THE COMING STRUGGLE MARY MARCY 1919

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"The Coming Struggle,"
by Mary Marcy
Published in The Ohio Socialist [Cleveland], whole no. 49 (Jan. 1, 1919), pg. 2.
Published in USA prior to 1923, public domain.

https://archive.org/details/TheComingStruggle/page/n1/mode/2up

This article by the co-editor of the recently terminated International Socialist Review gives voice to the revolutionary enthusiasm and illusions that swept the American radical movement in the aftermath of World War I. "To my mind the ultimate triumph of Socialism is as inevitable as the coming of the spring," Marcy declares. "The capitalist financial system is already crumbling. The spirit of revolution is already spreading beyond the boundaries of Russia into Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and down to Romania and far into Sweden and Finland."

In response, capital was becoming internationally organized into a single world entity, with a single world army to defend its interests, Marcy says. In order to be effective in the future, "Socialism must become more and more international," she indicates. Forthcoming conflicts would "rock every nation" and "the greed of the capitalist class, the collapsing financial system upon which it is built, the enforced rebellion of the workers will be our opportunity."

In the coming "real class war" Marcy says that equation of Socialism with electoral politics would be rejected by the working class; that instead the "rebellious force" must be organized and educated in "Industrial Socialism," which she defines as "shop-control by the workers."

For biographical information on Mary Marcy, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Marcy

Uploaded to Archive.org on March 12, 2014 by Tim Davenport ("Carrite"). Non-commercial reproduction permitted.

Dialectics of Magick; Negation of the Negation

Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877
Part I: Philosophy

XIII. Dialectics.
Negation of the Negation

Marx says: “It is the negation of negation. This re-establishes individual property, but on the basis of the acquisitions of the capitalist era, i.e., on co-operation of free workers and their possession in common of the land and of the means of production produced by labour. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, arduous, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property.” [K. Marx, Das Kapital, p. 793.] [Capital, volume I, Chapter 33, page 384 in the MIA pdf file.] That is all. The state of things brought about by the expropriation of the expropriators is therefore characterised as the re-establishment of individual property, but on the basis of the social ownership of the land and of the means of production produced by labour itself. To anyone who understands plain talk this means that social ownership extends to the land and the other means of production, and individual ownership to the products, that is, the articles of consumption. And in order to make the matter comprehensible even to children of six, Marx assumes on page 56 [Chapter 1, page 48 in the MIA pdf] “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community”, that is, a society organised on a socialist basis; and he continues: “The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary.” And surely that is clear enough even for Herr Dühring, in spite of his having Hegel on his brain.

The humanization principle of Death

 is portrayed as an endless series of transformations into a new life.

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/03/for-ruthless-criticism-of-everything.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=political+astrology

texts

The Day Is Coming: 

Life and Work of Charles E. Ruthenberg, 

1882-1927

by

  Oakley C. Johnson

https://archive.org/details/LifeWorkRuthenberg/page/n1/mode/2up

AMERICAN BOY 
The Midwest is that part of the United States usually re- garded as characteristic of the country as a whole, possessing the manufacturing and business skills of the East and the foodproducing powers of the West. The Midwest includes the smokestacks of Chicago, the automobile plants of Detroit, the shipping of the Great Lakes. 
And the heart of this MidAmerica, the geographical center of our industrial empire, is Ohio, the birthplace of Standard Oil and the “Mother of Presidents." 
It is of some interest—perhaps only in a sentimental sense— that Cleveland, the chief city of Ohio, was also the birthplace of the man who was to found and, until his death, lead the Communist Party of the United States. He was C. E. Ruthenberg, the son of a dock-worker who lived in the poorer districts of that city. 
Charles Emil Ruthenberg was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 9, 1882, of German parentage. His father, “Worker August Ruthenberg"—as his name was written on his marriage record —had left Germany earlier that year, February 19, taking with him his wife, W rilhelmina, and eight children. They reached the United States on March 9, and went directly to Cleveland. Charles—the ninth child—arrived four months 
later.




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Marxism In United States History Before the Russian Revolution (1876-1917)

by

 

Oakley C. Johnson

https://archive.org/details/MarxismUSHistoryBeforeRussianRev/page/n5/mode/2up

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Study shows cannabis temporarily relieves PTSD symptoms

by Sara Zaske, Washington State University

AHA! THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATION
THE PARANOIA OF POT CANCELS THE PARANOIA OF PTSD
OR VISA VERSA THE DIALECTICS OF NATURE 

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

People suffering from post-traumatic distress disorder report that cannabis reduces the severity of their symptoms by more than half, at least in the short term, according to a recent study led by Carrie Cuttler, a Washington State University assistant professor of psychology.

Cuttler and her colleagues analyzed data of more than 400 people who tracked changes in their PTSD symptoms before and after cannabis use with Strainprint, an app developed to help users learn what types of medical cannabis work best for their symptoms. The group collectively used the app more than 11,000 times over a 31-month period.

The study, recently published in Journal of Affective Disorders, shows cannabis reduced the severity of intrusions, returning thoughts of a traumatic event, by about 62%; flashbacks by 51%, irritability by 67%, and anxiety by 57%. The symptom reductions were not permanent, however.

"The study suggests that cannabis does reduce symptoms of PTSD acutely, but it might not have longer term beneficial effects on the underlying condition," said Cuttler. "Working with this model, it seems that cannabis will temporarily mask symptoms, acting as a bit of a band aid, but once the period of intoxication wears off, the symptoms can return."

PTSD is a disorder affecting people recovering from traumatic events and impacts women at about twice the rate as men with a 9.7% to 3.6% lifetime prevalence, respectively. While therapy is recommended as the primary treatment, Cuttler said there is growing evidence that many people with PTSD are self-medicating with cannabis.

"A lot of people with PTSD do seem to turn to cannabis, but the literature on its efficacy for managing symptoms is a little sparse," Cuttler said.

This study provides some insight into the effectiveness of cannabis on PTSD symptoms, but as the authors note, it is limited by reliance on a self-selected sample of people who self-identify as having PTSD. Also, it is not possible to compare the symptom reductions experienced by cannabis users to a control group using a placebo.

While some placebo-controlled clinical trials have been done with nabilone, a synthetic form of THC, few have examined the effects of the whole cannabis plant on PTSD.

In this study, Cuttler and her colleagues looked at a variety of variables but found no difference in the effect of cannabis with differing levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), two of the most studied constituents of cannabis. The results imply that it is some combination of THC, CBD and perhaps some of the many other parts of the cannabis plant that create the therapeutic effect. Cannabis has many molecules that can create a biological effect, including up to 120 cannabinoids, 250 terpenes and around 50 flavonoids.

"We need more studies that look at whole plant cannabis because this is what people are using much more than the synthetic cannabinoids," said Cuttler. "It is difficult to do good placebo-controlled trials with whole plant cannabis, but they're still really needed."Cannabis reduces headache and migraine pain by nearly half

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More information: Emily M. LaFrance et al, Short and Long-Term Effects of Cannabis on Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Journal of Affective Disorders (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.05.132

Journal information: Journal of Affective Disorders 

New coronavirus may have emerged in summer 2019, study suggests

People visit a night market in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on June 3

A surge in hospital visits and internet searches related to COVID-19 symptoms from the Chinese city of Wuhan suggests the coronavirus may have been circulating since August 2019, according to a preliminary study by researchers at Boston University and Harvard.

The pandemic, which has been linked to a virus that crossed over from animals to humans, was initially identified in Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Market in December 2019.

Later, experts estimated a genetic ancestor to the virus emerged around mid-November 2019. A report in the South China Morning Post citing government data suggested a "patient zero" could be traced back to November 17.

The new paper, which has not yet appeared in a peer reviewed journal, comes under the relatively new field of "digital epidemiology."

A team led by Elaine Nsoesie at Boston University analyzed 111 satellite images from Wuhan between January 2018 to April 2020, as well as frequently looked up symptoms on the Chinese search engine Baidu.

"A steep increase in volume starting in August 2019" was detected at Wuhan hospital parking lots, "culminating with a peak in December 2019," the authors wrote.

Because queries for the word "cough" rise along with yearly influenza seasons, they also looked for "diarrhea" which is a more COVID-19 specific symptom.

"In August, we identify a unique increase in searches for diarrhea which was neither seen in previous flu seasons or mirrored in the cough search data," the team said.

While respiratory symptoms are the most common hallmarks of SARS-CoV-2 infection, the study suggested that diarrhea "may play an important role in community transmission."

The authors concluded that while they could not definitively confirm that the data they documented was linked to the virus, it supported conclusions reached by other research.

"These findings also corroborate the hypothesis that the virus emerged naturally in southern China and was potentially already circulating at the time of the Wuhan cluster," they said.

AFP

Two cats are first U.S. pets to be sickened with COVID-19

by Dennis Thompson, Healthday Reporter

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The first documented cases of U.S. household cats infected with COVID-19 have emerged in New York state, a new government report shows.

Two cats—one in Nassau County, the other in Orange County—appear to have contracted COVID-19 from the humans with whom they lived, a team of veterinarians reported online June 8 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These are the first reported companion animals to contract COVID-19 in the United States, the researchers said.

Transmission occurred from human to cat in both cases, the report noted. Importantly, the authors of the report said that there's no evidence the cats passed the coronavirus to humans or other cats living in the same household.

"This evidence supports findings to date that animals do not play a substantial role in spreading SARS-CoV-2, although human-to-animal transmission can occur in some situations," the team wrote. "Companion animals that test positive for SARS-CoV-2 should be monitored and separated from persons and other animals until they recover."

The Nassau County cat, a 4-year-old domestic shorthair, developed respiratory illness on March 24 that included sneezing, watery eyes and mild lethargy.

The cat had been living in an apartment with five people, three of whom had COVID-19 symptoms. The first person's illness began nine days before the cat became sick. The apartment complex had experienced multiple cases of human COVID-19 around the same time.

The Orange County cat, a 5-year-old Devon Rex, fell ill on April 1 with sneezing, coughing, runny nose, watery eyes, loss of appetite and lethargy. The cat lived with an employee at a Connecticut veterinary clinic who developed COVID-19 symptoms eight days before the cat became sick.

Both cats fully recovered from their COVID-19, according to Dr. Alexandra Newman and colleagues.

These cases are further confirmation that COVID-19 can spread among cats, something noted by a laboratory study published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In that study, three healthy cats contracted COVID-19 after each was paired with an infected cat in their separate lab cage, researchers in the United States and Japan discovered. Within six days, all six cats were shedding coronavirus.

The study concluded that "cats may be a silent intermediate host of [COVID-19], because infected cats may not show any appreciable symptoms that might be recognized by their owners."

However, one of the researchers said the odds of human-to-cat or cat-to-cat transmission are likely greater than cats passing on the coronavirus to their humans.

"Cats are still much more likely to get COVID-19 from you, rather than you get it from a cat," researcher Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said in a University of Wisconsin news release.

Another vet agreed. "There has been no evidence yet of people getting COVID from any domestic animal. Coronavirus is no reason to abandon your pets," Dr. John Howe, president of the American Veterinary Medical Association, told HealthDay News in May.

Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

---

More information: www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr … htm?s_cid=mm6923e3_x

Peter J. Halfmann et al. Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in Domestic Cats, New England Journal of Medicine (2020). DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc2013400

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has more about cats and COVID-19.

Journal information: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report , New England 

Copyright © 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Happiness might protect you from gastrointestinal distress

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS IS HEALTHY FOR YOU

by UT Southwestern Medical Center

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Serotonin, a chemical known for its role in producing feelings of well-being and happiness in the brain, can reduce the ability of some intestinal pathogens to cause deadly infections, new research by UT Southwestern scientists suggests. The findings, publishing online today in Cell Host & Microbe, could offer a new way to fight infections for which few truly effective treatments currently exist.

Although the vast majority of research on serotonin has centered on its effects in the brain, about 90 percent of this neurotransmitter—a chemical that nerve cells use to communicate with each other—is produced in the gastrointestinal tract, explains study leader Vanessa Sperandio, Ph.D., a professor of microbiology and biochemistry at UT Southwestern Medical Center. In humans, trillions of bacteria live within this space. Most of these gut bacteria are beneficial, but pathogenic bacteria can also colonize the gastrointestinal tract, causing serious and potentially fatal infections.

Because gut bacteria are significantly affected by their environment, Sperandio, along with UTSW doctoral student Aman Kumar, laboratory manager Regan Russell, and their colleagues, wondered whether the serotonin produced in the gut can affect the virulence of pathogenic bacteria that infect the gastrointestinal tract.

The researchers worked with Escherichia coli O157, a species of bacteria that causes periodic outbreaks of often deadly foodborne infection. The team grew these pathogenic bacteria in petri dishes in the lab, then exposed them to serotonin. Gene expression tests showed that serotonin significantly reduced the expression of a group of genes that these bacteria use to cause infections. Additional experiments using human cells showed that the bacteria could no longer cause infection-associated lesions on the cells if these bacteria were exposed to serotonin.

Next, the researchers examined how serotonin affected virulence in living hosts. Using mice, the researchers studied how serotonin might change the ability for Citrobacter rodentium - a mouse gut bacterium often used as an analog for E. coli in humans—to infect and sicken their hosts. These mice were genetically modified to either over- or underproduce serotonin in their gastrointestinal tracts. Those that overproduced this neurotransmitter were less likely to become colonized by C. rodentium after being exposed to this bacterium or had relatively minor courses of illness. Treating mice with fluoxetine (sold under the brand name Prozac) to increase serotonin levels prevented them from getting sick from C. rodentium exposure. However, the mice that underproduced serotonin became much sicker after bacterial exposure, often dying from their illness.

Further experiments identified the receptor for serotonin on the surfaces of both E. coli and C. rodentium, a protein known as CpxA. Because many species of gut bacteria also have CpxA, it's possible that serotonin could have wide-ranging effects on gut bacterial health, Sperandio says.

In the future, she adds, she and her colleagues plan to study the feasibility of manipulating serotonin levels as a way of fighting bacterial infections in the gastrointestinal tract. Currently, few available antibiotics can effectively fight E. coli O157—some antibiotics actually worsen the consequences of infection, causing the bacteria to release more damaging toxins.

"Treating bacterial infections, especially in the gut, can be very difficult," Sperandio says. "If we could repurpose Prozac or other drugs in the same class, it could give us a new weapon to fight these challenging infections."

Study shows how serotonin and a popular anti-depressant affect the gut's microbiota

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More information: Aman Kumar et al. The Serotonin Neurotransmitter Modulates Virulence of Enteric Pathogens, Cell Host & Microbe (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2020.05.004

Journal information: Cell Host & Microbe 

Provided by UT Southwestern Medical Center 

Meet the father of the hydrogen-boron laser fusion reactor
Hydrogen-Boron Dream, Part 6: 

Professor Heinrich Hora explains why a viable fusion reactor is close at hand

By JONATHAN TENNENBAUM 

MAY 12, 2020

Professor Heinrich Hora. Photo Illustration: Asia Times / Wikimedia


One of the world’s leading specialists in laser fusion, the Australian physicist Prof. Heinrich Hora, has proposed a new type of nuclear reactor which promises to provide highly-efficient, radioactivity-free generation of electric power, with virtually unlimited reserves of fuel. The design uses ultra-high-power, ultra-short-pulsed lasers to trigger fusion reactions between nuclei of hydrogen and boron. Hora believes that a prototype of his reactor could be running within the decade.

In the previous installments of this series, Jonathan Tennenbaum introduced readers to the new reactor concept and its fascinating scientific and technological background.

It is fitting to conclude this series with an interview Tennenbaum conducted in March this year with Heinrich Hora.

Jonathan Tennenbaum: The first experimental realization of fusion energy happened 70 years ago, with the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb. Why have we not yet learned how to use the energy of fusion in a controlled way, to produce energy for mankind? Today we have these gigantic experimental devices, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser fusion facility in the United States, and the International Torus Experimental Reactor (ITER) magnetic confinement fusion device under construction in France. ITER has an official price tag of $20 billion, but many expect it to rise to $50 billion by 2035 when ITER begins full-scale experiments with deuterium-tritium fuel. In 2040 it might be possible to start designing a prototype reactor. If that is supposed to be the right approach, then the practical generation of energy by fusion reactions is far away, indeed.

What makes you think it can be done much faster?

Heinrich Hora: Most experiments for fusion are based on the assumption, that one needs temperatures of several hundred million degrees Celsius. The question is, how can you get around having to use these high temperatures?

The equation for a laser acting on a target contains pressure, given by the density and temperature, but there is a second term for the ponderomotive force produced by the electric and magnetic fields of the laser. (Today with lasers) you can produce very high fields for extremely short times, of millionths of a millionth of a second, and one can produce petawatt (a million billion watts) or multiples of a petawatt of power. From this one can produce forces from the laser fields. One can generate higher pressures than the pressures from thermal mechanisms (i.e. heating). This is an essential difference to everything that was done before. As a matter of fact the idea to use lasers for fusion [has existed] since the early 1960s, but where the laser energy would go into the thermal energy of a spherical compressed plasma. This was still via temperature.

Now, the latest results – which were not measured by us but which we understand because we have been involved in all kinds of detailed research – is that now ignition can be done with extreme laser pulses. That sends a new message.

Tennenbaum: And this happens without heat?

Hora: Indeed. (The pulse) produces the ignition, and from then on (heat) develops in the hydrogen-boron fuel at moderate density and produces reactions, which then have to be confined by ultra-high magnetic fields. These fields are now available. In Japan, Fujioka has produced kilo-tesla and higher fields (using laser pulses). These fields are more than 100 times those used in the systems operating without lasers.

Tennenbaum: Such as the ITER?

Hora: Yes. A new situation.

Tennenbaum: How has it become possible to produce laser pulses of such huge powers, that you can succeed with a non-thermal ignition of the hydrogen-boron fuel?

Hora: This has a fascinating history. The scheme of so-called chirped pulse amplification (CPA) of laser pulses was discovered in 1985 by Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland. After that, the laser intensities went up like a rocket.

Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland (inset). Photos: Wikimedia

Tennenbaum: It reminds me of the famous Moore’s law in microelectronics.

Hora: It was more dramatic.

Tennenbaum: Up to now when fusion is discussed, people always think of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. And as far as I know practically all the experimental reactors use DT fuel. Tritium is radioactive and DT reactions produce a lot of neutrons. Your proposal, on the other hand, would use boron together with hydrogen as a “clean” nuclear fuel. Why was this not considered before?

Hora: The reaction of deuterium and tritium is the easiest and fastest way to fusion, even for the ITER experiment with magnetic field confinement. [It was thought to be] the only way to realize fusion.

The hydrogen-boron reaction is well known, but it is about five orders of magnitude more difficult when going through the usual procedure of compression and heating. The reaction rate is so low that this reaction was usually neglected.

Diagram of a hydrogen-boron reaction (left). An early experiment with the production of alpha particles by the bombardment of boron by hydrogen (protons). Images: Wikimedia

But using lasers with chirped pulse amplification, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded, experiments have now been made which gave a billion times higher hydrogen boron reactions, than the very frustrating low values [obtained earlier].

You get directly three alpha particles with no radioactive ash. And the alpha particles are no environmental problem at all. Carrying the energy of the nuclear reaction, they can be slowed down by electric fields so that the energy can be directly converted into electric power, without heat exchangers and turbines.

It is simple to make a spherical (reaction) chamber, charge it to a high voltage and have the alpha particles run into this high voltage and change their energy into electricity.

Ninety percent of the nuclear energy would be converted directly into electricity.

Tennenbaum: But how would the fusion reactions be produced in the reactor?

Hora: For five or six years we did calculations, to [realize hydrogen-boron fusion] the same way as in all the other (laser fusion) experiments: to make a spherical compression, heating with extreme laser pulses. And it turns out that one needs not a petawatt but an exawatt – a thousand thousand times higher powers, and this is too far away. And then came the simple idea, to make it not spherically but to trap the reaction in a cylindrical geometry. And just at this time to produce the highest magnetic fields using another laser, kilo-tesla fields. These fields are enough, for a short time, to trap this cylindrical volume with the reaction.

Tennenbaum: How is the reaction triggered?

Hora: By one laser pulse rather than 192 laser pulses [as is done in the NIF]. We need only one pulse, and all the complicated apparatus is not necessary; only a single pulse which is extremely short and of extremely high power. A petawatt is about as much power as all power stations on the Earth, however only for a time of one-millionth of a millionth of a second. And this has been developed over the years since the discovery by Donna Strickland and Gérald Mourou.

Tennenbaum: You have emphasized the role of accelerated plasma blocks in the ignition process. Can you explain how that works?

Hora: This is a very interesting question. We can refer to computations by Jean Louis Bobin in Paris and C. K. Chu from Columbia University in New York. If you have a plane geometry [as in the end-on irradiation of a cylindrical target], how short must laser pulses be in order to start the ignition? I was involved very early in pulse theory and numerical calculations. Computations resulted in the following: for ignition in this plane geometry, the energy input has to be in an extremely short pulse, in the range of millionths of millionths of a second. And in this plane – not spherical – geometry it ignites a self-sustained reaction which indeed then does produce high temperatures, but by itself, in the fuel. The interaction of the laser field and the plasma generates, so-to-say a piece of neutralized plasma block, getting energy from the light, and moving into the fusion fuel, igniting the fusion reactions.

Courtesy Heinrich Hora

Tennenbaum: How fast is this plasma block moving?

Hora: About 1,000 km per second. It is interesting that these are also the velocities given in the Google article for the processes in H-bombs. [The Wikipedia article “Thermonuclear Weapon” gives the implosion velocity of the fusion secondary of the first hydrogen bomb, the Ivy Mike device, as around 400 km per second – JT.] It is disclosed there, and one can compare the numbers. And it is interesting, that the plasma block generation [in the hydrogen-boron reactor] is obviously of a similar kind, but in a fully controlled way, for a power station. Nothing can explode, nothing can meltdown like in a uranium [fission] reactor. This is safe and controlled in an easy and inexpensive way.

Tennenbaum: How big would such a power plant have to be? Could the plant be made relatively small? Or would it have to be as large as a present-day nuclear power plant?

Hora: No, instead of the gigawatts power stations it could go down to 100 megawatts, perhaps 50 or even smaller. We have a whole design, for which we have patents granted in the US, Japan, and China.

Tennenbaum: And the laser?

Hora: These types of lasers are fortunately just now available from companies, you can buy them, but indeed then they need to be specifically developed to be much cheaper and cost not $50 million but much less through standardized production. This is all possible.

Control room of POLARIS petawatt laser in Jena, Germany (left). POLARIS oscillator and CPA pulse stretcher. Photos: Wikimedia

Tennenbaum: In other words, the technical parameters needed for the lasers are essentially already in the commercial sphere?

Hora: Exactly on the same level. One leading company is in France but the main leaders are at the University of Austin, Texas. They can generate one pulse per minute. Whereas in Livermore [with NIF] they can make two pulses per day.

Tennenbaum: But for the reactor would you need a much higher pulse rate?

Hora: A higher pulse frequency going down to one per second or two seconds, five seconds. This can be optimized according to what is desired.

Tennenbaum: Can you say anything about the economics?

Hora: Provided that the scientific efforts on this track do not encounter unknown difficulties, then these reactors can be on the market in eight years altogether.

Tennenbaum: In eight years?

Hora: To have a prototype available from which you can then produce for the market. There are mountains of boron, we could power mankind for thousands of years.

Tennenbaum: What would be the order of magnitude of the investment required to build a prototype hydrogen-boron power plant?

Hora: A prototype would cost 100 million or so. That is so little money, that it is suspicious! But it will be in this order of magnitude. But then there are many components which can be made much cheaper in volume and so on. One can definitely say that one kilowatt-hour will cost a fifth to a tenth of the present lowest price.

Part 1: Hydrogen-boron fusion could be a dream come true
Part 2: Nuclear power’s ray of hope: hydrogen-boron fusion
Part 3: Nuclear power: Lessons from the hydrogen bomb
Part 4: Fusion power enters world of ‘extreme light’
Part 5: Lighting the nuclear fusion fire
Part 6: How to build a hydrogen-boron fusion reactor

Tennenbaum: Over the last 10 years you have published many scientific papers about hydrogen-boron fusion and I can see that you have a very impressive list of co-authors, from the US, China, Germany, France, Israel, the Czech Republic, and they include the Nobel Prize winner Gérard Mourou. How strong is the interest and support of the scientific community for your idea, now? Or are some people saying, this is crazy?

Hora: Well, I mentioned the measurements in Prague. Before that, a similar experiment with hydrogen-boron was performed at the École Polytechnique in Paris. The first good experiment producing hydrogen-boron reactions was done by Belyaev and his colleagues in 2005 near Moscow. Christine Labaune made, with her experiment in Paris, a big step forward and then came the results from Prague. We could then ask a number of former students and established physicists to follow up the computations which we published in papers with a large number of people from around the world, to confirm our progress step-by-step.

Tennenbaum: So you have a kind of international community around you which would be pulled into the project or which is available to answer various questions and to participate in this effort?

Hora: Yes, definitely.

Tennenbaum: What is the next step, from your standpoint?

Hora: Knowing what the difficulties would be if we would go to the government and say, please give us the money to do the research – we would need a year of discussions, and people who are not fully qualified would have the power to say, this is nonsense. The other way is to find investors and to use the existing, high-level laboratories around the world and give them tasks in an outsourcing way. We will have to pay for this. We have a number of very well-known advisors, to optimize this outsourced research. That is how we will try to proceed. Hopefully, it will go ahead. For the last three years, we have had good news. In recent weeks we have had good publicity in the media. I hope that despite all the other world problems, we will really get support from investors, and outsource experiments. The recent results from Prague make me even more optimistic than before. [See “High-current stream of energetic α particles from laser-driven proton-boron fusion” by Lorenzo Giuffrida et al., Physical Review E 101 (2020) 013204, specifically the last paragraph of Section 1 and Figure 9]

(More information on the proposed hydrogen-boron reactor, including scientific references, can be found on the website. A good summary with an extensive bibliography is also provided by the 2018 paper “Extreme laser pulses for non-thermal fusion ignition of hydrogen–boron for clean and low-cost energy” by H. Hora et al. published in the journal Laser and Particle Beams, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2018, available on the internet; and “Pressure of picosecond CPA laser pulses substitute ultrahigh thermal pressures to ignite fusion,” by H. Hora et al, High Energy Density Physics 35, 2020, Article 100739).

Jonathan Tennenbaum received his PhD in mathematics from the University of California in 1973 at age 22. Also a physicist, linguist and pianist, he’s a former editor of FUSION magazine. He lives in Berlin and travels frequently to Asia and elsewhere, consulting on economics, science and technology

ORIGIN OF THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE FOP

THE FOP 

IS A WHITE ONLY FRATERNAL ORDER NOT A UNION