotic water is able to freeze into a very ordered ice cube by giving up some heat to the surroundings. What this means in practice is that maintaining a non-maxwellian ion distribution in a plasma requires energy. This holds for ANY plasma no matter how it is contained, and the amount of energy needed is given by how rapidly the entropy would increase without an energy input. As it turns out the cross section for fusion is rather small, even at the resonance energy Bussard was claiming to utilize, and it turns out that maintaining the non-maxwellian velocity distribution would require more energy than you could ever get from teh fusion reaction. A couple of notes:
a)This is true for ANY fusion scheme using the p-B reaction in a mono energetic velocity distribution. Even in a head on collision the chance for scattering is so much higher than the chance of fusion that restoring the monoenergetic distribution will require more energy.
b)This does NOT assume that the plasma is quasi-neutral, isotropic or anything like that. The conclusion follows directly from the ratio between the fusion cross section, the scattering cross section and the laws of thermodynamics.
c)It doesn't apply to thermal plasmas since they are at maximum entropy for their temperature. This is why it doesn't apply to Tokamaks, hydrogen bombs, or the Sun.
Bussard and his followers used to respond to this criticism by claiming whoever had come up with it had ignored some of the features of his design, or that they didn't properly understand it or some other similar claim. In reality it doesn't depend on his design. If the second law of thermodynamics is correct, and if the cross section for fusion is much smaller than the cross section for simple scattering ( and it is , even at resonance energies ) then maintaining a non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require more energy than p-B fusion produces.
....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? .....
Neither appears to be the case. Earthly matter we are familiar with is mostly electrically neutral We assume (without evidence) that this is the case of objects in the cosmos, such as galaxies, stars, planets and the intervening space. We know the sun emits large electrical currents. When these currents get particularly big, we see spectacular aurora displays and sometimes our electrical grids fail because of these powerful flows of electricity. The presence of immense galactic and intergalactic movement of charges, in response to electric potential is borne out by many modern observations.
We observe powerful sources of X-rays, for example. How do we make these here on earth every day? Oh yea, with high voltage electricity! So are these x-rays from space evidence for immense electric fields accelerating charges over great distances, which then collide with matter or are forced into non-linear paths by the magnetic fields generated by these huge electric currents?
If these electrical forces are admitted, then the need for dark anything, including black holes, quasars and other postulated exotica in present cosmology disappears. If electricity is admitted as a major factor, in concert with gravity, in the operation of the universe, we are left with a rather ordinary cosmos with no weird never yet discovered forces, energies or matter. We can experiment in the lab with charges flowing through space. When we do, we see many of the same sort of weird and wonderful constructs and configuration that astronomers see in the distant reaches of the universe.
All theory is gray
this is called Venture Capitalism - some win, some lose.
recently there was an article about 10% of web 2.0 ventures suicceeding (90% "losing"), and most of them get much more money than 600k
Thus, something able to track the position of a star to within a milliarcsecond is able to measure distances out to 1000 parsecs (that is, a bit under 4,000 light years, only a fraction of the way to our nearest galactic neighbour).
Even the Gaia mission the ESA are sending up in a couple of years for this explicit purpose only gains about a factor of 50 on that, and that only lets us clearly measure the distance to three or four galaxies. Parallax is a nice base measurement, but unfortunately other methods are simply required to calculate distances to the vast majority of things we can observe.