Historical research guide · 0069 · 2020
Lattice Confinement Fusion (LCF) Overview
L Forsley · T Benyo · B Steinetz · V Pines · M Pines · A Chait · L Dudzinski · M Forsbacka
In one minute
On 19 August 2020 the Advanced Energy Conversion team at NASA Glenn Research Center laid out everything it had done and handed it to a review panel. The brief was a power source for long deep-space missions with no sunlight, no actinide fuel and a working life beyond ten years, and the team’s answer is lattice confinement fusion: pack deuterium into a metal such as titanium or erbium, fire a bremsstrahlung beam at it, and the photoneutrons kick a few deuterons up to about 64 kiloelectronvolts inside fuel that stays cold everywhere else. Lattice electrons screen the charge between nuclei, which the team calculates raises reaction rates by more than twenty orders of magnitude. Forsley, Steinetz, Chait and the two Pineses report fusion neutrons, protons, tritons, alphas, helium-3, transmutations and excess power, published as a pair of Physical Review C papers. Four NASA panellists were asked to attack the work; they concluded the theory and the experiment were sound, and named the next steps.
Connection
Chapter 12 rests on the two Physical Review C papers this deck presents, and here the same team shows the whole programme around them — what was measured, who checked it, and what the next machine would look like. It is also chapter 1’s evidence ladder in action: NASA convened a panel whose job was to challenge the result, and that panel’s verdict is on the record.
From the source
NASA Glenn demonstrated sub-barrier fusion — lattice electron-screened, bremsstrahlung photoneutron initiated nuclear reactions, including lattice confinement fusion, boosted fusion and stripping reactions — and the process is repeatable and works with different lattice materials holding the deuteron fuel.AEC Project: Objectives Met; Conclusion
Electron screening in a deuterated metal lattice enhances nuclear reaction rates by more than twenty orders of magnitude, and it also increases the probability of large-angle scattering between charged particles, which is what raises the tunnelling probability.Physical Review C Papers; Conclusion
Lattice confinement fusion occupies its own place between the two conventional approaches: inertial confinement runs at 10²⁶ ions per cubic centimetre for nanoseconds, magnetic confinement at 10¹⁴ for seconds, while LCF holds 10²³ ions per cubic centimetre at a 64 keV ion temperature with an indefinite confinement time.Comparing Fusion Methods table
Excess power has been observed in metal deuterides with the US Navy: a palladium/rhodium/lithium deuteride delivering 15 to 90 thermal watts per gram, continuous but unoptimised, against 0.54 watts per gram for the continuous thermal decay of plutonium-238.AEC Project: Objectives Met
The four-member NASA review panel, asked to challenge the findings, concluded that theory and experiment were sound — the experiment giving compelling evidence for the electron-screening-enhanced LCF hypothesis, and the theory rooted in well established foundational physics, with no magic required, testable and verifiable.LCF Workshop: Objectives Met; Panelist on Experiment; Panelist on Theory
A bremsstrahlung-boosted sub-critical reactor becomes realistic with a space-rated relativistic electron accelerator at 2.5 MeV — roughly three metres of accelerator cavity stages, possibly halved to 1.5 metres with cavity improvements — while accelerator-enhanced electron screening without any neutron driver may be effective at 190 keV in a 25 centimetre, ten-stage machine.Bremsstrahlung/electron source for sub-critical reactor
The way in
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205003973How to cite it
L Forsley, T Benyo, B Steinetz, V Pines, M Pines, A Chait, L Dudzinski, M Forsbacka (2020) Lattice Confinement Fusion (LCF) Overview https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20205003973