There are lots of people out there claiming to know how to get cheap or even free energy. Why is Focus Fusion different?

1) Two different governments have thought enough of this research to put funding into it. From 1994-2001, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics was funded $300,000 by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to carry out research aimed at developing Focus Fusion for space propulsion. This research was carried out in collaboration with teams of scientists at the University of Illinois and Texas A&M University. The funding terminated in 2001, not because JPL was dissatisfied with the results, but because the program that was funding this and other research, Advanced Propulsion Technology, was itself de-funded.

In addition, a technical review of our dense plasma focus development proposal, by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S. Dept. of Commerce) concluded: "Technically the plan is very strong. The objective is truly revolutionary, yet the plan to achieve it is feasible. The steps to the objective are clearly defined. The plan is based on new, highly original theory and analysis. There is a good coordination of simulation and experimentation. The optimization plan, while ambitious, is feasible."

While the proposal that LPP made to NIST is for an X-ray source, not a fusion reactor, ALL of the scientific assumptions, theories and techniques that lead us to calculate that we can achieve net energy production with Focus Fusion were included in this proposal to justify the achievement of the X-ray goals. The physical conditions that we promised in order to produce the X-rays will also allow the production of net fusion energy.

2) Unlike zero-point energy and cold fusion, which are based on new physical theories, or at least new interpretations of exiting theories, Focus Fusion is based on an original application of very-well-confirmed scientific theories such as electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. No “new physical theories” are invoked.

The work of LPP president Eric Lerner in this field is taken seriously by his peers. He has presented the science behind our approach in a scientific paper and at several scientific conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science, 2002: the American Physical Society, 2003 and the XI Latin American Workshop on Plasma Physics, 2005. Lerner was an invited speaker at both the Fifth (2003) and Sixth (2005) Symposia on Current Trends in International Fusion Research, which is sponsored by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In the Sixth Symposium, the paper was presented with Robert E. Terry, Naval Research Laboratory. http://www.physicsessays.com/doc/s2005/Lerner_Transparencies.pdf

No criticisms of the underlying science of Focus Fusion have been raised at any of these conferences. On the contrary, physicists in the field praised Lerner’s approach: "The experimental program that LPP plans to carry out has great potential to show how the plasma focus can be used to generate fusion energy and to demonstrate the feasibility of hydrogen-boron fusion," said Dr. Julio Herrera, physicist and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a leading international expert on the plasma focus.

3) Eric Lerner, in addition to his work in controlled fusion, is an internationally known astrophysicist, whose original theories of quasars, large-scale structure and the cosmic background radiation have been published in leading astronomy and plasma physics journals, including The Astrophysics Journal http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=doi:10.1086/169167, Astrophysics and Space Science, IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, and Lasers and Particle Beams. His work challenging the Big Bang theory has been reported in popular science magazines, including a cover article of New Scientist (July 2, 2005) and in television and film documentaries. His views on cosmology have been published in periodicals ranging from Sky and Telescope to The New York Times. He is the author of the cosmology popularization, The Big Bang Never Happened, (Vintage) and co-editor of the Proceedings of the First Crisis in Cosmology Conference (American Institute of Physics Proceeding Series.) In 2006, he was a Visiting Astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Santiago, Chile, one of the foremost observatories in the world. He has been invited to present his theories at many leading institutions, including ESO, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Princeton University, the University of Pavia (Italy), The University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

4) Focus Fusion is not the product of one researcher. It is the fruit of a research program involving dozens of experimental groups over 40 years. The plasma focus device, while it has suffered over the years from a great lack of funding, and faced challenges to theoretical understanding, has now become one of the most promising alternatives to the costly tokamak approach to fusion. In Latin America, for example, plasma focus devices are the only alternative device that is now being actively researched. LPP’s contribution to the plasma focus research has been, first, to develop a quantitative theory of the plasma focus that indicated that it was capable of burning hydrogen-boron fuel; second, to demonstrate that the magnetic field effect would greatly reduce the cooling of the plasma by X-rays, and third, to introduce the idea of improving the efficiency of the device by injecting angular momentum into it. These innovations are what are expected to overcome the remaining technical barriers to hydrogen-boron fusion.

In this work, LPP President Lerner has built on the work of the late plasma focus pioneers Winston Bostick and Victoria Nardi of Steven Institute of Technology and of the founder of modern plasma physics, Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven.

Focus Fusion reactors will create NO radioactive waste. While their energy is derived from nuclear reactions, they are very different reactions than those in present day nuclear reactors. The "waste product" of Focus Fusion is non-radioactive helium gas.

In current nuclear reactors, energy is produced through nuclear fission. Here, a neutron breaks apart a uranium nucleus releasing energy and more high-energy neutrons. The nuclear fragments produced are highly radioactive. They naturally decay and give off their own energetic radiation. In addition, the neutrons smash into the nuclei of atoms in the reactor structure, transmuting them to radioactive nuclei as well. All of these radioactive atoms constitute nuclear waste.

The form of nuclear fusion that the US government has funded, which uses deuterium and tritium as fuel, also produces some radioactive waste, although far less than fission. Tritium, a form of hydrogen with two additional neutrons, is itself radioactive. When deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse together they produce nucleus of harmless and non-radioactive helium and a neutron. But the high energy neutron that carries most of the energy of the reaction can again smash into the reactor's structure making it radioactive.

In Focus Fusion, however, none of this occurs. The fuel that will be used consists of hydrogen and boron. Both are harmless, non-radioactive substances. When hydrogen nuclei (protons) and boron nuclei fuse together at extremely high temperatures, they produce only helium nuclei and no neutrons.

A secondary reaction occurs when some helium nuclei fuse with boron nuclei, which does produce some neutrons. But these reactions are rare, and only 1/1000th of the energy is emitted in the form of neutrons. More important, none of these neutrons have enough energy to transform the materials they hit into long-lived radioactive materials. So no such radioactive materials are produced in the reactor structure. Hydrogen-boron reactors would be free of long-lived radioactivity, and the small number of neutrons emitted could easily be absorbed in several inches of shielding.

Focus Fusion reactors are so safe that anyone could safely enter the reactor room seconds after it had been turned off, even if it had previously been functioning for a year. Short-lived radioactivity within the shielded reactor chamber would be below background levels in a few hours, allowing the reactor vessel to be safely opened and maintained.

 

But weren't such claims made about nuclear fission energy as well? And they did not pan out, did they?

Focus Fusion reactors will produce electricity in a fundamentally different and much cheaper way than previous energy sources because they will avoid expensive turbines and generators.

 

Since Edison's time, there has been one main way to produce electricity. A heat source boils water to produce high temperature steam. The steam is fed under pressure to a turbine. The spinning of the turbine feeds power to a spinning electric generator producing electric power. Whether the source of heat is coal, oil, gas, or nuclear fission, the basic process is the same. The majority of the cost of a modern power station comes from the turbine, electric generator, and the associated plumbing to handle the steam and water. So simply replacing the heat source cannot produce cheap electricity.

A Focus Fusion reactor would produce electricity very differently. The energy from fusion reactions is released mainly in the form of a high-energy, pulsed beam of helium nuclei. Since the nuclei are electrically charged, this beam is already an electric current. All that is needed is to capture this electric energy into an electric circuit. This can be done by allowing the pulsed beam to generate electric currents in a series of coils as it passes through them. This is much the same way that a transformer works, stepping electric power down from the high voltage of a transmission line to the low voltage used in homes and factories. It is also like a particle accelerator run in reverse. Such an electrical transformation can be highly efficient, probably around 70%. What is most important is that it is exceedingly cheap and compact. The steam turbines and electrical generators are eliminated. A 5 MW Focus Fusion reactor may cost around $300,000 and produce electricity for 1/10th of a cent per kWh. This is fifty times less than current electric costs. Fuel costs will be negligible because a 5 MW plant will require only five pounds of fuel per year.

 

Why is Focus Fusion different?

Cold fusion involves claims that fusion reactions can be produced at room temperature in a simple cell with a solution and electrodes. For cold fusion to work, some basic scientific theories have to be violated. These theories, such as Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and theories of nuclear reactions, have been well validated in hundreds of thousands of experiments and underlie much of modern technology.

 

These theories state that atomic nuclei are positively charged and thus repel each other. For nuclei to overcome this repulsion and get close enough to fuse, they need to have high energies and thus high temperatures. For that reason, fusion at room temperature just does not make sense. Most scientists were rightly skeptical of cold fusion. The evidence claimed to support cold fusion was inconclusive and hard to reproduce.

The situation is very different for Focus Fusion. The process that leads to fusion in the plasma focus device is well understood using existing physical theories. Experiments have demonstrated that the very high temperatures, plasma density, and confinement time needed to fuse hydrogen and boron have been achieved. Theoretical models of the plasma focus based on these experiments indicate that the conditions for net energy output are obtainable with devices not much larger than existing ones.

The immediate cause is that funding for the plasma focus has been incredibly inadequate. There are currently only five physicists working on the plasma focus device in North America, and none of them full-time. In the rest of the world, there are a dozen other small groups. Most only have access to devices with very small capacitor banks incapable of achieving ultra-high temperatures.

The experimental work that led to the billion-degree breakthrough was first proposed in 1987 on the basis of a detailed theory by Eric J. Lerner, President of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and Executive Director of the Focus Fusion Society. But it took until 1994 to get the project funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since then, funding has been so minimal that over the seven years of the project, only $300,000 was expended. This did not even cover equipment. A new facility had to be built entirely from government surplus equipment, a slow process.

By contrast, for most scientific programs, $5 million a year is considered a small amount of funding. Tokamak research has been funded for about 25 years at $300 million a year.

There have been institutional obstacles to funding small scale fusion projects including, but not limited to, Focus Fusion. For the past 25 years nearly all fusion funding has been concentrated in one technology, the tokamak. The tokamak is an intrinsically large machine where the containment field is provided by external magnets. The tokamak is aimed at burning deuterium-tritium fuel. In addition, the large size and complexity of a tokamak reactor make many scientists doubt that they could ever produce energy at competitive costs. But within the fusion program, as with many government programs, there is a political prejudice toward large projects because of the way that money is allocated. Large projects with corporate sponsors which generate significant numbers of jobs are supported by Congress. Small projects lack such political support.

Focus Fusion represents a fundamentally different approach than the vast majority of existing technologies. Since the innovation of the steam engine, most technology has aimed at controlling nature by producing conditions that are stable and homogeneous, close to equilibrium. Instabilities (rapid changes that create inhomogeneities) are avoided as they decrease predictability. The tokamak, for example, functions by attempting to produce a plasma that is stable and quiet.

In contrast, the plasma focus device functions by using instabilities that nature provides. It is natural instabilities that cause the plasma filaments to form and later to compress themselves into an ultra dense plasmoid to generate fusion temperatures. Such instabilities are common in nature and, as Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine has emphasized, are the way that nature evolves and creates new structures and new types of order.

While the stable-state homogeneous approach to controlling nature has produced great advances, it is limited and at times highly destructive. Yet the stability approach dominates. As a result, funding agencies such as the Department of Energy have had difficulty accepting the instability-based approach of the plasma focus device. It is likely that major government funding will not become available until the feasibility of hydrogen-boron fusion has been demonstrated experimentally.