Why such slow progress?

Posted by Admin on May 11, 2006 at 11:35 PM
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Q:

A:

The immediate cause is that funding for the plasma focus has been incredibly inadequate. There are currently only five physicists working on the plasma focus device in North America, none of them full-time. In the world there are a dozen other small groups. Most only have access to devices with very small capacitor banks incapable of achieving ultra-high temperatures.

The experimental work that led to the billion-degree breakthrough was first proposed in 1987 on the basis of a detailed theory by Eric J. Lerner, President of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and Executive Director of the Focus Fusion Society. But it took until 1994 to get the project funded by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since then funding has been so minimal that over the seven years of the project only $300,000 was expended. This did not even cover equipment. A new facility had to be built entirely from government surplus equipment, a slow process.

By contrast, for most scientific programs $5 million a year is considered a small amount of funding. Tokamak research has been funded for about 25 years at $300 million a year.