General Fusion, the Canadian duo who hope to produce a cold fusion power plant for perhaps a tenth the cost of other such promised projects, just got a $12 million shot in the arm.
According to the Toronto Star, the four-year grant comes from a non-profit called Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC). However, SDTC will only provide the grant if General Fusion can match it with $28.7 million in private investment. Considering General Fusion only raised $6 million in its last round of funding, that sounds pretty steep.
Of course, it's all chump change in the world of fusion. By contrast, the National Ignition Facility, America's fusion project, has already cost $3.5 billion.
And, as with all fusion stories, caveat emptor. Whether it's $6 million or $3.5 billion, all the money is going towards an unproven technology that has yet to generate enough electricity to power a light bulb. But with General Fusion claiming they will produce electricity at four cents per kilowatt-hour, which is less than natural gas costs, here's hoping they do pull it off.
[via Next Big Future]
Here's hoping they pull it off as well...without potentially blowing up half the planet in the process. Fusion has long been considered as the pinnacle of energy production: it generates more energy than nuclear fission, and does not produce toxic radioactive waste. The early nuclear fusion plans involved the fusion of hydrogen into helium, and then splitting the helium back into hydrogen via fission, essentially granting twice as much energy as other techniques. Hydrogen would be sourced from splitting water. The only problem with nuclear fusion is containment: how does one contain such immense energy safely? A single leak or miscalculation in the energy production and you could be looking at a huge disaster.
Yeah, I've always believed that nuclear fusion would ultimately be the solution to the energy crisis looming over our heads. However, the creation of such an ideal energy source I believed was far fetched due to the inherent safety concerns with generating and handlgin that much energy. If this design can do it, then the world will be thanking them for it!
All I know is that if you want fusion, you need neutrinos. That means cooling that dimagnetic shell to superconducting temperatures. Decelerate neutrinos across a superconducting boundary, and when the n-plasma reaches long chain structures, apply an intense magnetic field to a proton injection from the uranium rod pistons.
That means you need electrically variable magnetic poles at each opposite end of the central core.
Apply magnetic polarization pulses = miniature sun.
A few misconceptions need to be cleared up.
Firstly, the energy in the reactor will heat the lithium-lead jacket around the fusing plasma. Containment will be pretty easy since the molten metal isn't being boiled and thus there's no ultra-high heat pressures being produced. There's no "containment" issues when it comes to the fusion reactions involved. A few hundred megawatts is not an uncontrollable mass of energy - it's regularly achieved by fossil fuel engines.
Secondly, in what way will it cause a disaster? Fusion can't occur except under immense pressures - in this case briefly achieved in the very centre of the reactor and nowhere else - and it can only happen between the right elements. This design uses tritium and deuterium, neither of which is sufficiently abundant for any uncontrolled reaction to spread anywhere.
Thirdly, neutrinos? They have no measurable magnetic moment and thus aren't influenced by magnetic fields. Most materials are practically transparent to them and even when they react it's a few nucleii at a time. No big deal and nothing to do with the fusion process except as an after-effect - neutrinos are produced by some fusion reactions, they don't cause fusion to occur.
Fourthly, fusing hydrogen to helium sounds all very well, but we're really talking the fusion of deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with another neutron, made in the lithium jacket via reactions with neutrons from the fusion when the fusion reactions are up and running), neither of which are especially abundant.
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It is the business of the future to surprise us
Well there's only one thing left for these guys to do, and that is simply to build it and see if it works while keeping under the budget. The rest of us can worry about the physics behind the process.