All Things in Moderation

Thought I’d post this story from NPR on a start-up company trying to compete with the big boys (governments) in developing an economically viable fusion reactor.

The world would be a very different place if we could bottle up a bit of the sun here on Earth and tap that abundant and clean energy supply. Governments have spent many billions of dollars to develop that energy source, fusion energy, but it’s still a distant dream. Now a few upstart companies are trying to do it on the cheap. And the ideas are credible enough to attract serious private investment.

One such company is hidden away in a small business park in the suburbs of Vancouver, British Columbia. Nothing seems unusual here — there’s a food distributor, an engineering firm and small warehouses. But on one door there’s a sign suggesting that all is not normal.

NPR on General Fusion

This would be really cool if it pans out. FairlingtonBlade can explain the science behind magnetized target fusion better than I, but the basic idea that it’s kind of a hybrid between magnetic confinement (tokamak, ITER) and inertial confinement (laser, NIF) fusion. Heavy hydrogen is heated up to a plasma, injected into a spinning lead sphere (which creates a magnetic field to contain the plasma), then the sphere is compressed with a series of pneumatic pistons. This results, theoretically, in fusion and the production of large amounts of energy, heating up the lead, which is then piped out and used to produce steam. Electricity is then generated by a typical turbine system.

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