Fusion Project
Jeff Bezos has reportedly invested close to $20M in General Fusion, a startup company dedicated to bringing net-positive energy from fusion within four years.
Their fusor is a hybrid pulse-acoustic confinement design that uses a solution of lead and lithium circulated around a core where deuterium/tritium plasma is created by arc discharge. Pneumatic pistons on the skin of the pressure vessel strike the exterior creating a shaped pressure front in the lead/lithium medium. The wave impacts the plasma creating a thermonuclear reaction fusing the deuterium/tritium into helium and excess neutrons that are absorbed by the lithium in the solution to maintain tritium equlibrium. The lead provides additional shielding and captures the 100 MJ of heat per pulse to turn into energy. The helium is either captured or released and the system needs only small additional amounts of deuterium and lithium over time.
In the event of a system failure, the reaction can not continue, and the only radioactive byproducts are the tritium with a 12 year halflife, plus residual heat in the exchanger medium.
Sounds like an interesting project to keep track of.
Nikola Tesla, the name the
Nikola Tesla, the name the world didn't want you to know!
Wow...only $20M? This would
Wow...only $20M? This would be a pretty big snub to Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (~$4.2 billion) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ($12.8 billion)
Stranger things have happened...I wish them luck.
The Canadian government is
The Canadian government is also supporting General Fusion. But I think it says something when business owners are willing to put up their own money.
Look at how commercial space flight is starting to get moving. It's been a drop in the bucket compared to all of the billions NASA gas received, and there are only a couple of commercial successes, but you have to start somewhere.
It is clear that the costs
It is clear that the costs from national labs and consortiums are extremely inflated due to paying for infrastructure within overheads. This is a pretty risky move for any business. It is an interesting hybrid design of the two approaches I mention above, namely, inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and magnetic confinement fusion (ITER). Looking at their team, I do not see any experts from Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos who I would think would need to have on board to work out any kinks. I see that in one of their press releases that they have a cooperative agreement with LANL, but there are not any laboratory physicists on their staff or board. I have to say that I am pretty pessimistic taking a look at the materials they have on-line. Most of their images and text is sourced from LANL and LLNL.
Just curious why you would
Just curious why you would say that a Canadian venture would need scientists from American labs on order to succeed?
Without going into details,
Without going into details, the American weapons laboratories have been performing fusion experiments in both ICF and MCF for over 50 years. The cumulative knowledge these scientists possess is much greater than any institution in the world. The costs and complexity of realizing positive energy return from a fusion reactor is so great that there are most likely millions of ways to fail but very few ways (yet discovered) to succeed. These scientists do not publish failures so the knowledge needed from them is more of what not to do rather than identifying the correct approach. In all ventures, the risks of failure normally kill investment. But still, they may stumble across the magic formula without any help. The probability, however, is quite low without some help in research direction.
speaking of which, I read a
speaking of which, I read a while back that the NIF is currently trying for fusion with lasers since the cost of lasers has greatly decreased over the last decade.
Any hope for viability?
The problem with he NIF is
The problem with he NIF is that its research is not focused on fusion per se, but analyzing implosions to predict functionality of the aging nuclear weapons stockpile.
Fusion is just a side project.
If anything it will be interesting go see how far they can get in four years.
BTW, wikipedia says that the likely hangups in this design of fusor are deformations of the wavefront in a liquid medium that are hard to predict and compensate for. Hope they can overcome it.
Pretty much, you are
Pretty much, you are correct. There have been a significant effort to spin off an ICF reactor idea called LIFE, check out the progress...billions will go into this effort.
So I take it that the
So I take it that the underlying fusor is still the Z-Machine?
Have they figured out how to do the heat capture yet? I thought that was the big issue with Z and that it takes such a massive amount of energy to run the capacitor banks for the lasers.
Whatever the outcome, I hope we can see some serious progress soon.
I wouldn't hold your breath.
I wouldn't hold your breath. We are at least 25 years out in my estimation...maybe my children will commission the first fusion reactor.