[Alex Pollard]

Another well-funded fusion concept lacking an efficient means for converting generated energy into electricity:

Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

At a time when fossil fuel supplies are dwindling and fears about global warming are forcing governments to seek clean energy sources, fusion could provide the answer. Hydrogen, the fuel needed for fusion reactions, is among the most abundant in the universe. Building work on the £1.2 billion nuclear fusion experiment is due to be completed in spring.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.

[Alex Pollard]

It’s Eric’s baby, so it should share his surname.

And it will be a bright spark, so I’d call it Fast Learner 🙂

[Alex Pollard]

Yes Black Light Power is the only other futuristic energy technology that could possibly save the world from a permanent energy crisis and decline. But it depends on “new physics” whereas FF does not. Dr Mills seems to have stumbled upon something real but it is not clear he has a complete theoretical understanding of what he has found. Hence he is probably stabbing in the dark a bit.

[Alex Pollard]

texaslabrat wrote: Especially now that both camps can handle double-precision computation in hardware.

Lerner wrote: You’re right and we are starting to work on this now. Details will be announced soon.

This is excellent news, single-precision GPUs are wholly inadequate for scientific purposes.

[Alex Pollard]

Following up on the contents of these slashdot posts:

Alex Pollard wrote:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23549241

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552411

Supposedly the paper in question could not be agreed to because it referred to thermonuclear neutron temperatures.
I’m not sure which of these papers it is:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0205/0205026.pdf
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0401/0401126.pdf

The term “thermonuclear” arises in neither. However isotropic neutrons were found

The isotropic distribution of the neutrons is indicated by their detection at both detectors, which are 90 degrees apart in azimuthal direction.

The slashdot poster hasn’t explained the dispute well enough for me to take his word for it.

It seems like the author of these slashdot posts is referring to the dispute Mr Lerner discusses here

http://www.progressiveengineer.com/PEWebBackissues2002/PEWeb%2028%20Jul%2002-2/28editor.htm

The experimental work was performed last year at Texas A&M University in a project funded by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA. Other scientists congratulated us on the success.

Yet, instead of hailing this new work, a Los Alamos National Laboratory manager threatened two members of our research team with firing if they didn’t repudiate the results.

Seems like politics got in the way of physics.

[Alex Pollard]

The slashdot discussion has some interesting contributions. I have no idea how reliable they are.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552533

Russians tried it way back and failed. Every time they though they were close, boom, energy lost and no reaction. The plasma with wiggle and break. It does NOT work.

From his diagrams, the device is much too simplistic to work. Russians used a similar setup. Plasma does not interact with just the outside, it interacts with itself. And that’s the problem that existed since the 60s.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552955

I am sure there are ways to stabilise the PF plasma, if enough efforts is put in, similar to the case of tokamak. I understand that somewhere in Russia they are building, or perhap built already, a very large PF device. Nothing seem to be exciting back in US.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23549241

Plasma focus technology has been around since the 60s (see the works of Mather and Filipov). They make cute neutron and x-ray sources, but not much more practical for fusion power production than these “bubble fusion” designs. I believe there’s still a lot to be learned from the plasma focus, and I’m glad that someone is willing to pay for further research. And if we get p-B11 fusion working, that would be a great step forward too.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=564391&cid=23552411

the problem is that it takes a beam-cold target approach. It is difficult to reach the temperatures necessary to achieve a significant fusion burn in this way. The plasma cannot be considered thermonuclear, as the neutron distribution is not isotropic – this was one of the bones we had with Mr. Lerner’s conclusions, as I recall. There are still a lot of questions about confinement as well. The plasma constrained by its own magnetic fields, so it fits in this sort of odd category between inertial and magnetic confinement. In terms of pulsed fusion, to me the Z-pinch method holds a bit more promise, as we understand a great deal more about how x-rays contribute to confinement and burn.

[Alex Pollard]

Brian H wrote:
Your committee paper link gives the following error: “Unfortunately ParlInfo Web was unable to open the the document you have selected.
Please notify the APH Web Manager using the Mail To link in the page footer below.”
Do you have another link?

I used the permalink and it still works for me.

[Alex Pollard]

Rezwan wrote:
Still, very inspiring. We have a better product, we just need better marketing – to polish our act and take it on the road so to speak. And we’re doing that now, with, among other things, random unnamed people in Australia raising the issue in a clear and eloquent way. He explained it well in that short time.

What can I say, I’m happy to help!

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/comments/iter_recruits_australians/

I also mentioned Focus Fusion when I appeared before an Australian Senate committee.

http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/TranslateWIPILink.aspx?Folder=COMMSEN&Criteria=DOC_DATE:2006-05-12;JOB:9266;SEQ_NUM:14&#x3B;

“It has come to my attention�I am an engineer by training�that there are technologies such as focus fusion, which basically involves a relatively small-scale production of energy, costing in the range of tens of millions to establish. It has no neutron production, so there is less radioactivity or no radioactivity. It has a very high conversion efficiency to electricity. The reason why it may not have been picked up is that it is only a recently researched concept. It has been researched in university laboratories in the United States and Chile. NASA has shown interest in the concept.”

[Alex Pollard]

Thanks for that link.

I do not know much about any advantages Magnetized Target Fusion would have over Focus Fusion.

The concept is described here

http://www.generalfusion.com/t5_general_fusion.php

It seems pretty elaborate and quite untested.

The main disadvantages appear to be that
* it requires the extraction of tritium from a liquid lead-lithium mixture
* it would rely on conventional thermal conversion to electricity, and not use a highly efficient approach such as capturing an ion beam and X-rays. This makes break-even much harder.

These challenges are not much different from those of the Tokamak project, they are just trying to solve the same problems in a more creative way.

Whereas Focus Fusion pretty much avoids these problems in the first place.

Focus Fusion is the only fusion technology I have come across that seems to have a plausible end-to-end solution covering the following issues:

* commonly available and cheap fuel
* heating the plasma
* confining the plasma
* not producing excessive neutrons
* extraction of waste products from chamber
* and crucially, capturing the resulting energy in the most efficient manner possible.

[Alex Pollard]

I recently saw a fascinating presentation from the company Simmersion:

http://www.simmersion.com.au/

The company is having a lot of success selling urban landscape modelling tools to local councils to help with planning decisions. The interesting
stuff is what else you can do with high-power off-the-shelf graphics hardware, in real-time.

What they are now doing at Simmersion is to utilisise the massively parallel capabilities of a typical graphics “shader” to do very intensive computations in about 1/1000th the time a typical CPU could do it. So for example, in one simulation the sky is coloured according to a scattering and refraction formula about two pages in length. Every pixel in the sky is painted using this algorithm in real-time – it is not pre-rendered.

A clearer example of this idea is a galaxy simulation. On screen a galaxy is displayed with a very bulbous massive sphere at the centre of a uniform disc of stars orbiting around it. Then the simulation sends a black hole through the disc and you see on the screen all the hundreds of millions of simulated stars being flung around in the black hole’s gravity field. Another simulation (this one was from Nvidia) showed real-time computational fluid dynamics – you could manipulate a puff of dust and a pool of water in real time. The graphics card is doing the simple drawing, but importantly, it’s also doing the intensive computational fluid dynamics calculations in real time.

My point, finally, is that if the average PC user has Windows Vista, they will have a very powerful parallel numerical processor. Your average technology enthusiast could model highly complicated plasma effects on their home PC. The power of graphics cards is doubling every 6 months so it won’t be long before realistic real-time particle-in-cell plasma simulations are possible on desktop PCs.

You could have a virtual plasma science workshop on your desktop, showing comparisons of Tokamak fusion attempts vs focus fusion vs the Bussard concept for example.

For the first time we may also have amateur astronomers creating highly orthodox simulations of galaxies and solar systems. As people play around with this stuff, they may come to realise how completely inadequate the models are. Previously only the institutional researchers have access to this power.

Enabling such a direct comparison could convince a lot of people that the conventional models are seriously lacking. I know computer models are garbage-in-garbage-out, which is why enabling a comparison would be best.

I’d suggest finding someone from the games industry to kick-start this effort. They should have lots of graphics cards know-how. They may be looking for another outlets for their talents, like many others in the gaming industry who are finding the competitiion getting intense – the games industry is now bigger than Hollywood.

[Alex Pollard]

The Earth is electrically charged with respect to space, for a start there is an electric field of 150V/m (downward) at the Earth’s surface. There are continual electrical exchanges between the upper atmosphere and space – “sprites” and “elves”. I would anticipate unexpected electrical effects when firing a stream of metal projectiles through the atmosphere. Mind you, such effects could perhaps be harnessed to power the process.

[Alex Pollard]

My understanding is that X-ray capture is necessary to achieve break-even for focus fusion, in addition to capturing the ion beam.

Eric Lerner has some IP in the area though.

See

http://www.lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/business_plan.htm

[Alex Pollard]

In my pitch I like to emphasise that the expenditure on focus fusion research will be quite small, and it will not take long to determine whether it is viable or not.

That is, I don’t assume that focus fusion will definitely work because I don’t want to come across as a zealot who has seen the light and has some “miracle” solution. People have no way of knowing how credible the concept is, and they won’t instantly take our word for it. Focus Fusion may well end up being a miracle solution, but we don’t know that yet.

And as a way explaining why it gets so little attention, I lead into this by talking about how misguided institutional science can be.

[Alex Pollard]

Here is an explanation of extreme ball lightening:

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=88edua1k

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