Updated from Future Energy, Vol. 1, No. 4, Spring, 2003, p. 1

Futurists agree that "Only a Technology Revolution Can Save the Earth" (C. Arthur, The Independent, 11/1/02) and that "A Quest for Clean Energy Must Begin Now" (A. Revkin, NY Times, 11/1/02). Answering the call is the pioneering discovery made by physicist Eric Lerner et al. with NASA JPL support. For the first time of temperatures above one billion degrees have been achieved in a dense plasma. Achieved with a compact and inexpensive device called the plasma focus, it is a step toward controlled fusion energy using advanced fuels that generate no radioactivity and almost no neutrons (www.focusfusion.org). This new technology is environmentally safe, cheap, and effectively an unlimited energy source using a hydrogen-boron reaction. Mr. Lerner announced the achievement at the International Conference on Plasma Science on May 26, 2002 and at the Fifth Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion Research on March 24, 2003. The other leaders of the research team are Dr. Bruce Freeman of Texas A and M University, where the experiments were performed in August, 2001 and Dr. Hank Oona of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The results (entitled, "Towards advanced-fuel fusion: electron, ion energy >100keV in a dense plasma") are posted at the physics on-line archive website: http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0205026 and updated in the Proc. of the Fifth Symp. on Current Trends in Inter. Fusion Research. Lerner has projected decentralized 2 MW power plants, at a cost of less than one million dollars to build. The new technology already faces efforts to suppress it. Dr. Richard Seimon, Fusion Energy Science Program Manager at Los Alamos, demanded that Dr. Hank Oona, one of the physicists involved in the experiment, dissociate himself from comparisons that showed the new results to be superior in key respects to those of the tokamak and to remove his name from the paper describing the results. Seimon also pressured Dr. Bruce Freeman, another physicist and co-author of the paper, to advocate the removal of all tokamak comparisons from the paper. Seimon did not dispute the data nor the achievement of record high temperatures. However, the tokamak, a much larger and more expensive device, has been the centerpiece of the US fusion effort for 25 years and apparently is now undermined by a smaller upstart.

In 2002, the US DOE also insisted that another project report’s negative assessment of federally-funded tokamak fusion research be withdrawn by Rand Corp.’s Robert Hirsch, who was then also fired. The report, "Energy Technologies for 2050" is now being sterilized by Rand for DOE review (see "Report Generates Negative Energy" Wash. Post, 3/18/03, p.A27 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42399-2003Mar17.html).

Fusion reactors using hydrogen-boron fuel and the plasma focus device, have several great advantages over existing energy sources:

1. Focus fusion reactors are safe and environmentally sound. No long-term radioactive by-products or pollutants are produced. The end-product is harmless helium gas. Focus fusion reactors would be free of radioactivity and the small number of low-energy neutrons emitted (less than 1/500^th of total energy) could be easily absorbed in several inches of shielding.
2. Focus fusion reactors are cheap. Almost all of the energy (98%) is released in the motion of charged particles that can be converted to electricity directly, thereby eliminating the need for generating steam to drive turbines, which account for most of the cost of electricity today. Focus fusion-generated electricity costs are projected to be as much as one hundred times less than present energy costs. Decaborane presently costs $10 per gram which translates to 0.06 cents/kWh or about 1% of today’s wholesale electricity. Mass production would reduce this price even further. In comparison, the realized future tokamak design of fusion reactor, due to the requirement for a steam generator, cannot reduce electricity costs at all.
3. Focus fusion reactors are small and decentralized. Focus fusion reactors can fit into a residential garage and can be made as small as 2 MW, sufficient for a small community.
4. Focus fusion energy is essentially unlimited. The raw materials for hydrogen-boron fuel are exceedingly common and plentiful. Hydrogen comes from ordinary water and boron from either abundant deposits or from sea-salt. Supplies of terrestrial boron are sufficient to maintain overall power consumption ten times the present global level for a billion years. The present industrial control of boron, which is restricted to only a few companies, is not projected to offer a price fluctuation supply problem.

Reactor Type	Plasma Focus Fusion	Tokamak
Fuel	Hydrogen-boron	Deuterium-tritium
Fuel availability	Abundantly available	Tritium must be bred
Long-lived radioactivity	None	Considerable
Radioactivity of structure	None	Considerable
Power output per unit	2 MW and up	500 MW and up
Unit size	3x3x9 feet	70x70x80 feet
Capital Cost per kW	$100 - $200	$2000 – 3000
Electricity conversion	Direct induction	Steam cycle

In operation, a pulse of electricity from the input capacitor bank (an energy storage device) is discharged into the plasma focus, which is inside a small vacuum chamber (see Figure 1 and 5). The chamber is filled with a dilute gas, decaborane, fed from the fuel chamber. (A kilogram of fuel will be sufficient for a year's operation.) The plasma focus consist of two copper electrodes nested inside each other with the outer one consisting of a circular array of rods and inner one is a single hollow copper rod (see Figure 4).

For a few millionths of a second, an intense current flows from the outer to the inner electrode through the gas. Guided by the current's own magnetic field, the current forms itself into a thin sheath of tiny filaments—little whirlwinds of hot, electrically-conducting gas or plasma. The sheath travels to the end of the inner electrode, where the magnetic fields produced by the currents, without external magnets, pinch and twist the plasma into a tiny, dense ball or plasmoid only a few thousandths of an inch across (see figure below). Within this plasmoid intense electrical fields are generated, causing it to emit a beam of electrons in one direction and a beam of ions, or positively charged nuclei, in the other. In the process the plasmoid heats itself to very high temperatures, over a billion degrees K ("Kelvin" in the absolute temperature scale - room temperature is about 300 K) and fusion reactions take place, before it decays in a few hundred-millionths of a second.

Electric energy from the pulsed ion beam is coupled through coils into an electrical circuit. Fast switches direct the energy into the output capacitor bank. Part of the energy is then be recycled back to drive the next pulse, while the excess, the net energy, is fed into a power grid. A 2 MW prototype would pulse about 500 times a second.

Helium from the spent ion beam is exhausted to a storage vessel. Excess heat is carried away by a cooling system surrounding the vacuum chamber.

The plasma focus process often refers to temperatures but plasma scientists more accurately refer to the average energies of the electrons and ions in a plasma, which are measured in electron volts (eV). An average energy of 100 keV (100,000 electron volts) is equivalent to a temperature of 1.1 billion degrees.

Specifically, the plasma focus generates high energy x-rays, which indicate high energy electrons colliding with ions. But until the recent Texas experiments, most scientists thought that these x-rays were generated when the electron beam produced in the focus smashes into the electrode, and thus did not indicate a truly "hot" plasmas. Based on theoretical work by Mr. Lerner and others, the research team believed that the x-rays would in fact be shown to come from the plasmoid and that the plasmoid could be extremely hot. This theoretical work also indicated that higher gas fill densities would help in getting to these high energies.

To find out where the x-rays came from, the Texas research team blocked the x-rays from the electrode with a lead brick, so they could not reach a set of x-ray detectors. Only x-rays from the tiny plasmoid could get to the detectors.

Measuring the energy of the x-rays is done by seeing how much they were absorbed by copper filters of various thickness—the less they were absorbed, the higher their energy. By measuring the ratios of the signals from detectors with different filters, the energy of the x-rays could be calculated. From the energy of the x-rays, the team can calculate the energy of the electrons in the plasmoid.

They found that, indeed the plasma was truly "hot" and generating typical energies ranging from 80 keV to 210 keV (equivalent to 900 million to 2.4 billion degrees), depending on the filling gas used.

The researchers employed another technique to measure the energy of the ions. They used deuterium (Deuterium is "heavy hydrogen" with a neutron added to the nuclear proton of normal hydrogen, while tritium has two neutrons and a proton in the nucleus) gas in some shots, which produces neutrons through fusion reactions. By measuring the spread in energy of the neutrons coming from the plasmoid, they could calculate the energy of the ions that produced the neutrons. These energies ranged from 45 to 210 keV (500 million degrees to 2.4 billion degrees).

The team was able to measure the confinement time by observing the duration of the x-ray and neutron pulses, which were around 50 billionths of a second.

Finally the researchers were able to calculate the density of the plasmoid. When a deuterium nuclei fuses with another deuterium nuclei, half of the time they produce tritium nuclei. These tritium nuclei are trapped by the powerful magnetic field of the plasmoid and can then fuse again with the deuterium nuclei, producing a very energetic neutron. The more dense the plasmoid, the faster this reaction goes. So by measuring the number of high energy neutrons from the Deuterium-Tritium "D-T" reaction (about 70 million in the best shot) and comparing them with the number of low energy neutrons from the Deuterium-Deuterium "D-D" reaction (about 10 billion in the same shot), the team found that the density of the plasmoid was as high as 1.7x10²¹ ions/cm³, some 250 times more dense than the initial gas that filled the chamber.

Energy generated by the focus fusion device emerges in the form of a tightly collimated ion beam with an energy of about 6 MeV, a pulse duration of a few nanoseconds, and a current of about 400 kA (400,000 Amps - already achieved by Ferrara). Average power delivered will initially be in the area of 2MW. The technology to convert the energy of particle beams into electrical energy in a circuit was developed during World War II to generate radar pulses. The technology today is very mature, and can easily be modified for our purposes. The main shift is to replace the electron beams used in radar technology with the ion beams, which travel at about the same velocity, but have much higher energy due to the ions' much greater mass. Devices that can produce several MW of output power at GHz frequencies have been commercially available for many years.

The simplest way to capture the beam energy is with a traveling wave tube. In this device the ion beam pulse travels down the center of a helical coil of wire. The electrons in the coil, traveling near the speed of light, have to go much further around the coil than do the ions traveling much more slowly in a straight line. With proper design, the electrons form a "traveling wave" of electromagnetic energy that stays just behind the pulse of the ions (which is a few centimeters long). In the process energy is transferred from the ions to the electrons—the pull between them slows the ions down and accelerates the electrons.

A typical traveling wave tube is about 30 cm long. For high efficiency, two traveling wave tubes can be used in series. In this case, efficiency can be close to 80%. Another device used for this purpose is the gyrotron, which is somewhat more complex, but similar in principle. During development work on the focus fusion device, we would be able to use the large body of knowledge about such devices to design an optimized one for use with ion beams.

The wave of electrons in the helical coil can be used to produce a pulse of radio frequency radiation. But in the case of a power plant, the current will be sent directly to the next stage to be rectified. Without this rectification step, energy that flowed out of the coil would turn around and flow back into it. In rectification, a fast switch closes after the electric pulse passes, preventing the reverse flow. Diamond switches capable of switching this much power this fast have recently been commercialized. These switches use a thin film of diamond that is routinely manufactured. Diamond is an excellent insulator, but when exposed to a brief pulse of ultraviolet laser light, it becomes a good conductor. When the laser is turned off, the diamond reverts to being an insulator.

After flowing through the switch, the current flows into a set of extremely fast capacitors, which charge up in a few nanoseconds. Then energy in the capacitors will then be fed partly back to the input capacitors for the next cycle and partly to the output grid as a DC current. Further routine conditioning can convert this DC current to a normal 60 Hz AC current with commercial inverters. Total efficiency of combined processing stages is projected to be above 60%, about double of existing commercial electricity generation technology.

Previous experiments at the University of Illinois has confirmed many of the detailed predictions of the focus fusion theory (see Appendix). The new Texas experiments also showed excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions of such important quantities as the density, temperature and magnetic field within the plasma.

In addition, new theoretical work by LPP has demonstrated that extremely high magnetic fields within the plasmoids of the plasma focus will drastically reduce x-ray cooling of the plasmas. Such fields decrease the flow of energy from the reacting nuclei or ions to the electrons. This reduces the electrons’ temperature and therefore the x-ray power they emit. Cooler electrons radiate less x-ray energy, so the fusion power my be much larger than x-ray losses, rather than just somewhat larger, as previous calculations had indicated.

LPP’s Lerner presented these new theoretical and experimental results at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in April, 2003 (Philadelphia) and at the Fifth Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion Research in March, 2003 (Washington, DC). The Symposium in DC brought together the leading researchers in the fusion field and was sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Global Foundation, Inc. The new results of the Texas experiments were received with great interest by the Symposium participants and will be published in the Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion Research. The details of the magnetic effect are presented in the Appendix.

Hydrogen-boron fusion is considered technically challenging because of the high temperatures required but that is now in the past as a result of the new experimental breakthroughs by LPP. The detailed theory developed by Eric Lerner shows how the less challenging design parameters may be coordinated and the theory has received substantial experimental confirmation. Furthermore, new calculations indicate that more compact focus fusion devices with higher magnetic fields are possible. Therefore, the overall feasibility is reasonably good.

Lawrenceville Plasma Physics’ objective is to achieve break-even (100% net efficiency) with focus fusion (as much energy out as fed into the plasma). The next experiment will take place at a new facility jointly run by LPP and University of Ferrara, Italy. The work will be done through the collaboration of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, and a team of experimental physicists at Ferrara who have years of experience with the plasma focus device.

These experiments, which will take about a year once the equipment is ready, are aimed at achieving a number of goals essential to moving toward a focus fusion reactor.

• First, they are aimed at optimizing the efficiency of energy transfer into the tiny plasmoids. These are magnetically self-confined knots of dense, extremely hot plasma where the fusion reactions take place.
• Second, the experiments will test the ability of the plasma focus to generate magnetic fields in excess of a billion gauss (over a billion times the magnetic field of the earth.) Such giga-gauss fields (megatesla) will reduce the amount of energy lost when hot electrons emit x-rays. This in turn will allow the plasma to stay hotter and produce more fusion energy.
• Third, the experiments will produce significant amounts of fusion energy from hydrogen-boron fuel, which will directly pave the way for a future set aimed at achieving break-even energy production.

The new plasma focus device that will be used for these experiments is physically small, and will, together with its power supply, fit in a small room. However it will be capable of producing 1.5 million amps of current in a short pulse, which will make it one of the most powerful plasma focus devices in the world, comparable with the other two large DPF in North America. In addition, it will be designed for small electrode size and high magnetic fields beyond those that can be achieved at other facilities. The facility will be designed to produce data that can be used for a variety of purposes in addition to the priory one of fusion power. It will also be capable of simulating astrophysical phenomena, such as quasars and neutron stars, and of investigations aimed at near-term industrial applications of the plasma focus, such as the production of intense microwave radiation.

The facility will be equipped with the most sophisticated set of diagnostic instruments in the focus community. Data from the instruments will enable researchers to fully characterize the plasma's size, temperature, and density and to test the theory of plasma focus operation.

The experimental end of the work will be carried out by Agostino Tartari and Federico Rocchi of the Universities of Ferrara and Bologna, while data analysis and comparison with theory will be done by FFS Executive Director Eric J. Lerner, who is also President of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics. Money raised by the Focus Fusion Society will help to finance this effort.

Task 1. Purchase of equipment.

This task involves the purchase of the capacitor bank by FFS and the purchase of the switching circuits and necessary diagnostic instruments by Ferrara.

Task 2. Theoretical calculations and design of electrodes and experiment.

Simultaneously with Task 1, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics will carry out extensive theoretical calculations, especially on the new magnetic field effect, which will determine the range of operating conditions for the experiments and the design of the electrodes.

Task 3. Assembly of Facility.

Once all equipment is one hand, the facility will be assembled, including fabrication of the electrodes, assembly of the capacitors into the bank, integration of the switching circuits, and assembly and positioning of the diagnostic instruments.

Task 4. Planning and Preparation for future experimental development stage

Simultaneously with Task 3, while the facility is being assembled, LPP will be planning and making preparations for the Phase II development experiments, so that there will be no break in work following completion of the first experimental tests. These plans will of course be refined on the basis of the initial experimental results.

Task 5. Testing of facility and calibration of instruments

Once the facility is fully assembled, Ferrara will carry out a series of preliminary tests using deuterium and helium fill gases to shake down the facility and to calibrate all the instruments.

Task 6. First experimental set

The first set of confirmations will demonstrate the theory that higher efficiency of energy transfer into the plasmoid or hot spot, can be achieved with higher run-down velocities and a larger ratio of cathode/anode diameter, up to 5. Testing of tapered electrodes to minimize inductance. Test with D, He or He-D mixtures, using 5 cm diameter cathodes. As many as 10 anodes of different lengths, diameters, tapers and insulator lengths will be tested, with the same cathode.

Task 7. Second experimental set

The second confirmation will demonstrate that DPF can achieve gigagauss magnetic field in hot spots and that these fields can inhibit heating of electrons by ions. Some data relevant to this test should be obtained in the first set of experiments. A second set would aim at achieving the highest possible magnetic fields by reducing the diameters of the cathode and anode, down to a 2.5 cm cathode diameter, maintaining the aspect ratio optimized in task 5.

Task 8. Third experimental set

The third confirmation will show that using mixtures of He or H and p¹¹B (decaborane) can achieve pinches with this mixture and measure secondary neutrons indicating p¹¹B fusion. The goal will be to add p¹¹B to an optimally function He or H gas, and the gradually increase the p¹¹B while seeking new optimal conditions.

Task 9. Fourth experimental set

The fourth confirmation will be runs with pure decaborane, based on optimized conditions derived with mixtures, for comparison.

Task 10. Preparation of papers for publication.

Task	Duration	1	2	3	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
1	6 Months
2	6 Months
3	3 Months
4	3 Months
5	2 Months
6	1 Month
7	1 Month
8	2 Months
9	3 Months
10	2 Months
Total	20 Months

Task	Equipment	Labor	Travel	Overhead	Total
1	$73,000				$73,000
2		$66,000		$6,600	$72,600
3					$0
4		$33,000	$0	$3,300	$36,000
5		$22,000	$2,000		$26,200
6		$11,000		$1,100	$12,100
7		$11,000		$1,100	$12,100
8		$22,000		$2,200	$24,200
9		$33,000	3,000	$3,300	$39,300
10		$22,000		$2,200	$24,200
Total	$73,000	$220,000	$5,000	$22,000	$320,000

Note: While this budget is drawn up for the 20 month task schedule, the Combined Budget in the Appendix covers two full years for Phase I.

In Phase II, extending through years 3, 4 and 5, LPP will develop the technology demonstrated in Phase I into a working prototype fusion generator with approximately 2MW output. This will involve optimizing fusion yield, adapting energy collection, switching and conditioning technology, testing the technology at the high repetition rates needed for efficient functioning. The budget for this period is approximately $6.3 million. However, LPP anticipates that there is a good chance that not all of this money needs to be raised from additional investors. A minimum of $1.2 million for equipment would needed to be raised from investors, but there is a good possibility that once break-even is achieved, funding from government sources either in the US or in Europe will be forthcoming for the rest. Such government contracts would enable LPP to operate at a profit even before development is completed.

In Phase III, LPP would market the focus fusion devices. We believe that the fastest and lowest-risk method of doing this is through selling non-exclusive licenses on the technology. LPP will be protecting its intellectual property rights with a series of patents. Likely initial licenses will be governmental agencies of oil-importing countries, such as, for example Japan, France and Italy. The sale of such licenses will generate a relatively large income stream initially that will be supplemented when royalties being to flow after actual production is begun. In the longer term, LPP may, with some of the accumulated revenue, proceed to establish its own manufacturing facilities either independently or in joint ventures.

LPP engineering analysis indicates that 2 MW focus fusion reactors could be produced for about $200,000 apiece. This is about one-tenth of the cost of conventional electricity generation units of any style or fuel design. This means that once the prototype is successfully developed within five years, focus fusion generators will be the preferred technology for new electrical distributed generation

More powerful units can be designed by accelerating the pulse repetition rate, although there are limitations due to the amount of waste heat that can be removed from such a small device. It is likely that units larger than 20MW will be formed by simply stacking smaller units together, with approximately the same cost per kW of generated power.

We can project the eventual market for new electric fusion generators. Current global new electric generation capacity today amounts to about 100 GW per year, averaging over the last decade. We estimate that the introduction of a much cheaper energy source will in fact increase growth of electric consumption considerably. There will also be a significant market for the replacement of existing sources as well.

The conservative estimate of eventual market size can be used to estimate income stream for LPP. Assuming a price of $100 per new kilowatt of installed focus fusion power generators, a royalty of 5% and a 50% split with Ferrara we have an eventual revenue stream of $250 M per year. By the same reasoning, a 10% market penetration of the new electricity generation market yields an income stream of $25 M per year.

An additional important source of income is from the initial sale of the licenses themselves, even before royalties are forthcoming. We expect that, given the size of the market and the importance of the technology, initial payments on five or six non-exclusive licenses will be in excess of $10 million apiece. This is very conservative, since a license that leads to 10% market penetration will generate $100 million/ year in profit, assuming a modest 10% net profit on sales.

Another market that is available to this product is the space propulsion market. Nuclear propulsion is a hot subject, recently reviewed in New Scientist magazine (Jan. 20 & 23, 2003) with NASA’s Nuclear Systems Initiative being renamed "Project Prometheus" and an increased budget recently approved by the White House. NASA explains that 600 million degrees was a prerequisite for this modality but that 6-8 weeks may be possible for a trip to Mars with a tripling of the space travel speed. As a result, NASA’s JPL recently funded Eric Lerner’s LPP dense plasma focus fusion project for that purpose and should acknowledge the billion degree achievement of the experiment.

The development of thermonuclear fusion for space propulsion has been, for many years, a long term goal of the space program. However, the difficulty of achieving fusion power generally, the very low thrust-to-weight rations of most fusion propulsion designs and the difficulties of dealing with neutrons, induced radioactivity and radioactive materials like tritium in space has made this goal appear impracticable.

But in the past few years, there has been a growth of interest in the dense plasma focus (DPF) device, used with aneutronic fuels, as a possible space propulsion system. This approach was proposed by the present PI, among others, in 1987 and has more recently been the subject of extensive analytical studies funded by the Air Force Systems Command, Phillips Laboratory (Edwards AFB). These more recent studies concluded, as did the earlier ones, that DPF used with advanced fuels, such as dHe3 and pB11, had the potential to be the basis of very attractive space propulsion systems, with high thrust to weight ratios, extremely high specific impulse, and negligible neutron production.

In the DPF, energy is released in the form of directed kinetic energy, suitable for producing thrust. No nozzle or magnetic focusing is needed to form a directed beam for thrust, since the ion beam is formed by the device itself. An advantage of using the DPF for propulsion as compared with energy applications, is that for propulsion, only a portion of beam energy need be converted to electricity to sustain the process, with the rest directly generating thrust.

Potentially focus fusion thrusters will have very high specific impulse, compared to chemical rockets which have very low exhaust velocities of only 2 km/sec that are obtainable in this manner. To achieve minimal space velocities above 25 km/sec need for interplanetary travel, far more fuel than payload is required. In contrast, the beam from a focus fusion device exits at over 7,000 km/sec. (Higher estimates of 11,800 km/sec exhaust speed is reported for p + 11B, which also has a mass conversion fraction of 1287 and 7 x 10¹³ J/kg. (Bussard and Jameson, "Design Considerations for Clean QED Fusion Propulsion Systems" 11^th Symposium on Nuclear Power and Propulsion, Jan., 9, 1993)) This means that very little fuel, less than the mass of the payload, is required to achieve very high velocities.

For example, for a p-B11 thruster made up of 100 individual electrodes each producing 3 kJ of net energy per pulse with a repetition rate of 4x104Hz, a thrust of 200 kg is possible with 12 GW total power. The thrust would be supplied exclusively by the ion beam of 3 Mev alpha particles (4 kA beam). Energy storage weight would be at most about 1 ton per thruster. For a 30-ton payload with ten thrusters a thrust to weight ratio of 0.04 would be attained. This would allow a reduced trip time to Mars (200 million km) of about 16 days, with a round trip fuel consumption of only 7 tons.

Such fusion-propelled ships would be far smaller and less expensive than existing chemical rockets and would greatly reduce the cost of interplanetary travel. By mixing in additional propellant with the beam, higher thrusts can be obtained, making possible fusion rockets that could take off directly from the Earth's surface.

Over time, fusion rockets could make possible robotic interstellar probes. While fusion rockets would be limited to about one third the speed of light, even if they were large with many stages, a space effort willing to sustain projects of over several decades (the cathedrals took far longer) could undertake 60-70 year missions to nearby earth-like planets, once they had been identified by astronomers. Such identification could happen in the next 10-15 years using instruments already being developed by NASA.

This new propulsion generation market may yield an additional income stream of $25 M per year, depending on the thruster price that the market may bear. This excludes income that may be generated from the initial sale of the licenses themselves and the distributed generator income cited above.

Based on the above market considerations, LPP has developed two income projections, one assuming that substantial government funding will be available for Phase II and the other assuming that none will be available. In the Projection One, with government funding, we assume that only $1.6 million is raised from investors, while in Projection Two, we assume the full $6.7 million is raised. (Profit on government funding is assumed at 15%, a standard rate.) In both cases we assume all shares are sold at $100 initially, although we expect that after Phase I is completed, that newly issued shares will be sold for a higher price. The return on investment (ROI) is calculated as an average annual rate for an investor buying shares at the start of year 1, paying $100 a share, a price which is guaranteed only for the first 4,000 shares issued, and holding until the end of the cited year. We assume a P/E ratio of 30 in calculating the value of the company, which is conservative for a rapidly growing high-tech company that is actually turning a profit.

Year	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Income ($ millions)
Gov’t fees	0.3	0.3	0.3
License Sales				10	10	10	10	20
Royalties					2.5	7.5	18	40
Total	0.3	0.3	0.3	10	12.5	17.5	28	60
Company Value	9	9	9	300	375	525	840	1800
Value per share ($ thousands)	0.28	0.28	0.28	9.3	12.7	16.4	26.3	56.2
%ROI per annum	41	29	23	113	100	89	86	88

Year	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Income ($ millions)
Gov’t fees	0.3	0.3	0.3
License Sales				10	10	10	10	20
Royalties					2.5	7.5	18	40
Total	0.3	0.3	0.3	10	12.5	17.5	28	60
Company Value	9	9	9	300	375	525	840	1800
Value per share ($ thousands)	0.28	0.28	0.28	2.2	2.8	3.9	6.3	13.4
%ROI per annum	41	29	23	68	61	58	58	63

As can be seen, even with quite conservative assumptions, annual average ROI will be in the area of 60% per annum for Projection 2 and around 90% per annum for Projection 1.

On the basis of these large ROI, LPP feels that non-voting shares will be an excellent investment. We are selling only non-voting shares simply because we believe the risk of efforts to suppress this technology is high, and selling voting shares will make it too easy for others to take over and suppress focus fusion. As a result, all voting shares will rest with the inventor and family.

All new technology development program involve risk, which is compensated for by expected high rates of return in the event of success. In our case, LPP locates the largest risk in Phase I of the project. While the theoretical projection LPP has made strongly indicates that new energy production can be achieved with focus fusion in an extremely economical manner, and these theoretical models have been tested by experiment and are based on firmly established physical principles, considerable extrapolation is involved. It is always possible that unforeseen factors may prevent the achievement of break even, although LPP considers this unlikely. There are no known physical problems that would prevent achieving net energy production.

Once break even is achieved the risks involved in Phase II are much lower, and in fact are, in our view, negligible. Mature technologies are available that can be tailored to the task of efficiently extracting and converting energy emitted by the focus fusion device.

In Phase III, three are some risks that fossil fuel interests, through their influence on the governments of oil-producing nations will attempt to create unjustified regulatory barriers in the way of marketing focus fusion reactors. However, we believe that the extremely safe and environmentally benign nature of focus fusion, together with its great economy, will produce sufficient political pressure to overcome such barriers. In any case, we believe that there will be many non-producing, oil-importing nations who will be eager to purchase and license this technology. So overall, LPP believes that, once breakeven is achieved at the end of Phase I, the risk that the technology will not achieve a high market penetration are very low.

The most successful magnetic confinement tokamak is the JET (Joint European Torus) in Culham, England. This $1 billion machine is most powerful tokamak today and the last in a long line of attempts in many countries over the last 40 years to achieve fusion. The JET is still not expected to produce more fusion energy than it consumes and the US DOE projects another 35 years before a commercial prototype may be ready.

The most prominent inertial confinement laser fusion experiment is the NIF (National Ignition Facilities) at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs. This $3 billion machine uses high powered lasers to heat and compress a small sphere of fusionable material to high temperatures and pressures. It is not expected to produce economical energy even if it ever reaches breakeven.

The most important electricity provider today is the fossil fuel power plants, capturing 90% of the market, which are the main competitor for focus fusion. However, when the 2 MW focus fusion reactors come on the market, they will completely displace the oil, coal, and natural gas power plants within a few years because of the substantially lower capital cost, ease of use, lack of appreciable fuel cost, and the complete lack of harmful pollution to the air, water, or ground. Therefore, even fossil fuel power generation plants do not present any real competition to focus fusion.

Eric J. Lerner
Primary Investigator
9 Tower Place
Lawrenceville NJ 08648
(609) 406-7857
Fax (609) 406-7861
elerner@igc.org

EDUCATION

Physicist

BS (1975)., MSc(1976) and PhD (1979), National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Dr. Herrera has been a researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Studies of the same University since 1979,and a member of the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, a national research organization. He is a professor at the Faculty of Science of the University, teaching Plasma Physics, Modern Physics (introduction to relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics), and more recently analytical mechanics. He has supervised 12 BSc, 3 MSc and 1 PhD disertations.

His original specialty was Nuclear Physics, and he has been working on Plasma Physics for 22 years, doing both theoretical and experimental work. His group has been working for the past five years on the "Fuego Nuevo II" dense plasma focus machine, which is a 5kJ device. He has published 20 papers in refereed journals, and 20 more in proceedings. He is currently interested in studying the ion acceleration and neutron generation mechanisms in plasma focus devices. He has also been working on radiative waves and instabilities from the theoretical point of view.

Nuclear Engineer

With over 50 years professional experience, Ted is a founding officer of the engineering firm MPR Associates, Inc. and of Radiation, Science & Health, an international public interest group working to rationalize radiation policy. He was Technical Director under Admiral Hyman Rickover of the national program to develop nuclear power for naval propulsion and to build the world's first commercial nuclear power plant. He is editor of The Reactor Shielding Design Manual, author of The Rickover Effect, co-author of The Shippingport Pressurized Water Reactor and Arms Control Agreements: Designs for Verification, and several articles and patents. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and his works have been published in German, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

LPP Combined Budget For Phases I, II and III
$ x 1000	Year1	Year2	Year3	Year4	Year5	Year6	Year7	Year8	Year9	Year10	Total
Revenue
Gov't fees			300	300	300						900
License sales						10000	10000	10000	10000	20000	60000
Royalties							2500	7500	18000	40000	68000
Total	0	0	300	300	300	10000	12500	17500	28000	60000	128900
Costs
Payroll
Salaries	120	120	1200	1200	1200	1800	1800	2000	2000	2000	13440
Fringe	24	24	240	240	240	360	360	400	400	400	2688
Total	144	144	1440	1440	1440	2160	2160	2400	2400	2400	16128
Period
Travel	2	3	10	25	25	25	25	25	25	25	190
Leasehold Improvements	0	0	35	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	35
Facility Rent	0	1	60	60	60	60	60	60	60	60	481
Utilities & Taxes	1	1	30	30	30	30	30	30	30	30	242
Documentation	1	1	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	5	42
Office Equipment	2	1	100	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	243
Shipping	1	1	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	18
Insurance	0	0	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	8
Marketing	0	0	0	0	10	10	10	10	10	10	60
Maintenance / Supplies	1	1	8	10	15	15	15	15	15	15	110
Lab Equipment	75	10	200	150	100	50	50	50	50	50	785
Electrical Supplies	1	1	150	100	100	50	50	50	50	50	602
Machine Shop Equipment	1	1	150	50	50	0	0	0	0	0	252
Parts & Fabrication	5	5	90	100	100	50	50	50	50	50	550
Contingency	1	2	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	20	163
Total Period Cost	91	28	861	573	538	338	338	338	338	338	3781
Total Cost	235	172	2301	2013	1978	2498	2498	2738	2738	2738	19909
Profit/ Loss	-235	-172	-2001	-1713	-1678	7502	10002	14762	25262	57262	108991
Cash Flow	-235	-407	-2408	-4121	-5799	1703	11705	26467	51729	108991

 

1964--The Plasma Focus is invented simultaneously in the US and the USSR by Mather and Fillip.

Late 60's to early 70's-- Winston Bostick and Victorio Nardi at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, develop the basic theory of the plasma focus, showing that energy is concentrated into tiny hot-spots or plasmoids, contained by enormous magnetic fields. Their discoveries become highly controversial, as other researchers insist that the energy is far more diffuse and ignore mounting experimental evidence from Stevens and other groups. During this same period US fusion efforts become concentrated almost exclusively on the tokamak. However, the number of groups around the world doing focus work grows to a few dozen. Funding for each group remains very limited. Work is also hampered by lack of quantitative version of Bostick-Nardi theory.

1986-- Eric Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics publishes first quantitative theory of dense plasma focus (DPF) and plasmoid, using theory to successfully model quasars. The theory is based on Bostick-Nardi model, and was developed with advice from Nardi. In the next few years this theory is extended to predict plasma focus performance for various fuels, showing that improved performance is expected with hydrogen-boron fuels.

Late 80's to early 90's-- End of Cold war and decrease in general funding of physical science leads to drastic cuts in focus fusion, with about half of the groups ceasing to function and many others redirecting research to x-ray lithographic applications. Fusion funding is cut and concentrated ever more narrowly on Tokamaks.

1994--Experiments performed at University of Illinois on small plasma focus confirm predictions of Lerner's theory, including five-fold enhancement of output with smaller electrodes.

2001--Experiments at Texas A &M university confirm predictions from Lerner theory that energies above 100 keV (equivalent to 1.1 billion degrees) can be achieved with plasma focus.

2002--New theoretical calculations indicate that strong magnetic field in DPF can suppress heating of electrons and thus x-ray cooling of plasma. This makes achieving net energy easier and implies that very compact electrodes are desirable.

One of the key problems on the way to a functioning focus fusion reactor is the way that x-rays can cool a proton-boron (p-11B) plasma. When hot, high-velocity electrons collide with boron nuclei, the electrons are accelerated. All accelerated charges emit radiation, and the electrons emit x-ray radiation that can leave the tiny plasmoid, robbing it of energy and cooling it. Previous calculations indicated that fusion reactors would heat the plasma only about two or three times as fast as the x-rays cooled it, a relatively narrow margin.

But new calculations performed by Eric Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics indicate that the strong magnetic fields in a plasmoid can make that situation far better for fusion. The magnetic field makes it harder for the ions to heat the electrons, allowing the electrons to be far cooler than the ions. Cooler electrons radiate less x-ray energy, so that fusion power may be about ten times as large as x-ray losses, rather than just two or three times. In addition, the new calculations seem to indicate that more compact focus devices with higher magnetic fields are more desirable. Such compact devices also are cheaper, so that the costs of the Focus Fusion Society's initial experiments have been reduced from the area of $500,000 to only $100,000.

To understand how the magnetic effect works, it's important to note first how ions heat electrons in the plasma. For fundamental mechanical reasons, a particle can only impart energy to particles that are traveling slower than it is. A simple way of seeing this is to imagine two runners, one fat (the ion) and one skinny (the electron). If the electron is running faster it can catch up to the ion and give it a shove, increasing the ion's energy. But if the ion is running faster, it can give the electron a shove, increasing the skinny runner's energy. In either case the faster particle gives up energy to the slower particle. This is the case even if the slower particle has far more energy to begin with due to its greater mass.* Since ions have at least 1836 times as much mass as electrons, slower moving ions often have far more energy than electrons, but if the electrons move faster, the ions gain still more energy at the electrons' expense.

In a plasma without a strong magnetic field, however, the are always a few electrons that are randomly moving more slowly that the ions. The ions give up energy to those electrons, which then mix in with the rest. So in a "normal plasma" energy does get equalized and the ions and electrons end up at the same temperature, with the average ion moving far slower than the average electron, but faster than some electrons.

A powerful giga-gauss magnetic field, more than several billion gauss (several billion times the magnetic field of the Earth) changes this situation. The magnetic field imposes a lower speed limit on the electrons – ALL electrons have to travel faster than this critical velocity. This is a quantum-mechanical effect. In any magnetic field, an electron moves in a helical orbit around the direction of the magnet field, the magnetic field line. The size of the orbit, the gyroradius, gets smaller for lower electron velocities and for HIGHER magnetic fields. But quantum mechanics dictates that associated with each electron is a wave, which gets longer as the electron velocity goes down.* An electron can only be located with one wavelength, not within a smaller volume.

At a certain point, the gyroradius shrinks down to the same size as the electrons wavelength. It can't shrink any further. So for a given magnetic field, there is a minimum velocity that an electron can have – a smaller velocity would makes its gyroradius smaller than its wavelength, an impossibility.

This means that for very powerful magnetic fields, ions moving slower that the slowest possible electrons will not be able to heat the electrons at all. They will have NO electrons moving slower than they are. But if the ions have to move faster than the electrons to heat them, they must have far greater energy – at least 1836 items as much energy, or 1836 times higher temperature. So instead of ions and electrons having the same temperature, the electrons are far cooler than the ions. This in turn leads to far less x-ray cooling and is a unique discovery constituting intellectual property of LPP.

The effects of magnetic fields on ion-electron collisions has been studied for some time. It was first pointed out in the 1970's by Oak Ridge researcher J. Rand McNally, and more recently astronomers studying neutron stars, which have powerful magnetic fields, noted the same effect. However, Lerner was the first to point out that this effect would have a large impact on the plasma focus, where such strong magnetic fields are possible. Experiments have already demonstrated 0.4 gigagauss fields, and smaller DPF, with stronger initial magnetic fields can reach as high as 20 gigagauss, Lerner calculates. This should be achievable in the next round of experiments, once funding is obtained. The higher magnetic field intensity will ensure higher plasma temperature on the average, creating a greater fusion energy yield on the order of megawatts.