Focus Fusion?

[Mendeli]

So. Another one of these unlimited free (edit: well... not free but cheap...ish) energy things.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowertheworld--3

Is this woo or is this as groundbreaking as they claim?

http://vimeo.com/92680177

I dont really understand much about the science behind it. certainly not enough to have any idea if this has actual chance of becoming something that will basically save humanity from fossil fuels and nuclear waste

 

[Aepervius]

Not as much woo as more of a scam.

My rule of thumb is , if it is on indiegogo or kickstarter and is a fundemmental physic experiment or something icnredibly deal changing like fusion pwoer, it is a scam.

Focus fusion is elgit in the sense that there is research, but so far as I can tell is far away from even being energy positive. If it was legit and they got positive yield they would be attracting real investor by the bucketload.

In this specific case the group proposing the research might be legit (I did not check) but they are clearly misrepresenting how far away they are from positive yield "scientifics at LPP Fusion, led by Chief Scientist Eric Lerner, are just one step away from this groundbreaking technology and we need your help for the final push."

 

[Craig B]

Not as much woo as more of a scam.

My rule of thumb is , if it is on indiegogo or kickstarter and is a fundemmental physic experiment or something icnredibly deal changing like fusion pwoer, it is a scam.

Focus fusion is elgit in the sense that there is research, but so far as I can tell is far away from even being energy positive. If it was legit and they got positive yield they would be attracting real investor by the bucketload.

In this specific case the group proposing the research might be legit (I did not check) but they are clearly misrepresenting how far away they are from positive yield "scientifics at LPP Fusion, led by Chief Scientist Eric Lerner, are just one step away from this groundbreaking technology and we need your help for the final push."

Yes, it's been around for a while.

May 28, 2002. A team of researchers has announced the achievement for the first time of temperatures above one billion degrees in a dense plasma. The breakthrough, achieved with a compact and inexpensive device called the plasma focus, is a step toward controlled fusion energy using advanced fuels that release little or no radioactivity. "We have achieved a key condition needed to burn hydrogen-boron fuel," said Eric J. Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, one of the researchers. "This fuel produces virtually no radioactivity and can potentially generate electric energy without expensive steam generators and turbines."

That's from the website http://www.bigbangneverhappened.org where Eric Lerner touts his unorthodox book The Big Bang Never Happened. This, and his biography, set off all kinds of alarm bells.

Look at this for example. If you donate $5,000

You will receive Scientific Immortality! Your name acknowledged as a funder in the scientific papers announcing our breakthroughs, including achieving net energy. Where else can you get immortality this cheap? You'll also receive: -Your Name on a Plaque -Your Name Added in the Monthly Reports -Video Tour of the Lab -emPOWERtheWORLD T-Shirt -Limited Edition emPOWERtheWORLD Poster -Personalized Plasma Portrait -emPOWERtheWORLD Sticker -Personal Shout Out -LPP Reports

Looks like a free energy scam to me, but it may be simple insanity of course.

 

[ben m]

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. Plasma cosmology requires such deeply delusional thinking about the role of plasma physics in cosmology that I find it hard to imagine a PC adherent producing non-delusional laboratory plasma physics.

Regarding the details of "focus fusion", an actual plasma physicist weighs in here:

http://mikebhopkins.wordpress.com/2...sults-are-not-even-wrong-a-detailed-analysis/

Reading some Lerner papers myself I saw some things that raised warning flags. Lerner attempts to explain a "quantum magnetic field effect". It's explained in a mix of physics-speak and crackpotspeak, but it amounts to the idea that a fusion plasma heating suffers from energetic ions losing energy to (lossy) electrons, and that in strong magnetic fields (and nonthermal ions) this energy-transfer is suppressed due to a sort of bandgap-like behavior of the Landau levels. But it only makes sense at huge magnetic fields.

Red Flag #1 is the fact that Lerner claims to have achieved 0.4 gigagauss magnetic fields in his sort of garage-grade apparatus, and expects to get 10 gigagauss. Um! That's a claimed 40,000 tesla! He's targeting a megatesla! Did you manage to convince anyone other than yourself that you've broken the world record for strong laboratory fields? Oh, sure, there's a citation claiming that these strong fields are precedented ... but the citation is to Winston Bostick. Recognize the name? Of course you don't. Bostick was a dense plasma focus researcher and a plasma cosmology crackpot. After a decade or two of actual plasma physics research, he spent most of his life "publishing" lone-wolf astro/particle/gravity crackpottery in Physics Essays and the like and hanging out with Lyndon Larouche. (It so happens that I'd heard of him ... because his particle-physics crackpottery had been adopted by a creationist crackpot I argued with a decade or so ago.)

So: Maybe he's made these fields and maybe he hasn't. The problem is that he seems to have convinced himself that he made the fields on virtually no evidence. It looks the same or lesser evidence is how he convinced himself (again, himself and no one else) that he's got a scaleable fusion technology. Yikes.

Red Flag #2: He "derives" what he calls a theory of this scattering suppression. Totally illegitimate derivation, I think. He cites an astro paper that discusses this suppression in neutron stars, i.e. in magnetic fields 1000 times higher than Lerner wants. In these ultrahigh fields, the astronomers only care about electrons in the ground state. Lerner misuses this result by applying it to a plasma where virtually nothing is in the ground state.

This is not a small detail, this is the detail that (he thinks) makes his fusion device different than everyone else's. He's going to get huge suppression of ion-electron coupling! Because he'll have megatesla fields, and megatesla fields mean big suppression! But he has no evidence (or crappy evidence) that he's got world-record fields. He's got no theory (or a crappy theory) predicting big suppression. That's a whole lot of nothing.

 

[Mendeli]

Thanks. So it seems like this is wishful thinking at best and a scam at worst.

 

[catsmate]

The RW Fusion woo article mentions Lerner and Fusion Focus.

 

[Cuddles]

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.

Beat me to it. All we have here is a crackpot continuing to make the same crackpot claims, except now he seems to have graduated to actively scamming the public because no-one serious believes his nonsense any more. And yes, we can be sure it's a scam and not just someone who genuinely believes he has something. Some quotes from the Indiegogo page:

With only 1/1000th the budget of the huge government funded projects...

Governments have spent billions of dollars on fusion with little to no success...


The Department of Energy decided forty years ago to put all its fusion money on one device, the tokamak

From Eric Lerner's Wiki page:

Lerner received funding from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1994 and 2001...

On November 14, 2008, Lerner received funding for continued research, to test the scientific feasibility of Focus Fusion...

Those billions governments have spent on fusion with little to no success includes his own funding. This isn't some little guy being ignored by Big Fusion, he's been funded by exactly the sources he is criticising for not funding him. And that last sentence is nothing more than an outright lie, as anyone familiar with the National Ignition Facility will know.

There are more lies as well:

Focus Fusion energy produces no radioactive waste.

Nuclear fusion is certainly better than fission in terms of waste, but it's simply not true to claim it produces no waste at all. 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. One of the challenges with both tokamaks and inertial confinement fusion is figuring out how to design a reactor in a way that allows irradiated parts to be replaced without having to dismantle the whole thing every couple of years. Focus fusion would be no different in this respect.


So to summarise - a known crackpot lies about his funding, lies about the benefits of his claim, and is asking for money from people who are generally not qualified to know anything about what they're paying for. It would be difficult for this to look more like a scam without having a Nigerian prince involved.

 

[DeiRenDopa]

Red Flag #1 is the fact that Lerner claims to have achieved 0.4 gigagauss magnetic fields in his sort of garage-grade apparatus, and expects to get 10 gigagauss. Um! That's a claimed 40,000 tesla! He's targeting a megatesla! Did you manage to convince anyone other than yourself that you've broken the world record for strong laboratory fields?

This part struck me as particularly odd: if he has, in fact, managed to create such strong magnetic fields in his garage, all he needs to do to get all the funding he could ever want is patent and then commercialize the methods (etc) he uses to generate these intense fields!

 

[ben m]

The RW Fusion woo article mentions Lerner and Fusion Focus.

Actually, it mentions Lerner and Focus Fusion but there's an awkward pro-Lerner rebuttal tacked onto every anti-Lerner sentence. One editor "allenev" seems to be responsible.

Additional criticism is levied at the group's leader, Eric Lerner, for his rejection of the mainstream consensus regarding the Big Bang, which leads to more doubt as to the group's legitimacy. Though some would say that only a person willing to challenge the mainstream would have the where-with-all to try that which has been deemed "woo" by the mainstream.

"some would say" that, would they really, hmm?

Focus Fusion - while the approach is a variant of the "mainstream" magnetic confinement fusion and might not be completely useless, its proponents make claims of being able to eventually achieve net energy gain from proton-boron fusion, which was thought to be physically impossible in 1995 but recent theoretical considerations of the quantum magnetic field effect now make an attempt at fusion by dense plasma focus worth trying.

"Worth trying", now, really?

l. The conditions required for p-11B fusion are so extreme that bremsstrahlung[wp] losses would dwarf any power produced from fusion. However, recent considerations of the quantum magnetic field effect leaves the door open on bremsstrahlung losses.

Oh, right, the "recent consideration" by Lerner of an effect he doesn't understand.

Even if you could make p-B11 fusion work, why would you not choose to put in D-T fuel instead and produce a thousand times more power for the same investment? (editors note: "thousand" is an exaggeration. D...

Followed by an amateurish, citationless, and error-ridden calculation of how p-B11 fusion is "more efficient" at electricity generation than DT fusion.

Those are all from a single editor.

 

[ben m]

Here is Lerner claiming 4e8 gauss:

Such plasmoids have been observed to have magnetic field as high as 400 MG and density in excess of 1021/cc (1,9,10,11).

Reference #1: is a conference paper by Lerner, not available online
Reference #9: is Lerner's ex-colleagues at Stevens, in a paper that does not mention magnetic field measurements at all.
Reference #10: Does not mention magnetic field measurements.
Reference #11: Is a Soviet journal article from 1988, not indexed online

Available evidence that dense plasma focuses can produce 400MG fields: zero.

Field at which Lerner thinks he can get to and where he thinks quantum mechanics suppresses electron-ion scattering: 10,000 MG.

Field at which non-crackpot physicists calculated that quantum mechanics suppresses electron-ion scattering: 1,000,000 MG.

 

[ben m]

(Following up) Actually Google Books *does* have the first paper Lerner cites:

http://books.google.com/books?id=JtdClDWSlOYC&q=lerner#v=onepage&q=mg&f=false

in which he accidentally a world-record magnetic field (without thinking it worth mentioning). There is no direct magnetic field probe whatsoever. There is a huge train of assumptions from which he derives that 0.4 gigagauss. It all hinges on a measurement of low x-ray power P emitted by some fusion shot, coupled with what he describes as a upper bound (from fusion neutron production) on the density n in some transient plasmoid. From this he finds the volume V proportional to P/n^2. (Except, he fails to mention, that's now a lower bound on the volume, not a measurement of it.) He has some other idea---poorly constrained---that the tiny transient plasmoid has to obey a bunch of field-compression conservation laws, and that it has to have a B field large enough to confine 1 MeV tritium ions in a tiny radius. If you believe that constraint, and if you take use his claimed tiny radius ... yes, the B field has to be large in order to bend tritions around in this tiny r. But by now he's forgotten that r is a lower bound on the radius. The B field has to be no bigger than 0.4 GG to bend tritons in a circle no smaller than 6 microns. That's all he has actually shown, even allowing that all his other assumptions are correct.

So: Lerner's paper, which he claims is the proof-of-concept that Focus Fusion has reached a world-record 0.4 GG, in fact contains only a calculation (not a measurement!) suggesting fields somewhere between 0 and 0.4 gigagauss. In other words, it's no proof of concept at all; Lerner has misrepresented it.

I hope some of his IndieGoGo funders are reading this: Do not fund this campaign, people. Lerner's fusion contraption, is no better than that of any other garage-tinkerer's. Lerner's record of running, analyzing, and reporting the behavior of his machine is terrible, and his presence in the field does more to hurt fusion than to help it.

 

[BenBurch]

It might be wrong but I don't think it's dishonest.

 

[Craig B]

It might be wrong but I don't think it's dishonest.

What worries me most regarding honesty is not the pseudoscience, but the soliciting donations in terms like these, which really don't look honest at all. If you donate $5,000

You will receive Scientific Immortality! Your name acknowledged as a funder in the scientific papers announcing our breakthroughs, including achieving net energy. Where else can you get immortality this cheap? You'll also receive: -Your Name on a Plaque -Your Name Added in the Monthly Reports -Video Tour of the Lab -emPOWERtheWORLD T-Shirt -Limited Edition emPOWERtheWORLD Poster -Personalized Plasma Portrait -emPOWERtheWORLD Sticker -Personal Shout Out -LPP Reports

 

[BenBurch]

I think it's worth trying, too.

Sometimes knowing what doesn't work is valuable.

And, the Farnsworth Fusor looks daft too, but it does fuse deuterium.

 

[Craig B]

I think it's worth trying, too.

Sometimes knowing what doesn't work is valuable.

And, the Farnsworth Fusor looks daft too, but it does fuse deuterium.

How long to you have to keep trying it before you decide you can't get it to work, so it's not a good idea to solicit thousands of dollars from simpletons in return for "empower the world" tee shirts?

 

[ben m]

I think it's worth trying, too.

Sometimes knowing what doesn't work is valuable.

And, the Farnsworth Fusor looks daft too, but it does fuse deuterium.

I have no problem with someone trying to improve the science and engineering of dense plasma focuses. I have a problem with Eric Lerner doing whatever it is he does, which though it involves a plasma focus machine, does not actually produce believable, followup-worthy, non-crackpot results about such machines.

 

[George]

From the comments section..

We need those tungsten electrodes, damnit. There is still a 50k gap which is significant. They won’t be able to get the data they need and progress with their research without those electrodes. Everyone contribute as much as you can spare. Individually, it isn’t much money, but to put all that burden on the Focus Fusion team means they are going to have huge problems.
Trust me, I know what it’s like to be innovating without any money and every small bump in the road is a major set back.

Just to be clear—the Focus Fusion project will get all the funds contributed (minus IGG fees) even if we don’t reach our goal. But we can still reach the goal—only a bit more than 20% short!

Wot?

eta.
I wondered why there is not one skeptical post.

You must contribute to this campaign to make a public comment.

I think this may explain why.

 

[Craig B]

From the
Wot?

eta.
I wondered why there is not one skeptical post.

I think this may explain why.

That settles it. A bunch of crooks.

 

[thedopefishlives]

From the comments section..

Just to be clear—the Focus Fusion project will get all the funds contributed (minus IGG fees) even if we don’t reach our goal. But we can still reach the goal—only a bit more than 20% short!

Wot?

That's at the discretion of the person who starts the crowdfunding project. This is why you should always look carefully before contributing to anything. If it's not a project you wouldn't mind losing money on, then maybe you shouldn't invest in it. Of course, the rubes don't care, because they're convinced he's on to something, no way he could be scamming them.

 

[Cuddles]

It might be wrong but I don't think it's dishonest.

Why not? As I noted in my previous post, there are several deliberate lies being told in order to persuade people to give him money. How is that not dishonest?

I think it's worth trying, too.

Sometimes knowing what doesn't work is valuable.

Again, see my previous post. This is not a new idea, it's something that has been worked on for decades with funding from the US government, both the DoE and NASA at least. This is precisely why we can say it's dishonest - it's already been tried with government funding, but Lerner claims it's not been tried and the government refuses to fund it (and apparently also refuse to fund NIF).

Just to be clear—the Focus Fusion project will get all the funds contributed (minus IGG fees) even if we don’t reach our goal.

Wot?

Yes, this is one reason IndieGoGo is popular with scammers - you can solicit funds for pretty much anything, and get the money regardless of whether you actually have enough to do anything.

I wondered why there is not one skeptical post.

I think this may explain why.

To be fair, that's the case with most similar sites. While it does mean you can't call out possible scams, it also means legitimate projects aren't flooded with trolls and nonsense. Obviously it's less of a problem with sites like Kickstarter which make at least some effort to ensure projects are legitimate.