The official document’s prime comment is, “During the course of the (previous) contracted study several anomalies related to how electrons were fed into the device were discovered.  These anomalies must be characterized and solutions created if the device is to be made functional.”

The time and funds are then, “ . . . additional effort will require the incumbent contractor to further their studies by employing independently powered electron gun arrays . . .”

The status is given quite a lift with, “A committee of distinguished scientists reviewed the progress of EMC2’s work to provide a recommendation to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) on the merits of the project.  The committee consists of internationally recognized, independent experts in the field of magnetically confined energy producing devices.  These committee members are qualified independent scientific and academic experts who were designated by ONR to evaluate and provide impartial opinions on the research done by EMC2.  The committee validated the progress made by EMC2.  The experimental results to date were consistent with the underlying theoretical framework of the Polywell fusion concept and, in the opinion of the committee, merited continuation and expansion.”

Artists rendering of WB-8. Click image for the largest view.

Tom Ligon offered in view of the anomalies most likely being a matter of the machine’s scale, “Way back in the early 90′s they thought there would be two ways to build a wiffle-ball. One was to inject the electrons and then build up the magnetic field. That’s not the easiest power control problem but it certainly can be done and is an option.”

Dr. Bussard wanted to build the demonstration machine because he understood the potential trouble in pushing electrons into the small Wiffle Ball devices. In a larger machine, the electrons would predominantly come from the ionization of fuel.  This puts EMC2 in the position to solve problems for the smaller devices that won’t be relevant for devices that fill out the theory to scale.

Readily admitted, your humble writer has a soft spot for Dr. Bussard the Polywell method to confine and Bussard’s theory to drive fusion.  Its elegant, and the single most intuitive method to drive nuclei past the Coulumb barrier.

Bussard had a great idea to take the work of Farnsworth to overcome the electric repulsion the electromagnetic force to get close enough for the attractive nuclear strong force to take over fusing the particles together and releasing the energy.  Bussard was also first to realize that fusing pB-11, a gas of Boron would release highly electrically charged atoms instead of vast amounts of heat – so producing a vast amount of electric power. So far, and we’re pretty far along, Dr. Bussard has been right and pretty accurate as well.

That makes the news of the review and the added time and funds very reassuring.  There isn’t a surprise that the little WB-8 needs help in getting the electrons loaded, Dr. Bussard knew this would happen.  But bureaucratic funding is going to check each step and that’s no surprise as well.

The news is good, the steps are getting made, progress should come to an irrefutable demonstration device in a few years, and net power from fusion will be a done thing.

More waiting, but every step will have the design and engineering worked out – and that will be worthwhile later on.

The energy source for the future … RF Accelerator Driven Heavy Ion Fusion Power

There is a solution to the energy need for the world and the US without generating green house gases or nuclear fission radioactive problems.

It is Heavy Ion Fusion (HIF) as developed in the late 1970′s at Argonne National Lab under the Department of Defense (DOD).

You never heard of it, … right, few people have, … as HIF was set aside by the US DOD (& DOE) in favor of lasers, as lasers could maybe be a weapon and HIF could not be a weapon.

Fusion was first suggested as a potential power source in the late 1920’s. The first earth-bound fusion reaction was demonstrated in 1952. Then shown potentially doable in a small size in 1978-9 at Argonne National Lab and Hughes Lab. Since then it has been endorsed for 35 years by the scientific community “as the conservative way to go” to develop fusion as an energy generation source … but never funded, as it was and is still BIG (expensive, prolific and “benign”). In 1980, the world did not need a BIG new source of energy, as it does now. Fusion was put on the shelf or attached to research projects to see if it could be done in small (MW-GW) size. Fusion cannot be done small and be economical. Data suggests that fusion can produce 5-7 cents kWh electricity, $3.20 per/gal fuel, and $0.002 per gallon for potable water, all needed today and at a very reasonable unit price.

Fusion Power's Process and System Heat Block Diagram. Click image for the largest view.

In 2009, Fusion Power Corporation with Dr. Robert J. Burke and Dr. Charles E. Helsley, secured a patent using heavy ions as the energy source to fuse the Hydrogen isotopes Deuterium and Tritium producing Helium and heat. It solves the problems that Germany, Russia, America and Japan were having in focusing enough energy on the pellet (target) to cause fusion to occur.

In December 2010, the process was presented at the 18th HIF International Symposium in Darmstadt, Germany, along with an economic model, by Fusion Power Corporation (FCP)l.

In May of 2011, FPC presented the process to the Accelerators for Heavy Ion Fusion Workshop (AHIF) at Berkeley CA, sponsored by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the Virtual National Lab (DOD & DOE). Again, the result was “now is the time to move forward” with a fusion program … as there is now a world need for a large new carbon free energy source.

The science has been done and it now is an engineering process. FPC’s process applies known and existing technologies in unique and novel ways to provide the energy necessary for fusion to occur. FPC’s fusion power is more developed than was rocketry in 1961 when JFK committed the nation (US) to go to the moon and back.

FPC is an engineering design, implementation and licensing company. FPC’s mission is to provide the energy necessary for maintaining current levels of energy use (standard of living) and to provide opportunities for growth in the energy supply using fusion. FPC’s vision is the development of a fusion power source based on the use of the techniques of radio frequency (RF) accelerator-driven Heavy Ion Fusion (HIF) that were researched in the 1970′s; a technique that has repeatedly received scientific endorsement.

FPC’s primary goal is to translate the science vetted design of a RF accelerator-driven fusion power system to one that can be brought on-line within a decade – each installation having an energy output equivalent to that of a giant oil field without the depletion problem and located where needed.

FPC can also be eligible for carbon credits, as FPC can produce per day, 500,000 barrels of a carbon neutral synthetic liquid fuel (diesel-kerosene-gasoline), 15 GW electric, and 2000+ ac/ft of potable water from sea water, all with no GHGs, no highly radioactive waste and no potential for a “run-away” nuclear meltdown.

By 2050, fusion will be the source of most of the world’s energy. This is not wishful thinking, it is simply a way of stating that all other forms of energy that are based on the use of finite fossil fuel sources must decline in the next few decades. This decline will provide a major impetus for the rapid increase in the utilization of this new form of energy. Wind, solar and bio fuels are only “feel good solutions” of “we are doing something to solve the problem” when have little possibility of generating the 14 TW needed in the next 40 years. I can show you the math.

HIF is the ONLY practical answer for non-proliferation of atomic weapons and maybe the real way to world peace … non-aggression for national energy supplies and national security.

Let us get moving to really solve the energy problem … not 35 more years of research!

For more information and detail of the FPC HIF process visit http://www.fusionpowercorporation.com and see the You Tube presentations “StarPower for Tomorrow” and Goggle Tech Talk “Heavy Ion Fusion”.

Inquires may be sent to: contact@fusionpowercorporation.com

Your humble writer spent some time on the FPC website and found it quite thorough in covering the main topics of interest. What’s missing is the process graphic of a reaction and an economic synopsis easy enough to grasp by major media types. It is an engaging site, rich in information.

The ‘other hand’ so to speak is the FPC power plant would be huge, and the investment as well.  While the facts at hand bear out the potential, and the numbers imply that a couple hundred plants would power the entire planet, an installation would need a deuterium supply, adequate water, room for an accelerator, proximity to a major grid interconnect, carbon sources, room for a huge synfuels plant and market access for unloading a half million barrels of liquid fuels.

This is a very tall order – without a pilot or demo unit, and that would be a very expensive undertaking on its own.  Still, unless the innovators can come up with very cheap small fusion processes, the FPC idea has to get up front both economically with a drive to confirmation and product cost reductions.

The Heavy Ion Fusion idea definitely has the legs, and when its gets to commercial viability the investment is going to be billions.  But it’s one way to get the equivalent of a giant oil field without it ever running dry.

The ITER effort is based on the tokamak, a donut looking thing that circulates fuel plasma around endlessly at temperatures and pressures that could get a net energy gain if the fuels are hot enough and at high enough pressure.  It really is the leading way to get to solar temperatures and pressures here on earth.  It is very possible – and incredibly impractical.

ITER has the money to worry away at the problem.  Very hot, light element plasmas, and incredible pressures are huge problems. Hydrogen at room temperature is a devil to contain for any length of time, warm it up to perhaps billions of degrees and pressurized to perhaps millions of atmospheres and the control problems are, shall we say, monumental.

Still, the tokamak is the strongest potential to get to hot fusion containment.  To solve the control problems electronics engineer Maria Goretti Sevillano has come up with some tools in her thesis defended at the University of the Basque Country. Her thesis is entitled Tools for plasma control in Tokamak nuclear fusion reactors: Astra-Matlab integration and control in real time.  Two papers have been published about her work, one in the journal Informatica and the other in the journal Energy.

Maria Goretti Sevillano

Sevillano has detailed how they function: “The materials used in fusion must have certain specific features, and these materials have to be turned into plasma. At the same time, the plasma has to be restricted to a limited space to enable the reaction to be generated and the energy to be used. To achieve this, magnetic confinement is applied in the case of the tokamaks.” In other words, the magnetic field creates lines that act as a wall to keep the plasma in the space where it is meant to remain. But the plasma and the device itself have several problems that have yet to be solved, and Sevillano has been working on some of them.

Sevillano explains, “To develop Tokamaks, many of the plasma’s parameters must be controlled, as well as the whole device itself; the currents that are going to be used, the voltage, the intensity, etc. Until all these things are controlled, it will not be possible to use these machines to produce marketable energy,” she points out.

In connection with this, Sevillano has embedded a code known as ASTRA into the Matlab software; ASTRA is frequently used to simulate the behavior of Tokamak reactors, and the embedding of this code into Matlab will facilitate the development of controllers suited to these devices. The control problems are of several kinds, but in this case some very specific parameters relating to the plasma have been explored in depth.

Sevillano continues, “Control of the parameters is necessary to obtain the maximum energy possible from the plasma, and the amount of this energy that can be extracted is calculated on the basis of the current: the greatest amount of current possible has to be maintained during the longest time possible. That is why these parameters have to be controlled by means of the control, in turn, of the numerous coils and voltages within the structure.”

Sevillano points out that her PhD thesis has produced only a single branch of what would be a complete tree by saying, “All I have achieved is no more than a step towards doing more things. The aim of all these tasks is to design a machine capable of generating marketable energy within the ITER project.”

Its an awe inspiring challenge with a five decade history stacked up so far and the scientists calculate they will obtain some results around the year 2050, some four more decades.

Tokamak and Problems. Click imabe for the largest view.

Fusion is a tantalizing power source and emulating the sun seems a logical and sensible path.  Fusion is possible, we use its’ natural form continuously.  Yet the primary questions remains unanswered.  By what means can humanity get matter to fuse?  Then, which is the most practical?

Taxpayers in the EU, India, Russia, China, South Korea, Japan and the United States must wonder how the political momentum got so far on such thin practical certainty.   French Nobel laureate in physics, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, said, “We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to make the box.”

The building of the tokamak has begun, with no clear idea how to control it successfully.  Whether or not Sevillano’s concept’s will make a difference is a question to be answered years out.

Meanwhile the basic question about what the most practical means are to generate fusion is off limits for most of the research world.  The research system is very serious about the ITER project – the competency and credibility of the research system’s desire to get to the goal of commercial fusion is not.

What puts Brillouin out in front first is the temperature output.  Brillouin expects the test of the new Hot Tube model at SRI will be capable of delivering steam at temperatures from 400ºC to 500ºC (750-932ºF).  These kinds of temperatures are called superheated or deliver “dry steam”, a steam form that does not contain water mechanically suspended.  Dry steam is what’s needed for generating power and moving heat because it saves a great deal of water and is more efficient.  Pressures, especially for turbine drives can be much higher.

Brillouin Hot Tube Boiler. Click image for the largest view.

The second Brillouin advantage is control and predictable output. The Brillouin team noted Dr. McKubre has joined the Brillouin Board of Directors because of the consistency of the results.  So far as we know, Brillouin is the first cold fusion or LENR process that is able to repeat tasks every time, without exception.

Brillouin believes they understand how LENR works, and if operating results are proofs, then the company has the idea worked out.

Robert Godes explained it’s not a nickel-hydrogen fusion reaction. Nickel is merely a catalyst.  “A tiny amount of hydrogen protons are converted into neutrons. These newly produced neutrons are soon captured by hydrogen ions or other atoms in a metallic (e.g. nickel) lattice near to where the hydrogen ions were converted to neutrons. The captured neutrons generate heat because the new atoms that are one neutron heavier shed excess binding energy as heat to the lattice, resulting in a dramatically clean, low-cost, hi-quality heat output.”

Godes goes on to explain the error in “cold fusion” and “LENR”, instead using the terms Controlled Electron Capture Reactions or “CECR”, for “phonon-moderated hydrogen reactions.”

For documentation the suggestion is in the firm’s business summary, “Evidence suggests this reaction involves the synthesis of neutrons, which accumulate on hydrogen dissolved in a matrix (lattice), which progresses to deuterium, then tritium and on to quadrium that decays to helium.  In a Brillouin reaction the process is promoted and catalyzed in a highly energized nickel matrix. The process releases thermal energy far in excess of what is possible from chemical reactions. The important feature is that neutrons are generated and accumulate in a comparatively low-energy environment, and this accumulation generates heat.”

Simply stated, hydrogen in a nickel lattice exposed to Brillouin’s proprietary electro-stimulation will yield heat and at the end, helium.

Brillouin 4-steps to Heat and Helium. Click image for the largest view.

The latest visual explanation comes from Brillouin with a YouTube video:

Godes noted that 1.024 ml, a volume about the size of a #2 pencil eraser, of water provides as much energy as two 48-gallon drums of gasoline. “That is 355,000 times the amount of energy per volume – five orders of magnitude.”

Refueling and service expectations are extraordinary as well.  Godes expects systems will last 3-5 years before servicing, including refills or replacement of the nickel lattice.

Godes points out the nuclear process Brillouin utilizes is the same albeit better understood and thus controlled, as is being used by the competition including Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat, Defkalion’s Hyperion, Piantelli’s Nichenergy, George Miley’s LENUCO, and Celani’s Cold Fusion Energy Inc.

Is there a business model in this that makes more sense than the seemingly odd reports about Andrea Rossi or the off/on information flow out of Defkalion?

The Brillouin CEO is Robert W. George II, who was a Managing Director at Grosvenor Financial Partners.  Mr. George has honest, real and practical experience in bringing startups to market.  It’s very likely that George can find a way to get the technology into customer’s hands at a price that’s attractive enough to attract even more customers.

The premise now should be that Brillouin has the technology worked out.  Note that three patents have been filed – so far no issues because of the US Patent Office’s inability to recover from being mislead by experts over the Cold Fusion Debacle over twenty years ago. But the prior art is on file, copycats be warned . . .

Yet Godes points out that there are certain aspects that he has filed for patent protection on, and still others that he plans to maintain as proprietary or trade secrets.  The intellectual property, or the know how to do the electro-stimulation, have to do with the circuitry used to control the CECR technology. “These trade secrets constitute a challenging barrier to entry for competitors,” said Godes.

The electro-stimulation is more complex than what is presumed to be going on at the E-Cat or Defkalion efforts.  The Brillouin documentation says in the Business Summary, “One of the intellectual property methods claimed in Brillouin’s Patents, and being used in both systems, is designed to aid stimulation of phononic activity by introducing Q pulses. These are high current pulses through the lattice of our CECR reactor. The Q pulses cause electromigration, which means the nickel atoms and the hydrogen ions get moved by passing electrons. In other words, electromigration causes the creation of cold neutrons, which is an endothermic reaction. The cold neutrons accumulate on the hydrogen nuclei, from 1H to 2H to 3H to 4H then to 4He in milliseconds (see “step” block diagram below). Each time a neutron is added to the hydrogen nuclei it is an exothermic reaction. Unlike plasma physics, where high-energy particles would be emitted, this binding energy is released as pure heat.”

Mr. Allen has met Andrea Rossi, visited Defkalion and talked with the Brillouin people and without realizing it has hit on the key measure we have for now, “when I was watching the data emerge from the Defkalion set-up, when I was in Greece, I was expecting to see a steady curve, but instead what I saw were intermittent spikes from the nuclear events. The Brillouin curve would be steady.”

Allen believes that Brillouin can turn the reaction on and off, govern it up and down, and run it in steady state, capabilities that none of the competitors are reported to have yet.

By whatever the name, cold fusion is looking marketable – one of these is sure to get trails one day soon.  Then the improvements will come, miniaturization, and the human tendency to exploit good ideas with the whole of good minds intuition and imagination.

Professor Miley has been experimenting with unique forms of cold fusion cells and designing electrolytic systems that use multi-layered thin-films of metal as electrodes since the Fleischmann and Pons announcement more than 20 years ago.

His team’s latest work has been manufacturing specialty nano-particles coated with thin-films to host to low-energy nuclear reactions.

Dr. Miley’s research has shown both excess heat and a wide variety of transmutation products detecting iron, copper, calcium, zinc, even gold and rare earth elements.

Miley cells are composed of super-thin layers of palladium and nickel atop a metal substrate to form an electrode submerged in a heavy water solution. After cycles of loading and de-loading, Miley hypothesizes that hydrogen (or deuterium) collects in the small cracks and voids between the film layers forming clusters. Superconducting quantum interference devices have confirmed ultra-dense states of deuterons within palladium crystal defects.

Palladium Nickel Layers for Hydrogen Clusters in LENR. Click image for more info.

The clusters are collections of hydrogen nuclei called protons, or deuterium nuclei called deuterons (which are protons with an added neutron). The clusters are thought to be composed of 1000 hydrogen nuclei or more, all bunched up together.

Dr. Miley uses the language of the nuclear active environment or (NAE) to describe these localized clusters that lead to a reaction and a cratering of the surface.

Where Miley’s work gets interesting is when the hydrogen is so close together, a NAE will ultimately produce fusion products, creating both excess heat energy and heavier elements. It is these heavier elements that then may break apart, fissioning, creating the plethora of new transmutation elements directly measured in his cells.

This is also the result that makes some involved in LENR cringe because fission is not only undesirable it complicates things enormously.  Still, Miley’s work is there, credible and documented.

The work also calls up another theory for LENR.

As the writer at Cold Fusion Now explains Miley’s view, protons and deuterons are positively charged, repelling each other strongly with a force called the Coulomb force. It is this powerful force that must be overcome for fusion to occur. Dr. Miley visualizes negatively charged electrons shielding the positively-charged hydrogen nuclei from each other just enough for the protons and deuterons to get within range for the strong nuclear force to fuse them together. In his case, he believes that multiple pairs of deuterons are doing the majority of the fusing.

Reversing the polarity of the cell’s electrodes multiple times ‘shakes out’ the loose hydrogen in the electrode. Alternately pushing and pulling the positively charged nuclei through the metal leaves only the most tightly bound clusters. After repeating the cycle half-a-dozen times, the available cracks are almost all filled with clusters, increasing the probability of creating a nuclear active environment, and initiating the energy effect. As the loose protons and free electrons shoot back and forth through the material during this loading and de-loading process, they transfer momentum to the clusters, which also may help to initiate the reaction.

Currently Dr. Miley’s research explores a gas-loaded cell that uses multi-layered thin-film nano-particles in order to increase the number of spaces where clusters can form. The gas-loaded cell type allows for higher temperatures to heat the cell, which has been shown to increase the magnitude of excess heat generated.

Doesn’t read like a theory at all – yet the observations over twenty years seem to make it quite on point for the experiments that Miley has been doing.

The truth in it may be over simplified, yet the observation could apply to a wide range of the experiments to date.  We’ll have to wait for the theories that drive further development.

The article at ColdFusionNow includes an interview with Dr. Miley well worth one’s time.  Dr. Miley has explored nuclear science and plasma research for more than three decades winning numerous prestigious awards for his pioneering work for which he holds more than a dozen patents. He is also founded The Fusion Studies Laboratory at UIUC.

Miley was an editor of the American Nuclear Society‘s journal Fusion Science and Technology and was one of the few to publish results from early cold fusion experiments.

Dr. Miley’s views are something everyone interested in cold fusion or LENR needs for background and understanding.

As simple as Miley’s take is, it is likely the one most correct so far.

Mr. George said right at the start, “After ten years of work by Robert Godes, he’s designed a control system in the laboratory that is able to start and stop the reaction to get the boiler to run steady state and sometime later next month, we will be working with SRI International to do another version which will operate at a higher operating temperature.”  That is key after getting a LENR device to run at all.  Brillouin’s confidence continues to grow.

Assuming the firm can build replicable units that perform predictably – an assertion they imply is at hand in the lab, another dark horse form of energy production could be on the market in the coming months or years.

Brillouin’s idea is different than what we’ve come to learn of the Rossi E-Cat and the Defkalion device.  In a Brillouin machine the electronics that Godes has designed sends the fuel charge “electro-magnetic pulses” to push the hydrogen from H1 to H2, H3 and H4 until Helium is expelled with the heat.

Brillouin Graphical Fusion Operating Principle. Click image for the largest view.

Godes explained, “Brillouin Energy designs all of its reaction systems based on the hypothesis that was published in Infinite Energy and is available on our website. But we’re actually driving the underlying physics, which gives you control over the reaction. Once you understand the physics, you can turn it on, you can turn it off, and to some extent you can control how much heat you’re getting out of the system.”

Another matter that bedevils the LENR field is the theory matter.  Here Godes offers another view, “. . . the LENR reaction is a weak interaction. It’s a two-step reaction. The first step is actually endothermic, which means that it absorbs energy. The exothermic part, which is much more exothermic than the endothermic part, is when neutrons accumulate onto another nucleus within the lattice. Ideally you have them accumulate onto other hydrogen nuclei that are within the lattice, which is always an exothermic event, or it doesn’t matter whether it accumulates on a nickel or palladium, that’s also an exothermic event, it releases a lot of energy.” See the firm’s PowerPoint Slide Show.

Gode may be right, his further discussion explains, “What you do is you want to control the creation of the neutrons, and you generate a neutron by causing a proton to capture an electron.” This also harkens back to the Fermi dictum on neutrons and building atoms.

Martinez took the duo into the timeline for marketing with George leading saying, “We’re looking at 12 to 18 months to bring it to strategic partners. We don’t plan to become a manufacturer; we’re going to be a licensor. Obviously, the boiler manufacturers already have the ability to do the heat exchangers and so forth, and what we’ll be providing is a system that will be the new boiler, it’ll be the heat source, and they’ll do the heat exchangers, and heat your domestic hot water in your home, your commercial building, and the other systems should actually be capable of generating electric power out of some of the retiring coal-fired electric power plants.”

On the public relations front George offered, “ . . . we’ve been quiet because we wanted to get our system operational, we wanted to be able to show people a system that’s running, and we wanted to make sure our technology is sound. So we’re moving in that direction, we’re excited about it, and this next round will bring us, we believe, to the goalpost.”

For sales George explains, “There are any number of different sizes of pressure vessels which we use in our wet boiler, and so we expect that the commercial systems will probably be 20-30% (in price) more than a current boiler and about the same size. We’re talking about, for a residential application, a pressure tank about the size of a scuba tank, the electronics which Robert Godes has developed and patented through Patrick Townzend, basically a heat exchanger which the boiler manufacturers all over the country have the capability of doing, that’s why we don’t want to become a manufacturer, we won’t become a competitor. And they’ll be able to substitute Brillouin Boilers in where you now have a coal-fired, oil-fired, gas-fired, electric boilers providing the heat, and maybe you have additional heat exchangers to transfer to the building. But this system is basically going to be a one-on-one replacement.”

On the legal front Godes fills us in with, “Currently the patents are applied for. We have one large patent applied for and that initial application was actually granted in China. We’re in Japan right now. We recently filed an update with the USPTO to keep the US application alive.”

Many American’s know that the US Patent Office is a serious development problem for American technical leadership.  Godes goes on with, “We actually just had a significant interaction with the examiner of the USPTO. The guy that’s examining our patent worked quite a bit in the plasma fusion arena for a number of years, and now is in semi-retirement working as a patent examiner, he’s kind of rooting for the cold fusion crowd, but the edict has been handed down from on high that they’re not to grant any patents in this field, which is a really sad state of affairs. The fiasco that happened in 1989 is still bogging us here in the United States.”

For Brillouin the attention has been useful and gratifying.  Folks from the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC have come out to the lab to look at the system. Its expected they’ll come back in the next several months for additional tests with their analysis equipment.  There’s a start of commercial interest with “a lot” of major corporations coming to meet with Brillion in the last couple of months.

The current production cost quote from George is,  “The high-end system that will easily generate electricity, we’re looking at potentially, from our cost analysis, about 1 cent per kilowatt hour, but that’s on a commercial system.”  Because Brillouin’s technology is a boiler making heat, a residential electrical generation system isn’t a technology they seem to be pursuing.

Much of the rest of the interview is a discussion on the LENR political challenges, patents and funding.  George points out the electronics, for which the firm has a patent pending, is a decade long effort by Godes.

They expect that a boiler would cost about a third more than a conventional unit.  The question isn’t especially on point, though.  A Brillouin boiler may have unique electronics, something less complex than a cell phone.  But a conventional boiler using say coal or heavy oil is going to come with a costly combustion control and effluent treatment for managing air pollution.  Add fuel storage and the fuel handling investment could have Brillouin being much more competitive than they think they are now.

The interview winds up discussing the immediate future.  Godes points out the Brillouin position that, “. . . the reality is, just a few million dollars could actually bring this technology to the point where OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturers) could start producing these in large numbers for general consumption.”

Sometimes it just a pity that securities law in the effort to protect people from unscrupulous stock sales have barricaded off investments into research and development for most people.  Brillouin is the kind of example where a small number of small investors generating a few million dollars of financing could make a big difference.

The whole interview is a good read worth the click over for a few minutes.  Commercial LENR energy production could be very close indeed.

One point eight billion degrees is a temperature high enough to ignite the nuclear fusion of “aneutronic” fuels like hydrogen and boron.  Such aneutronic fuels, which produce no neutrons, could generate energy that can be converted directly into electricity, without going through the capital intensive cycle of generating steam, driving it through turbines and re-cooling the steam and water.

The peer reviewed paper shows that the firm has achieved two of three criteria for net fusion energy.  This news can put some meaning to garage-sized fusion generators that might be possible in a few years.

Focus Fusion Tungsten Cathode Damage. Click image for the largest view.

These results came before the Focus Fusion device hit a design limit. Late in January a ceramic insulator broke in late January, damaging the nearby cathode base.  This base takes the plasma charge and sends it away.  The temperature achievement price is a new and better cathode.

The new design presented some new challenges.  The team made a small change from 100 to 96 tungsten pins (since 96 is a nice even multiple of the 16 cathode rods).  The tiny (40-mil, or .040″) holes that held the tungsten pins on the inside edge of the plate proved extremely challenging for the firm’s regular machinist, due to their size and the softness of copper.

The tungsten pins are critical to the functioning of Focus Fusion machine because the current starts to flow from them and forms into filaments and the overall plasma sheath.

Focus Fusion New Tungsten Cathode Design. Click image for the largest view.

Research team members Aaron Blake and Derek Shannon designed a more robust substitute for the pins choosing to design a serrated ring of tungsten, with the saw tooth points substituting for the points of the pins.   LPP has located a much larger machine shop which uses electrical discharge machining (EDM), a highly precise method of machining with intense electric currents making a very appropriate method for the high voltage happy Focus Fusion machine.

The new ring of tungsten teeth is expected to arrive in early April.  That will allow LPP to resume firing, confident they will have a highly symmetric set of electrodes.  This symmetry is essential to achieving good compression of the plasma and producing higher fusion yields.

Dr. Lerner, Chief Scientist at LPP explains the significance of the two out of three criteria results that have passed the peer review process, “The research reported in the paper shows that we have achieved two of the three conditions needed to scientifically demonstrate net energy production with aneutronic fuels. We have demonstrated the extremely high ion energies needed to ignite this fuel, and the confinement time of tens of nanoseconds that we need to burn it.  We are still far from having sufficient density in the tiny hot regions to get net energy, but that is our next goal.”

This is progress.  About a year ago LPP had reported energies for ions of 1.1 billion degrees, equal to record temperatures for the dense plasma focus device that had stood since 1978.  The new work shatters those long-standing records and, most importantly, crosses the threshold temperature expected that’s needed to burn aneutronic fuels.

The paper, is titled Fusion Reactions From >150 keV Ions in a Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) plasmoid also lays to rest a long-standing scientific controversy with major implications for whether the DPF is a viable source of useful fusion energy.

Lerner’s team shows conclusively that the majority of fusion reactions in LPP’s DPF come from confined, circulating ions, and not from a beam of ions just passing through once.  If fusion reactions in a DPF come primarily from an unconfined beam, then the fusion yields are unlikely to scale to useful quantities of energy.

On the other hand, if, as this research has shown, the fusion reactions take place primarily between ions confined within a concentrated ball of plasma (a “plasmoid”), then the energy from the reactions will be trapped and will heat the plasmoid up further, leading to a complete burn and net energy production.

The paper is available from LPP by personal request.

The LPP research team is currently upgrading their fusion device to achieve the higher densities required for net energy, a goal they hope to achieve soon.

Dr. Lerner and his team have come a long way since the idea was glimmering thought in mind.  The next threshold is net energy production, a significant event that should garner worldwide attention and considerable acclaim. These folks deserve it, although I doubt they have the hubris to make much of it – the humble sincerity your writer has experienced with these folks is a refreshing experience grounded in reality.

The new parts are also a confidence builder.  The LPP team is a pretty sharp group and one can fairly expect the engineering at the start to have been right at what the plan envisioned – but the plan is being exceeded.  In an odd way one hopes there will be more and better equipment need to scale up the output, because that tells us the potential is higher than first expected.

Go guys, step by step until something else fails, maybe you’ll get some net energy first. Either way, the concept looks better with every shot.

To start is the 40-page PDF presentation by Yogendra Srivastava from the University of Perugia.  The file is a set of the slides shown during the presentation and is complete enough to get a good feel for the narrative.  This is the first complete enough and extensive enough presentation to put real confidence into the Widom Preperata – Larsen theory(s).  The theory(s) may well turn out to be the facts, and if the connections Srivastava uses turn out to be accurate metaphors, the chance to inform the public is looking up and could very well prompt some public support.

Basic LENR or Cold Fusion Tabletop Setup. Click image for the largest view.

Srivastava gets the technology overview going by page 9 and over the following ten pages covers the most likely and experimentally validated energy inputs.  From electricity and magnetic to elastic piezoelectric, the prevailing influence of a theoretical view from Widom the evidence is compelling that with a good enough kit many experimenters can get in on the progress.

Celani gave an overview of background history of significant Low Energy Nuclear Reaction experiments for the CERN observers running 32 pages.  The PDF file is strong enough that it would do for a download and saving for answering those you’d meet who’d like to get up to date in a brief way.

Of particular note Celani identifies 6 key unanswered questions worth a quick repeat in your humble writers preferred order.

1.    What is the root cause of experimental irreproducibility? This problem deserves answered for multiple reasons.
2.    Is there one mechanism active or are there multiple processes?  A question that leads to:
3.    Are the reactions only nuclear, only atomic or both?
4.    Which external factor could be used to initiate and control LENR?
5.    What, if anything, is common to electrochemical and gas loading experiments that have exhibited excess power and heat?
6.    Do the reactions occur only on the surface of materials or also in the bulk (volume) of the materials?

As a set the order may be subjected to more questions that individual experimenters seek to answer as they make progress.  Celani does make the leading matters to outside observers pretty clear.  As the possible answers get closer to firm conclusions the news will really heat up.  Celani winds up with an appeal for an international, multidisciplinary approach.  The idea has merit as well as sparking reservations.  Still, the world needs answers and the questions that follow more than a giant research project.

Celani and Srivastava were both expected to at the colloquium so the news centers on a new player: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Technical Headquarters from Japan. Keep in mind the Japanese folks never fell for the cold fusion assassination that went on in the west.  Instead they worked along, making progress.

Mitsubishi Graphic of LENT Action. Click image for the largest view.

Mitsubishi is saying, “D2 gas permeation through nano-structured Pd multilayer film makes it possible to induce nuclear transmutation under low pressure and low temperature condition.”  That was followed by the notice the Toyota R&D Center, Osaka Univ., Iwate Univ., etc. replicated the transmutation experiments of Cs into Pr.

LENR is going commercial?

Mitsubishi is hoping for three applications, nuclear transmutation of radioactive waste, production of rare earth materials and a portable nuclear energy source.

This news while subtle is quite interesting.  The folks at Mitsubishi are looking far beyond palladium, platinum and nickel.  That begs the question – “What is it they already know?” They seem to have an answer that stimulates a far-reaching implication – there may well be Low Energy Nuclear Transmutations or “LENT” across a much larger part of the element table that any of us have been thinking so far.

Srivastava offered a reminder of Enrico Fermi who famously said, “Give me enough neutrons and I shall give you the Entire Periodic Table.”  Evidently the huge Japanese conglomerates are taking the Fermi dictum seriously with encouraging results.

That LENT term seems to be a new acronym we’ll need to keep at hand.  Srivastava used it as well as Mitsubishi.  The term clearly implies rather solidly that Cold Fusion to LENR is moving on with LENT as well.

Perhaps the colloquium served as a wakeup call to the folks at CERN.  The private industry work surely raised eyebrows.  Rossi and Defkalion aside, cold fusion to LENR to LENT is getting more interesting by the month.

Sandia Prototype Magnetic Electrostatic Confinement

Sandia researcher Steve Slutz, lead author of the paper published at Physical Review Letters said, “People didn’t think there was a high-gain option for magnetized inertial fusion (MIF) but these numerical simulations show there is. Now we have to see if nature will let us do it. In principle, we don’t know why we can’t.”  Take that to mean “might” moves to “could”.

The Sandia team is talking about high-gain or quite substantial returns past breakeven reactions.

Before we get too far lets have a very brief refresher.  The two leading Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (ICE) paths are from Dr. Robert Bussard with quite a bit of design information and the Rostocker design handled quietly by Tri-Alpha Energy.  Add to those the plasma method gaining ground designed and led by Eric Lerner.  The easiest comparison is the Bussard confinement design – a semi spherical (essentially a cube) volume held by magnetic fields within which fusion is occurring and expected to get past breakeven.

Where Sandia Lab team diverges is the semi sphere is instead a cylinder.

Two years ago the Sandia team proposed the cylinder idea with simulations that offered, “significant fusion yields may be obtained by pulsed-power-driven implosions of cylindrical metal liners onto magnetized (>T) 10 and preheated (100–500 eV) deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel.” What was learned was key, the cylinder idea builds a confinement strong enough to hold in the heat and keep the alpha particles inside – that keeps the energy loss way down.  More simulations and tests were planned . . .

This year the press release explains the MIF technique heats the fusion fuel (deuterium-tritium) by compression as in normal inertial fusion, but uses a magnetic field to suppress heat loss during implosion. The magnetic field surrounds a small liner so together they act like a kind of shower curtain to prevent charged particles like electrons and alpha particles from leaving the party early and draining energy from the reaction.

At the top and bottom of the liner are two slightly larger coils that, when electrically powered, create a joined vertical magnetic field that penetrates into the liner, reducing energy loss from charged particles attempting to escape through the liner’s walls.

Once set up the simulated process relies upon a single, relatively low-powered laser to preheat a deuterium-tritium gas mixture that sits within the liner.

Z Machine Cross Section View.

An extremely strong magnetic field is created on the surface of the liner by a separate, very powerful electrical current, generated by a pulsed power accelerator such as the Sandia Z accelerator machine. The force of this huge magnetic field pushes the liner inward to a fraction of its original diameter. It also compresses the magnetic field emanating from the coils. The combination is powerful enough to force atoms of gaseous fuel into intimate contact with each other, fusing them.

Sandia's Old Saturn Pulsed Power Machine, Predecessor to the Z Machine, In Operation.

What they get is an implosion, everything crashing in rather than exploding out.  The product we’re interested in is heat, and the new work shows there is a lot of it.

Heat released from that reaction raises the gaseous fuel’s temperature high enough to ignite a layer of frozen and therefore denser deuterium-tritium fuel coating the inside of the liner. The heat transfer is similar to the way kindling heats a log: when the log ignites, the real heat – here high-yield fusion from ignited frozen fuel – begins.

Tests of physical equipment necessary to validate the computer simulations are already under way at Sandia’s Z accelerator.  Sandia engineer Dean Rovang expects a laboratory result by late 2013.  Sandia has already performed preliminary tests of the coils. Portions of the design are slated to receive their first tests this month and continue into early winter.

The team is already on the suspected problems.  The potential ones already seen involve controlling instabilities in the liner and in the magnetic field that might prevent the fuel from constricting evenly, an essential condition for a useful implosion. Even isolating the factors contributing to this hundred-nanosecond-long compression event, in order to adjust them, will be challenging.

Sandia manager Daniel Sinars said, “Whatever the difficulties we still want to find the answer to what Slutz (and co-author Roger Vesey) propose: Can magnetically driven inertial fusion work? We owe it to the country to understand how realistic this possibility is.”

There will not be a history making result, though.  As Sandia’s Z machine can bring a maximum of only 26 million amperes to bear upon a target, the researchers would be happy with a proof-of-principle result called scientific break-even, in which the amount of energy leaving the target equals the amount of energy put into the deuterium-tritium fuel.

This route would be fueled by deuterium-tritium available from seawater, the most plentiful material on earth.

Here’s the closing “Wow” statement the team gets from developing the simulations: the output demonstrated was 100 times that of a 60 million amperes input current. The output rose steeply as the current increased: 1,000 times input was achieved from an incoming pulse of 70 million amperes.

It seems there’s plenty of room for energy conversion from heat to electricity.  Keep it going Sandia!

Steven Krivit, the sometimes to some folks notorious writer of heavily biased opinion on cold fusion and once in a while other energy fields broke out a story over the weekend about an allegation that the Florida Department of Health, Bureau of Radiation Control (FBR), called on Andrea Rossi at his Miami address.

The story has been picked up by others that this time won’t be mentioned or linked out of kindness.  Things in just hours have gotten very emotional on some sites.  The email deluge coming in here is driving this post and postponing perhaps more valid news.

The gist of the mess centers on a complaint that was supposedly filed with the FBR by a party from Las Vegas, Nevada, alleging that Mr. Rossi may be building nuclear reactors in a Miami condominium complex.

Then it seems a FBR inspector had an onsite visit with Mr. Rossi.  The report is essentially empty other than the description of the investigation that only tells what is pretty much already known – the active chemistry is nickel and hydrogen, there’s excess heat and excess energy in thermal form at a 6X rate.  Somehow, the Krivit crowd has highlighted the investigator saying of Rossi, “He acknowledged that no nuclear reactions occur during the process . . .”  The question for which Mr. Rossi is acknowledging isn’t mentioned.  And the report notes, “Currently all production, distribution and use of these devices is overseas.”

For Krivit’s part in all this there is a pdf file that contains a set of emails alleged to have exchanged between Gary Wright of Las Vegas and persons at the FBR running some 5 pages, followed by 15 pages of ill-informed biased statements, a barrage of selected comments from assorted sources making for quite a contradictory record, a NyTeknik article about Rossi linking to Ampenergo from back in May of last year, Rossi’s Leonardo Corporation filing in Florida, a smattering of emails about Wright having Mr. Rossi’s addresses and phone numbers, and Finally the report by the inspector.

Krivit’s pdf is at best –tedious, obviously unbalanced and suspect in completeness.

A little due diligence might be worthwhile in looking the matter over.  Who is this Wright fellow?  Anonymous, which is fine and understandable, still a provocateur that seems quite closely connected to Krivit who has a very quick connection to documents and a highlighter as well.   Krivit in his turn has bias to keep filled, a position to sell, a web site to promote – all good motives.  The FBR took what looks a lot like a set-up and wasted their own and the Florida taxpayer’s time and money.  Everyone else is just playing out the emotions.

The hard reality is no one can conclusively show that Rossi’s device, other LENR, Cold Fusion of other terms describing the phenomena are factually nuclear reactions in the conventional sense.

One also needs to temper how one follows Mr. Rossi.  Factually Rossi seems alone and is going into the public arena alone.  No spokesperson, PR department, just Mr. Rossi who is piling up misstatements about as fast or faster than a guy in his position would.   Regular readers here will note, quoting Mr. Rossi just isn’t done.  It’s not that he’s good or bad, he is and can only be the most subjective observer possible. It’s not that he’s truthful or not, he’s an English as a second language person, and he’s not much for distinguishing the present past or future tense. Reading him leaves one bewildered, is he talking what was, what is or the future plans?

With the information at hand, the observation of the events, no certainty of credence of the activities – the shenanigans this time don’t come from Mr. Rossi.

So here’s what you humble writer is thinking:  This isn’t a story about Andrea Rossi and the E-Cat. It’s a story about Gary Wright, Steven Krivit, a bunch of follow along bloggers and readers.  There isn’t any E-Cat news.

No more emails – Please.  Comment as you like, but there isn’t any E-Cat story, it might be a post about yellow journalism, though. Time will tell. Stay calm, wait for the Underwriters Lab.