Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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).
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.
Sounds interesting, but I wish they'd named it after something other than a couple of Ford car models. Ford Fusion, Ford Focus, Focus Fusion?
If they'd wanted credibility, they shoulda gone for something like the Yaris Matrix or maybe the Fit Element.
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.
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.
AFAIK, Electric Universe doesn't even have a *hypothesis* to explain the cosmic microwave anisotropy. Which was, by the way, a huge vindication for Big Bang theory, since it was predicted in advance.
By the way -- has anyone else looked up CMEF, his source of funding? Right on the front page, a big pitch for cash:
The Company is privately offering 1,000,000 shares
Centre for Environmental and Energy Resources Sweden AB is raising funds, for demonstrate the scientific feasibility of Hydrogen-Boron fusion and production of net energy by selling shares. Please contact the company at arnold@cmef.eu to discuss investing.
Support a better future
You can help yourself, your country and future generations by supporting us (CMEF). You can assist us by sending a monetary donation. Any assistance you are able to provide will be appreciated. For more information click here
I'd be willing to wager that they don't have the $10m, and might not even have the $600k yet. In fact, their whole website is about how wonderful Focus Fusion and Lerner's work is. So, I mean, acting like you got a grant as though it's some sort of vindication of your technology when it's from what's virtually a fansite isn't exactly fair. It's just some Focus Fusion fans trying to raise money to fund it.
I'll just make a quick observation that the "Tree Power" guy managed to get funding, too.
Friends! Help! A guinea pig tricked me!