Reply To: Fantastic news.

[Brian H]

LINKed up wrote: I managed to survive them, thankfully. The semester started yesterday, and I am going to be sending the email to the Dean in charge of the experience stuff soon. Here’s for hoping that he likes the idea. 😀

Excellent!
BTW, you don’t have to use nekked emoticons; the “Smileys” button to the left of the entry box provides a “laugh” image: 😆 And my favorite, :cheese: . Or you can type, e.g., colon-lol-colon for the laugh– : lol : 😆

Below is a “layman’s summary” I wrote up early last year; feel free to borrow, plagarize, or excerpt in your presentation to the Dean: (continues next post)
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There are a firm and associated non-profit society in New Jersey called, respectively, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and Focus Fusion Society. They are dedicated to advancing and putting into play a revolutionary and incredibly cost-efficient energy source.

I have been following this for years, and now funding and progress have accelerated. I’ll walk you through my own understanding and projections of outcomes a bit first, and then you can get the data from their sites, directly.

Scientific/technical:
The process is a form of what’s called Dense Plasma Focus fusion. It involves inducing a combination of elements to self-ignite by (usually) magnetic contraction. There are two main varieties: steady-state (as exemplified by the Bussard approach), and pulsed. This is the latter, and is vastly easier to sustain once established. Rather than, e.g., fusing Deuterium with (highly radioactive) Tritium (both very expensive and requiring elaborate handling), both are designed to master the much tougher but ‘aneutronic’ p-B (proton-boron) process, using ordinary stable elements (hydrogen and boron). The pulsed system does not have to manage and suppress turbulence, however, as the pulse duration is a microsecond or less.

The device itself consists of a ring of 8-16 cathode pins surrounding a tubular anode, all in about the size of your palm with fingers pointed upwards. It sits in a vacuum chamber full of hot decaborane (B10H14), which supplies both boron and hydrogen. A 45KV pulse is sent up the cathodes from a capacitor bank, producing a rolling ‘donut’ of charged gas which is drawn into the anode tube.

There, it coils into a twisted cord which is drawn down, kinking more and more until it knots into a sub-microscopic “plasmoid”, which implodes under the pressure of its own magnetic fields. A brief fusion event occurs, in which single protons (ionized hydrogen) fuse with B11 ions, producing C12 which immediately fissions into 3 He4 ions. A powerful electron beam exits the plasmoid in one direction, and helium ions in an opposing beam out the opening in the anode tube. The electrons are absorbed in the chamber gas, reheating it, and the helium ions pass out through a standard “solenoid” (wound copper wire tube), which experiences a huge pulse of induced current as it slows the ion beam. That current is fed back into the power control system, and fully recharges the capacitors.

About 40% additional energy is produced as hard X-rays. (This very low and manageable % is achieved by a new (patented) quantum process for limiting the “X-ray cooling” which normally squelches plasma fusion events.) These escape the core chamber and encounter a new (patented) shell of thousands of layers of foil(s), drained by a wiring grid. The X-ray photons impact the foils, gradually giving up all their energy as current. This current is drained off as the “profit” from the generator.

Output increases with pulsing frequency. The most manageable “sweet spot” seems to be around 330cps (Hertz), which produces a steady 5MW power supply. [With adequate fast electrode cooling technology, up to 25MW seems quite possible.] One of these generators can run a year on about 5 kilos or so of boron — a trivial amount. Fuel costs are negligible.

There is no radiation outside the housing, and it can be entered after about 9 hrs “cooling off” in complete safety. (There are a only few low-energy neutrons produced from reactions on the “statistical fringes” of the main p-B energy regime, so no troublesome long-lived radioisotopes are produced in the equipment, etc. The neutrons are trapped by a shell consisting of about 1 meter of water and a few cm. of B10.) There are no waste products, other than a small amount of garden-variety helium. Some fairly low-grade excess heat is produced, which can either be vented or used for local purposes (building heating, industrial processes, etc.)

It is critical to note here that this is NOT a “thermal cycle” heat engine like ALL other nuclear/fusion/fission processes. That is, it does not depend on generating heat to boil water (or other volatile fluid) to spin a turbine to generate electricity (at about 30% efficiency, typically). The comparable energy efficiency/recovery measure in FF is estimated at 80-95%, which accounts for much of its startling cost advantages.
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