Tiny Amounts of Lithium Improve Temperature, Pressure in Hot Fusion Experiments

Thanks to Matt Severens for sending the following

An interesting article has been posted on the Science Daily website regarding the use of lithium in hot fusion experiments. Researchers from the Princeton Plasma Fusion Lab in Princeton, New Jersey have been doing some testing where they inject tiny grains of lithium into a plasma which undergoes turbulence.

The researchers found that under certain conditions this caused the temperature and pressure to increase dramatically. Lithium has been known by fusion scientists to increase temperatures, but this testing has apparently surprised researchers since only small amounts of lithium raised temperatures more than was expected.

From the article:

High heat and pressure are crucial to fusion, a process in which atomic nuclei — or ions — smash together and release energy — making even a brief rise in pressure of great importance for the development of fusion energy.

“These findings might be a step towards creating our ultimate goal of steady-state fusion, which would last not just for milliseconds, but indefinitely,” said Tom Osborne, a physicist at General Atomics and lead author of the paper.

[. . .]

“These results “could represent the birth of a new tool for influencing or perhaps controlling tokamak edge physics,” said Dennis Mansfield, a physicist at PPPL and a coauthor of the paper who helped develop the injection device called a “lithium dropper.””

Of course there is a big difference between the hot fusion, and LENR approaches — but the fact that small amounts of lithium have a significant effect in these fusion experiments may be somehow connected with the way that lithium seems to enhance Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat and allow for the high temperature reactions that have been achieved in the Hot Cat.