October saw a flurry of press coverage of private efforts in fusion energy, with a cover article in Time magazine, and new articles in the New York Times, the Economist and elsewhere. The stories focused on the angle that billionaires were funding fusion energy—Amazon’s Jeff Bezos funding General Fusion, Microsoft’s Paul Allen funding Tri Alpha Energy and PayPal’s Paul Thiel funding Helion energy.
Unfortunately, the journalists missed the perhaps more interesting angle that the private fusion company that produces the most fusion energy has no billionaire backers at all. That, of course, is LPPFusion. Even though this company was only mentioned in the Time article and not featured in any of them, the published results of the various companies tell a very clear story. At the moment, LPPFusion’s FF-1 device produces 100 times more fusion energy production per unit of energy input than any other private fusion effort.
“Of course, being ahead right now does not mean we will win the race,” says LPPFusion’s Lerner. “And we are not yet close to where we want to be—more fusion energy output than energy input to the machine. But it should be newsworthy that the company with the least money spent so far has the best published results.” It is notable that while the mass media have focused on better-funded efforts, science magazines such as Nature and Science have featured LPPFusion in their stories.
One newspaper article in the past month did feature LPPFusion: The Israel Times ran a story that described LPPFusion President Lerner’s initiative with other scientists for a “Fusion for Peace” collaboration between Iran, the US and other countries. The story also featured the ongoing scientific collaboration that has developed between LPPFusion and researchers in Iran.
This news piece is part of the November, 2015 report. To download the report click here.
