This is the transcript from the presentation held at CEEP by LPP in - PDF document

This is the transcript from the presentation held at CEEP by LPP in NYC on Oct 12 ’12, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU Let me just talk a little bit about the current state of fusion research. What’s been in the news ... The National Ignition Facility (NIF), one of the two largest fusion programs in the country, in the world – it is a gigantic laser, about a size of a several football fields, cost $5B, and they recently announced that they would be unable in a foreseeable future to reach their goal, which is the ignition of a single controlled fusion reaction. Another fusion project, which is the largest in the world, is called ITER (International Tokamak Experimental Reactor), which is to be an enormous Tokomak device (talk about it more in a second). I t’s budgeted at something like $20B and it’s projecting not to do their first experiments until about 2027. So if these projects with billions of dollars are unable to reach just a first level of scientific feasibility for controlling thermonuclear fusion for peaceful purposes then why does little LPP think that we can prove scientific feasibility for about $2M more and get a working prototype working generator for about $50M. Are we crazy? Or are we just doing something different? I’ll let you guys decide by the end of this presentation. Focus Fusion We talk about - sort of our trade name for what we are doing - is Focus Fusion. Focus Fusion (FF) means controlled nuclear fusion that is the controlled release of fusion energy from the nucleus, using the device called DPF and using hydrogen-boron aneutronic fuel. So the first difference that we have from what the big guys are doing is 1 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU

aneutronic fuel and that’s an extremely important difference. What this me ans is that we are using a fuel - hydrogen and boron - that reacts together at high temperature to briefly fuse to form an unstable carbon nucleus, which immediately breaks apart in three stable helium nuclei with a tremendous release of energy. Aneutronic means no neutrons. That means no induced radioactivity. That’s what makes fission reactors of concern - production of radioactive waste. With this fuel there is no radioactive waste. The other thing is neutrons are tremendously destructive to material structures. Without neutrons you can make a structure very small with a very dense energy source. What that means is if you have small- size devices then you can reduce the cost. In addition you have direct conversion of energy into electricity. How the energy comes out (of the nuclear reaction) is in the form of moving charged particles (helium nuclei). These…. Do we have a pointer? [Explaining the image on the projector screen on the wall.] All right I’ll use my finger. These helium nuclei are charged particles. You have a motion of charged particles, you have electricity; so you can take the electricity out of this process with a sort of high-tech transformer. You do n’t need to go the route that we have been taking since Edison, which is taking a heat source, boiling water, running steam through a turbine, and using that to turn an electrical generator. That’s what we have been doing over a century. It is extremely expensive. This is direct conversion so potentially costs are much less. The fuel is abundant, hydrogen of course comes from water, boron is an abundant element; we mine it out of the ground, and if necessary we can get it from sea water …and as I said it is extreme ly safe. There is no long term radioactive waste - and of course since this is nuclear there is no greenhouse gas. So that’s big difference number one. 2 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU

Costs So these advantages translate into our approach being much cheaper than the conventional approach both for research and for generators. The FF-1 generator costs about $0.5 M to build compared to billions for ITER or NIF. And similarly if this approach is developed to the point of generating electricity our approach can produce electricity at about 6 cents per installed watt vs. several $ per installed watt for the conventional approach. Why Use DT Of course if advanced fuels, like pB11 (hydrogen-boron), have all these advantages why do people use deuterium - tritium (DT) fuel in the first place? Well DT ignites at the temp of 400 Million K degrees. That doesn’t sound like much of an advantage except when you consider that pB11 ignites at 1.6 Billion K, four times as high. Therefore a lot of people have taken 3 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU

the approach that DT is easier. [Because 400 million K is easier to reach than 1.6 billion K.] But with our experiments we’ve already proven in peer -reviewed publications that we can achieve the nec essary temperatures to ignite this fuel. So we’ve overcome one of the main barriers to use what is generally considered the ideal fusion fuel. Tokamak So the other main difference with our approach is the type of device we use to burn this fusion fuel. The major conventional device is called the tokamak and this drawing gives you some idea of the size. If you can find him down in the left hand corner there is a little guy representing the size of a man. So this is a gigantic machine. 4 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU

Pinch Effect But the other thing is the approach of conventional fusion to try and make the plasma stable, to try to make plasmas sit still, sort of like a good dog. The problem with that is plasmas don’t want to sit still; plasmas in nature are continuously unstable because currents flowing in the same direction want to attract each other and currents flowing in the opposite directions want to repel each other. So our approach instead of trying to fight the instabilities is to use the natural instabilities of the plasma to concentrate the energy and at each stage, to make it more and more dense. So this instability that we call the pinch effect, which occurs as I say, when two currents are traveling in the same direction, is a fundamental process throughout the universe. We see it, for example, in the aurora on Earth and northern lights where electric currents are coming through the magnetic field of the Earth and coming through the atmosphere and forming these filamentary curtains of light. We see it at much greater scale in surface of the Sun where huge filaments like this project vast quantities of matter away from the Sun and actually also lead to phenomena of solar flares. And we’re seeing one here with the filament of the current coming out of the Sun. And on a still larger scale, on the scale of nebulas, these vast clouds of dust and gas between the stars, much larger currents form these filaments that are light years long. And these filaments eventually condense into new stars like a new Sun. In addition, if these currents are sufficiently dense, than they start to twist and kink themselves up, sort of the way, if people still have telephone wires, your telephone wire 5 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU

used to kink itself up. What we see here is some of these filaments. This is over here; this is the surface of the Sun. [Black & white slide] This is the development of the solar flare. You see how this is becoming like a little cork screw and then becomes a bigger cork screw. Bigger and bigger and finally this enormous intense beam comes out of it… This is the process of the solar flare… Gigantic explosions come out of instabilities caused when these filaments have current kink themselves up. Again on a larger scale stars that are in formation emit these huge beams from the currents that are flowing inward towards the star as it forms. This is a picture … this is several light years long, many, many millions of times bigger than the solar system. This is … this whole thing is called Herbig-Haro object, which is just a fancy name for a star in formation. This is what Sun looked like when it was becoming a star four and a half billion years ago. And at a still larger scale, quasars, which are gigantic explosion in the centers of galaxies, use the same kinking process to send out these enormous beams that stretch over millions of light years. And in fact it was a study of quasars, using a dense plasma focus as a model, that actually led me to formulate the theories that I’m now using to develop this device. On a larger scale, the formation of the giant Spiral Galaxies, of which Milky Way is one, again come out of the formation of these filaments, filaments that, as Carl Sagan might have said, carry billions of billions of amps of current. All right, so with that as a lead in … 6 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU

What Is a DPF? A DPF is a fusion device and it is extremely compact. It consists of a set of two copper electrodes. This is a used anode, an inner electrode which I’ll pass around… and we have the cathode bars … Electrodes Capacitors 7 LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU