Written by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. A Quora post from earlier this year is gaining visibility on social media platforms. The post asks and tries to answer what has been keeping us from making a viable fusion reactor. It cites a half dozen barriers that have proven difficult to overcome. Three can be grouped as communication issues, with the other three as funding issues. The communication issues cover public ignorance, poor communication from the scientific community and over hyped claims. People are generally unaware of fusion power, its potential and of current research efforts. It’s not a topic that garners mainstream media attention. Most folks don’t seek out such news. The lack of accessible communication from the fusion […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Historically, governments and universities were centers of cutting edge research. They were the primary types of institutions that could bear the risk of the most ambitious plans. Now a new type of venture is rising. Privately funded research facilities whose path is unexplored but who hold the potential for great rewards. Fusion research exhibits this trend. LPPFusion, Tri-Alpha Energy, General Fusion and Hellion are all privately funded groups pursuing fusion energy. Following the recent announcement of LLPFusion’s WeFunder campaign comes news of a British company, First Light Fusion, obtaining new venture funding. First Light Fusion (FLF) hopes to harness fusion power via a novel inertial confinement technique. Using proprietary computer simulation, they […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. The ITER project in France garners lots of press coverage. Another fusion effort is taking place in England using similar project phases but different design approaches. A UK company called Tokamak Energy is using a spherical tokamak design to achieve net gain fusion power. Like ITER, they are planning for a similar development path. Both projects have built proof of concept devices and each is planing a fusion power demonstrator. Tokamak Energy believes a spherical fusion device can achieve net power generation more cheaply than conventional toroidal designs. The ITER device will follow a toroidal design. This reactor shape is often compared to a doughnut. A spherical tokamak shrinks the doughnut hole […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. LPPFusion has been pursuing aneutronic fusion from pB11 fuel for some time. Their fuel components of hydrogen (one proton) and boron-11 fuel fuse at high temperatures to produce an excited state of carbon-12 which immediately decays to three helium nuclei. This same fuel is behind a fusion experiment using lasers. Lasers accelerate protons to fuse with stationary boron-11. A team of international researchers conducted tests to prove the viability of this approach. The July 2017 edition of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B described these results. The research was performed using the ECLIPSE saphire laser at Centre Lasers Intenses et Applications (CELIA) hosted at the University of Bordeaux. The laser, […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Update: 12/12/2017 A month after the start, crowdfunding has already raised nearly 90% of it’s initial goal – and there are 5 more months to go to reach the stretch-goal! Thanks to recent changes to U.S. securities laws, LPPFusion is able to start a crowdfunding round of investment. Announced November 9th 2017, the initiative hopes to raise investment capital to support their search for clean, inexpensive, aneutronic fusion power. In 2012 President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act). Title III of this legislation went into effect on May 16th 2016 and allows for more liberal investment opportunities in private companies. LPPFusion is using these new rules to place […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is an international agreement on the nuclear program of Iran. The agreement’s goal is to allow Iran to pursue peaceful nuclear research without developing weapons making capabilities. Participants in the agreement, finalized in Vienna on 14 July 2015, include Iran, the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States—plus Germany), and the European Union. Last month, as reported by Science, President Trump declared that the JCPOA is not in the United States’s national interest. The U.S. Congress now has 60 days to reevaluate it. One provision of JCOPA provided a path for Iran to join the […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. A recent post highlighted the importance of computer based simulation to fusion science. We now have two more reports demonstrating the important role computer science plays in fusion research. The first is a story from the venerable Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). PPPL in collaboration with General Atomics (GA) have joined forces to bring PPPL’s premier transport code, TRANSP, to beginning users and experts alike. Another story illustrates that fusion researchers are in constant need of greater computing resources. Private research lab Tri Alpha Energy (TAE) thinks it will need exascale supercomputers to help design its next reactor. PPPL’s TRANSP code helps researchers understand plasma transport analysis: the study of how plasma […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. A joint announcement recently outlined a new collaboration between LPP Fusion and the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The Center for Energy Research (CER) at UCSD will cooperate on fusion research with LPP Fusion. The research will strive for sustained fusion power from a dense plasma focus (DPF) reactor. CER Director, Farhat N. Beg stated “LPPFusion is a leader in this field and will make available to CER its research data and expertise to help us set up our own DPF facility at UC San Diego.” The benefits of fusion energy from a DPF have guided the development of LPP Fusion’s Focus Fusion 1 (FF-1) reactor. These benefits include low cost, […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. There are a pair of stories highlighting the importance of computer simulation for fusion science. Fusion research is expensive. Big reactors require large quantities of costly materials. Construction projects run for years or decades. Ramp up times necessitate huge investments before the science can even begin. Hence the usefulness of computer simulation. Careful modeling of reactor design or plasma behavior can yield insights that save time and money while inching us closer to clean fusion power. Therefore, computers are often the most valuable tool to the fusion scientist. The first story describes simulation of plasma turbulence. Researchers used multi-scale simulations to study turbulent instabilities that cause plasma heat loss. The simulation added […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. The prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently published a story covering LPP Fusion. Author Mark Anderson describes the efforts at LPP FUsion, their unique approach to aneutronic fusion, upcoming publications as well as some quotes from Eric Lerner. The article lays out the basic design and function of the dense plasma pinch reactor upon which LPP bases their work, much of which will be familiar to regular readers of the Focus Fusion Society. More interesting is the mention of a publication under peer review at the journal Physics of Plasmas. Reportedly the proposed article will show the achievement of confined mean ion energies of 200 kilo-electron volts. To reach […]
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