Exceptional characters and prime numbers in sparse sets

We develop a lower bound sieve for primes under the (unlikely) assumption of infinitely many exceptional characters. Compared with the illusory sieve due to Friedlander and Iwaniec which produces asymptotic formulas, we show that less arithmetic information is required to prove nontrivial lower bounds. As an application of our method, assuming the existence of infinitely many exceptional characters we show that there are infinitely many primes of the form $a^2+b^8$.