Written 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 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. LPP Fusion recently released a newsletter. The letter outlined three items and gave insight into the research program for the balance of 2017. News of a new cathode along with reactor data analysis and maintenance updates were included. The most significant news was the arrival of a new beryllium cathode. A beryllium anode was received earlier in the year. With both in hand, plans for swapping out the current tungsten terminals can proceed. The balance of September will see some final testing with these tungsten electrodes. Then disassembly of the vacuum chamber will begin. The reaction chamber will receive a fresh titanium coating and have the electrodes changed out. “We expect that […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. So much resources have been devoted to ITER it must be mankind’s best hope for achieving clean sustained fusion energy. Right? Many countries have devoted billions to its construction. Vast teams of researchers have engaged multiple fronts of science and engineering challenges. Road maps with timelines stretching into decades have been drawn. With so much activity this must be the ideal path to fusion, right? Last month the BBC posted a summary report that paints a pretty grim picture for ITER’s prospects. ITER is an international effort to construct the worlds largest tokamak fusion reactor. The plans call for ITER to be built in southern France. Long ago the scientific community deemed […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. These days the term hybrid normally refers to automobiles. Most car companies now offer models propelled by both battery powered electric motors and fossil fuel engines. Nuclear reactors can also come in hybrid varieties. In this case the hybrid design features both a nuclear fusion and a nuclear fission component. An article recently posted to power-technology.com offered a comparison of this hybrid reactor design in relation to some of the leading fusion research efforts. All nuclear power stations in the world today use fissile materials for fuel. They use heavy atomic isotopes which split into lighter elements under the right conditions. The most common reaction is when a heavy atom absorbs a […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. Often when considering the relative merits of fusion energy reactor designs the focus lands on underlying scientific principles or construction costs. Rightly so since these are the upfront hurdles to reach viability. Less often is the proposed fusion fuel a topic of comparison. A recent article discussing theoretical extra-terrestrial mining operations touched on the availability of Helium-3 on the moon. Helium-3 is an isotope of helium with one less neutron than the far more abundant helium-4 variant. In fact, there’s only one or two atoms of helium-3 on earth for every million atoms of helium 4. This scarcity makes helium-3 harvested from earth a poor choice for powering a fusion reactor. However, […]
Read MoreWritten by Tim Lash, Focus Fusion Society Contributor. The world is in desperate need of energy. Growing populations, dwindling natural resources and continuing global strife place enormous strains on delivering enough energy to all earth’s inhabitants. The primary goal of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics research is to deliver abundant, cheap, green fusion energy to the world. A story recently carried by Reuters emphasizes the ever present need for such energy solutions, and the horrific lengths society can go to satisfy those needs. A town called Douma in war torn Syria supports an energy production facility detrimental to both its workers and the environment. In a series of open furnaces, workers feed plastic waste into the flames. The fumes generated by this […]
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