Crowd Funding Focus Fusion

by Dennis Peterson
(Charlotte, NC, USA)

LPP's Focus Fusion project is crowd funding focus fusion seeking $200K for beryllium electrodes for their special reactor core.

They think they're 12 to 18 months away from break-even with boron fuel. After that it's four years to engineer a production plant which will be able to generate power at least ten times cheaper than is possible with fossil fuels.

Eric Lerner, the chief scientist, gave an invited talk at Oxford last week. He published a paper in 2012 in Physics of Plasmas, the leading fusion journal, showing that they'd attained the temperature and confinement time needed for boron fusion. The temperatures achieved were many times higher than any other nuclear fusion project in the world.

Now they need to increase plasma density by 10,000 times, which they think they can do with the new electrodes, along with increased input power and switching to boron fuel (from deuterium).

More information on the dense plasma focus idea for creating viable power-generating nuclear fusion is covered on another part of this site. In particular the work by LPP - Lawrenceville Plasma Physics.

The boron and hydrogen mix fuel will enable nuclear fusion to be achieved without producing neutrons. Neutrons from fusion reactions create radioactive byproducts and weaken structural material in reactor chambers.

The beryllium electrodes beings sought through the funding will enable x-rays produced in the boron-hydrogen reaction to pass freely in the reactor to increase the effectiveness of fusion.

There is more information on crowd funding focus fusion in an article in Gizmag.

The place to participate in crowd funding focus fusion is with indiegogo through this link.