General Fusion's latest reactor tech.
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NIF fusion reactor. Image: Wikimedia
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“All we’re doing is applying modern industrial technologies to actually take a crack at what has been an existing idea,” says Michael Delage, General Fusion’s vice president. He says the approach has been around since the 1970s—the only major missing components were sophisticated enough electronics to control 200 100kg hammers down to within microseconds. The plan is to create a fleet of small-scale generators that could produce energy for a small town, instead of one giant plant that powers a whole region. Of course, first it has to work.“If we’re not pushing the risk envelope a little bit you won’t catch the big winners,” says Rick Whittaker, vice president and chief technology officer from Sustainable Technology Development Canada. Whittaker’s agency, which exists to carry promising technology over the “valley of death” from R&D to commercialization, supplied around one third of General Fusion’s investment money. He predicts commercialization right around the corner. “I place this one in the 2020 timeframe.” The cost could be as low as 3, 4, or 5 cents per Kw/Hr, which is competitive with coal.Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, a small New Jersey-based outfit, is going in a more complicated, but similarly open route. As opposed to approaches that use the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium (DT) as fuel, LPP is attempting to use a hydrogen and boron-based fuel known as pB11 instead. Although the hydrogen and boron fuse at a much greater temperature than DT, they don’t make any radioactive particles in the process, and the energy produced comes directly in the form of electricity as opposed to heat, which is much more efficient.“Even if there was only one chance in 3 or 50/50 or one chance in 2, the potential payoff if they succeed is so amazing, that I was willing to risk my money”
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LPP's Focus Fusion project. Image: Flickr
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There’s one joke those involved nuclear fusion always tell (I heard it four times in the course of reporting this article), and it’s not really funny. It’s something to the effect of “Oh yeah, fusion energy is just twenty years away…and it always will be.”Any yuks attributable to this little mantra must be of the funny-because-it’s- true variety. Because despite over a half century of research, gigantic, multi-billion dollar public fusion projects like those at the National Ignition Facility in California, or the 34-nation International Thermonuclear Research project in France are still some decades away from producing energy in a commercial reactor. To wit: despite the National Ignition Facility’s recent experimental success, a blog post in Science describes how “the experiment in question certainly shows important progress, but it is not the breakthrough everyone is hoping for.”The current private market for fusion is both a product and sometimes a victim of the two major public approaches.“It’s an investment to potentially bring something about that would really transform the world.”
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