BORON, FUSION, AND ANOTHER HISTORICAL ANOMALY

[EndtheMadnessNow]

November 15, 2024 / Joseph P. Farrell



This story that was shared by T.S. (with our thanks) is another one of those stories that has me scratching my head, wondering just exactly what is going on, and how long it's been going on. So, I'll get to the article first, because my problems with it are numerous and will require a bit of an extended tour around Harvey's Barn:

Scientists uncover 'saltshaker' breakthrough in quest for limitless energy — here's how it could transform the future

So here's the latest "fusion" breakthrough (honestly, folks, aren't you getting tired of all these "fusion breakthroughs", and there's still no fusion? Or is there? We'll get back to that):

Scientists are getting closer to functioning, sustainable fusion energy, and they've just taken another big step: finding a way to prevent material on the chamber walls from interfering in the reaction, Interesting Engineering reports.

Scientists were facing a problem. A fusion reaction needs superheated plasma to work. Experiments have revealed that tungsten is a durable material that is good for containing that plasma, and the plasma-containing device — called a tokamak — was built with tungsten walls.

However, when a fusion reaction runs inside a tungsten tokamak, tiny pieces of tungsten break off and mix into the plasma — these tiny bits cool down the plasma too much, preventing the reaction from running.

Researchers at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have found the solution, Interesting Engineering revealed: sprinkling boron powder into the plasma and allowing it to form a coating on the tungsten walls.

Well, hooray for boron! Just a spoon full of boron helps the fusion take place...(Sung to the tune of "Just a Spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down...")

Now we can help prevent those big hot fusion reactors from melting down. And it's only taken us - what - about seventy years since these were first proposed and designed in the 1950s.  Heck, I can remember reading my Scientific American articles in junior high school and looking with fascination over those pictures and cut-away diagrams of tokomak reactors... in the 1960s... (Notably, the popular press and Weekly Readers of the time seem to have almost totally ignored Philo Farnsworth's public announcements of fusion breakthroughs - no boron needed, apparently - but that's another story for another time, and I've talked about that extensive before in my books and on this website anyway.)

None of this is at the heart of my historiographical frustration, however, and those regular readers here who are familiar with my books, and particularly my book The Nazi international, wherein I detail the fusion research of Dr. Ronald Richter in Juan Peron's 1950s Argentina, will know exactly why.

For those who've not read the book (you may purchase it off the website), my problem is that Dr. Richter, who claimed to have solved the controlled fusion problem for Juan Peron in the early 1950s (!) made two rather intriguing claims (among many others!) about his process for doing so: (1) he was using lithium 7 as a fuel, with (2) a mixture of boron.  In other words, boron has been part of the fusion equation since the 1950s, at least, if you believe Dr. Richter. (Those "other claims" also involved rotating the plasma, pulsing it with high voltage, and the discovery of a coupling effect between plasmas and the zero point energy, but hey, who's paying any attention, because he claimed to be doing at this at temperatures far below what the standard orthodoxy of thermonuclear mechanics at the time dictated.)

Richter was therefore roundly denounced in the world press and by fellow scientists for being a fraud, a montebank, and a swindler, all of which I detail in my book.

But here we are, in 2024 (not 1952), and all of a sudden we learn that boron is a useful ingredient for sustaining a hot fusion plasma... in other words, Richter has been somewhat confirmed, which is unusual for a fraud, montebank, and swindler (and you'll have noted a distinct absence of mention of his name and thoughts on boron in the article.)

So this is a bit of a teensy-tiny (or, depending on one's lights, whopping) discrepancy... It took us more than seventy years to find out what a Nazi scientist working for Juan Peron told us long ago?

"That dog don't hunt," as they say.

Of course, the other side of the story, the one forgotten in popular accounts when they do bother to mention Dr. Richter's Argentinian fusion fantasies, is that the US Air Force secretly sent a team to interview him after his 'exposure" as a fraud to the world press. This team published a report which I reproduced in The Nazi International, and it makes for some very interesting reading, because in one and the same report, often within the same paragraph, Richter's ideas and the man himself are roundly denounced; he is indeed a fraud, montebank, and swindler. But the other half of the story is, that some scientists, reviewing the interview of Richter, concluded that he was "some sort of mad genius, working in the 1970s", which at that time, was two decades ahead of where we were.

But if this "Just a spoon full of boron helps the fusion take place..." report is true, then at least in this regard, Richter was about 70 years ahead of the curve. "Those gosh-danged Nazis... one wonders just what else has been hidden..."

And one wonders why these things seem to be coming out just now... world's fairs, anyone?

See you on the flip side...

The Giza Death Star