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

LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU 1

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). It’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

LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU 2

aneutronic fuel and that’s an extremely important difference. What this means 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

• n 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 don’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

• ver 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

• f the ground, and if necessary we can get it from sea water …and as I said it is extremely 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.

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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

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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 necessary 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.

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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

• ne 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

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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

• f 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 …

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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

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…What happened to the cathode bars? Pick up the plate [Laughter…] Just pass these around. This just shows the electrodes themselves on FF-1 and this gives you an idea of the actual size of the entire experimental device. This is FF-1without the vacuum chamber and the big blue objects are the capacitors.

Dense Plasma Focus – Inside Look

For presentation see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVif4hUAJ8c For DPF animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgfY_Ig9648

At the heart of the DPF are two cylindrical electrodes only a few inches across nested inside each other. The electrodes are enclosed in a vacuum chamber with a low pressure gas filling a space between them. A pulse of electricity from a capacitor bank, an energy storage device, is discharged across the

• electrodes. For a few millionths of a second an intense current flows from the outer to the inner

electrode through the gas. Instabilities first compress the gas into the dense filaments. These filaments are little whirlwinds of plasma. The sheath of filaments converges together into a dense pinch or focus combining all the filaments into one. This filament kinks and twists itself into a tiny dense ball only a few thousandths of an inch across called the plasmoid. Instabilities in the plasmoid create powerful beams in the opposite directions: Positively charged nuclei flow in one direction and the electrons flow in the other. [The hot electrons in the plasma also emit a burst of X-rays isotropically.] The electron beam heats the plasmoid to billions of degrees, hot enough to fuse nuclei together to release fusion

• energy. In sum, the DPF operates by leveraging electricity to induce a plasma state for some gas. It then

exploits the series of instabilities within the plasma to bring about controlled nuclear fusion. We call this Focus Fusion.

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…again slowly

Basically the first instability is the formation of the filaments. So the filaments are forming here and are running down the end of the electrode. So that’s the first instability. And the second instability is that the filaments merge together into a single filament. And then the third instability is that these filaments twist themselves up into the plasmoid. So this is the formation of the plasmoid. The fourth instability is this plasmoid creates a beam of electrons in one direction and ions in the other which then heats up the plasmoid to produce the fusion reactions. [Also, the hot electrons in the plasma emit a burst of X-rays.] So that’s a series of four instabilities each increasing the energy density. This is an artist’s conception of what the generator would look like, with part of the energy coming off in the form of a beam, going into

LawrencevillePlasmaPhysics.com Presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM4talPKvtU 10

the spiral. So the beam goes into this helical coil which is basically a form of a high-tech transformer which collects the energy into an electric circuit. The second part of the energy comes of in a form of X- rays which spread out into this

• nion-like array of photoelectric

receptors which collect the energy and again converts that into electricity.

Garage-Size 5 MW

And this gives you some sense of the scale of the generator which could fit in a garage and produce about 5MW of power… enough for a small community.

Our Advances and Other DPFs

Hannes Alfven in 1971 won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the entire field of Plasma

• physics. I developed a theory that connected the operational plasma focus device with astrophysical

phenomena such as the quasars. So I had to develop a quantitative theory that projects these natural phenomena from the scale of the laboratory to the scale of the galaxy. And we tested that against the experimental results. And what that theory predicted was that we had to shrink the device in order to make it function well. So we made the electrodes considerably smaller than other such devices. We also developed the idea, this was a contribution of one of my coworkers, Aaron Blake, of an axial field coil to control the spin, to control how much the plasmoid is spinning, and we can go into this if people are interested in Q&A. I also applied a known physical phenomenon, the quantum magnetic field effect, to understand how we can tailor this machine so that the X-rays emitted by the electrons don’t cool off the plasma to make it too cool for fusion. So these are various advances that we had over earlier DPF work.

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Innovation On The Shoulders Of Giants

What I want to emphasize is the physics we are using here is not something that’s come out of my head. This is physics that’s based on basic 19th century development of theory of electromagnetism, Faraday, Maxwell and others; 20th century quantum mechanics and nuclear physics; and on research done by tens of groups working with this very device over the last decades. Our experimental program actually started in the beginning of the 1990s in which we ran an experiment funded by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. We had major delays based on funding and an inability to get another facility and we didn’t run another experiment till 2001 at Texas A&M, also funded by NASA. Then unfortunately NASA was ordered to get out of fusion business and our funding ceased until we could raise enough money privately in order to do the present series of experiments at

• ur own facility starting in 2009 and we’re now collaborating with other plasma focus groups such as

Kansas State University and at the NTSEC facility in Las Vegas. So these are just few innovations that we’ve made and which are contained in our patent.

So Where Are We?

And we’ll soon get into the Q&A after this. Basically to get net energy out of fusion you need a tripod, you need three things. You need sufficient

• temperature. You need to confine that temperature for a sufficient amount of time and you have to

have very high density so fuel burns fast enough. We have achieved two of those goals: we have gotten

• ver a 160 KeV that we calculated would be necessary to ignite pB11. We haven’t done that with pB11

fuel yet--we at moment are just using deuterium. It’s simply much easier a fuel to work with at an earlier experimental phase. We should be moving to pB11 very shortly. We’ve demonstrated the confinement that we need, which isn’t much, 20 nanoseconds -20 billionths of a second. We demonstrated we can efficiently transfer energy into the plasma but we haven’t gotten the density we need--and in fact we need to increase density by several orders of magnitude. We have a plan for doing

• that. Now before I get into that I should mention you don’t have to entirely take my word for achieving

these extremely high temperatures. We have published this in a peer-reviewed journal, Physics of Plasmas, earlier this year. So our plan for getting higher density is first of all to get greater symmetry of

• ur compression and that’s basically just getting up to speed, getting everything right in putting our

machine together. And the machine, even though it’s small, has to be put together properly [to the precision of 1/1000th of an inch] and there is a learning curve. So that’s the first step, which is something we intend to achieve very quickly.

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Steps to Increase Density

Second, we get a ten times increase in density just by increasing current from our present level, which is about 1.4 Meg Amps, to 2.8 meg Amps. Then we are going to switch to a heavier gas which is going to increase compression and therefore density.

Getting Net Energy

Now the goal of our present phase is to prove scientific feasibility. To prove that in one pulse we can get enough energy out so that with reasonable conversion we can get net energy out

• f the generator. We need a much

bigger project, we estimate about $50M, to get to get net power out of

• it. Net power means that we have the

entire prototype generator that collects the energy and funnels it back into capacitors.

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Focus Fusion Energy Flow

So… I don’t expect everybody to read this diagram but this basically shows that we calculated how much energy is lost at each step, so that with the gains we anticipate we can have from the gross fusion energy, 66 kilojoules, we can have a net energy of about 24.5 kilojoules fed out to the grid.

Engineering Phase

In the engineering phase, which we are not working on right now as I say – it will take a bigger effort - we basically see three

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challenges: One is cooling the device. It is going to have some waste heat. It has to be removed from this rather small object, the anode. We see basically doing that with compressed helium-cooling, which

• ther people are also developing.

The second engineering challenge is developing that X-ray onion device, which we have invented, which has to be proven and developed from the engineering standpoint. And the third and probably least of the challenges is the high efficiency ion beam conversion. There is already a megawatt magnetron device that takes energy out of electron beam with 87 % efficiency, so we’re pretty confident we can reach 80% efficiency without stretching the existing technology very far.

pB11 Hydrogen-Boron

Now we’re not the only group trying to get aneutronic fusion. To our knowledge there are two other groups both of which happen to be also in the US. There is the Polywell effort which is being funded by the Navy and there is Tri Alpha, basically funded privately, and both of them are considerably larger effort than ours. This is sort of a comparison where they are in achieving this tripod and where we are.

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This is putting density and confinement time together as a product – we call it n-tau…and this is a log scale so for each of these … this is 1010 and this is the log of the temperature scale in 1000 of electron

• volts. So this is where Polywell is. [Showing on the projector screen.] They got pretty good temperature

but not very good density. Tri Alpha has better density but pretty low temp and we have a range of results from very good temperature, basically what we need, and reasonably good density to better density and lower temperature. So that’s where we are. This is where we need to go and just for comparison the Princeton Tokamak is not even where we are and they are not aiming for pB11 but for deuterium tritium.

What Our Colleagues are saying?

And these are some things that some of our colleagues have said about us. Bruno Coppi is the leader in the effort called Ignitron and that’s form of Tokomak. So he’s investing his career in another horse but he thinks our horse is worth investing in. And a second quote is from an Iranian group that studies similar approaches theoretically and finally from one of our colleagues in Mexico.

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Our Intellectual Property

Now people are of course interested in how do we protect this invention of ours. We do have intellectual property which is the US patent 7,482, 607 and basically it’s a pretty broad patent. It protects the fact that we’ve discovered that the size of the device is important; it protects the X-ray capture device; it protects the axial field; so it’s pretty broad. And it protects it not only for fusion application but also for spin off applications such as using this as an X-ray source for things such as nondestructive testing. We have an Australian patent which is pretty much identical. We have patent applications with the same priority date for Europe, China, Canada &India, which are moving along. So…

What’s Holding Us Back?

What could make us move faster? Well, there’s too few of us. I think we have a terrific team Right here, we have Derek Shannon who’s been terrific in the laboratory, we have Ivy Karamitsos, who has been doing many, many different tasks,

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including work in the lab, [ Fred van Roessel, our electrical engineer], Sam is on our business end, we also have Aaron Blake, our chief financial officer and off-site we have John Thompson, a plasma physicist who has helped build this device, John Gillory in Virginia who’s helping us with the simulation device and Dr. Warwick Dumas over in England who’s also doing simulation work. So that’s the problem - I’m not forgetting anybody, it’s too small of a team. What we would really want is another experimental or an experimental plasma physicist on site. My background is theoretical plasma physics. I’ve been learning a lot of the details of the experiment as we go along. We need somebody who’s very experienced in using this machine. There are couple of problems of getting someone like that; You need money in the bank to attract somebody to a start-up. We’ve been getting funding and spending it as we go along. There’s a disadvantage if we want somebody in the US who are mostly senior people with their own labs to relocate to a startup. In terms of younger people-- unfortunately this country has not been training people in this device and not been training them very much in plasma physics so all our job applicants who are younger are from outside the US. And that gets us into the immigration mess which is, as almost everyone knows, is very difficult to deal with. Money would help a great deal. We are trying to accelerate things through international collaboration. The Iranians, oddly enough, have the most advanced program in this device and we recently signed a scientific publication collaboration agreement with Plasma Physics Research Center in Teheran. And yes, this is legal under the sanctions, which have a loophole for scientific publications. In addition we’re trying to involve Japan, which also has an active program in plasma focus, but finances could be improved. We raised $2.7Million dollar from one institution investor, Abell Foundation, with about 40 individual investors.

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We’re raising another $1.7 M right now for scientific feasibility and for transition to engineering phase and eventually we’ll need about $50M, we estimate, not necessarily all from private sources, for development phase. We have an active application with ARPA-E which is the Advance Research Programs Agency for Energy and one of their reviewers wrote a fairly favorable review saying that what we did was based on credible prior work and that it would be great if it works. We did hear from them that we have been selected for a call back… and we talked to them by phone and seem to have had a fairly promising conversation. On the other hand they’re absolutely overwhelmed with applications – it is extremely competitive field, so we don’t have any guarantees. They don’t even know when they’re going to announce winners but they think it may be some time next month. People say if this is so great, why we are so short on funds, why we are short on funds. Why there is no stampede to invest?

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Why No Stampede To Invest?

Well I think a stampede is a sort of an operative term. We found that it really is really a herd mentality among investors even, I have to say, among most energy investors. There is solar, there’s wind and there’s geothermal. It’s very difficult to get people to - sort of - think outside the box, and go with something that’s as far in a different direction as what we’re doing, even though what we’re doing is based on extremely sound physics. Department of Energy is another problem: they’ve focused in the last 40 years on the tokomak as essentially all the eggs in one basket. We’re hoping that that may be changing. Recently one of our new investors pointed out this quote from recent Black Rock report which said that they are keeping their eye on startup fusion companies and that’s, I mentioned earlier, there are very few of us. There are less than a half-dozen such companies in an entire planet. So possibly this will change with our next big results. So that’s about it and thanks for your attention. Taking up more than my time but I’m open for Q&A.

Questions & Answers:

Q: What’s the size of machine going to be? A: The size of machine is what was illustrated in the illustration with the man standing next to the machine. Q: Are we talking size of this room? A: That’s something that would fit in somebody’s garage. Won’t fit in someone’s car but would fit in a ship or train. Q: If you had your funding, $2M you’re asking for, what do you believe your timeline for feasibility. A: Well I hesitate a little to say timeline because everybody underestimate deadlines, but we do look to get feasibility in the next 12 months. Q: Once you achieve feasibility then it goes to the next phase which is engineering. You figure a time line on that is about 3-4 years?

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A: That’s right. If we got instant funding, in other words, if the day after we announce our feasibility somebody said here is a $50M check, then we’d say 3-4 years to actually solve engineering problems with an adequate program. Q: Now an investor that comes, say with $2M, would they have a right of first refusal to go for $50M for the engineering. A: Well at the moment I should say something about our ownership structure. The ownership structure …this is a C corporation with two classes of stock. It’s a common ownership structure such as with New York Times. The Class A voting shares are only owned by myself. This is purely defensive strategy. We feel that if this technology proves out we do not want a hostile takeover by, let’s say, Exxon-Mobile. So that’s the only reason for that. We have a shareholder’s agreement which was created by our first big investors, including Abell Foundation, which protects the interest of all of the class B shareholders with the nonvoting shares. Among those provisions is that the existing shareholders get first dibs on any share offer. So any share offer that goes out, the existing shareholders can first have their pro-rata

• share. So at the moment the existing offer which existing shareholders have taken whatever shares

they’ve chosen is $2Million dollars … *** _____________________________________________________________________________________

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