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A truly fascinating discussion.

I can only take issue with one point. The math indicating a drop in GDP of three trillion seems valid, as far as it goes. It represents a store of money not expended in electricity costs, but what would happen to it then? I am not sure of the proportions, but a substantial part of electrical usage is in homes. A savings in electrical costs there would put more money in the hands of consumers, a group notorious for spending into the economy any spare cash they have lying around. The rest of the savings would be enjoyed by industry which could use it to expand and create more jobs. Electrical costs are the main limiting factor to profitability of many businesses. I suggest that this savings of money would jump back into the economy in a variety of ways.

I believe the Duke is right in that control of Focus Fusion, if it works, would best be in the hands of Eric Lerner and his team. I trust them more than I would power company executives or entrepreneurs. The legal structure and demographics of many states would provide opportunities to build and operate FF plants. In California, 40% of all electricity is not generated by the power companies but by private firms who chiefly burn natural gas. State law requires the power companies to buy this electricity and pay the same rate that it would have cost them to generate it, a price the power companies have worked for years to make as high as possible. I am not sure what sort of licensing procedures would be in play, but the trail has already been blazed.

I am hoping that Focus Fusion will be a success. If it is, there will be three areas where great changes will occur — the technical, where LPP is right now, the political, which has hardly been discussed yet, and the economic, which Duke Leto has begun to explore. I hope other contributors will express themselves on this issue.

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This is an important question, and the DPF may well contribute to a vastly changed economic environment, but different for each carbon source.

Let us imagine that for the moment that the promise of fusion, and wind, and solar is realized. We would still have considerable use for oil as a source for lubricants, feedstocks for plastics and drugs, asphalt, even. If we stop burning it in cars, the diminished use will be matched by the diminishing supply. Natural gas already has a huge application in the production of ammonia through the Haber process for Nitrogen fertilizers and other chemicals, and this will continue, although fracking the world to get it may not be necessary. Notice that so far these uses do not involve burning and liberation of CO2.

Coal would likely be the big looser, though. There is hardly any use for it but to be burned for electrical production, and there is a lot of it still out there. There is already a growing resistance to the environmental costs, but there are some very powerful interests pushing for its continued use.

Some may look to laws and government regulations to channel whatever change may occur, but I feel that the economic forces would be far more powerful. Anyone who can produce electricity cheap both financially and environmentally will have the world seek him out, and the competition will be holding a bag full of air.

The economic disruptions to come from such changes would be hard to calculate — massive change can bring both pleasure and pain. However, we are rapidly approaching a time when we may not have much choice in the matter. The economic and environmental costs of our current way of energy production are spiraling upward unsustainably, and it would be better to step toward something better while we can still choose where to set our foot.

The big investors with a large carbon footprint in their portfolio would probably fight such changes for a while, and then quietly slide out of their compromised investments. There is a special line on the IRS form for such things.

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I didn’t read Rezwan’s June 16 article on “Energy League and Brackets Campaign,” but I must have been channeling her keyboard. My concept was more narrow than hers, but it should be useful as a basic information source, the “Baseball Cards”. Several questions need to be asked:

Who would be in charge?

What would be the scope of the endeavor? Is the matrix format I mentioned suitable? If so, what forms of energy production should be in the rows and what characteristics evaluated should be in the columns? My original thought was purely on atomic fission and fusion, but should coal, natural gas, wind, solar, etc, be part of the matrix?

Who is the target audience for this information? If it is on a web site, eventually the web crawlers will find it and it will pop up on Google searches. Who do we want to communicate with, or would it be more in-house information? The form it takes would be important.

I see this as a sub-project within a larger campaign, outlined by Rezwan, so it should be fashioned carefully to prove useful in that larger picture.

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The basic theoretical support goes back to Maxwell’s theories of electro-magnetism. A charged particle moving through a coil of wire will induce an electric current, loosing some of its kinetic energy. Such a device is basically a particle accelerator operating in reverse. Perhaps the statement of 90% efficiency is based on the performance of such accelerators, which are highly refined instruments. It may be that the hard data is lacking yet because such an abundant and tightly colimated stream of alpha particles traveling at such a high velocity has been a rare item. As an electrician, I am confident that to develop this part of a future FF generator would present surmountable technical problems.

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Since I am a subscriber to Discover Magazine, I read this article when it first came out. Immediately, I sent a letter to the editor suggesting that there were other, unmentioned “dark horse” projects which might have better chances of achieving success. I highlighted LPP and the progress to date, but it was not printed, and there was no response. There have been other letters to other persons and institutions with the same, subdued result.

I have come to the conclusion that in this game achievements often don’t matter — not routine fusion of Deuterium for over a year, not one billion degrees, not steady progress. In the Discover article, paragraphs 4 and 5 unintentionally reveal a critical fact about this game that might need some consideration.

The Tokamak will cost $20 billion, NIF has already burned up $3.5 billion, but Glen Wurden’s project weighs in at less than 4 million, and even though he thinks he has a fair chance at success, he resists any comparisons with the larger projects. The unconscious attitude expressed here points to an important fact.

From birth Americans are trained to evaluate everything in terms of money. The more it costs, the better it is. In this process, they confuse value with price. Talking to friends investing in the stock and commodity markets has uncovered a great reluctance to buy anything when the price is down because “cheap” is disreputable for them. They prefer to buy when the price is high because they think they are buying value. These people will also tell me that “buy low and sell high” will make money, but they can’t do it, and they loose money consistently.

Therefore, the Tokamak is a “great” project because it is “worth” $20 billion. This great wad of probably wasted money will attract more money until the project collapses. So where does that leave LPP?

I believe that LPP has sparse funding not for reasons based on technology, but more on psychology. Potential funding sources would take a look and ask “how much is it worth”. The stream of cash gets the blood flowing for these folks, not a stream of helium nuclei. And so, LPP has sparse funding because the funding has been sparse. How to break out.

This is the part where I am bound to get yelled at, the Machiavellian part. I feel that a measure of cleverness in a a good cause should at least be considered. . . .

If the impression could be given that funding is sufficient, even abundant, it would probably attract more attention than if net electricity had been produced. The perception of fund raising ability could incite more, a technique used all the time in the business world. If a measure of exclusivity was exercised, it would be like ringing Pavlov’s dinner bell. Much care would be necessary, but nothing breeds success like the impression of success.

I have been somewhat reluctant to post this comment. I know that many readers would think that such psychological warfare should be beyond those interested in advancing science, but we are swimming with sharks here, and not with guppies.

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I believe that what Rezwan says about the spinoff benefits of projects like ITER is true. A similar case: out of SDI (Star Wars), a failed endeavor, came adaptive optics, a giant boon to astronomy. But at what cost? Both ITER and NIF are primarily for discovering new physics rather than adding to the useful store of technology, and they gobble up enough funds to run a small country. However, if these projects disappear, the cause of fusion research will be harmed, and the damage could be especially telling during this time of global economic weakness.

The difficulties of these two major projects must be managed carefully. We should be advancing the cause of FUSION power, stressing that there is no obvious best method yet, that the expenditure of funds is good and necessary, but that financing should be spread around a bit more to hedge our bets. That ITER and NIF are considered to be THE fusion projects is dangerous, and they should be reduced in stature, but not down to zero.

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As a certified Electrician practicing in California, I have access to several sources of basic information about the fundamentals of electricity, but unfortunately many of them are proprietary, and I cannot pass them on. The link offered by Francisi is a good one, but it might be useful to know what the information is needed for. I don’t think that the crew building FF1 needs a primer, so is the information for FFS members who want to grasp the basic concepts? If so, the hose/water flow analogy used by Aeronaut is a powerful one, explaining voltage, current and resistance. Inductance and capacitance would be a bit more difficult since they require the subject to visualize processes which have no obvious analogue to use for illustration. Again, what is the target audience and how much would they need to know?

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Most interesting. Could it be that economic problems in the European Union may contribute to choking off funds for ITER? This project always was a giant black hole for money with an absurdly long timeline. Starving it for cash at this time will only lengthen the time to results, opening a better opportunity for a dark-horse, low-budget project. I can think of one. . .

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I have to say I like it. This new orientation looks like a tree, the tree of life maybe. The traditional peace symbol looked a bit too much like an ICBM to me. The new orientation also looks like a person with uplifted arms. All good.

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This certainly has turned into an interesting conversation. The inevitable diminution of job opportunities is certainly true, but it seems to me only if the technological horizon remains static or shrinks. For the last fifty years this has been so, but not always before that.

Canals used to be big on the East coast. Thousands of workers were employed digging them, barge builders produced at full speed, factories sprang up along the banks. Then came the railroad. The diggers were unemployed, and barge builders went broke, but overall the horizon expanded. The steel industry shifted into high gear, new jobs were created running rail lines across the country, Midwestern farmers had a way to market their produce, This story was repeated in many diverse ways. The expanding horizon readily absorbed the job losses, and the U.S. entered a boom time.

I hope we may see a chance to expand the horizon with new opportunities which we have yet to visualize. I have already described one which I am sure will be huge in my part of the country. In the Southwest we mostly don’t get rained on. We must import our water, stealing it from some one else to fill our needs. Cheap power for water purification of brackish or salt water would be an enormous breakthrough. For example, factories which can’t be built now because of the need for large amounts of water would be feasible creating jobs. Our biggest industry, agriculture, could be doubled if we had more water. This is just one narrow slice of the spectrum of possibilities.

How many more opportunities will we see through an expanding horizon?

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Aeronaut brought up an important point — the jobs which could be created. In my small town of 30,000, we would need perhaps twenty generators for electricity and several more for water purification. Someone would have to build them, and I would imagine a good manufacturing location would be in a state with idle factories and skilled people needing work. Someone else would have to install these facilities, and others run them. This is a good time to be pitching jobs.

A couple of potential tag lines:

1) Focus Fusion to tame a star.
2) Step into the 21st century.
3) Repower America.

We might want to adopt a token, an animal representing who we think we are. I would suggest the Cheetah. For the megabuck projects like the tokamak, the Hippopotamus.

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Originally my point had to do with the logo exclusively, but Rezwan has taken it in a new and important direction. How is the whole concept of Focus Fusion to be sold, not only now as an innovational research project, but, if it can be made to work, as a radical new type of electrical generator. An approach which would work in Berkeley would fail in Houston and vice versa. The peace symbol is only a symbol ( if I may presume ) of a larger issue, the benefit as it is percieved. For some, reduction of the overall carbon footprint would be telling, for others the savings of money would be most important. A few would like the novelty of the technology, others would just like to stick it to the coal companies.

The people i read on this website are those who “got it” right away. They all seem to understand the importance of the work being done and the implications, but most people will have to have it explained or even sold to them. How to do this. The means would have to be diverse.

I can only speak for the people who live around me in Southern California. We have a fission power plant at San Onofre just down the coast from us, and it has been viewed with suspicion and dread by most of us since it was built. The beach next to it has been off limits for years due to radioactive contamination, and nobody would dare eat the fish from that area. The plant is aging and nearing the point of retirement or rebuilding. To pitch support for research into a method of electrical generation which would eliminate this expensive monstrosity might bear fruit, but the same arguments would have less weight in L.A., 75 miles distant. There the savings of money on electrical bills may be telling. Both these points may be unimportant elsewhere. An isolated community near Death Valley without any electricity could be impressed by the low cost of building their own power plant.

To return to Rezwan’s point, the approach we use must be tailored to the audience, including the symbol. The respondents to this site seem to come from diverse enough locations that I feel that they could speak authoritatively for the people around them — what would those people find persuasive about a research project now and ( hopefully ) a finished product later?

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My original choice of words was “win/win”, but it is an expression somewhat overused. I could not possibly quantify the gain since the technology is not yet mature. My experience was that a momentary contact with the panel produced second degree burns to the side of my hand. If any inexpensive means could be developed to harvest some electricity from this heat, it would be a good thing and worth keeping track of its development.

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This makes a lot of sense, especially with regard to the several smaller projects like LPP which labor mightily with little notice. A positive attitude here would allow an important spirit of cooperation and some mutual benefit. However, would the same apply to the “money into black hole” projects like NIF and the Tokamak? When the NIF finally gets ignition, the emotion I would be suppressing would sound like “better late than never — and this cost you how much?” I suppose I could suck it up and grin, passing along a “well done” if it would help, but would they even notice?

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This is a fascinating subject, not only for harvesting power from the DPF production of X-rays, but also as a method to get a few extra watts cheaply from the waste heat that the device will produce. If it works, the method should scale down economically to any source of heat.

As an electrician, I can suggest another application right away. Having installed several sets of solar panels, I learned from experience not to touch them when they have been exposed to the sun for a while. The natural heat build up is a source of hazard and inefficiency. When the panels are hot, they yield less watts per lumen. Extracting the heat to generate electricity would increase the efficiency of the panels, a double win.

Doncha love modern technology?

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