FUSION BREAKTHROUGH REPORTED…AND A LOOK BACK
This one was sent to me by many of you, and it is one of those stories that requires being mentioned on its own merits, and for because of what is not being said. But first, the story itself:A team of scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California have reported the achievement of another significant milestone on the road to achieving viable thermonuclear power – fusion – in this case, the milestone being that finally more energy was obtained out of an experiment than was input into the experiment, giving the long-sought-for over-unity reaction in an energy system(or, to be much more accurate, a coefficient of performance greater than 1):
Nuclear fusion breakthrough: US scientists make crucial step to limitless power
Now let’s be honest, this is a small breakthrough, a significant milestone, for it did really just bring fusion power a step closer.
And as the article notes, what scientists are trying to do is effectively to engineer a small star…
And it is precisely here that there is a great divergence between the public story and the lesser-well-known story of fusion. The mainstream media still focuses all of its attention on the two “standard” methods of achieving controlled and sustained thermonuclear fusion reactions: (1) the “electromagnatic containment” method, via huge magnets and plasma traps, and (2) convergent laser beams zapping a small pellet with thermonuclear fuels such as deuterium or tritium.
What most people are unaware is that the American physicist and engineer Philo Farnsworth used the “pellet” idea sans lasers in two patents taken out in the early 1960s, and claimed, and announced that he had achieved a sustained reaction in one of his devices for a few seconds… in 1965. As the patents were owned by I.T.T., they, and Farnsworth’s announcements, were quickly shuffled into oblivion never to be heard from again, except, in a few rare instances, we were assured that Farnsworth could have done no such thing since the energies of his devices and temperatures achieved were far below those maintained by the standard models… Farnsworth wasn’t the only such claimant, for readers of my various books, and in particular The Nazi International, will recall that German physicist Ronald Richter claimed a similar limited success with his devices in the early 1950s. More recently we all know the story of Pons and Fleischmann, who were drummed out of American science simply for reporting what they had observed, even though their observations ran counter to then-reigning theory (of course, a theory was amended with the Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reaction model, and the phenomenon finally explained… and the result was the phenomenon was real).
Now the attentive reader will have noticed one thing about stars and about all these fusion experiments (save one), that distinguishes the two: in stars, the plasma is not only electromagnetically contained(and gravitationally according to the model), but also rotating. In most contemporary fusion experiments – at least, those we’re allowed to see and talk about publicly – the fuel source and plasma is not rotating…
Sooner or later (and it’s probably already being done) someone will figure out that the rotation of the fuel is somehow an essential component…
And for those who don’t know the story, that’s exactly what Richter did, and claimed…
So why bother with all this obscure history of two men and their devices? Precisely to point out that, in the light of the claims of Pons and Fleischmann, what each was saying was not all that unusual, nor should it have been rejected out of hand. Moreover, given the history of both men subsequent to their announcements, it is also clear that someone in the world of black projects took them and their claims very seriously. Thus, when the story of controlled fusion is eventually told, as it inevitably must be, that story is not going to be able to ignore a hidden history.
In the meantime, try rotating your fuel guys…
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