The Bae Institute in SoCal (Tustin) is a curious R&D center. Maybe 'laughable' is more apt, if you happen to be Bob Park or a mainstream fusion guru from MIT.
It is named for Dr. Young K. Bae - and it does indeed do high-tech experimental work - but is also advertised as a technical school in the sense of ITT, not MIT. They even have a cooking school. There have been some grants from NASA, but nothing to compare with what is now being claimed. The two key technologies are pure photonic propulsion and micro-fusion. The Bae Institute would also rather announce their finding by PR News release, than by peer reviewed journal (not that they have a choice). You almost get the sense that 99% of this work has been and will continue to be ignored by the mainstream of physics. That is until they reach a tipping point. Friedwardt Winterberg is a great scientist who has also been largely ignored by the mainstream. His spoken English is poor, and he teaches at a third rate University, and most of his voluminous publications have been in German Language Journals - but he is nevertheless a true genius in my eyes and in the eyes of a few mainstream physicists who have followed his work. It is no surprise to anyone, however, that he has teamed up with the Bae Institute - since he is given the cold shoulder by almost everyone else. Winterberg has been working with the Bae Institute on MIMS - or "metastable inner-shell molecular states". This is really another name for ballotechnics and so-called "red mercury". In the past, a few of us have also called it "supra-chemistry" since it deals with inner orbitals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballotechnics MIMS, like the infamous red-mercury (which may be fictional or not) is the basis for a conjectured super non-nuclear explosive, or better still - for a peaceful "warm-fusion" breakthrough. I would classify soft x-ray ignited IC-fusion as warm, as opposed to hot (keV and above) but it is much hotter than combustion. Normal chemistry can produce UV photons, but MIMS (like fractional hydrogen) can take the energy level into the soft x-ray range. Coupling to "targets" is still very good in this range, unlike x-rays. Too bad for R. Mills that he did not consider (concurrently with his other work) this hybridized route to fusion as a possibility, since it will probably mean billions in funding, eventually (when the mainstream gets hold of it). Of course, Mills thinks he will be successful without it, and time will tell on that. And as I notice George is saying in another post - Mills wants to totally distance himself from anything nuclear. The Bae Institute indicates that they have now experimentally confirmed MIMS and Winterberg's theory. The result will eventually be that MIMS will make a super-explosive trigger in the form of x-rays for a target - in a way similar to the LLNL laser fusion does now - but with a tiny fraction of the cost of lasers and without the burden of their inefficiency. http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/conjectured-metastable-super-explosives.htm l In fact, it appears that MIMS will employ hypervelocity (v > 100 km/s) impact nanoparticles. How they push "powder" to that velocity is not clear. MIMS testing with these nanoparticles resulted in the observed intense soft x-rays in the range of 75-100 eV - which is in agreement with Winterberg's prediction - but - with unprecedented conversion efficiency. The efficiency from kinetic-energy to x-ray energy is over 40%. Typically laser beam lines are 1-2% efficient for the same intensity level. Intense soft x-ray beams, like lasers, can ignite deuterium targets in ICF schemes - inertial confinement fusion, and make it efficient and economically viable. It is that simple. And if the overpaid and overhyped geniuses at LLNL, who have burned through about $5 billion in taxpayer funding in the past decade with almost nothing to show for it --- have been caught with their intellectual pants down, by an hourly-worker training institute - then all the better (for the cynics amongst us). BTW - few details on the nanoparticles composition, or the acceleration method which is being used by Bae, have been released AFIK - but given that palladium nanoparticles (filled with deuterium) would probably make an excellent choice - this makes me think that this niche could evolve into kind of hybrid with LENR - and result in less velocity being required. What to call it? How about "powder-burn fusion" ?
