SINGAPORE: The Singapore Police Force (SPF) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Thursday (Dec 21) warned of a scam variant involving the impersonation of MAS officers. At least 41 people have fallen victim to the scam since January 2023, losing at least S$2.6 million (US$1.95 million) in total, SPF and MAS saidContinue Reading
SINGAPORE: A freelance hairdresser found a side business operating as a middleman harvesting bank accounts from her friends and acquaintances that she would sell to unknown individuals.
The bank accounts wound up in the hands of scam syndicates who used them to handle scam proceeds of about S$3 million (US$2.26 million) that came from almost 1,000 victims.
Heng Pei Jing, a 40-year-old woman, was sentenced to four years’ jail (1 year and 36 months) on Thursday (Dec 21) for her roles in the crimes.
She pleaded guilty to 12 charges including conspiring to acquire criminal benefits, providing banking details without authorisation and consuming methamphetamine.
Another 26 charges were taken into consideration.
The court heard that Heng was a middleman for the sale and rental of bank accounts to “unknown individuals”. She would contact her friends and acquaintances, offering money if they sold or rented their bank accounts to her.
Those who took the bait would give Heng their usernames, PIN and iBanking login details, and Heng would forward the information to the unknown individuals.
The compromised bank accounts – 19 accounts across banks like the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), United Overseas Bank and the Oversea Chinese Banking Corporation – were used by scam syndicates to receive and transfer scam proceeds.
In total, the bank accounts were used to receive about S$3 million in scam proceeds from 996 victims in 2020 and 2021.
Heng’s foray into crime began in September 2020, when she saw a Facebook post by a user looking for unused bank accounts or iBanking tokens.
She contacted the poster and spoke to a person named Mike, who offered to pay her S$400 for each bank account she could obtain for him.
Heng took up the offer and made a post on Telegram offering to pay S$400 for bank accounts to be sold or rented out to her monthly.
One person responded and sold her his UOB and OCBC bank accounts for S$1,000.
Heng forwarded the details of this person’s bank accounts to Mike. The UOB account was used to receive at least S$118,909 in scam proceeds from at least seven victims in 2021, while the OCBC account received at least S$848,489 from at least six victims in the same period.
The scam proceeds were transferred out.
In 2020, Heng got to know a man named Mohd Amirudin Mohd Shafiee through a mutual acquaintance. She would lend Amirudin money and they became good friends.
Sometime around April 2021, Heng’s friend, Lee Yong Sheng, proposed a plan to hijack money that was going to a Malaysian scam syndicate.
Heng approached Amirudin with the plan, to borrow his bank account to hijack those funds. The plan was to obtain the scam proceeds by resetting the login credentials after funds flowed in.
In April 2021, Amirudin gave his iBanking login details to Heng, receiving S$800 from her.
Heng passed Amirudin’s POSB account to the Malaysian scam syndicate for their use. Investigations later revealed that the account was under the control of unknown individuals from around Apr 19 to Apr 23 in 2021.
During this period, the unknown individuals made at least 72 transactions using the bank account, with deposits totalling at least S$286,491.78 and withdrawals of about S$268,000.
Among the deposited sums was an amount of S$50,000 which was from a scam victim.
Around Apr 22, 2021, the trio found out that a large sum of money was going to Amirudin’s account. Amirudin and Heng went to an ATM in Rivervale Mall to reset Amirudin’s login credentials and deny the scam syndicate any further access to the account.
This way, they could obtain the money that was in the bank account. After Amirudin reset the iBanking login credentials, he transferred about S$54,000 that was in the account to another UOB account.
However, the UOB account was frozen by the police before any funds could be withdrawn.
The bank accounts that Heng obtained for use by unknown individuals received thousands of dollars in scam proceeds. The largest single amount was S$1.08 million from 581 scam victims contained in a DBS account belonging to a man named Asura Azeal A Salahudeen.
Asura had sold a total of six bank accounts to Heng, for S$500 per bank account and S$1,000 per corporate bank account. He wanted to earn fast cash, the court heard.
Heng was arrested by the police and Central Narcotics Bureau on Aug 2, 2021. Her urine samples tested positive for meth and she admitted to consuming the drug since early July 2021.
After Heng was arrested, Asura called Amirudin for advice on what to do with the bank accounts.
Amirudin suggested that they close the accounts but withdraw the money for their personal use.
Asura agreed and the pair closed the accounts on Aug 13, 2021, withdrawing about S$70,500 that was left in them, that was likely to be scam proceeds.
When Heng was released from remand, she discussed how to distribute the money with the rest. She kept a sum of S$47,000 for herself.
To date, the police have not recovered the sum of S$70,500.
Amirudin and Asura have been sentenced to jail for their involvement.
The prosecution sought a jail term between about four and five years for Heng, pointing to the substantial amounts of scam proceeds that were transferred through the compromised bank accounts, which scammers and criminal syndicates “put to very effective use”.
Heng was a middleman in an extensive scheme, helping to “harvest” compromised bank accounts which she provided to syndicates and unknown third parties, said Deputy Public Prosecutors Eric Hu, Ronnie Ang and Benjamin Low.
Defence lawyer S S Dhillon asked for three-and-a-half years’ jail for his client, a divorcee with a teenage daughter. Heng’s father left the family about 30 years ago, and she lives with her mother, said the lawyer.
He said Heng was an intermediary who would connect people offering fast cash online to her friends who needed money and were willing to “lend” their bank accounts.
He said she was paid a commission of 10 per cent of what her friends were paid, which was not “much”.
The fear she felt from her arrest, police investigations and court attendances have “completely shell-shocked Heng”, who will not dare to be “anything less than a law-abiding citizen henceforth”, said Mr Dhillon.
SINGAPORE: A Singaporean man ran a business helping China clients set up companies in Singapore and became a director of 980 companies this way.
However, he failed to fulfil his directorship duties properly, with about US$5 million (S$7.3 million) being laundered through some of the companies under him.
Xie Yong, a 37-year-old Singaporean man, was sentenced to four weeks’ jail and fined S$57,000 by a court on Monday (Dec 18) for multiple charges of failing to exercise his duties as a director and under related charges under the Companies Act.
Xie, also known as Alex, paid the fine in full. He was also banned from being a director for five years.
The court heard that Xie, who has a master’s degree in professional accountancy, set up a company called Tox Technology in 2013, which he later renamed DD Corporate Services.
He pivoted DD to offer accounting and corporate services in 2019, providing accounting and tax services and filing of annual returns, as well as incorporation of Singapore companies that came with the setting up of bank accounts and providing directors for overseas clients.
He was familiar with the duties required of a director of a Singapore-incorporated company, including the need to exercise due diligence.
Initially, DD reached out to local companies. Its clients later became mainly China-based after Xie expanded his reach to China in 2020 and advertised DD’s services on a Chinese online forum.
After this, multiple agents from China contacted DD about its services and Xie worked with the Chinese clients the agents referred him, including a person named Lou Yong, who was known as Leo.
Xie charged S$700 for a package including the provision of nominee director services, corporate secretarial services and a registered company address.
If the company needed a bank account, Xie would charge an additional fee between S$100 and S$150.
From 2020 to 2021, Xie registered himself as the director of the companies he set up for his Chinese clients, in order to fulfil the statutory requirement for a director who resided in Singapore.
Xie also registered himself as the corporate secretary of those companies, while placing his clients as the directors and shareholders.
Xie got his clients to sign an indemnity agreement stating that they would not engage in illegal activities, that he would not be involved in the business and that he would not be liable for anything to do with the companies.
As he knew it was important for him to check the purpose of the companies he incorporated for his clients, Xie would perform simple online searches to check if his clients were linked to criminal investigations.
He would also check if their passports were valid, but otherwise took his agents’ words at face value.
He did not ask the agents about their clients’ activities, as he knew that they would not be able to answer his questions.
He said he intended to get information about the companies’ businesses and activities at the end of the financial year when he had to file their annual returns, and apply to strike off the companies if he discovered any illegal activities.
Two companies that Xie incorporated this way became vehicles for money laundering.
The first company, called Wei Hui, dealt with the retail of bags, luggage and travel accessories on paper.
Other than Xie, the director of Wei Hui was a Chinese national named Xiao Weian. Xiao had been referred to Xie by Xie’s other client, Leo.
Leo told Xie that Xiao wanted to do a “trading business”, but his business was not usually in Singapore.
Xie understood that Xiao wanted to set up a company to get a bank account, to circumvent foreign currency restrictions in China.
Xie also knew that it was very difficult to open a bank account in Singapore with a Chinese company, and that this was why Xiao wanted to set up a company in Singapore.
He helped set up a multi-currency bank account with DBS Bank for Wei Hui, with Xiao being the authorised signatory.
In October 2020, an American company called Armor Survival fell prey to a business impersonation scam and was cheated into transferring a total of US$1.5 million to Wei Hui’s bank account.
The money was later transferred out of Singapore.
Police reports were lodged in Singapore over this case, and police investigations revealed that Xiao had not entered Singapore.
The company Wei Hui was registered and a bank account opened for it through “exploitation of local banks’ remote account opening processes”, the prosecution said.
Know-Your-Customer processes were allowed to be done through video-conferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In May 2020, Leo asked Xie to take over the directorship and company secretary position for a Singapore-incorporated company called Joy Trader for one of Leo’s clients.
Xie was told that Joy Trader, which had two foreign directors named Wang Huquan and Fan Jing, was a dormant company and that he was just to file the annual returns.
He was paid S$460 by Leo.
Between June and August in 2020, an American company called the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington was cheated via an email scam.
Spoofed emails from a person masquerading as an investor asked for funds to be transferred to bank accounts in Hong Kong.
The company was deceived into transferring US$7.5 million to accounts in Hong Kong. Of this amount, US$.3.1 million was transferred to Joy Trader’s OCBC account in Singapore and later dissipated.
A Hong Kong company called The International Medical Co was cheated in a business email scam in July 2020 and sent about US$731,000 to a bank account, which was later transferred to Joy Trader’s account along with other sums.
The total sum was laundered through Joy Trader’s bank account. It was emptied in November 2020 and closed in May 2021.
Sometime before May 2020, Xie realised he was being blacklisted by local banks. He did not find out why, but instead looked for other people to be directors for the companies he wanted to incorporate for his clients to get around the blacklisting.
He got to know a 51-year-old China national and Singapore permanent resident named Lan Fang, whose daughter worked for him.
He asked her to be the nominee director for the companies DD set up for its clients, offering S$50 per post.
A company called Aurora Free Trading set up with Lan Fang as nominee director was used to launder money from a scam on an Australian company called Tempo.
Police investigations into Xie’s activities found that Xie was a director of 980 companies in Singapore as of January 2021.
Of these, 831 were active and current appointments. Lan Fang was also registered as a director of about 100 companies under her agreement with DD.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Janice See asked for four to six weeks’ jail and at least five years’ disqualification from acting as a director.
Ms See said Xie “turned the proverbial blind eye” and took “no steps whatsoever” over supervision of his companies’ affairs.
This resulted in significant sums of illicit funds being channelled through the bank accounts of Wei Hui and Joy Trader, amounting to about US$5 million in total, Ms See said.
She said a fine for certain offences would not achieve “the necessary deterrent effect” against Xie, given the degree of culpability he showed in his “total failure to exercise reasonable diligence” and how he took active steps to prolong his business despite “the glaring red flag” that he had been blacklisted from setting up bank accounts for his companies.
PUBLISHED : 21 Dec 2023 at 04:14
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed its first reading of the government-sponsored bill seeking to decriminalise the writing of bad cheques except in fraud cases.
Addressing the chamber, Justice Minister Tawee Sodsong said the bill to amend the Offences Arising from the Use of Cheques Act BE 2534 (1991) would prevent the use of criminal liability against individuals who unintentionally write bad cheques.
He said the proposed amendment was also in line with Section 77 of the constitution, which states that criminal penalties should be imposed on serious offences only.
Both government and opposition MPs spoke in favour of the proposal, saying the law was outdated.
They agreed that no one should be prosecuted under criminal law if they did not have dishonest intent.
Anucha Buraphachaisri, a list-MP from the United Thai Nation Party, said the current cheque law imposes a one-year jail term and/or a fine of up to 60,000 baht for writing a bad cheque.
He said while the law aims to boost people’s confidence in the use of cheques, there are many cases where cheques are not honoured due to financial difficulties rather than any criminal intent.
However, he said criminal prosecution should be maintained for check fraud to deter dishonest behaviour, and those who issue bad cheques with or without the intention to do so still face civil suits.
Thirajchai Phantumas, a Move Forward Party (MFP) MP for Bangkok, said he agreed in principle with the amendment, but noted that without appropriate measures to deal with bad cheques, the move could erode public confidence in the use of cheques altogether.
Mr Thirajchai said banks should be stringent in giving credit lines to customers and tighten scrutiny of cheque accounts.
Anusorn Iamsa-ad, a list-MP of the Pheu Thai Party, also supported the bill and said anyone who intends to commit fraud must face legal action.
Mr Anusorn said payments have already shifted to electronic transactions, making the old law anachronistic.
The MPs voted unanimously to accept the bill. A 25-member panel will further examine the bill. Provisional clauses in it stipulate that those detained for writing bad cheques should be released when the law takes effect.
ReutersAirbnb has been fined A$15m and has agreed to pay compensation after it was found to have misled around 63,000 Australian customers.
The prices of some lettings on the firm’s website were in US dollars rather than the lower value Australian dollars – but this was not made clear initially.
It meant some customers paid more than expected for their accommodation.
Airbnb has apologised and said it is committed to “price transparency”.
The fine was handed down by Australia’s Federal Court on Wednesday after Airbnb admitted making false or misleading representations to Australian users between January 2018 and August 2021.
The short-stay rentals firm has also agreed to pay compensation to those affected, which could add up to a further A$15m.
For some lettings on the Airbnb website, customers in Australia saw a price initially displayed with the dollar sign but no mention of this being a US dollar figure.
This remained the case until the final booking screen, when USD was displayed in a small font.
The issue is believed to have affected 70,000 bookings and 63,000 consumers.
Airbnb received more than 2,000 complaints from Australian consumers raising concerns about being charged in US dollars and the court found some of these consumers had been told they had selected for prices to be in US dollars, when in fact they had never made that selection.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which brought the case, said customers should have been shown prices in Australian dollars, unless they had manually chosen to see the cost of their booking in another currency.
The commission said the fine sent “a strong signal to large digital platforms like Airbnb that they must comply with the Australian Consumer Law and not mislead consumers”.
The commission’s chair, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, said: “Affected consumers ultimately paid significantly more than they expected to pay because of the prevailing USD/AUD exchange rate at the time.
“Some users also paid additional charges to their banks as a result of paying in a foreign currency.”
She said customer eligible for compensation should be contacted by Airbnb in the next 45 days but people can contact the company if they believe they might have been affected and have not heard from them by that date.
Airbnb, which operates around the world, said it has since changed how prices are displayed for countries that use dollars, with a three-letter code denoting the currency displayed throughout.
Susan Wheeldon, Airbnb’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand, apologised and said while only a “small percentage” of Australian users were believed to have been impacted the company was “disappointed that happened”.
She said the problem had been rectified and added: “It is important to note that the final payment amount clearly displayed the applicable currency code, including in USD, at the point at which guests confirmed they wanted to proceed with the booking.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced a new fiscal stimulus program in response to a fall in his cabinet’s approval rating. His approval rating, which peaked at 59% in June 2022, plunged to 29% in November 2023 and hit a low of 17.1% in December.
Despite a reshuffle of the cabinet aimed at strengthening female representation, it has proven ineffective in alleviating growing political discontent. Japanese “voters have grown increasingly disillusioned with the administration’s ability to address the country’s social and economic woes.”
The reason for the political turmoil is higher inflation, which has painfully eroded the purchasing power of Japanese households, as wage increases have consistently lagged behind rising prices.
Kishida asserts that the new fiscal stimulus program — exceeding 17 trillion yen (US$118.3 billion) — aims to overcome deflation and put the economy back on track. The package includes temporary tax cuts of 40,000 yen ($275) per person and payouts of 70,000 yen ($480) to low-income households.
Subsidies for gasoline and utility bills have been provided to dampen consumer price inflation. Together with spending by local governments and state-guaranteed loans, the size of the package amounts to 21.8 trillion yen ($149 billion).
While this initiative focuses on aiding low-income households and the regions outside the economic centers, which have suffered over three decades of stagnation, there are major problems to overcome.
Similar to numerous previous fiscal stimulus programs, the relief will only be short-term. The persistent low-interest rate in Japan keeps paralyzing the productivity gains of Japanese corporations.
The government projects a growth rate of 1.2% between 2023–26. The projection seems far too optimistic, as the fundamental economic problems of Japan, including negative growth and distribution effects of persistent monetary and fiscal expansion, remain unresolved.
Though tax cuts may have a positive impact on consumption, persistent inflation continues to weaken growth through declining real wages. As the financing of the additional expenditures and lower tax revenues remains unclear, government debt is likely to increase further.
With about two-thirds of Kishida’s fiscal stimulus relying on debt financing, uncertainty about the future macroeconomic policy has increased. The situation could result in decreased consumption and investment.
The global monetary environment has changed. Under former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the combination of expansionary monetary and fiscal policy was sustainable, because other large central banks such as the US Federal Reserve kept interest rates low as well.
With the US Federal Reserve continuing to increase the federal funds rate along with the European Central Bank since March 2022, the Bank of Japan is caught on the wrong foot.
If the Bank of Japan were to follow the monetary policy of the US Federal Reserve, the government’s interest rate payments on the immense stock of government debt — equivalent to more than 260% of GDP — would hike.
This could lead to blocked expenditure obligations and a further decline in Kishida’s approval ratings. Large valuation losses on the Bank of Japan’s substantial holdings of government bonds could impose an additional burden on taxpayers. This explains why the Bank of Japan continues to stick to its close-to-zero yield curve targeting.
The Bank of Japan’s approach has revived carry trades, allowing investors to raise funds at low costs in Japan and invest them, for instance, in US government bonds. The US Treasury bills with a 10-year maturity yield of 4.23%, compared to the 0.77% of 10-year Japanese government bonds.
This has exerted strong depreciative pressure on the Japanese yen, which has lost 40% of its value since January 2021.
As the US Federal Reserve may keep interest rates high for longer, the depreciative pressure may persist. The continuous rise in the prices of imported goods, including raw materials, would contribute to an increase in energy and food prices.
Kishida faces a delicate situation and may be forced to choose between a Truss or an Erdogan scenario. If the Bank of Japan tightens the money supply to strengthen the yen and contain inflation while the Japanese government maintains high deficits, financial markets may lose trust in the sustainability of Japanese government finances.
Interest rates on Japanese government bonds could hike, in the same way as the United Kingdom’s interest rates hiked when former United Kingdom prime minister Liz Truss announced tax cuts without sufficient financing, coinciding with the Bank of England raising interest rates.
Alternatively, if the Bank of Japan buys more government bonds, both yen depreciation and inflation would accelerate, reminiscent of Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
While the depreciation would benefit large export-oriented Japanese corporations, rising consumer prices would hurt major parts of the population, posing a political problem for Kishida. Facing unappealing scenarios, Kishida can only hope for a financial crisis in the United States that would force the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.
In this scenario, a revival of Abenomics as “Kishidanomics” could ensue, though Japan’s main economic problems – namely low growth and high inequality – would persist.
Gunther Schnabl is Professor of Economic Policy and International Economics at Leipzig University.
This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
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CGC Digital Sdn Bhd, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), and Payments Network Malaysia (PayNet) signed a collaboration agreement aimed at driving financial empowerment and fostering inclusivity among Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in…Continue Reading
After two frustrating years of Covid-induced economic slowdown, Vietnam bounced back in 2022 with a strong performance — its GDP grew more than 8%.
In 2023, the government hoped that a stronger Chinese and global economy would allow a continuation of export-led growth, including growth in tourism and related services. Projections, or hopes, were for 6% to 7% GDP growth.
But both the world and China proved to have less demand for Vietnam’s exports than hoped. Now even Vietnam’s prime minister is suggesting growth of “around 5%”, which is close to the 4.7% estimated for 2023 by the International Monetary Fund. Exports fell 5.7% in the first 11 months of 2023. For an economy where exports nearly equal GDP, this creates a major growth problem.
Through November 2023, tourism revenue increased 50%, but this was not enough to offset the weakness in industrial output growth, which was only 1%.
While external factors significantly contribute to slower growth, the problems with electricity supply also contributed to the slow growth in foreign direct investment (FDI) realizations. These realizations only grew 2.9% in dollar terms, probably a slight shrinkage in real terms.
The government did several things right.
It managed to increase public investment by more than 20%, providing better infrastructure and more demand. It kept inflation under control and the banking system sound, though problems in the real estate sector continued to weigh on investment, confidence and the liquidity of some exposed banks. Many real estate development companies had trouble repaying or refinancing their corporate bonds.
The visit of US President Joe Biden and the upgrading of US-Vietnam relations to a level equal to that with China encouraged ‘friend shoring’ of FDI and technology transfers.
But the decision of Intel not to expand its already significant chip assembly and testing facilities suggests that though political skill is necessary, it is not sufficient to attract the higher-quality investments Vietnam wants. The government’s emphasis on computer chip production, while understandable, may result in slower progress in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
A bigger problem for both FDI and overall economic growth is the relatively weak state of the formal private sector and the lack of skilled labor needed to replace simple factory assembly jobs, which are migrating to countries with lower-cost labor.
Intel decided not to expand in Vietnam due to a combination of concerns about stable electricity, excessive red tape and the skill levels of Vietnam’s university graduates. Losing the expansion of an incumbent and major firm will make it challenging for Vietnam to move further up the value chain to competitive chip manufacturing.
The energy problems were especially surprising because Vietnam Electricity, the state utility, had planned for 8% annual demand growth, while actual electricity use since 2019 had grown only about half as much.
There was excess generating capacity but shortages of coal, leading to over-use of hydroelectricity, maintenance issues and a lack of transmission capacity which culminated in electricity shortages.
While more transmission lines are planned, the hit to Vietnam’s reputation is reflected in the slow growth of realized FDI. More transmission capacity will allow increased use of renewable electricity from central Vietnam, where solar and wind resources are favorable.
This could be important if fuel prices rise again due to shortages in Europe. With El Nino weather patterns threatening a drought in Southeast Asia, more renewable power would allow considerable hydroelectricity to be used when renewables are not producing. This would create a cleaner and more robust electricity system.
If Vietnam can improve its energy, training, and soft infrastructure, its GDP should be able to grow at least 6% annually for the rest of this decade. For 2024, the government growth target is 6% to 6.5%, which is similar to the Asian Development Bank’s July 2023 projection.
While some projections are lower — Fitch has 5.5% due to expected export weakness — the continued movement of some export production out of China should help Vietnam’s exports rebound.
But there may be significant headwinds should both the United States and European Union slip into recession or very slow growth, or if China’s economy continues to depress consumer spending and tourism.
In addition, labor force growth is slowing and surplus labor from rural areas is diminishing. Most of the growth will have to come from more capital per worker and increased productivity.
This will depend on the growth of Vietnam’s formal, domestic private sector. Its share of GDP is only about 11%, much lower than the 30% to 50% in Thailand and China.
Overall, 2023 was a disappointing transition year for Vietnam. If the global economy recovers as central bank monetary policy stops tightening and gradually loosens, 2024 should be better.
David Dapice is a Senior Economist in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.
In my discussion (published starting here) with Paul Methven, head of Britain’s STEP program to build a first electricity-producing fusion power plant, Methven stressed that the program is open to more than one technological option.
While STEP is betting mainly on the spherical tokamak, it is supporting the formation of a “fusion cluster” that will include private fusion companies pursuing entirely different approaches. As far as fusion is concerned, the UK is not putting all its eggs in one basket.
During my recent visit to UK fusion facilities I had the opportunity to visit one of the most innovative of the companies involved, First Light Fusion, and to speak with its founder and CEO, Nick Hawker.
First Light is pursuing a new, innovative approach called “projectile fusion” in which fusion reactions are created by the impact of a projectile, accelerated to tremendous velocities, onto a cube-shaped target containing a tiny sphere of fusion fuel.
The target is designed in such a way that the powerful shock wave resulting from the projectile’s impact is intensified many times over and focused onto the fuel pellet, creating the ultra-high densities and temperatures required to generate energy by fusion reactions.
The primary innovation of First Light, and the key to its potential success, lies in the design of this “amplifier” technology.
As of now, First Light is still far from producing significant amounts of energy with this method, but its experiments have already yielded detectable amounts of fusion reactions.
This milestone result was first achieved in November 2021 with the help of a two-stage gas gun device, capable of accelerating projectiles to a velocity of 7 kilometers (km) per second. That corresponds to 25,200 km per hour, or more than 20 times the speed of sound.
The detection of fusion reactions provided strong evidence for the validity of First Light’s projectile fusion approach and the amplifier technology in particular.
To achieve fusion “breakeven” – more energy released than was absorbed by the fuel – will probably require about 10 times larger velocities. There is little doubt, however, that such velocities can be achieved through a relatively straightforward scale-up of existing technologies. First Light is progressing step by step toward that goal.
Could First Light’s approach work? At first glance, the proposed method looks like a long shot. But it turns out to have a solid physical and computational basis.
First Light Fusion evidently has significant support in the scientific community. Its board of advisors includes, among others, the eminent plasma physicist Steve Rose; Professor Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the UK Center for Inertial Fusion Studies; Steven Chu, Physics Nobel Prize winner and former US Secretary of Energy; and Sir David King, who was the UK government’s chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007.
On January 23 this year it was announced that First Light Fusion and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) had signed an agreement for the joint design and construction of a new facility at UKAEA’s Culham Campus to house “Machine 4” – First Light’s next-generation fusion device. Machine 4 is intended to demonstrate a net energy gain by projectile fusion.
First Light’s “projectile fusion” approach has certain features in common with laser fusion. To explain the similarities and differences, I’ll start with a few words about laser fusion.
In the simplest approach of so-called direct drive, a huge pulse of laser energy is focused from all sides onto a tiny spherical fuel pellet. The outer layer of the pellet is instantly transformed into an explosively-expanding plasma, creating a giant pressure wave that compresses the pellet down to a fraction of its original size.
At the center, the pressure reaches over 10 Mbar – more than 10 million times atmospheric pressure. The fusion fuel is compressed to 1,000 times the density of its normal solid form, and its temperature rises to over 100 million degrees. The fuel pellet explodes like a tiny hydrogen bomb.
In this form of direct drive laser fusion, there are no magnetic fields to keep the fuel confined, as in a tokamak, but only its own momentary inertia. Hence the name inertial confinement fusion (ICF).
First Light’s “projectile fusion” method falls into the same category, inertial confinement fusion, but it uses a totally different method to compress the fuel.
Reaching super-high density is essential to all the many variants of ICF. Without super-compression not enough fusion reactions would occur, in the brief moment before the pellet flies apart, to release significant amounts of energy.
Future ICF power plants will necessarily operate in a pulsed mode, producing one or more micro-explosions per second. After each detonation, a new fuel-containing target must be introduced into the chamber.
Laser fusion has a long history, going back to the 1960s. Although enormous progress has been made, this approach has drawbacks, especially with regard to the prospects for future commercialization.
One of the biggest challenges is to achieve a perfectly spherical implosion of the fuel pellet. Without that, hydrodynamic instabilities arise that spoil the compression process. Enormous effort and ingenuity went into solving this problem.
In its milestone achievement of fusion ignition, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF), employed an alternative method called “indirect drive”: The fuel pellet is suspended in the center of a cylindrical enclosure called a ”hohlraum”; the laser beams are directed through holes onto its walls, heating them to millions of degrees.
At that temperature matter emits X-rays. The hohlraum is instantly filled with a uniform field of intense X-ray radiation. Bombarded from all sides, the pellet implodes in a manner similar to what happens with direct drive.
While the results with “indirect drive” are encouraging, we should not forget that NIF, with its 192 laser beamlines, is the size of three football fields. Although cheaper and more efficient laser systems will no doubt become available, the basic fact remains that coherent laser light is an extremely “high quality” form of energy, inevitably more complicated and expensive to produce than energy in less coherent forms.
First Light’s method, if it works out, would be an ideal alternative. The expensive, “high-quality” energy of a perfectly-timed burst of laser light is replaced by the far cheaper, “low-quality” kinetic energy of a flying projectile. And instead of having to focus energy onto a target from all sides simultaneously, we need only hit it on one side.
What makes this possible is a cube-shaped object that Hawker calls the “amplifier.” The amplifier transforms the shock wave, produced by the projectile’s impact on the side of the cube into a vastly more powerful set of shock waves that converge onto the fuel pellet.
While details of its design are a proprietary secret, Hawker stresses that the underlying physical principles are well-known. These concern above all the nonlinear behavior of shock waves. Specifically, shock waves can be multiplied, intensified and focused by reflections on surfaces, passage through heterogeneous media and interactions between shock waves themselves.
As Hawker stresses, inventing the amplifier would have been impossible without the ability to accurately simulate these complex processes using powerful computers and sophisticated computer codes. Thanks to enormous progress it has become possible, in many cases, to substitute simulations for expensive and time-consuming experimental work. Thereby one can “play” with parameters and try out new ideas much more quickly.
I shall discuss the science behind the “amplifier” in the following article. Here I want to concentrate on the “easy” part: launching projectiles to super-high velocities.
It is estimated that to achieve fusion “breakeven” with First Light’s projectile fusion method, projectiles must be accelerated to velocities on the order of 60 kilometers per second, equivalent to 180 times the speed of sound, or 216,000 kilometers per hour. No one has so far been able to accelerate a macroscopic object to such velocities.
First Light is proceeding stepwise toward that goal.
“The Big Friendly Gun,” which I saw during my visit, achieves velocities of 7 km per second, or more than 25,000 km per hour. It is a two-stage cannon. The first stage uses exploding gunpowder to propel a piston down a tube. The piston compresses hydrogen gas in the second stage to 10,000 times atmospheric pressure, and the expanding gas accelerates the projectile.
This is the device First Fusion used in its first demonstration of fusion reactions by projectile fusion in November 2021.
It is worth noting that two-stage cannons of this sort have been built for a variety of purposes. NASA employs them, for example, to investigate the impact of micro-meteorites on spacecraft. They also provide a serious option for propelling payloads directly into space.
Back in 1966 a two-stage cannon, built by the High Altitude Research Project (HARP) of the US and Canadian defense departments succeeded in shooting an 84 kg projectile up to the suborbital altitude of 179 km.
A follow-on US government program, the “Super High Altitude Research Project” (SHARP), aimed at shooting specially-designed satellites directly into Earth orbit. SHARP was discontinued for budgetary reasons, but the goal is being pursued today by a private company, Green Launch.
To reach higher velocities, First Light has built a device called “Machine 3,” which is one of the largest so-called pulsed power devices in the world. Electricity, stored in capacitor banks, is discharged in millionths of a second through two small electrode plates situated at the center of the device. The combination of the high current and the magnetic field they generate produces a gigantic force of repulsion (the so-called Lorenz force).
With a suitable setup this force can be used to accelerate a projectile – referred to in the business as a “flyer plate” – to astronomically high velocities. The acceleration is so tremendous that the maximum velocity is reached already within the first few millimeters of its motion.
Machine 3 can produce velocities of about 20 km per second, three times the speed of the Big Friendly Gun.
The next step is “Machine 4,” which is designed to deliver velocities of 60 km per second, estimated as sufficient to achieve a net gain by fusion reactions. A projectile launched at that velocity from outside the Earth’s atmosphere would reach the Moon in less than 2 hours.
Although Machine 4 will be the world’s most powerful pulsed power device, the science and engineering principles involved are well-established. The Z-Machine at US Sandia National Laboratories, a giant, multi-purpose pulsed power facility, has already produced velocities of 45 km per second – the present world record.
From a purely scientific point of view, all of this is the easy part. In the following article, I shall turn to the hard part of the projectile fusion problem and recount the fascinating story of how the study of shock waves produced by a small undersea creature, the pistol shrimp, contributed to the genesis of First Light Fusion’s revolutionary “amplifier.”
Dr Serina Rahman, who is a lecturer with the Southeast Asia Studies Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and specialised in environmental issues in Malaysia, told CNA that the implementation of these projects will inevitably take time.
However she acknowledged that delays due to cost cutting measures by the government or the funds not being allocated properly would hurt residents, who are mostly rural folks.
“Good that cash has been allocated to work to alleviate floods. But the process of putting this into fruitful action on the ground will take time,” said Dr Serina.
“But climate change impacts needed to be mitigated a few years ago so until it is done, we will continue to suffer these disasters,” she added.
Amid slow progress for the RTB projects, environmental experts CNA spoke to warned that the effects of climate change are likely to exacerbate the problem.
UTM’s Dr Zulfaqar told CNA that due to Malaysia’s topography, it is susceptible to coastal flooding and flash floods, both of which are increasing in frequency and intensity due to global warming.
He explained that the melting of glaciers and ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise, adding volume to the ocean water and likely to impact coastal areas across Peninsula Malaysia as well as Sabah and Sarawak.
Moreover, flash flooding will also be more frequent as warmer temperatures increase, putting more moisture into the atmosphere that then gets released as rain.
Dr Zulfaqar estimated that based on the climate change projection reports on Malaysia released by the World Bank, floods are likely to occur 20 per cent more over the next five years.
He also spoke about the matter during his presentation on climate change scenarios and water security during the five-day Asia-Pacific Climate Week 2023 in Johor Bahru in November.
Dr Zulfaqar also told CNA that based on his research and data collection, Peninsular Malaysia specifically has already seen increased volume of rainfall between November and January each year.
“This means that the impact of the annual northeast monsoon will be much worse in years to come. Expect more rainfall and if the mitigation efforts are not stepped up, worse floods,” he added.
For some residents, the increased frequency of rain over the last few years has been clearly felt.
Fisherman Sharuddin Hatman, who lives on the banks of the Johor River at Kampung Sungai Telor near Kota Tinggi, told CNA his village has seen more frequent and more intense floods over the last five years.
“It’s been getting worse, and we are so used to floods especially during the year-end that it has become the norm,” said the 31-year-old.