Focus Fusion?

[Eric L]

To get back to the original topic of this thread, which is whether or not our work in focus fusion is either a fraud or, as Ben m says ”crackpot”. If we get away from the kindergarten-level name-calling-- “you’re crazy!”-- which is literally what crackpot means, the real question is how do you tell if a line of research is legitimate science or pseudoscience, something which is not science at all?

A lot on this thread makes the false syllogism:” Pseudoscience is rejected by almost all scientists in the field. Unpopular scientific ideas are (by definition) rejected by almost all scientists in the field. Therefore all unpopular scientific ideas are pseudoscience." I hope when spelled out like this, the failure of the logic is clear. No, not all unpopular ideas are pseudoscience and not all of them are even wrong.

If you reject this premise, then you end up with orthodoxy—the majority opinion is always right—which is death to scientific progress.

So how do you really tell pseudoscience from real science, which can be right or wrong? Well, here are my ideas: (Jean Tate, I just noticed I could post websites) If you look at those criteria, you can see why our focus fusion research could never be judged as pseudoscience, no matter how unlikely you think our success might be.

The second point I want to make is that Ben m is wrong in his assertion that our basic model(which is Bostick’s basic model) is even unpopular in the field today. I have not noticed Ben m admitting his error here even though I’ve provided the citations.

This is a good example of how it is totally wrong to confuse unpopularity with lack of scientific rigor. In the 1970’s Bostick’s and Nardi’s theories about plasmoids were unpopular. But not only was it good science, they were right. It took 30 years for it to be accepted, but it happened. (By the way Bostick, while having an unpopular idea, was always respected by his colleagues. He was Chairman of the Physics Department at Stevens Institute for many years and you don’t get to head a department at a major institution without the respect of your colleagues.)

 

[Eric L]

May I ask, what critiques of your analytical model have been published?

I have not seen any.

May I ask, are you the only group working on this kind of simulation?

No, not at all, but no one else has built a full 3-D model of the whole process either.

Can you provide some details? Particularly as to why COMSOL "is totally inadequate"?

It is a commercial program that can't be modified to overcome the problems I pointed out in my earlier post. In other words if you used it to model a DPF you would need more than the world's fastest supercomputer to run it on.

 

[marplots]

To get back to the original topic of this thread, which is whether or not our work in focus fusion is either a fraud or, as Ben m says ”crackpot”. If we get away from the kindergarten-level name-calling-- “you’re crazy!”-- which is literally what crackpot means, the real question is how do you tell if a line of research is legitimate science or pseudoscience, something which is not science at all?

I have a science degree, but not in physics. As a potential investor, what you describe is exactly the problem I have. I can see no way for me to properly evaluate the claims, nor estimate the value of the proposed experiments. I must rely on someone's opinion and that someone is chosen based on attributes I am familiar with - it may be less than ideal, but I must trust based on factors not directly related to project.

I think many others are in the same situation as I am. This is why it is so important to be as clear as possible, to educate, and to admit shortcomings where they exist. Let's face it; shortcomings always exist.

 

[Eric L]

how to evaluate us

If you are considering an investment, then you certainly need to know more than if this is pseudoscience or not. I guess that you need to know if this has the best chance of success in fusion. I emphasize that this is purely a discussion of how to decide. This is not a solicitation to invest, which is only made to qualified investors in our Private Placement Memorandum.

As to the first question—is this real science? If you have a science degree, you should be able to judge that for yourself. Did you read the guideline in the article at this location- here -that I referenced? To summarize: “scientific work describes results and theories in open detail, making predictions that can at least in principle be falsified, and, in physics, (and for the most part in chemistry and biology as well) these are quantified predictions about real observations. Anything else is not science.” You can certainly use that test yourself if you visit our website.

But how do you judge if this is the best route to fusion, and therefore worth an investment (rather than in one of the other approaches)? Sure, it would help to ask questions of a physicist that you know. But if you rely on someone actually in the fusion field, you are not likely to get a totally unbiased answer. Most scientists naturally think the project they are working on is most likely to succeed. So the best you can get about us is the view that our work is worth funding. And indeed, we have on our website just those opinions from outside experts like Robert Hirsch, former director of the US fusion program, and Dr. Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus and a leader in compact tokamak research. They, and others, think our work should be funded.

It is not universally true that physicists think the project they are working on is best. We have a stack of resumes from physicists working on other projects who would prefer to work on ours because they think it has a better chance. But this natural bias towards their own work is true for most researchers.

I do think that, as someone trained in science, you can still use your own judgment in comparing our approach with others. First, you can look at results we have obtained. A widely-used measure is the product of density, confinement time and temperature. By this measure, we are more than 2000 times ahead of our nearest rival, Tri-Alpha Corporation. You can find documentation for this on our website.

You can also understand the physics advantages of our approach. First, we use the natural instabilities of the plasma, while all other approaches fight them. Plasma naturally forms filaments through the pinch effect. In the type of device we use, the dense plasma focus, these filaments are used to compress the plasma. The plasma is confined to tiny volumes comparable in dimensions of the filaments themselves. In all other approaches the confinement dimensions are many time larger than the filament radii, so confinement is like confining a can of squirming worms—without the can.

Second, compared to all other magnetic confinement approaches (not including laser-based inertial confinement) we achieve much higher plasma densities. Since reaction rates go up as the square of plasma density, this means we need to confine our plasma for much shorter times. We need metastability, while the other approaches need absolute stability.

To put this in numbers, to burn up the fuel in our plasmoid—if we can achieve the desired density—we need to confine the nuclei of a few thousand orbits around the plasmoid. In the other approaches, they need to confinement then for hundreds of millions of orbits.

Third, our machine is much smaller and simpler in design than any other fusion device. That makes experiments cheaper and easier. It also makes the final product much cheaper to manufacture.

Finally our approach, using hydrogen-boron fuel , shares with two of our rival companies (TriAlpha and EMC2) the big advantage that the reaction produces almost no neutrons, and no radioactive waste and the energy can be converted directly to electricity, without an expensive steam cycle.

If you visit our LPPFusion.com website, I think you can see that you can judge all this for yourself.

Next—where we still fall short.

 

[Eric L]

where we still fall short

Here are two potential or real drawbacks to us as an investment (aside from the risks inherent in any such early-stage investment. If you want safe investment, try US 5 year notes!)

First, our financial resources are not as large as they should be. Personally I think that is in part due to the fact we have chosen to remain independent, with voting shares owned by the founder (me). But, whatever the cause, small resources—we have spent only $5 million on the project so far and have a budget of $600,000 per year—slows down progress. This is true even though our small machine requires far less money than other approaches.

Second, we have not achieved, nor approached, the plasma density we need. Our best density is a bit below 1/10,000 th of what we need. We do have a detailed theory of why we have not achieved this. In summary, this is due to the major impurities entering the plasma. We have taken a number of big steps to reduce the impurities, but have not succeeded yet. So our theory of how to get to much higher density has not yet been tested. We think we can do that soon.

Hope this answers some of your questions!

 

[ben m]

A second point Ben m is confused on is the basic one of what a quantitative model is. He seems to think that it is a simulation. He also seems to think that the commercial program COMSOL is a good way to simulate the DPF. Let’s sort this out.

Sorry, I keep forgetting that you are treating this like a courtroom rather than like a seminar. If I ask a question like "you never plugged this into COMSOL?" in a seminar I'm looking for an answer like "So you're asking about simulations. There are a bunch of different codes, COMSOL isn't one of them as it turns out, and I can tell you about that" rather than "No. In fact you're stupid for mentioning COMSOL."

Eric, you already knew I'm not a fusion guy. You're supposedly here trying to explain your fusion experiment to a non-fusion-expert physicist. Earlier in this thread you exhorted people to judge your results for themselves, from ground zero, instead of asking experts to weigh in. Now you're acting as though "he suggested a domain-inappropriate simulation package" is evidence that I'm unqualified to judge for myself. Huh.

My quantitative model is an analytical model, not a simulation. That is, I derived from basic plasma physics theory the formulae that describe how the plasma will evolve quantitatively (magnetic field, density, dimensions) given the Bostick-Nardi qualitative description of the evolution.

Well, Eric, unless that 1986 paper has been posted, I remain confused as to why I should believe this. In rejecting the idea of simulations, you insist that the relevant phenomena are generated by instabilities (not linear evolution, which would be easy to simulate) with no spatial symmetries (since you insist on a 3D, not 2D, simulation). Your analytic setup seems to consists primarily of:
a) drawing a picture of a little torus,
b) hypothesizing that it has a certain tiny radius, and
c) calculating the B field that results from flux compression to this radius, and
d) doing (fancier and AFAICT more believeable) ion/electron/fusion dynamics in zero dimensions under the conditions of a,b,c.
paying no attention whatsoever to the formation, instabilities, or symmetries of the little torus. The configuration Bostick drew a cartoon of, it's got lots of symmetries and looks highly amenable to a 2D simulation. The complexities of the process that you insist defeats simulations---well, that doesn't sound a lot like your analytic model.

This kind of analytical model, expressed as a set of equations, used to be the only kind of quantitative theory that existed in physics. People did do physics before there were computers, you know.

Sure! Analytic plasma theory is sort of notorious for the sophistication of its analytical work. Eugene Parker's papers from the 1950s are these beautiful little gems of vector calculus. Eric, if either you or Bostick had a sophisticated quantitative theory, one containing analytic treatments of plasma transport, showing what instability makes kinks in what sort of structure? Maybe a handwaving discussion of the nonlinear evolution, which gets stitched back in to an analytic model of a plasmoid? If that's what I was seeing, this discussion would be a bit different. But in the vast literature of yours that I've now read, the only time calculus makes an appearance is in this "Coulomb logarithm" which has nothing to do the formation or structure of the supposed plasmoid.

(I repeat I haven't seen the 1986 paper.)

If that's the best you can do analytically, then "toss it into COMSOL"---yes, even COMSOL---sounds like an improvement even if the details are all wrong. Obviously there are plasma parameters that govern the size of the plasmoid, right? You think your machine compresses a little current stream to a too-small-to-resolve scale, whereupon it develops a kink instability and makes a plasmoid? Well, since you claim to understand the scaling laws, simulate a system that leads to a bigger plasmoid.

It is a commercial program that can't be modified to overcome the problems I pointed out in my earlier post. In other words if you used it to model a DPF you would need more than the world's fastest supercomputer to run it on.

Actually, COMSOL has very nice adaptive mesh refinement. Multi-scale phenomena are right in its wheelhouse, so I'm not sure why that is an excuse. (I haven't used adaptive mesh with the plasma module. Actually I don't have a COMSOL license at my current institution.) Poking around the webpages of my old NIF friends, it looks like FLARE (which I knew from astro) and HYDRA (maybe internal to Livermore?) are the norm in inertial confinement (a much harder problem than yours, as far as I can tell). I see 3D, 2D, adaptive mesh of course, beautiful stuff all over the place.

 

[ben m]

One final technical question, Eric.

As far as I can tell, a lot of your analysis is 100% dependent on the claim that you have tiny, tiny plasmoid structures. The tiny-plasmoid-size is what generates into your huge-magnetic-field claim. The huge-magnetic-field claim is necessary for all of your other diagnostics, including explaining your x-ray data, and your extrapolating towards an 11B fusion experiment that you say won't be shut down by bremsstrahlung losses.

As far as I can tell, we have no plasma-dynamical, stability, or computational expectation that these tiny structures ought to form. We are meant to believe that they did form because you took a picture of them. That picture, as far as I can tell, is best represented in Phys. Plasmas 19, 032704 (2012) ...

And it's---well, it's not convincing. It's an entire photo in which every visible component is represented by wobbly intensity variations. That includes the glow of the plasma, the electrode edges, the window edges. In other words, it looks like on a small scale, your image is dominated by noise in your (otherwise unspecified) ICCD camera. But your paper has drawn little arrows pointing to a few of those noise-like wobbles. You are interpreting these few wobbles as evidence that there are tiny, sub-100-um-scale light-emitting structures in your actual plasma. If those images are evidence for 30um filaments in the middle of your plasma, then they're also evidence that your ENTIRE plasma and indeed your apparatus fragmented into similar blobs in the focal plane of your camera.

I'm not saying I have a physics objection to such small structures (the 2014-2016 Kubes paper certainly argues for such), but I am very confused at how you conclude anything from this sort of image, given that you've drawn arrows pointing to features that are similar in amplitude and size to the very, very obvious whole-image CCD artifacts.

 

[Eric L]

old paper

OK, here's my old scan of the 1986 paper, permission or not. Just go here: http://lppfusion.com/about/ and it is at the bottom, first paper.

 

[marplots]

Hope this answers some of your questions!

Yes. Thank you for taking the time.

 

[ben m]

Dr. Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus and a leader in compact tokamak research. They, and others, think our work should be funded.

Also: yay, that answers one of the first questions I asked. "Are you trying to convince easily-misled amateurs/crowdfunders, or are you trying to convince experienced experts?" I know and respect Coppi, and he's a bit of a curmudgeon but no fool. Can you give some context for the blurb on your web page? When and where was the statement made? Had he been asked to review your work in some context?

 

[dlorde]

... Any nuclear reaction means neutrons and other particles flying around the place, with the result that containment vessels and other equipment nearby inevitably become irradiated.

That's what caught my eye in the 'Science' section of the Focus Fusion blurb:

Focus Fusion will be aneutronic, meaning "no neutrons" and no pollution...

I don't see how they can get fusion without neutron emission.

 

[ben m]

That's what caught my eye in the 'Science' section of the Focus Fusion blurb:
I don't see how they can get fusion without neutron emission.

Not all fusion reactions emit neutrons; some emit only gammas and ions. (Unlike neutrons, gamma rays are easier to shield, and don't make the shielding radioactive.) ITER, NIF, etc. are willing to tolerate neutrons in order to use DD and DT fuel mixtures which fuse at lower temperatures. A p-B11 mixture fuses well only at high temperature, which is unattainable in standard plasma containments (not just due to containment, also losses) but which Lerner says will work for him.

 

[Eric L]

That is easy to answer. The reaction between a proton (hydrogen nucleus) and a boron-11 nucleus yields a single carbon-12 nucleus. This is too excited--has too much energy left over from the reaction--to stay together, so it splits up almost instantly into three helium nuclei--alpha particles. There are no free neutrons left over. The energy is carried by the alpha particles, which are of course all charged particles.

 

[BenBurch]

This is small enough that it would be foolish not to try.

 

[ben m]

This is small enough that it would be foolish not to try.

I made a specific point early in the thread which is relevant (and was posted before Eric showed up in person, which is relevant to the user agreement etc.)

Show me the idea of figuring out whether dense plasma focuses are good for fusion? High risk of failure? Low-ish cost? Great. I start out 100% in favor of getting someone to tinker with it and see what we learn. It'd be foolish not to try.

Tell me that a plasma cosmology crackpot wants to tinker with DPF? That's a different story. My expectation is that a plasma cosmology crackpot is able to collect data, misinterpret it, and reach whatever conclusion that they wanted to reach---because that's basically what they seem to do with astrophysics. It's almost the opposite of "see what we learn"---it seems more likely to displace a chance for learning.

For an analogy, I personally think geoengineering is probably a terrible way to approach global warming---but, sure, if there are cheap/harmless engineering studies, "it'd be foolish not to try" even if I have a high expectation of failure. However, if there were a moon landing denialist asking you to fund a geoengineering study, you might say the opposite---"I don't want to contribute to a guy whose results I wouldn't trust either way."

So: if I'm doing careful/skeptical probing of this proposer, that does not mean I am advocating a never-take-risks approach to fusion research in general.

 

[Reality Check]

Just go here: http://lppfusion.com/about/ and it is at the bottom, first paper.

The technology for the LPPFusion nuclear fusion R&D project may be valid. But that web site includes some obvious woo, e.g. Cosmic Connection

• Plasma is not "99.99% of the matter in the universe".
  There is much more dark matter and dark energy than normal matter.
• "The discovery by Alfven and his colleague Carl-Gunner Falthammar of the basic role played by filaments of current in the cosmos in the formation of structure from stars up to galaxies laid the basis for understanding filamentation in the plasma focus device."
  Alfven and Carl-Gunner Falthammar were pioneers in plasma physics. It is that which could be cited as the basis for understanding filamentation in the plasma focus device as in any plasma.
• Alfven did not use plasma physics in his critiques of the Big Bang theory.
  Alfven used plasma physics in his invalid Plasma Cosmology theory.
• The incorrect assertion that coronal loops are plasmoids and "release energy in the form of solar flares" (these are magnetic reconnection events).
• A fantasy that quasars are plasmoids.
  Along with the insane logic of Herbig-Haro objects exist, look like quasars, do not involve black holes so quasars cannot involve black holes!

The validity of Focus Fusion becomes less likely when the President and Chief Scientist is Eric J. Lerner who is a denier of an expanding universe, e.g. persists in the ignorance that large scale structures cannot have formed in the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang when the consensus is that they can.

 

[Eric L]

So Ben m, who can’t find flaws in our fusion work, who wrongly said that few physicists working with our device agree with our basic model, who made huge million-fold mistakes in attempting to poke holes in our work, now wants to change the subject and say ”well since Lerner holds crazy views in astrophysics, I would not trust his results in fusion.” Does anyone else on this forum object to this sort of kindergarten debate tactics? Why don’t you admit you have been wrong on every point you have raised so far, Ben m?

As I’ve said before, we can start a fresh discussion on my—and my colleagues --work in cosmology on another thread—and another week. But for those curious as to an up-to date survey of what is wrong with “concordance “ cosmology, I refer them to my presentation at the EWASS conference in June— here.

 

[Reality Check]

So Ben m,..., now wants to change the subject and say ”well since Lerner holds crazy views in astrophysics,

So Eric L, cannot spell Reality Check !
The subject was not changed. The points are simple

• If the web site for a project contains delusions about some areas of physics then how can we trust the web site statements about another area of physics?
• If the Chief Scientist on a project is deluded about some areas of physics then how can we trust their assertions about another area of physics?

ben m pointed out months ago on 3rd July 2014 that: To start with, they lose a whole big heap of credibility-points because Eric Lerner---author of the crackpot plasma-cosmology book "The Big Bang Never Happened"---is running the show.
His post cites a plasma physicist's analysis Why Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Results are Not Even Wrong; a Detailed Analysis

I recently responded to a claim from Lawrenceville Plasma Physics that they were close to a commercial fusion reactor. I was annoyed that such claims were being made and even more concerned that such claims were not receiving a strong criticism from the scientific community. I read the paper published in the journal – Physics of Plasma by Lerner and his colleagues. The journal is a reputable peered reviewed publication. It was clear to me that the paper was not significant. Dense plasma focus devices are well understood and have been modelled in detail. The results quoted by Lerner did not show that the focus device which he has developed was significantly better than other devices and there was no evidence that a commercial fusion device was any closer.

And goes onto 2 more red flags.

Aneutronic fusion is not as nice as the LPP web site asserts without any evidence in "ecologically safe, non-bio hazardous, radioactive-waste & spillage-free power".
The p + 11B reaction does not produce neutrons so that reaction has radioactive products. But this assumes isotopically pure fuel - no D or 10B. Then there are several nasty side reactions that produce slow neutrons and gamma rays. So the LPP Fusion web site is basically lying - there will be some radioactive waste.

ETA: Then you pop in with the fantasy that an anonymously-authored policy editorial is a Nature endorsement of LPP which is wrong as ben m points out. LPP is mentioned as an example of a small company that might be worth federal funding. There is no hint of any review of the science involved.

ETA: Your no evidence for your accusations? post has a basic misconception about science. In science is up to the supporters of a experiment to produce the evidence supporting the experiment! For example, you claim magnetic fields of X. You need to produce the evidence such as measurements of a magnetic field of X. A calculation that says your apparatus will have produced a field between 0 and X is not evidence that a field of X was produced.

 

[ben m]

"can't find flaws in your fusion work"? Your publications keep claiming agreement with a poorly specified model---I have to know what you're talking about before I can even attempt to "find flaws" in it.

"wrongly said few working physicists agree"? I explained you why I thought that, and posted what I saw as the evidence, and indeed you said I'd correctly read the pre-2014-ish literature but missed a very recent change in the mood. I'll let others decide if they want to label me as a precipitous or judgmental crank on that basis. Anyway: you have asserted that the Czech and Polish groups broadly speaking agree with you. I am not sure I believe you---the documented agreement doesn't seem to go much further than the fact that you both cite Bostick. The Kubes paper sounds like it's describing plasmoids as the endpoint of a sort of turbulent cascade, which sounds quite different from the very ordered process you described in the 1986 paper (thanks for posting)---but I'm still reading this before forming a more confident opinion.

"made huge million-fold mistakes in attempting to poke holes in our work"---yes, a calculation I spent a few minutes on contained an error, which I caught by myself more or less immediately and deleted.

"now wants to change the subject"---no, if you reread the first sentence of this post, you'll see that I am reminding BenBurch of a subject which had come up previously.

 

[JeanTate]

<snip>

As I’ve said before, we can start a fresh discussion on my—and my colleagues --work in cosmology on another thread—and another week.

I agree that we should keep discussion of the meat of the two sets of things separate. However, I think the existing plasma cosmology thread Plasma Cosmology - Woo or not is the best place to hold such a discussion (unless you, Eric L, think that your cosmological model(s) should not be called 'plasma cosmology').

But for those curious as to an up-to date survey of what is wrong with “concordance “ cosmology, I refer them to my presentation at the EWASS conference in June— here.

For those who are interested, Eric Lerner presented an 'invited talk'^ at Special Session 2 ("Observational anomalies challenging the Lambda-CDM cosmological model"); here's the program, with links to PDFs of the slides of each presenter.

^ "Surface Brightness of Galaxies and the Evidence Against the Concordance Model"